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I’m going to say something that will make many of you deeply uncomfortable: our culture has confused ironic detachment with intelligence. We’ve mistaken cynicism for sophistication, distance for depth, and the refusal to commit to anything for wisdom itself.
This is killing us.
Not metaphorically. Not in some abstract cultural sense. It is literally destroying our capacity to respond to the crises that define our moment. Because while we perfect our poses of detached cleverness, people with deadly serious intentions are reshaping the world according to their vision.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And ironic detachment is moral cowardice dressed up as intellectual superiority.
Let me be clear about what I mean. Ironic detachment isn’t genuine critique—it’s defensive armor. It’s the reflex that allows you to comment on everything while committing to nothing. It’s the stance that lets you mock both sides of every conflict while accepting responsibility for none of its outcomes.
You see it everywhere. The journalist who treats democratic collapse like entertainment, crafting clever observations about the “theater” of authoritarianism without ever stating plainly that democracy is worth defending. The intellectual who responds to moral clarity with knowing smirks, as if the ability to see complexity were the same as wisdom. The friend who greets every urgent concern with “well, it’s complicated” or “both sides have valid points” or “this is all just politics anyway.”
These people have convinced themselves that their detachment signals sophistication. That their refusal to take moral stands demonstrates superior understanding. That their immunity to “naive” concerns about right and wrong proves their intellectual maturity.
They’re wrong.
What it actually demonstrates is a profound failure of moral imagination. An inability to conceive of situations where clarity matters more than cleverness. A retreat from the responsibilities that come with living in a world where our choices have consequences.
Because here’s what ironic detachment really offers: the comfortable illusion that you’re above the fray while remaining safely within it. It lets you feel superior to those who “fall for” caring about things while never having to defend anything yourself. It’s the perfect stance for people who want to seem engaged without actually risking anything.
Moral seriousness is different. Moral seriousness forces you to face consequences. To choose clearly. To stake out positions that require genuine courage rather than performative intelligence. It demands that you say what you believe even when saying it costs you something.
And yes, this makes people uncomfortable. Because moral seriousness isn’t simplistic—it’s demanding. It isn’t arrogant—it’s responsible. It requires you to act as if your judgments matter, as if your choices have weight, as if the world depends on people like you making decisions about what’s worth defending and what isn’t.
The ironically detached hate this. They prefer the safety of eternal meta-commentary, the endless deferral of commitment, the pose that says “I’m too smart to be fooled by caring about anything.”
But here’s what they miss: intelligence without moral commitment is just sophisticated paralysis. Nuance without the capacity for judgment is just elaborate confusion. The ability to see complexity in everything is worthless if it never leads to clarity about anything.
So let me ask you directly: if moral seriousness bothers you—if you find yourself recoiling from people who speak with clarity about right and wrong—what does that say about you?
Does it say you’re sophisticated? Or does it say you’ve trained yourself to avoid the discomfort that comes with taking responsibility for your own moral judgments?
Does it say you understand nuance? Or does it say you’ve become so committed to seeing all sides that you’ve lost the capacity to choose any side?
Does it say you’re intellectually mature? Or does it say you’re using intelligence as a shield against the demands of living in a world where things actually matter?
I know this is uncomfortable. Good. It should be.
Because while you’ve been perfecting your ironic distance, people with no such hesitations have been busy. They don’t waste time wondering whether their convictions are sophisticated enough. They don’t apologize for moral clarity. They don’t treat their own beliefs as just another position in an endless debate.
They understand something the ironically detached have forgotten: that power goes to people who believe in something. That the world belongs to those willing to commit fully to their vision of what it should become. That democracy doesn’t survive on clever commentary but on citizens willing to say plainly what matters, what is true, and what is at stake.
The authoritarians aren’t ironic. They’re deadly serious about their goals. They don’t hedge their commitments or apologize for their clarity. They don’t treat their own power grabs as just another interesting development in the ongoing political show.
They understand that ironic detachment is the perfect ideology for people who want to feel important without actually mattering. For people who want to seem engaged without risking anything. For people who prefer the comfort of eternal spectatorship to the responsibility of actual participation.
This is why a culture built on irony will crumble in crisis. Because when everything is equally interesting, nothing is truly important. When all positions are equally valid subjects for commentary, no position becomes worth defending. When commitment itself becomes naive, only the uncommitted remain to watch the committed reshape the world.
We don’t need more cleverness. We need more clarity. We don’t need more sophisticated commentary on the complexity of our challenges. We need more people willing to name what threatens us and act accordingly.
We need citizens who understand that moral seriousness isn’t just stylistic—it’s existential. That democracy survives not on ironic detachment but on people willing to say what they believe and defend what they value.
