Operation Black March: Boycott Big Content

In which Anonymous acts on Public Enemy’s culture industry thesis

A couple of weeks after I blogged about boycotting Big Content to protest copyright-censorship bills like SOPA, Anonymous has launched “Operation Black March” – precisely such a boycott – via a Youtube video that is viralizing nicely. As the video explains:

March 2012 is the end of the 1st quarter in economic reports worldwide.
Do not buy a single record. Do not download a single song, legally or illegally. Do not go to see a single film in cinemas, or download a copy, Do not buy a DVD in the stores. Do not buy a videogame. Do not buy a single book or magazine.
Wait the 4 weeks to buy them in April: see the film later, etc. Holding out for just 4 weeks, maximum, will leave a gaping hole in media and entertainment companies’ profits for the 1st quarter, an economic hit which will in turn be observed by governments worldwide…

I’m not claiming any credit; I’m just digging the coincidence. If we want to give credit where credit is due for a Big Content boycott (never mind one dubbed “Black March”), we should take a fresh listen to Public Enemy’s scathing critique of the culture industry: “Burn Hollywood burn,” from their 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet.

Banksy and the persistence of postmodernism

A review of Exit Through the Gift Shop (with some kicks at Richard Dawkins’ deserving balls along the way)

Watching Exit over the holiday was more or less my introduction to Banksy and his art. The film is a glinting glass onion of layered ironies; the scene it sketches, the stories it tells, and the style with which it is executed all declare that the reports of postmodernism’s death are greatly exaggerated.

First, a backgrounder on these reports (to which a still-going concern like the editors of Postmodern Culture and other scholars of postmodernism might rightly object). It was maybe the Sokal affair that rang the first death knell of postmodernism, virtually in the teeth of its pop-culture arrival: in Simpsons references, raves, Tarantino movies, Kathy Acker’s last works, and so on. The short version is that one Dr Sokal submitted a hoax “postmodernist” paper to a prominent refereed journal, which accepted it for publication. Designed to lampoon the perceived excesses and inutility of postmodern theory, the affair ended up making peer review look bad as well. For some reason, Richard Dawkins joined the ensuing pile-on; he published an unprovoked and ill-informed rant against postmodernism as a review of Sokal’s work in 1998. It might have been suitably lost to public memory, except that he exhumed this baffling bit of “blind and dumb criticism” to post it online in 2007, at which time it mostly just made Dawkins seem like the drunk and belligerent crasher of a party that most people had already left. (It’s also rather unseemly for a knighted scientist to pick a turf war with a Humanities specialization; aren’t the Humanities being bullied enough by the government of the 1%, without a fellow scholar bustling in for a cheap kick to the ribs while they’re down?) At a conference I attended, around 2003, my alma mater’s own expert on postmodernism remarked that it seemed just as the idea was getting some public traction, everybody started talking about globalization instead. Most recently, the Guardian ran a column last year about how postmodernism was a premillennial flash in the pop-culture pan, and had been replaced – not by globalization this time – but by the Internet: “Postmodernism was, crucially, a pre-digital phenomenon. In retrospect, all the things that seemed so exciting to its adherents – the giddy excess of information, the flattening of old hierarchies, the blending of signs with the body – have been made real by the internet.”

Banksy, Commissioned mural. New York, 2008. Photo CC-licensed from SteveR-.

Enter Exit, and Banksy’s work more broadly: playful with pastiche and parody, replete with détourned ready-mades and quoted references, at once street-wise and Sotheby’s-worthy, distinctly stylized in its stark imagery and sardonic tone, sublimely ambiguous in its uncertain attribution, its oscillation between presence and disappearance. It’s consistently preoccupied with the problematic status of art as commodity, and placed to interrogate the roles of artist and audience, and the social function of art itself, everywhere it appears. And it’s all wickedly, infinitely ironic. Banksy’s aesthetic is almost textbook postmodernism – given the logic of his work, it might not be a stretch to suggest his whole oeuvre represents a postmodern parody of postmodernism itself.

Banksy, Original Thought. New York, 2010.

I did say “almost.” How Banksy’s work departs from textbook postmodernism is in its plain-spoken populism and its open public access. The jokes are almost never in-jokes, the ironies are immediately grasped, the images are iconic, the themes and statements are clearly political – addressing controverial issues and matters of public interest – and the language is both direct and fiercely witty. Dawkins would be hard pressed to find in Banksy’s version of postmodernism the perceived obscurity, uselessness, and social detachment at which his “blind and dumb” criticism takes such gender-coded and ambiently xenophobic umbrage. (The artist himself might object to having his work described as “postmodernist.” But it’s not the artist’s job to interpret one’s own work for the public. That’s tacky.)

