Let’s revisit the Stewart Brand quote that “information wants to be free”.
The full quote reads: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient.
“That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.”
The phrase “information wants to be free” is little more than throat clearing for Brand’s real aim, to reveal the inherent paradox of the digital age. Though advances in technology allow all creative works to be digitised, copied and distributed easily for something that resembles “free”, does that mean we should carelessly treat it as such?
The fact content can be accessed for free doesn’t somehow erase the immense value that professional creativity adds to our lives.
Will we be so overtaken by the power of our technology that we collectively forget to preserve ourselves or the quality of our lives?
Why information shouldn’t be free
by Chris Ruen
http://www.afr.com/p/national/arts_saleroom/why_information_shouldn_be_free_ODMOpJVlRLZ5BAZjkCAsoJ
I spent the summer killing trees. Kneeling down upon a grassy hillside under the searing heat of late July, sweat dripped down my forehead, stinging my eyes while I struggled with an 2.5-metre-tall eastern red cedar tree. Holding back its unforgiving bottom limbs, conifer needles and splintered bark clawed at my wrists and forearms. I reached for a nearby hacksaw and seized the limbs again, attacking the tree’s foundation.
A surprise awaited below the wide skirt of stiff branches. Not one, but three gnarled trunks spun out from the same patch of dry, bare soil. From a distance, eliminating the tree appeared a simple task; only by kneeling down to its source could I discover the organic dysfunction hiding below.
Since childhood, I have visited my family’s farmland in south-east Minnesota, oblivious to the character of my surroundings. Patches of cedar tree saplings rose unchallenged from the open meadows, and tall glades of mature cedars dominated the hilltops.
Growing older, my appreciation for the land grew. The proliferating cedars, I gathered, had rightfully outcompeted the neighbouring plants and trees. They were a natural force of evolution, if unfortunate competition for the commanding oaks that dotted the property.
OPPORTUNISTIC INVADERS
My perception shifted in 2007. Researching this corner of Minnesota, I learnt its true name: the Driftless. During the last Ice Age, glaciers that invaded from the north spared an ovular region of rolling hills. When the Ice Age ended, torrents of glacial meltwater carved narrow valleys and scoured the hillsides, exposing limestone bluffs. A unique landscape was born. Whereas hardwood forests permeated the cool, north-facing bluffs that saw little direct sunlight, the rest of the land was characterised by oak savanna.
Beneath the oak canopies, tremulous light filtered in through permissive leaves. Rainwater drained through the shallow soils and dripped through the underlying limestone into ice caves where waters cooled before emerging again as frigid freshwater springs.These springs collected as cold water streams, providing habitat for trout, birds, mammals, and reptiles.
It was a land of magnificent depth and diversity. When farmers began to settle the area though, many of the centuries-old oaks were chopped down. Wildfires were suppressed allowing fire-intolerant species – most notably the eastern red cedar – to move in and proliferate. They surrounded the oaks and gradually choked them off from water and sunlight.
The cedars’ root systems and fallen needles altered the chemistry of the topsoil, making further degradation more likely; native plants withered into dormancy beneath the impenetrable branches. The barren soils that resulted were prone to erosion and runoff, dirtying the streams and filling the valleys with sediment.
With degeneration in full swing, land devalued. The cedars kept rising, threatening to transform a diverse habitat of colour into one of dreary sameness and concealed potential.
Once I understood the landscape, I no longer viewed the rise of the cedars as evolutionary. They were a regressive force, an opportunistic invader, a threat to development. I realised that, if I wanted to enjoy this land, the Driftless, throughout my life, I’d have to do my small part to maintain it.
CREATE OR DESTROY?
On a January morning in 2010, nervous congregants gathered in a San Francisco auditorium. They awaited revelation, if not rapture. There he was. Applause thundered: dressed in his uniform of black turtleneck and blue jeans, Steve Jobs finally entered from stage left.