The center cannot be held by people who refuse to acknowledge there’s a center worth holding. The flood cannot be pushed back by people who treat every rising tide as just another fascinating phenomenon. The wire cannot be walked by people who prefer watching others fall to taking the risk themselves.
Ironic detachment promises you safety through distance. But there is no safe distance from the collapse of the systems that make your detachment possible in the first place. There is no commentary booth elevated enough to escape the consequences of living in a world where serious people with serious intentions are making serious choices about the future.
The pose of sophisticated neutrality is itself a choice. The stance of ironic distance is itself a commitment. The refusal to take sides is itself taking a side—the side that benefits from your passivity, from your paralysis, from your conversion of moral clarity into epistemological complexity.
So choose. Not between simple answers to complex questions, but between engagement and evasion. Between responsibility and performance. Between the hard work of moral judgment and the easy comfort of ironic observation.
Choose to speak plainly about what matters. Choose to commit to what you believe. Choose to risk the discomfort of being wrong rather than the cowardice of never being anything.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the world belongs to people who take these simple truths seriously enough to build something real upon them.
The revolution is moral seriousness. The rebellion is choosing clarity over cleverness. The resistance is saying what you mean and meaning what you say.
Every minute of every day.
Remember what’s real.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Filed Under: ironic detachment, irony, morality, reality, truth, view from nowhere
I need to say something that will be deeply uncomfortable for many of you: if you have friends, family, or colleagues defending what’s happening right now, their old sane selves may not be coming back.
Let me be specific about what I mean. This week, Donald Trump posted explicit orders on Truth Social directing federal law enforcement to conduct “Mass Deportation Operations” targeting “America’s largest Cities” because they are “the core of the Democrat Power Center.” He used the term “REMIGRATION”—language borrowed directly from European fascist movements. He accused Democratic officials of treason for opposing him. He framed resistance to his orders as hatred of America itself.
This isn’t hyperbole. This isn’t political theater. This is a written directive for ethnic cleansing and political warfare, posted publicly by the President of the United States.
But here’s what’s going to happen next—what’s already happening: his supporters will tell you that you’re overreacting. That Trump is “just being hyperbolic.” That you suffer from some cognitive pathology if you take him seriously. They’ll perform concern for your mental health while his ICE agents conduct raids in the exact cities he named, using the exact dehumanizing language he provided.
This is the shell game of fascist gaslighting, and you need to understand how it works.
The game has three moves, executed simultaneously:
First, speak directly to your base using unmistakable authoritarian language. “REMIGRATION.” “Mass Deportation Operation.” “Radical Left Democrats who hate our Country.” The signal is clear: we are at war with internal enemies who must be eliminated. The base hears this loud and clear.
Second, implement the policy exactly as described. Deploy federal troops. Conduct mass raids. Target political opponents. Separate families. Use the state apparatus to terrorize designated enemies. The action matches the rhetoric precisely.
Third, gaslight everyone else into thinking the language doesn’t mean what it obviously means. “He’s just being tough on immigration.” “It’s political rhetoric.” “You’re reading too much into it.” The goal isn’t to convince—it’s to create enough confusion that resistance seems like overreaction.
This allows the regime to operate in plain sight while maintaining plausible deniability. Supporters get to cheer ethnic cleansing while pretending they’re just supporting “law and order.” Enablers get to collaborate with fascism while telling themselves they’re being reasonable about complex issues.
And critics get painted as hysterical for accurately describing what’s happening in front of everyone’s eyes.
The people in your life defending this aren’t confused. They’re not struggling with cognitive dissonance. They’re not victims of misinformation who just need better facts. They’ve made a choice—to align with authoritarianism while maintaining the comfortable fiction that they’re still reasonable people making reasonable assessments.
When your colleague tells you that mass deportation raids are just “enforcing immigration law,” they know those raids are targeting cities because they vote Democratic. When your family member says Trump is “just being tough,” they know he’s using the language of ethnic cleansing. When your friend claims you’re overreacting to “political rhetoric,” they know that rhetoric is being translated into operational reality by federal agents.
They understand exactly what’s happening. They just want you to pretend you don’t.
This is the most insidious part of the shell game—it recruits you into your own gaslighting. It makes you question whether you’re seeing clearly, whether your moral responses are proportionate, whether your alarm is justified. It transforms your accurate perception of fascist tactics into evidence of your own psychological instability.
Stop playing along.
When someone tells you that explicit orders for ethnic cleansing don’t mean what they obviously mean, that person has chosen to enable fascism. When someone suggests you’re mentally unwell for taking authoritarian threats seriously, that person has chosen to weaponize psychology against moral clarity. When someone demands you remain calm while democracy is dismantled in real time, that person has chosen compliance over resistance.
These aren’t good people trapped in bad information ecosystems. These aren’t confused souls who need patient explanation. These are people who’ve decided that maintaining their social comfort matters more than opposing ethnic cleansing.