And yet at the same time, Dawkins would also look simply ludicrous to denounce Banksy for postmodernism’s perceived sins of fakery and dissimulation – er, better make that more ludicrous than he already looks for missing entirely the meaning and materiality of fakery and dissimulation for the culture of late capital. (Okay, that’s enough about Sir Dick; his problem is more with postmodernist scholarship, not art.) As with quintessentially postmodern productions like Videodrome, Philip K. Dick stories, and the surgical body art of Orlan and Nina Arsenault, Banksy’s work messes specifically with perceptions and assumptions about what’s real or authentic, and what isn’t, in its use of trompe l’oeil tactics and, moreover, in the uncertainty his work leaves in its wake: “is it a Banksy?”

its neither real or a hoax. its a banksy
- this guy I know

What the film does, then, is amplify this almost-textbook postmodern aesthetic – it creates more ambiguity and play in the very gesture of posing and purporting to answer questions. It turns the documentary form on itself and so turns the screw, to collapse the form’s defining premise in truth-value and the real into a hyperreal hall of mirrors, a procession of footage, interviews, narration, and montage that leave it impossible to distinguish what is simulation and what is too weird to make up.

Exit is a documentary about a would-be documentarist documenting an eminently postmodern scene of cultural production. Compounding this recursive premise is the story it tells, which fast becomes either stranger than fiction or a fantastic farce. Or both. The most absorbing facet of the film is how it both supports and subverts the post-Romantic ideology of artistic authenticity and originality.

In the first place, the proffered genealogy of “street art” is highly selective and dehistoricized, a speciously sketched “birth of a movement” that, as public art of social revolt, ultimately differs more in degree than in kind from its venerable predecessors in wildstyle graffiti, Dada, and Don Juan.

Moreover, the basis of Banksy’s and Fairey’s work in ready-mades and various types of appropriation, of devices and spaces as well as images, renders their protests over Guetta’s perceived artistic inauthenticity at once undeservingly harsh, more paradoxically post-Romantic than postmodern, and absurdly ironic. The documentary narrative, to its credit, situates Guetta in the tradition of Duchamps, Warhol, Koons, Kostabi, and Hirst. This is also equally the tradition to which Banksy belongs (at least as much as he belongs to that of Bronx wildstyle and Basquiat), however much he and Fairey disavow it, however truly or feignedly Banksy appears discomfited by critical and commercial success in the high art world of millionaires’ trophy cases.

Ultimately, though, the film succeeds not despite but because of these ambiguities. It is a film thoroughly consistent with Banksy’s paint and sculptural work, a varition on its major themes (the critique of the art commodity, the interrogation of the author function and its inordinate cultural capital), a bracing rejuvenation of the postmodern sublime, and a persuasive realization of postmodernism’s political potential.

How it realizes this potential is perhaps best illustrated in the Disneyland sequence.

The Thunder Mountain Gitmo detainee installation is pointedly political in its imagery, placement, and public visibility; however the viewer interprets it must deal with the disconcerting juxtaposition of leisure capital and neo-imperial torture.

Accordingly, the piece demonstrates the real limits on and risks to genuine freedom of radical expression, not just in its reference points but in its placement and in the documentation that shows the stick it throws in the spokes of an average day at the “happiest place on Earth.” The film’s use of the piece footage is itself as astonishing and political as the piece itself, given Disney’s notoriously tight and litigiously guarded control over its public image (discussed in another fine documentary, The Mickey Mouse Monopoly). The very use of this footage in the film tests credibility, as a provocation to the corporation that has become emblematic of copyright extremism and hypersensitive perception management.

Exit‘s Disney footage also engages a postmodern politics of historical memory – it captures and commemorates a moment of daring guerilla art that tests believability, but for its corroboration by archival period reports in news media. If “the events of 11 September signalled the death of postmodernism,” as the Guardian has it, this piece and its documentation signal postmodernism’s return with a vengeance, expressed with reference to September 11 itself (the catalyst for those Guantanamo detainments).

The copyright and legal questions prompted by this and related scenes of subversive appropriation (like the anecdote about the counterfeit pounds) put the film’s ambiguities and ironies to perhaps their toughest test. After months of speculation and dispute over the film’s veracity (including the intriguing suggestion that the film’s main subject, the French documentarist Guetta, was played by Banksy himself), reports emerged a year ago that Guetta was being sued for copyright infringement. A legal proceeding like this still doesn’t necessarily prove anything about Guetta or the film, but it does provide some compelling evidence towards resolving the film’s ambiguities (and spoiling some of its fun, as copyright law all too regularly does). A ruse that involves sworn oaths and lawyers’ fees seems a colossal project for even an artist of considerable patience, tenacity, and resources like Banksy.