The oracle of Apple Inc began to enumerate the many charms of his latest revelation: the iPad. The new tablet computer represented an entirely new category of digital device, splitting the difference between the smartphone’s elegant mobility and the laptop’s utilitarian power. Tablets took the totality of digital media consumption and made it truly mobile. Digital web browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, and books were hardly new, but having such an optimised, sleek, intuitive device with which to obtain and consume it all was revolutionary.
“Let me show you what it looks like. I happen to have one right here,” Jobs said. “Holding the internet in your hands. It’s an incredible experience.”
Now that the prophet had offered the ability to hold the past, present and future of human expression in our hands, what would we do with it: create or destroy?
By 2010, the new age of digital media had already presented difficulties for traditional creative industries. With the iPad adding to the mix, would magazines, books, newspapers, television and film reap sustaining profits from digital metamorphosis? Some believed the industries would be reaped, sacrificed to the gods of progress.
In a column entitled “A saviour in the form of a tablet”, the New York Times’s David Carr gushed: “The tablet represents an opportunity to renew the romance between printed material and consumer . . . somewhere between the iTunes model and the iPhone app store . . . there may be a model for print.”
But would consumers be willing to open their wallets for content after years of getting much of it for free online? The gale-force winds of technological change had already blown many media professionals to the precipice. The iPad threatened to push them over the edge.
Once the internet became ubiquitous in the 2000s, newsstand, subscription and advertising revenue dropped steadily as consumers migrated to the web for free news, information and classified listings. Publishers, accustomed to the “analogue dollars” of print, struggled to deal with online advertising’s “digital pennies”.
As if that were not ominous enough, in came the Great Recession of 2008. Consumer budgets wilted. The New York Times, once thought invincible, became so cash-strapped that it took out a $250 million emergency loan from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, laid off employees, and axed sections.
TECHNOLOGY WAS NOT RESPONSIBLE
Aside from optimists such as David Carr, who had faith that new digital models would save us all, another school of thought emerged. Writer Stewart Brand’s famous edict “information wants to be free” was its guiding light. For these people, the notion that any industry needed to be “saved” was misguided and pathetic. Technology was not responsible for anything, much less the salvation of old, inefficient industries rendered useless by the market.
If historic institutions failed, even ones as important to society as robust journalism, it was the industries’ fault for not adapting fast enough or for no longer serving a purpose in the eyes of the marketplace. Institutional death was a necessary cost of progress.
“Technology giveth and technology taketh away,” BoingBoing editor Cory Doctorow said. In the issue of Wired magazine devoted to the iPad, the editors gave “Fake Steve Jobs”, a pseudonymous blogger from Silicon Valley, the last word on the iPad’s potential impact for print industries. His entry, “Go save yourself”, was full of rancour with allusions to “dumb f—wits who write for The New York Times:
“The iPad isn’t about saving newspapers. It’s about inventing new ways of telling stories, using a whole new language – one we can’t even imagine right now . . . the truth is you guys really need to die so we can clear the way for the new guys.”
This endnote to Wired’s exploration expressed a digital mob’s readiness to drag old institutions to the village green for a good old-fashioned stoning. But the mob never bothered to consider what these supposedly outmoded institutions would be replaced with. Instead, they blindly embraced the holy commandment that all digital content shall be open, free, and shared.
Their vision of participatory, open-source digital creation and consumption (known as Web 2.0) preached that technology would bless us so long as we dutifully laid our offerings of labour and creativity before it for the good of the “hive”. We would be rewarded, eventually, with progress and prosperity. The digital sect promised revelatory new business models, wealth creation hitherto unseen, an explosion in creative culture, and an evolution in modes of expression so fantastical we “can’t even imagine” them.
“Now would be the time to embrace the internet,” Tech Crunch’s Michael Arrington said of the iPad release. “But the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and others are running in the opposite direction with [iPad] apps that have no hyperlinks and/or require a fee to get access.” Blasphemy!
