by
Astra Taylor
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[...] By 1972 blue-collar workers were fed up, too, with wildcat strikers at auto factories protesting the monotony of the assembly line. The advances of technology did not, in the end, liberate the worker from drudgery but rather further empowered those who owned the machines. By the end of the 1970s, as former labor secretary Robert Reich explains,
a wave of new technologies (air cargo, container ships and terminals, satellite communications and, later, the Internet) had radically reduced the costs of outsourcing jobs abroad. Other new technologies (automated machinery, computers, and ever more sophisticated software applications) took over many other jobs (remember bank tellers? telephone operators? service station attendants?). By the ’80s, any job requiring that the same steps be performed repeatedly was disappearing—going over there or into software.
In Ribot’s field this means the more uncertain part of the business—the actual writing, recording, and promoting of music—is increasingly “outsourced” to individuals while big companies dominate arenas that are more likely to be profitable, like concert sales and distribution (Ticketmaster, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play, none of which invests in music but reaps rewards from its release). “That technological change is upon us is undeniable and irreversible,” Ribot wrote about the challenges musicians face as a consequence of digitization. “It will probably not spell the end of music as a commodity, although it may change drastically who is profiting off whose music. Whether these changes will create a positive future for producers or consumers of music depends on whether musicians can organize the legal and collective struggle necessary to ensure that those who profit off music in any form pay the people who make it.”
quoting Marc Ribot, NY-based jazz musician
Instead of devising truly liberating ways to harness machines to remake the economy, whether by designing satisfying jobs or through the social provision of a basic income to everyone regardless of work status, we have Amazon employees toiling on the warehouse floor for eleven dollars an hour and Google contract workers who get fired after a year so they don’t have to be brought on full-time. Cutting-edge new-media companies valued in the tens of billions retain employees numbering in the lowly thousands, and everyone else is out of luck. At the same time, they hoard their record-setting profits, sitting on mountains of cash instead of investing it in ways that would benefit us all.
very impressed that Astra Taylor was writing about this stuff when i was basically still a babby
The struggle between amateurs and professionals is, fundamentally, a distraction. The tragedy for all of us is that we find ourselves in a world where the qualities that define professional work—stability, social purpose, autonomy, and intrinsic and extrinsic rewards—are scarce. “In part, the blame falls on the corporate elite,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote back in 1989, “which demands ever more bankers and lawyers, on the one hand, and low-paid helots on the other.” These low-paid helots are now unpaid interns and networked amateurs. The rub is that over the intervening years we have somehow deceived ourselves into believing that this state of insecurity and inequity is a form of liberation.
In-depth reporting is an “ancillary benefit” of this process, an unprofitable enterprise subsidized in a decidedly roundabout fashion. But this model is now falling apart. The Internet, by unbundling the different functions of the newspaper and allowing readers to go direct, has certainly made things more efficient—we can now download as many crossword puzzles as we desire, go to Craigslist to find an apartment, and visit the local blog or the foreign news aggregator to read about what’s happening in the world. But it has eliminated the cross-subsidies that kept journalism afloat and, by doing so, exposed a form of market failure.
“The basic divide at work here is between those capitalists that make money by selling access to content, and those that make money by controlling the content distribution networks,” explains sociologist Peter Frase. “For content sellers like the music business, extremely harsh intellectual property laws are desirable because they create the artificial scarcity on which their whole business model depends. Companies like Facebook and Google, in contrast, mostly make their money by controlling the platforms on which people distribute various kinds of media, and selling access to their user base to advertisers.” For the latter group, looser copyright laws don’t pose a threat to their profits but actually facilitate them; the more copying and sharing happen, the faster their revenues grow.
The problem, though, is that it is not clear how file sharing actually addresses financial improprieties or points the way to an arrangement that’s more equitable: unlike a label or studio, where a percentage of profits trickles back to creators, peer-to-peer sites and online locker services return nothing to artists, though they can be incredibly lucrative for those who run them.28 The Pirate Bay, for example, is bedecked by advertising. The now-defunct Megaupload (parent company of Megavideo and Megaporn) made its flamboyant owner, “pirate king” Kim Dotcom, over $40 million in 2011 alone (wealth he famously flaunted all while comparing himself to Martin Luther King). Meanwhile, piracy has set a new, low baseline for artists’ negotiations. Where free culture enthusiasts justify their position by invoking the exploitation of artists under the old model, digital capitalists, looking to build profitable businesses by storing or streaming creative work produced by others, defend microscopic or nonexistent payments by arguing that the alternative is nothing at all.
need to figure out how to address this critique from the left
The professions, as many others have observed, have served as a kind of “class fortress,” excluding talented, motivated people in service of monopolistic self-preservation. (“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution” is known in tech circles as the Shirky principle.) [...]
extremely true of tech too tho lmao
Of course the advertisers themselves want nothing more than for all of us to encounter their offerings, to “engage” and “interact” with them. We have known for years that culture can be a commodity even when you don’t have to pay for it outright. Those who would protect the cultural commons must see that the challenge is not only copyright, but those who own the platforms and channels through which culture is increasingly shared. On their watch, the cultural commons has become little more than a radically discounted shopping mall, a consumers’ paradise of free entertainment propped up by advertising. What’s being hoarded now are the means of delivery, the channels through which the economic value of culture is realized. The commons can be commodified without being enclosed outright.
Cohen is highlighting a value that has long been central to any progressive movement: respect for labor. From this angle, it’s clear that “copyleft,” as the free culture position on copyright is sometimes called, is not “left” in the traditional sense. As Richard Stallman told me, he designed copyleft to ensure the freedom of users to redistribute and modify copies of software. Freedom to tinker is the paramount value it promotes, but a left worthy of the name has to balance that concern with the demand for equality, for parity of wealth and redistribution of power.
Copyleft, with its narrow emphasis on software freedom, even when broadened to underscore the freedom of speech implications of such a position, offers a limited political response to entrenched systems of economic privilege, and it does not advance limits on profitability or promote fair compensation. Free culture, with its emphasis on access, does not necessarily lead to a more just social order. To pay to watch an independent movie does not mean capitulating to the privatization of knowledge but rather recognizes the work that went into making it and provides some support so that the effort can continue.33