In any case, Exit is perhaps best understood paradoxically, as the cinematic equivalent of Banksy’s counterfeit Princess Di pound note: turns out you can spend it anyway. That’s the cultural logic of late capitalism at work.

Works Cited
Banksy. Banksy.co.uk.
Bonner, Sean. “Thierry Guetta, aka Mr. Brainwash sued for copyright infringement over Run DMC image.” BoingBoing 26 Jan. 2011.
Dawkins, Richard. “Postmodernism disrobed.” Richard Dawkins Foundation, 31 Mar. 2007.
Exit Through the Gift Shop. Dir. Banksy. Paranoid Pictures, 2010.
Kunzru, Hari. “Postmodernism: From the cutting edge to the museum.” The Guardian 15 Sept. 2011.

Format-shifting and fidelity: on reading and adaptation

Recent work on adaptation studies (the study of novels turned into movies, and so on) suggests that the ideas the field was founded on – like how “faithful” a movie is to its source – have been superseded, left behind as passé or outmoded. That’s the state of the field according to Linda Hutcheon’s 2006 book A Theory of Adaptation, for instance.

So reading Jamie Lee Wallace’s blog post about how “audio books are not cheating” – to gether with its comments – is a useful reminder that ideas about fidelity to source texts and authenticity in original versions are alive and well in everyday language and popular culture. Wallace is responding to criticisms that reading audio rather than print editions of books is a kind of “cheating.” She makes solid, practical arguments: that the text is the same; that audiobooks make reading possible for otherwise busy schedules; and, most interestingly, that the speaking voice adds presence (what Walter Benjamin calls “aura”) and, sometimes, additional interpretive layers.

My main criticism of the post was going to be that she doesn’t name those who think audiobooks are cheating: who are the “bibliophile purists” she’s responding to?

Then I started reading the comments. The overwhelming majority agree with the blogger (not surprising, since the blog medium itself would filter out a lot of print purists). But the dissenting comments are revealing. (I admit I’m taking some of these out of context.)

“I don’t listen to books — I read them.”
“I’m still just purist enough to be annoyed by eBooks. I still think nothing beats the feeling of actually holding the book and turning the pages.”
“I am totally one of those people who wouldn’t be caught dead with a kindle or any fandangled technology device that’s trying to replace books.”
“I felt dirty for listening to it. I was cheating myself of the experience of cradling a book in my hands and being curled up on the couch with it, but it freed my hands up to do other things..granted there was a few sound effects added into the story, which helped enhance the experience but I don’t think I can really say I’ve “read” that book because I didn’t physically hold it in my hands.”
“I still insist that books are meant to be read. However, I do not consider audio-books or kindle versions to be cheating, with one condition: That the book is intact. That is all summaries, short versions and most obviously movie adaptations are cheating. Mostly because they give everything in bite size, easily digested pieces. The point about a book is to let your imagination go wild and enjoy the imagery the author so carefully created.”

As you can see, the discussion ends up encompassing not just audiobooks but e-books as formats seen to compete with print as more people shift to them. But the shift isn’t one-way, just as adaptation isn’t one-way. (Hutcheon discusses how novels changed over the 20th century to adopt more “cinematic” techniques.) In this light, the last quoted comment’s point about abridgments is well taken – I read unabridged audio editions – but to call a film adaptation “cheating” is to misconstrue what films do (unless you’re talking about films that cheat estates out of their royalties), and yet it’s a widely held opinion. I myself confess to having felt vaguely like I was taking a shortcut by reading Ulysses (unabridged) as an audiobook; but that feeling was easily trumped by a rewarding feeling of accomplishment: I’ve read Ulysses!

Ulysses, by James Joyce

What this blog post suggests for adaptation studies is that it needs to engage critically with the popular romance of fidelity: the fetishes of authenticity and aura that we have inherited from Romantic tradition and that clearly continue to inform popular receptions and understandings of popular culture. (There’s also, among this post’s comments, a recurring sense that new media simply replace old – as I discussed last week.)

But by the same token, “purists” need to ask themselves what purity they are defending, and what that defence serves. Discourses of purity, for instance, are historically bound up in pernicious practices and institutions of race and nation. And defences of purity are one of the main ideological weapons still deployed by multinational media conglomerates to sell the public on increasingly restrictive, censorious, and invasive copyright regulation. In addition, media today are so diverse and multi-directional in their mutual appropriations and cross-pollinations that more pertinent and productive questions beg to be asked than whether audio editions are more real or more readable than paper, or whether Clueless is “faithful” to Austen.