A LIFE OF PIRACY
When file-trading service Napster was peaking in 2000, I was entering my freshman year at a university where each dorm room came outfitted with new, juicy broadband connections, ideal for transferring large digital files. Nearly all of my friends habitually used services such as Napster, burning digital songs to blank CDs. I knew very few people who still purchased music, even in 2000. Multiple record stores in my Minneapolis college district closed in my four years there.
I pirated hundreds of songs during my college years, but I sensed disposability and devaluation infecting my relationship with music. Logging on to a file-sharing service was part of an addictive cycle. At the end of each downloading session, the disappointment of a still unfulfilled and unquenched desire followed. “Free” music and its perfect abundance felt awfully cheap in the final analysis.
It was an exercise in hyper-consumption: quantity over quality, breadth over depth, entitlement over ownership. Intuiting that my classic relationship with music (paying for it) was indeed more spiritually profitable, and a hell of a lot more interesting and fun, I mostly stopped pirating when my online service of choice, Audiogalaxy, was shut down in 2002.
Anyone in my generation, though, who paid attention to the litigious battles between Napster and the Recording Industry Association of America instinctively gleaned that nothing was less hip than getting uptight about music piracy. Doing so aligned one with multi-millionaire artists, greedy major labels, corporate scallywags and thick-skulled Luddites.
I also assumed new digital models were emerging to replace the revenue of physical music sales. They had to be emerging, right? Considering all the capital and brainpower invested in the industry’s future, solutions would need to come sooner rather than later. In my mind, the controversy over piracy evidenced a healthy period of technological transition.
Piracy was arguably a positive development. It helped promotion-starved small artists connect with fans, threatening the unjust monopoly of bloated major labels. I didn’t hear of any independent artists raising their voices on the issue. Plenty of great new records continued to be released each year. How bad could piracy be?
The Greenpoint café where I worked in north Brooklyn, slinging espressos, was frequented by members of various Brooklyn bands such as TV On The Radio, The Hold Steady, Vampire Weekend, Yeasayer, and MGMT.
WHAT SUCCESS MEANS IN THE INTERNET AGE
I saw the cyclonic press coverage of these artists, the breathless critical praise, and the sold-out dates around the country. In the sphere of indie rock, they were in the upper echelon – either one step away from being on a major label or already succeeding on one. These were the success stories of the internet age, supposed poster children for the triumphs of file sharing. But from my ground-level vantage point in Brooklyn – away from the Rolling Stone reviews, SPIN cover stories, and profiles in the New York Times – all was not as it appeared on the mediated surface.
After getting to know a handful of members from some of these bands, I was shocked by how little money they seemed to be making. As a measly young writer and part-time barista who had never even heard of a trust fund before moving east, even I had an apartment – that paramount symbol of fortune in New York City – as nice or nicer than some of these “rock stars”.
My peers, 20-something rock disciples and aspiring songwriters, obtained nearly all of their music by downloading unlicensed copies for free online, often well before album release dates. They rarely went to concerts or bought band merchandise such as T-shirts or posters, rationalisations I’d heard others express for their downloading habits.
Millions of fans, such as my friends, had decided they no longer saw a reason to pay for the music they genuinely enjoyed and loved.
THE MARIACHI BAND AND MY CONSCIENCE
I remembered something my older brother Peter said to me years before. One day, he and I sat on the E express train as it clattered and squealed towards Manhattan. When it lurched to a halt at the Queens Plaza station, the doors slid open and a Mariachi band squeezed in. They struck up a resonant, bittersweet ballad.
The passengers looked up from their books and opened their sleepy eyes at the first few guitar strums. Soon, most everyone had craned his or her neck to watch and listen. Music made the trip endurable.The unheralded Mariachis collectively transported passengers’ minds to a better place, one that reverberated subconsciously.
The brakes squealed. Before the doors opened again, one Mariachi offered an overturned hat to the passengers. When he passed by our seats, I saw his sombrero already held a few dollar bills and quarters. Yup, he seemed to be doing just fine. I decided against giving him any money, as there was no compelling reason to do otherwise. I had already enjoyed the music. For his part, Peter offered a dollar before the Mariachis moved on to the nextcar.