The version of them that you could reason with—the one that shared basic democratic values, that would be horrified by mass deportations, that understood the difference between immigration enforcement and political warfare—that person is gone. What remains is someone who’s chosen tribal loyalty over moral truth.
This doesn’t mean they’ve become cartoonish villains. They still laugh at the same jokes, care about their families, perform kindness in their daily interactions. But on the question that defines our moment—whether to resist or enable fascism—they’ve made their choice.
And their choice is enabling.
Stop waiting for them to snap out of it. Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt they wouldn’t extend to you. Stop pretending their “concerns” about immigration justify support for ethnic cleansing. Stop treating their gaslighting as good-faith disagreement about complex policy questions.
They know what they’re supporting. The language is explicit. The implementation is visible. The historical parallels are unmistakable. Their choice to defend it isn’t based on ignorance—it’s based on preference.
Some people, when forced to choose between democracy and authoritarianism, choose authoritarianism. Some people, when forced to choose between human dignity and tribal dominance, choose dominance. Some people, when forced to choose between moral clarity and social comfort, choose comfort.
That’s what you’re learning about the people around you. Not that they’re confused, but that they’re complicit. Not that they don’t understand, but that they don’t care. Not that they need better information, but that they’ve chosen to prioritize their own position over other people’s humanity.
This is who they are now. This is who they’ve chosen to be.
The shell game depends on your willingness to pretend otherwise. It requires you to treat their gaslighting as sincere confusion, their enabling as innocent misunderstanding, their collaboration as reasonable disagreement about policy details.
Stop participating in the performance. Stop pretending their positions are intellectually respectable. Stop treating fascist sympathizers as if they’re just confused about immigration policy.
Call it what it is: they’ve chosen to enable ethnic cleansing because it targets people they consider enemies. They’ve chosen to support authoritarianism because it promises to hurt the right people. They’ve chosen fascism because it offers them power over those they despise.
The most dangerous lie you can tell yourself is that they don’t really mean it. They mean every word. They just want you to pretend they don’t so you won’t resist effectively.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And when someone shows you who they are—when they defend ethnic cleansing, enable authoritarianism, and gaslight you for noticing—believe them.
The revolution is seeing clearly. The rebellion is refusing to play the shell game. The resistance is calling fascism by its name, regardless of how much that upsets the people who’ve chosen to enable it.
Stop waiting for their permission to defend democracy. Stop seeking their approval to oppose ethnic cleansing. Stop playing their game of pretending this is all normal political disagreement.
This is fascism. They support it. Act accordingly.
Remember what’s real.
Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.
Filed Under: donald trump, fascism, reality
Usually, when we’re talking about video game footage being used to attempt to fool others into thinking it’s real footage, it’s been done by nation states looking to either pretend they’re far better at war than they are, that their weapons are far cooler than they actually are, or to frame their adversaries for doing nefarious things far more than they actually are. Those cases aside, it does also happen that news organizations get fooled by this sort of footage too. And we should probably only expect this sort of thing to occur more often, given the leaps in graphical realism the gaming industry takes every year or so.
And so it’s only with a little bit of meanness that I bring you the following video.
As you can tell from the title of the video, it’s a gameplay video from Grand Theft Auto 5, in which the player is piloting a passenger aircraft and nearly causes an explosion when an oil tanker crosses the runway as it’s landing. Cool. These videos of GTA5 are common and showed off regularly on the internet by players amazed at what they can pull off in the open world game, not to mention the thrilling nature of how relatively realistic it looks.
Realistic enough, it seems, for Pakistani minister Khurram Nawaz Gandapur to retweet the video alongside his now-deleted tweet stating: “Narrow escape of an aircraft which could have ended in a great disaster. Miraculous save by the pilot’s presence of mind.”
He apparently confused a GTA V clip with real life, and tweeted praising the pilot for excellent skills. The video showed a Airbus A380 flying over a city and avoid an oil tanker in the runway as it was about to land. Gandapur tweeted, “Narrow escape of an aircraft which could have ended in a great disaster. Miraculous save by the pilot’s presence of mind.”
I love stories like this. Again, it’s not really about laughing at someone for getting fooled. What interests me more is both how cool it is that video game footage is getting realistic enough to regularly fool people into thinking its real footage, and how terrifying it is to think of the mayhem that might cause in the future. After all, it’s all well and good for a country to promote its military might by using game footage of some terrifying weapon… until it’s believable enough to cause another adversarial nation to react in real life.
Still, I hope whoever the pilot of the GTA5 plane is from that video feels they have an extra feather in their cap over getting a clap on the back from a Pakistani minister, because that’s pretty cool.