Take Canadian poet Christian Bok’s Xenotext Experiment, for instance: a poem transcribed into a bacterium’s genome, for it to replicate and mutate – literally re-writing Bok’s poem – ad infinitum. What might readers attached to print make of this writing? How does one read the “original” text of a bacterial genome?

New media to old (and vice versa): Om nom nom

The “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content.” The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech. (31)

This passage occurs towards the end of the first chapter of McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964) – the chapter that details his most famous statement: “The medium is the message.” In the context of explicating that statement (explication that, for McLuhan, entails both explanation and further encryption), he makes the above comment about content – or message – as both a distraction from the real issue, form – or medium – and, at the same time, a kind of palimpsest or accretion of legacy media.

McLuhan’s statement that “the medium is the message” became famous as a well-worded, soundbite-friendly wake-up call to pay attention not to the “content” of cultural production but to its “form.” In addition, the way it’s worded suggests that form and content, medium and message, can’t be easily distinguished from each other – they are mutually entangled, mutually constitutive of each other. Treating form and content as separate and opposed tends to oversimplify how cultural production works.

Other scholars and artists have made this point too. As Slavoj Žižek puts it: “form is not the neutral frame of particular contents, but the very principle of concretion” (190). “We need to do more than explain what our texts are saying,” says Romantic literary scholar Jerome McGann; “we need to understand what they are doing in saying what they say” (viii). Henry James, in a personal letter from 1912, anticipates McLuhan’s own statement: “Form is substance,” he writes. “Form alone takes, and holds and preserves, substance” (235).

Understanding this admittedly complicated statement of McLuhan’s is a priority for the student who would succeed in literary, cultural, or media studies. Rutgers U English professor Jack Lynch translates the idea into practical terms: “in an English paper, don’t talk about the ‘real world.’ Talk about writing.”

Don’t assume literature is a transparent window that shows us the real world – it’s not something we can reliably look through. Often it’s more like a painting than a window, and instead of looking through it we should learn to look at it.

Or as I’ve put it, in my own discussions with students, the focus in literary study shouldn’t be on what the text says, but rather on how it says it. Write about the literary work not as though it’s a “window” you can ignore while you watch the scene through it, but instead as though it’s a tapestry: a dense network of textual threads that have as much interest – or more – for their intricate interweaving and connections, as for the scene they show.

So one way McLuhan suggests the mutual constitution of medium and message, as well as the socially determining power of the former, is by giving examples of how new media interact with old. To call old media the content of new media is, first, to describe cultural production as more of a practice of adaptation. While we are accustomed to thinking of art-making as “creation” (according to traditions inherited from Romanticism and the reproduced in the rhetoric of the entertainment industry) – as, instead, more accurately understood as a practice of appropriating and transformatively re-working existing texts, genres, and discourses. As McLuhan’s colleague at the U of Toronto also observed, “Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels” (97). Hence, Linda Hutcheon appropriates this very passage from McLuhan as a fitting epigraph for A Theory of Adaptation (2006).

“The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera.” Any text you can think of – and by “text” I mean any kind of cultural production (movie, novel, play, opera, etc.) – is to a greater or lesser extent an adaptation of other existing texts and conventions; nothing gets created out of nothing. Even William Wordsworth, exemplar of Romantic originality, wrote his celebrated poetry by responding to and reworking an extensive repertoire of earlier literature (Hayden 215).

Here’s an example from one of Western culture’s most adapted – and adaptive – playwrights, Shakespeare. His play King Lear – itself an adaptation of a story from medieval Anglo-Celtic folklore – provides source material adapted by Japanese director Akiro Kurasawa, for the feudal epic Ran; or by Margaret Atwood, for the novel Cat’s Eye, whose beleaguered protagonist is named after Lear’s dutiful but persecuted daughter Cordelia. And every production of a dramatic script is is own adaptation. The 1993 staging of Lear by London’s Royal Shakespeare Company presented a postmodern historical pastiche, with characters starting out in period costume but then appearing in progressively more modern garb. By the ultraviolent finale, characters looked like they had arrived onstage from the killing fields of Serbia and Croatia. The production’s ironic costuming and prop strategies thus turned Shakespeare’s play into a critique of ethnic nationalism, and even of modernity’s master narrative, progress.