“Those musicians were pretty good, actually,” I said to my brother as we exited the train and took the staircase up from the bowels of Manhattan. “Yup,” he concurred. “The thing is, if you like having that music around the city . . . you’ve got to support it.”
I instantaneously became defensive. What, was he trying to make me feel guilty? No matter, after a few minutes I realised the truth in my brother’s simple observation.
The more consistently those Mariachis on the subway returned home with rent and grocery money, the more likely they were to perform in the future, and the more likely the weary passengers – including me – would enjoy the benefits. It wasn’t merely a matter of incentivising that particular Mariachi band, but of actively maintaining the health of a particular cultural ecosystem in the city that benefited me, and the public at large, by association.
By putting their music up for sale, musicians were tacitly requesting compensation for their work. Fans freely enjoyed the fruits of musicians’ labour, but when it came time to show material gratitude, they folded their arms, saying, “No, I’m not gonna”, like a generation of spoiled, entitled children.
But behind free content’s superficial illusion of more lies a long-term reality of less. Sooner or later, it is something for which we all have to pay.
DOES QUALITY MATTER
To pay or not to pay? It is the existential crisis of the digital age. The Web 2.0 crowd rejected the notion that consumers would ever pay for digital content, which after all could be easily copied and redistributed for free. It was an antiquated expectation.
“I fear the ship for most publications may have already sailed,” wrote Infoworld’s Robert Cringely. “People are too used to getting subpar content for free. The premium rates publications charge(d) for print advertising subsidised a great many things – like teams of researchers, fact checkers, copy editors, and multiple line editors – that online ad models simply don’t support . . . Does quality matter? Or have we passed the point of no return, where fast and cheap trumps fast and good, and everything else be damned?”
As eReaders took their first toddling steps in 2010 towards widespread adoption, 28 per cent of eReader owners already admitted to downloading eBooks from illegal file-sharing services. In the days following the release of the iPad, when Apple had sold a mere 300,000 units, downloads of unlicensed eBooks via bittorrent protocols jumped by a whopping 78 per cent.
Though newspapers had offered free (and legal) online content for years, the spectre of piracy hung over that industry like a dark cloud.
The pirating of such large files as movies and TV series was already a problem for entertainment studios and stood to accelerate as bandwidth and connection speeds exponentially increased. Down-loading a season of a TV show would soon be as quick and easy as downloading an MP3, while iPads and high-definition screens made the cinema a less sought-after experience.
In music, digital sales initially skyrocketed. But the de-bundling of albums into the sale of individual tracks eroded the potential for such profits as physical sales careened into a free fall. After only 10 years, music industry revenues in the United States shrivelled from more than $US14 billion a year to less than $US7 billion.
Meanwhile, piracy expanded in scope and acceptance. The New York Times’s Carr might point to the 10 billion songs purchased from the iTunes store in its first seven years, but compare that to the 40 billion tracks pirated worldwide in 2009 alone. Even though numerous legal streaming services, subscription sites and MP3 stores emerged over the years to offer digital consumers convenience and affordable pricing, an astounding 95 per cent of music downloads in 2010 were pirated.
A 2009 study shows that only about 3 per cent of the music on the average person’s iPod had been purchased via the industry-standard iTunes Store. “We are at one of the most worrying stages yet for the industry,” Mark Mulligan of Forrester Research said in early 2011. “Music’s first digital decade is behind us and what do we have? Not a lot of progress. As things stand, digital music has failed.”
The industry appeared to be locked in a downward spiral. No new business models had appeared to save the day. Record stores closed by the thousands. Record labels merged or went out of business.
Even live concert tours, once considered “the saviour of the music business”, saw an historic downturn in 2010. Across the world that year, despite the global economy gaining some steam after the Great Recession, live concert revenues, attendance, and the number of shows all declined by double-digit percentages. Meanwhile, millions of technologically savvy consumers accepted piracy as the new norm. But what sort of future were they helping to build?
