Piracy as capitalism at work (part 1)

i’m writing this on my girlfriend’s laptop, which has the left shift key broken. apologies for the lack of caps, but smart people can read english without such an archaic tool.

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i hold piracy a subject near and dear to my heart. i follow copyright conversations in detail, especially when my mind is working at full capacity (not during school breaks!). i will state outright that my sympathies are with the copyright violators. i state this bias even in the awareness that i plan to work in an industry whose income trickles (book publishing is not particularly lucrative) only from sources of intellectual property and that i myself am currently generating and plan to continue generating such sources: all of the creative work on this blog was birthed in the hope that it would be remixed or shared. (i also understand that a blog and a book are two very different things.)

what one would see, should one attempt to engage this cultural conversation, is a series of ethical attacks between those in power and those unthreading the power. i would like to break this strand of conversation, for as any reader of alistair macintyre’s after virtue (or any watcher of modern politics) would know, moral arguments are no longer the means by which people reach stasis or compromise but are merely one process in a set of processes meant to elongate engagement in order to put off reaching stasis or compromise.

the primary tool for nipping this rhetorical weed should be capitalism, except that the piracy movement is so drowned by psuedo-communist propaganda  that to speak in terms of practicality about it might seem an insult to the fanatics. but let us speak seriously: the eighteen million (and growing) users of file-sharing services do not think of communism specifically when they download any given file; rather, the great majority will think of entertainment or at least the delay of boredom. they download either because it is easier or cheaper than locating the media by another means. that is, file sharing is popular from a user standpoint because it is practical.

i would like to use a paraphrase from one of my favorite new york times articles to put the conversation in immediate perspective. business decisions are not moral decisions. we allow, via capitalism, businesses certain leeway in regards to tools reserved from them in the past in order to bolster their financial prowess. a business is never under moral attack, even were the psuedo-communistic rhetoric to work in full sway, which it never will. only the pirates can lose to moral attacks, but they are so popular now that they won’t. to paraphrase another favored source, CEO of the MPAA as caught in this documentary, the MPAA’s role is not to kill piracy for it will never die; their role is to hinder as much as possible the consumer from using pirate sources.

i therefore argue from a business perspective that piracy endures because it is emminently practical: the end-user recognizes it as such and the arch-rival specifically names the goal as hindrance, not victory. Piracy is a capitalistic outcome to the problem of availability even despite the pseudo-communistic propaganda offered by its most vocal and energetic proponents. The question is why capitalism is being outlawed rather than embraced in this economic environment.

Corporate free speech

We live in an age with the most advanced propaganda machines the world has ever seen. We call them, euphemistically, marketing departments. Public relations. The primary function of these branches, having worked closely with them myself for years, is to get people to purchase without thinking overmuch about what it is they’re buying. The most effective advertising has little to do with the product itself but rather associates a brand with a happy lifestyle. It is public knowledge, in that the public is capable of seeing marketing mechanisms at work, that there is a disconnect between message and purpose. And yet we watch them daily, as a nation. We watch as many of them as the marketers think we can stand without revolting, without being sick to death of them.

We also live in the wake of a Supreme Court decision that grants corporations the power of free speech. We are going to allow, in our national debate, the most widely successful propaganda campaigners into our political arena. This is one large step down the road America has already started upon: we have fought tooth and nail for our freedoms, but we would rather sacrifice them to those already in power than use our votes ourselves. It’s a logical outcome of our faith in the division of labor, an outcome of the long hours brought about by our longstanding work ethic.

The problem with propaganda is that it’s polarizing. These effects exist already in our bipolar government, but the arm of marketers and publicists has always been limited by scrutinized  means. A politician has a speech written; he reads it off a teleprompter; he hands a press release to FOX News and CNN and waits to see what they do with it. Corporations are much more savvy. They write a press release, they offer no information other than their press release, they purchase some advertising space, and then they watch their press release and their ads appear simultaneously, side by side, unquestioned by the very arm that’s pushing them out.

Now we’re going to allow these propagandists into the most closely waged war of this country, and I expect an escalation of violent proportions. We slung mud before, but that was when we were too poor to afford farmers’ tools. Watch us march ahead, torch and pitch fork in hand, and the pandemonium screams ever louder around us, amplified in the way only professionals could accomplish. Watch it lead to political turmoil the like of which America has not recently endured, perhaps to a second civil war, caused only by the irresponsible voices of profit-hungry but incorporeal pseudo-individuals.

This is not an instance in which greed, functioning as a primary virtue, will overcome all lesser obstacles. This is not an instance in which self-interest will stop with victory. Self-interest will go further. The corporate powers that be will not stop until they have secured a stable puppet on the thone, not just in the presidency but across all of Washington, and this kind of tyranny the people will not stand. At least, I hope they won’t stand it.