Now, McLuhan, for his part, isn’t interested so much in adaptations of texts and genres but in adaptations of media, as institutions, to one another. The point of observing that the content of a movie is a play is to illustrate how new media adapt, interact with, and – as he tends to see it – integrate and assimilate older media. The content of commercial radio in its early days was a compbination of drama adapted from stage, journalism adapted from print, performed music, and recorded music. The tiny iPod has eaten the giant jukebox. The tablet screen I’m typing these words on is also the typewriter. The desktop computer is often cited as the apotheosis of media convergence (I’ll get back to the example pictured here).

From left: tube amp, iMac, scanner, printer on speaker

McLuhan, deeply engaged with issues of modernity, tended to see media change and development in terms of epochs and revolutions, as though they succeed one another and make each other obsolete: video killed the radio star. He was surrounded by kids who took to television in a way that books seemed unable to compete with. McLuhan’s comment aout old media as the content of new implies something of this sense of turnover and perennila obsolescence: if a play is the content of a movie, then plays are on the way out. This is patently false, of course, and more recent scholarship has both critiqued this premise of McLuhan’s work (among others) and extended McLuhan’s investigatons of how new and old media interact, suggesting instead that emergent media negotiate and make accommodations with existing media. Bolter and Grusin suggest the term “remediation” to describe how new media both incorporate old media and strive to seem “immediate,” or transparent. Henry Jenkins’ term for the interaction of new and old media, and the consequent blurring of distinctions between producers and consumers, is convergence culture.

To give a few examples: The novel’s conventions changed after the advent of film, plays as easily incorporate video as video adapts drama, and video games and movies are constantly turning into each other. A decade’s worth of file-sharing has also been a decade of growing and sometimes record profits for big entertainment industries. The popularization of computing has entailed not the paperless office or ubiquitous telecommuting, but more paperwork (literally) and new laws to regulate computing while commuting. My family computer functions as a radio, a CD player, a DVD player, a TV, a game console, a photo album, and a film studio. It also, sometimes, serves as a computer. But this is a two-way street: as far as my big old vacuum-tube amplifier is concerned, the computer is just one input channel, no different than the cassette deck also hooked up to it. serves as just one input for my big old vacuum-tube amplifier and vegetable-crate sized speakers.

McLuhan himself later “discovered a better way of saying the medium is the message,” as follows: “Each technology creates a new environment” (qtd. in Gordon 175). He thought this wording better addresses how media strive for “immediacy,” how they become taken for granted, invisible, and natural in their social implementation – and thus how they effect their most profound transformations on subjectivity and society, time and space.

Works Cited

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 1999.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.

Gordon, W. Terrence. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding. Toronto: Stoddart, 1997.

Hayden, John O. “The Road to Tintern Abbey.” Wordsworth Circle 12.4 (1981): 211-16.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.

James, Henry. Letter to Hugh Walpole (19 May 1912). Rpt. in Novelists on the Novel. Ed. Miriam Allott. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ca. 1959. 235.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.

Lynch, Jack. “Writing about the Real World.” Getting an A on an English Paper. Rutgers U, n.d.

McGann, Jerome. Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). Corte Madera: Gingko P, 2003.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Afterword,” in Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917. Ed. Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso, 2002.

The human mic: a live extension of Twitter?

From yesterday’s refreshingly clear-sighted and supportive report on #OccupyWallStreet in the Globe and Mail:

Perhaps the most cogent symbol of this raw democratic process is the “human microphone,” a natural form of call-and-response voice amplification that the occupiers use to overcome the police ban on speakers and megaphones. At their general assemblies, a large group of occupiers repeat the words of a single speaker, allowing the power of multiple voices to resonate through the crowd. The result is both moving and arresting. The speaker must slow down, choose his or her words carefully, and then listen as the crowd repeats those words back. Likewise, members of the crowd move from passive listeners to active participants.

Agreed. The human microphone system being used by #OccupyWallStreet is proving an effective performative tactic to work around the imposed ban on technological amplification at the Occupation’s public gatherings. And as even this short quotation suggests, the tactic offers lots to think about, especially for studies of performance, media, and culture; it readily lends itself to poststructuralist reading. Check out the people’s acoustic sound system in action as Slavoj Žižek addresses #OccupyWallStreet:

Slowness, attention, delay, repetition, and the liveness of the moment: structured around these features, the human mic system might seem a direct revolt against the proliferation of new media technologies that are now so often cited as responsible for accelerating, diffusing, and hyper-mediating contemporary communications. But it seems to me that the human mic system would have been unthinkable before Twitter. The parceling out of brief statements, and their echoing repetition by those in attendance at the time, strike me as eminently Twitter-based practices. To say nothing of the statements that then get actually tweeted and re-tweeted by the crowd.