INFORMATION WANTS TO BE EXPENSIVE
As an example of the inherent clumsiness that has characterised our journey into digitisation, let’s revisit the Stewart Brand quote that “information wants to be free”.
The full quote reads: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient.
“That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.”
The phrase “information wants to be free” is little more than throat clearing for Brand’s real aim, to reveal the inherent paradox of the digital age. Though advances in technology allow all creative works to be digitised, copied and distributed easily for something that resembles “free”, does that mean we should carelessly treat it as such?
The fact content can be accessed for free doesn’t somehow erase the immense value that professional creativity adds to our lives.
Will we be so overtaken by the power of our technology that we collectively forget to preserve ourselves or the quality of our lives? We humans invent our own tools (technology). We can use those tools for the benefit of mankind or for its self-destruction. Invent a hammer, and it’s just as good for me bashing your nose into your skull as it is to build you a house.
We can use digital technology for individualistic opportunism, trampling upon our fellow man’s individual rights, or we can use the same technology to reinforce the individual rights of all men and women, support quality creativity when prompted.
Can we fight technology? The question is beside the point – grasping at air. Our use of technology is and will always be a choice.
Digital determinism may have originated in a genuine hope and enthusiasm for the potential of technology to unite humanity, but it spread to the masses not on the strength of ideals or potential for results; it spread from the pent-up demand of millions of 18-24 year-old men (the demographic for Swedish downloading site, The Pirate Bay) around the world who desperately wanted to believe they were entitled to free music and movies. These young digital determinists needn’t admit to such entitlement when it was easy to parrot Cory Doctorow and his ilk.
MISGUIDED PESSIMISM
Digital determinists could support their theories (or preferences) only by assuming the worst of humanity. Jaron Lanier exposed the flaws in such logic in his book You Are Not a Gadget, that the ease of finding free, unlicensed copies made obsolete the choice of whether or not we should choose to do so: “[It’s] an unrealistically pessimistic way of thinking about people. We have already demonstrated that we’re better than that. It’s easy to break into physical cars and houses, for instance, and yet few people do so. It is only human choice that makes the human world function. Technology can motivate human choice, but not replace it.”
But the reality of choice makes digital determinists uncomfortable, for it puts the individual and society back in control of the machine. Suddenly, the user is determining the action and therefore is responsible.
In digital determinism, we greet not a self-evident philosophy, but a self-fulfilling prophecy that chooses passive determinism over active self-determination. It is a gospel for true powerlessness.
And if you need proof that digital determinism is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a value judgement and a choice rather than a condition humans must adapt to, history has proven digital determinism to be totally, utterly wrong: an epic fail.
DAVID BOWIE GETS IT WRONG
Let’s look at a David Bowie quote that so captured the spirit, enthusiasm and self-assuredness of digital determinism. In 2002, he said: “The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music is going to take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it . . . I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing . . . It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen . . .”
I can imagine an internet user reading this between 2002 and 2009, and enjoying a sharp jolt to their nervous system: Yes! I am living through change. How lucky I am.
In reality, people purchased dramatically fewer songs and albums through the 2000s, but recorded music remained a more-than $6 billion industry in the US and was worth $15 billion worldwide in 2011. CDs still accounted for about half of all recorded music sold in 2011 in the US, with digital music roughly accounting for the other half of sales. Globally, CDs remained the dominant music format.
It turned out that millions upon millions of people are still choosing to pay for their digital music, accounting for worldwide digital sales of $4.6 billion in 2010. And thanks to digital sales, total US record sales actually grew by a modest margin in 2011 for the first time since 2004. As the decade mark on Bowie’s deterministic prophecy came up, recorded music was technically a “growth industry”.
WHY THE RECORD ALBUM SURVIVES
Further discrediting digital determinism was the resilience of the 10-song, 40-minute album format. That format, invented in the early 1900s, was tied to the technological limitations of the vinyl LP. Such albums held no purpose in the boundless digital era of easy, free copies of individual tracks. Yet sales growth for digital albums consistently outpaced the à la carte singles so many assumed to be the future for digital music. Consumers chose artistic context in spite of the atomisation the digital format implied. Human choice overruled digital logic.