“Mic check?" – “MIC CHECK!": We Are All Human Microphones Now bit.ly/rsvbTu #OccupyWallStreet—
Sarah Strnad (@FoxyStrnad) October 05, 2011

Rather than a revolt against new media, the human mic looks more like an embodied extension of them, a corporeal remediation of social network technology — technology that is widely held responsible for “doing [bad] things to our brains” — in the service of cultivating attentive listening, dialogic socializing, and above all critical thinking. (I’d like to think there’s something anti-proprietary about the system too; its formal focus on sharing and dissemination can be read as a critique of tightening copyright laws that are entirely of a piece with the kleptocracy against which the Occupation stands.)

I could be wrong; I’m venturing an impression here, and I haven’t researched the human mic phenomenon. If it predates Twitter, I’d love to learn about where it came from, and how it developed. (I certainly don’t mean to discredit anyone with my hypothesis — or to credit Twitter too much, as happened a lot amidst discussions of the Arab Spring.) In any case, the Occupation’s critical mass (which is at the same time, paradoxically, a global dispersion) of converged new media and embodied assembly producing some new kind of body politic?

What’s Battlestar Galactica got to do with the copyfight?

My article on Battlestar Galactica and Canada-USA tensions over copyright is now available in open access full text at AU’s repository (courtesy of Liverpool UP). At the link you can read the abstract and download the PDF.

McCutcheon, Mark A. “Downloading Doppelgängers: New Media Anxieties and Transnational Ironies in Battlestar Galactica.” Science Fiction Film and Television 2.1 (2009): 1-24.

So what’s Battlestar got to do with copyright? Briefly, the show was produced in the USA, but it was shot in Canada, and it cast Canadian actors as the lead bad guys, who “download” a lot. At press time, Bill C-61 was on the table, but the argument remains relevant to C-32′s expected successor. The recently leaked cables showing the “U.S. swayed Canada on copyright bill” (Geist) add fresh evidence to my claims.

The OA version has neither the layout nor the frame-grab still shots from Battlestar that grace the publisher’s version. There’s an ironic copyright backstory story here. I got the proofs of my article laid out with lots of these still frames — none of which I’d chosen, let alone cleared. I told the editor the images added great illustrative value, but I was concerned about their copyright status — wouldn’t their uncleared use lead to litigation? The editor replied to say that, although “the copyright law around frame-grabbed images” had not yet been tested,

it is the case in the UK that they can be used without obtaining permission (and in the US and Canada, they are covered by fair-use clauses – at least until they too are tested in court). Publishers like [***] Press regularly use images without obtaining permission. We discussed this issue with Liverpool UP before launching the journal and they are prepared to go along with our understanding of the situation; and we do always credit the source of images, even though this is not strictly necessary.

Imagine my delight, then, that this essay on copyright got to appear in print accompanied by illustrative images used legally but without the Hollywood producers’ permission.

It’s only fair that research on copyright law should be openly accessible. It’s a bonus that fair dealing became a principle of this work’s form.

Work Cited

Geist, Michael. “Leaks show U.S. swayed Canada on copyright bill.” Toronto Star 3 Sept. 2011.

The line, the skyline, between then and now

Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. – Walter Benjamin

NYC skyline (from the ferry), Feb. 2001

In a hugely absorbing (but disappointingly under-attended) session on Imperialism and Culture at the 2008 Socialist Studies conference, I suggested that the attacks of September 11, 2001, marked a line between past and present that feels uncannily like the kind of line described in science fiction, a line that sharply divides one’s lived and felt experience of time in its unfolding. (Think of Lionel Verney’s reflections on life before and after the plague in The Last Man, or Offred’s reflections on life before and under Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale…or Cayce’s reflections on life after September 11 in Pattern Recognition.) The session presenters suggested (and rightly so, I think) that to represent the attacks of September 11, 2001, in this way is to reproduce the kind of cultural imperialist ideology that has driven not only a lot of popular culture since, but also a lot of dubious-to-disastrous foreign policy decisions.

Point taken, and a fair enough one at that.

Lines of tragedy and trauma divide and sometimes dismember everyone’s lives, whether on the personal scale or the sociopolitical. Walter Benjamin observed that the state of emergency is not the exception but the rule. As witnessed by the helpless and horrified hindsight of Benjamin’s hypothetical angel, history is illuminated as a grim palimpsest of such lines, like a whip-scarred back: West African nations after slavery, the First Nations after colonization, Japan after August 1945, Rwanda after 1994. (This isn’t to homogenize different traumas and tragedies, only to suggest how they mar and mark time.)

Memorial mural, NYC, Apr. 2002

So it is perhaps not despite but because of this knowledge — knowledge of history’s lacerated hide, and of the military-entertainment complex that feeds greedily on it –that one still feels so keenly this line, this skyline, cut down through the lived experience of time in its unfolding.

Or its collapsing.

Such a strong storm buffets the angel of history, it’s impossible to tell which.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations (1940). Trans. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969. Rpt. in Simon Fraser U http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html

Forsyth, Scott and John McCullough. “Imperialism and Culture.” Society for Socialist Studies annual conference, U of British Columbia, 4 Jun. 2008.

For Labour Day: diagnoses of neoliberalism

To observe Labour Day at a time when labour is being aggressively demonized by business and its political enablers, I’ll share this shrewd and concise diagnosis of neoliberalism, and its core contradiction, by David Harvey:

To guard against their greatest fears––fascism, communism, socialism, authoritarian populism, and even majority rule––the neoliberals have to put strong limits on democratic governance, relying instead upon undemocratic and unaccountable institutions (such as the Federal Reserve or the IMF) to make key decisions. This creates the paradox of intense state interventions and government by elites and ‘experts’ in a world where the state is supposed not to be interventionist. [...] Faced with social movements that seek collective interventions, therefore, the neoliberal state is itself forced to intervene, sometimes repressively, thus denying the very freedoms it is supposed to uphold. (A Brief History of Neoliberalism [2007], 69-70)

While I’m at it, I’ll share Roseanne’s diagnosis too:

I’m pleased to say I’m indebted to student work for directing me to these instructive illuminations.

“As private as I can afford”

“This is as private as I can afford.” (William Gibson , Neuromancer 49)

Internet privacy is on my mind — again — amidst AU CIO’s post on face-recognition tech, a Facebook meme about people finding their smartphone contacts lists suddenly all over the social network, and a phone talk this morning with a family member, distressed by an aggressive phone-based phishing attempt from someone claiming to represent Microsoft, warning that “your computer is at risk.”

The would-be phisher claimed to be calling from Microsoft, claimed that the family member’s computer was at risk (of what?), and claimed they’d sent the user numerous online warnings. (Right, I know what those look like.) I think the relative called me for assurance this was indeed a scam. My assurance ensued, righteously: How would Microsoft know anything about a computer at a given household? More importantly, why would Microsoft care? A fully staffed call centre is mad expensive compared to even-daily MS Update notifications. As if that didn’t clinch it, the phisher called back, and when pressed for personnel ID and contact info, spelled out a password for my relation: “F-U-C-K O-F-F.” (Apparently it’s the scammer’s prerogative to get mad at the person who isn’t cheerfully co-operating with the attempted scam.)

"Panopticon" by Zombieite, 8 Jun. 2011

Which is maybe why I was a bit more predisposed to cheer this report that Anonymous wants to kill Facebook. Hey, I use FB all the time. But could I live without it? Easily. (I make a point of doing so every summer.) Part of me is simply curious to see if they can pull it off. Their statement about the operation suggests how deeply Facebook is invested in the military-entertainment complex of personal data mining:

“Facebook has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world.”

It’s the kind of claim, true or otherwise, that so readily (and rightly) rattles Internet users, visitors and residents alike. That report (conflicted as it is) clicked through to another, more detailed article that takes up the questions about privacy that perennially pop up at my institution’s social network got me reviewing all the data I’ve volunteered to the various apps and networks I use. Still as minimally need-to-know as possible. (Never mind the fully public info about me in the Landing or the AU website. Sharing that info is tacitly obligatory, for public accountability and for being a public intellectual, I guess.)

After reading this far you’re already searching for yourself on some of these sites. You’re probably noticing that there are a lot of inaccuracies – there are. Though there is also enough true information to give anyone a coronary.

Sure, I started “ego-surfing” to see where anything on me might be showing up. Thankfully, I didn’t find much at all, and what i did confirmed the article’s point about inaccuracies; and it would seem that a lot of the services mentioned in the article are US-centric. But I don’t see anything at Canada411, which I notice has gone all stalkerish now, with reverse-lookup options. I did find my face, which I don’t much like (but at least I share my name with enough professional athletes, maverick mathematicians, and murderers that it gets a bit lost in the crowd).