What could be more a repudiation of Bowie’s baseless prophecy than the resurgence in vinyl record sales? When he made the statement in 2002, 1.2 million vinyl records were sold in the US. By 2011, 3.6 million units were projected to sell – a growth rate of 300 per cent.
If there were truly “no point in pretending” that copyright was alive, and that touring would be the only way for bands to make a living, then why did Bowie’s record label re-issue two of his greatest albums, Station to Station and Space Oddity, in 2009? These re-issues were released on 180-gram vinyl, as two-disc CDs (!) and – you guessed it – as a paid digital download.
Copyright is nowhere close to irrelevant, digitally or otherwise.
More newspapers strengthened and protected the value of their content by instituting paywalls, rather than continue to “share” their content free of charge as digital determinists told them they must do in 2010 (if quality journalism died as a result, so be it).
The New York Times paywall drove a massive increase in total subscribers of the publication and paywalls for local US newspapers became normal. Others around the world followed suit. The paywall also seemed to scare away the “trolls” who haunted newspaper article forums. “Once you ask people to pay, it’s not a problem,” said a digital subscription company chief. “All the idiots leave and the normal people stay.”
YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR
All content industries faced vast challenges in adapting to digitisation, but none of them had died by 2012. The confusion brought on by digitisation had put all creative industries in a precarious spot, so when the Great Recession hit in 2008-09 and traditional newspapers, magazines, record labels and retail locations began to fall, digital determinists could point and say, “See! We told you so.You can’t fight technology.”
But that proved to be a particular time and place in economic and media history. It turns out that most consumers understood, on some level, that you get what you pay for. These content industries are not saved, by any means. All face big challenges in seeking revenue wherever it can be found. But the fact the trend towards free content seemed impossible to fight, then reversed itself, is a critical point for our engagement with digital content.
We are not following technology. By paying or not paying for it, individuals are gradually deciding for themselves how to use digital content and whether to respect copyright. It is a choice, not fate.
CERTITUDE GOES BEFORE A FALL
As for Cory Doctorow, who made waves in the world of new media by giving his eBooks away for free, his version of digital determinism was threatened at its core when Amazon announced the release of its first eReader, the Kindle, in 2007 along with plans to sell eBooks.
Doctorow claimed at the time: “Whenever Amazon tries to sell a digital download, it turns into one of the dumbest companies on the web.” Only an “expert” in something so fast moving as digital media could be proven so wrong, so quickly.
Just three years after Kindle’s launch, at the end of 2010, Amazon announced its eBook sales in the US had overtaken paperback sales.
In fairness to Doctorow, no one could have predicted the runaway success of eBooks, especially after the struggles of the music industry. From 2009 to 2010, eBook sales rose 165 per cent. The following year, in the first quarter of 2011, eBook sales were up another 159 per cent.
In 2010 alone, nearly 13 million eReaders, like the Kindle, were shipped worldwide – an increase of 325 per cent from 2009.
After just four years in existence, the eBook was on the verge of overtaking trade paperback as the dominant book format. And total US publishing revenues rose by more than 5 per cent from 2008 to 2010, proving that a shift into digitisation could potentially lead creative industries to better times.
Perhaps the final nail in the coffin for digital determinism was on full display in 2012. All one had to do was sign into Amazon and enter “Cory Doctorow” into the search bar. On the following screen, you would find numerous books of his, offered as electronic editions for the Kindle, charged at $9.99.
THE VIGILANT OBSERVER
TUCKED AWAY IN THE hills of the Driftless near my parents’ farm, a space was made where the savanna oaks could grow again under the fullness of the sun. Over time, the invasive cedar trees had been recognised for the obvious force of decline they represented.
The grasses and plants returned. Once again, the diversity of life radiated from every field and tree. Amidst the vivacity, the huge oaks towered.
But new cedar saplings arose in the grass, reminders that the work of preserving the beauty of our own nature – our own humanity – is never quite complete.