But the other thing of interest in the article is what it suggests about the commodity status and future of privacy. On one hand, the article alludes to “the acrimony between privacy pundits and data brokers.” A phrase like this suggests (in a paradoxical semantic twist) that the privacy interest is a public interest, a concern for, say, privacy commissioners and a principle for holding financial interests accountable, and at bay from the citizenry; while the publicity interest is the private interest: that is, it’s the privately-held transnational corporations who traffic in your public information. But on the other hand, the article also mentions a number of entrepreneurial companies like Abine, “a privacy startup in Cambridge that is in the business of deleting individuals from these sites.” (Spoiler alert: deleting your personal info once it’s out there is enormously difficult, however you try to do it — so maybe it’s more about taking preventative measures, as in measure twice, post once.)

Imagining a dystopian near-future that pits “data brokers” against “privacy brokers” is arguably fine fare for SF writers like Gibson or Cory Doctorow, but then again maybe that future’s already here. As connectivity theorist George Siemens so bluntly, hauntingly put it at an AU conference last year, it may just be the case that “privacy doesn’t exist.” Between the ubiquity of data mining by everyone from ersatz Microsoft impostors to political parties, and that of devices and apps that invite you to publicize your every move (thanks anyway, Twitter, but I’m never going to “add my location”), the network society is becoming a surveillance society that, at times like this, makes the panopticon seem less like a model prison than a gated civil society, while the outside world gradually becomes the prison.

Works Cited

Blue, Violet. Anonymous Vows Destruction of Facebook on Guy Fawkes Day.” Pulp Tech [blog]. ZDNet, 9 Aug. 2011.

—. “How to remove yourself from people search websites.” Pulp Tech [blog]. ZDNet, 16 Aug. 2011.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Penguin Ace, 1984.

Siemens, George. Keynote presentation. Annual Research Forum, Athabasca U. 27 Apr. 2010.

Cross-blogged from the AU Landing

Recherche du tapes perdu

It seemed enchanted to manipulate magnetic tape, the very stuff of real studios, as if you were the next step after producer and engineer and mastering. Somehow, your little black plastic envoy conveyed that churning thing you meant. (Wilson R6)

Amidst the many adventures of a trans-Canadian July vacation, I was bequeathed with a box of old audio cassettes that had somehow been lurking, overlooked, in my parents’ basement for a good many years. (Later on our vacation, I was surprised to see audiocassettes for sale in a Toronto Chinatown shop.) Very few of these are commercial tapes, many more are personal mixtapes–most of them completely unlabelled. So I’ve dusted off the Walkman to give these tapes a fresh audition as my workday soundtrack.

The mixtapes are mostly of the recorded-from-radio variety, and these are chiefly comprised of: recordings of CHUM FM middle-of-the-road playlists and “Sunday Night Funnies” shows from the mid-1980s; recordings of CFNY chart and request shows from the late 1980s; and recordings of college radio house music shows from the mid-1990s. There are some lost classics amidst these reels: not just great tracks but accidental fragments of broadcast history. Like erstwhile CFNY DJ Steve Anthony introducing “Love will tear us apart” with a blackly comic dig at Canadian radio regulations:

Hi there, Steve Anthony at 9:03 and, uh, one of our many CRTC regulations requires that we play music by a band that contains dead people: Joy Division on The Spirit!*

Some excellent** tunes that I’ve rediscovered (including some Canadian ones) are:

• The Arrows, “Heart of the City”
• Dalbello, “Black on black”
• OMD, “(Forever) Live and Die”
• Pop Will Eat Itself, “Def Con One”
• Simple Minds, “Love song”:
• Transvision Vamp, “Baby I don’t care”:

What’s really eerie about listening to these tapes again is how quickly, like within the first few notes, I can identify a song that I haven’t heard in decades — and then sing along, or at least hum the tune. Don’t my synapses have anything better to do than archive forgotten one-hit wonders and art-school tracks? There’s an interesting literature on music, psychology, and neurology that I’ve been meaning to read (see Works Consulted below), and it likely has something to say on the fact — as Friedrich Kittler puts it — that “we all know hits and rock songs by heart precisely because there is no reason to memorize them anymore” (Kittler 80).

On one hand, these tapes are like a short, roughly drafted chapter in the imaginary Bildungsroman that would chronicle the development of my musical tastes; on the other, it’s a set of murmuring echoes from within the cast-off husks of previous selves, discarded subjectivities. They’re a time capsule filled with nonsequiturs from a past somebody, or somebodies, improbably claiming to have been me.

* CFNY, before it became the Cobain-clone sausage party called “The Edge,” was known as “The Spirit of Radio” (as commemorated in the eponymous Rush song).

** You may take this descriptor with however many grains of salt that you wish.

Work Consulted

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986). Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.

Levitin, Daniel J. This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Penguin, 2007.

Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Vintage, 2008.

Wilson, Carl. “Ode to the yearning, churning mix tape.” Globe and Mail 4 Jun. 2005: R6.