Filed Under: games, gta v, khurram nawaz gandapur, pakistan, reality, video games
With the way the past couple of weeks have gone for Denuvo, the DRM that was supposed to end piracy but instead only ended the industry’s brief resurgence in faith in DRM, you would be forgiven if you thought this was going to be yet another post about another Denuvo-protected game being cracked and released to the pirating masses. This isn’t that kind of story. Instead, it’s the story of game publisher Funcom accidentally stripping Denuvo out of the latest build of its early access game, Conan Exiles, and having that be released to the pirating masses.
In Conan Exiles’ case, Denuvo Anti-Tamper was temporarily removed – and accidentally. An updated version of the game was suddenly without protection. Denuvo Anti-Tamper returned soon enough, via another update, but not quickly enough. Pirates pounced and the damage was done.
Remember, Conan Exiles isn’t solely an online game, which tend to prevent piracy by requiring game versions to match that of the official servers. In Conan Exiles you can host your own worlds and play them alone or with others, or join their private worlds. In other words, a pirate can play the game.
I’m having trouble thinking up a way to construct a more frustrating experience for a game publisher. To have a game not susceptible to server check-ins, to have tried to infuse that game with DRM only to have it stripped in error and released, and to then have that game very much playable by the people you had specifically tried to prohibit via the DRM is like some kind of trifecta from hell for a game publisher. Remember, Nintendo lost its shit comnpletely when its free app was found to be “pirated.” You’re probably expecting Funcom to be cheesed off at equal or greater levels.
Except, at least from the company’s first public statements on the matter, not so much.
“There is unfortunately not much we can do about those who choose to download and play unauthorised copies,” Funcom said, “but we hope they make the jump to the official version so they can stay up to date with the latest patches and improvements. Being an Early Access title, there will be a lot of updates going forward!”
It’s a nearly perfect response. First, the company admits that piracy is a thing that’s going to happen. Then the company makes both a logical case for why fans of the pirated versions have a reason to buy an authorized copy, while maintaining a cool demeanor and enthusiasm that can only ingratiate the publisher to its fans, paying customers or otherwise. And keep in mind that it would be totally understandable if Funcom had a negative emotional response to all of this. But this way is better business.
It may be a little light on the connecting with fans part of the equation, but Funcom has focused on giving those who might pirate the game — and like it! — a reason to buy. Well done.
Filed Under: conan exiles, denuvo, drm, infringement, piracy, reality
Companies: funcom
Normally, when we talk about any issue involving how realistic video games are becoming as an art form, those stories revolve around either the decrying of realistic violence within the games or occasionally governments attempting to use realistic game footage to pimp their own fictional military capabilities. But, while those stories often come off as silly, those examples and their like are not the only benchmarks for just how realistic gaming is becoming. Other examples involve games reaching a realism level high enough to open the door to real-life application.
Serving as a recent example of this is the latest from racing game giant Gran Turismo, which has achieved enough realism to earn it a partnership with Formula One Racing as a sort of proving ground for racers to get their license with the professional racing organization.
A new partnership with the FIA means that in-game progress can now count toward a racing license with the association. The partnership with the FIA somewhat mirrors the GT Academy, which allows some of the best Gran Turismoplayers to compete for the opportunity to drive a real race car.
Through the FIA partnership, game racers will be tracked on their ability and their “race track etiquette”, which I assume is a way to ensure that drivers are performing not only well, but in a manner that would be safe for real-world drivers around them. In addition, there will be a sub-section of the game specifically designed in partnership with the FIA, where drivers can compete with one another and have their skills and driving behavior analyzed.
This isn’t just a cool benchmark in gaming realism, either. It provides a nice example of how this kind of realism can benefit an industry like the racing industry in very real ways, both in terms of safety and cost.
Considering the astronomical costs of pursuing a career in motorsports, being able to knock certain aspects of it out in a video game—without the cost of wrecks, mechanical issues, parts and just buying a car—could open the opportunity for a wider array of competitors. Purchasing a gaming setup fit to race isn’t cheap, but it’s far cheaper than running real races.
Believe me, the moment that Major League Baseball teams start looking to the management of video game teams as a proving ground for hiring general managers and coaches, I’ll have a whole new career path on my hands. More seriously, this type of thing won’t eliminate the need for real-world racing experience to qualify for a license, but it likely will have a nice weeding-out effect for potential drivers.
Filed Under: certificates, racing, reality, video games, virtual reality
Fake news stories are a scourge. Something different from parody news folks such as The Onion, there are outfits out there that produce false news stories simply to get clickthroughs and generate advertising revenue. And it isn’t just a couple of your Facebook friends and that weird uncle of yours that gets fooled by these things, even incredibly handsome and massively-intelligent writers such as myself are capable of getting completely misled into believing that a bullshit news story is real.
Facebook is generally seen as a key multiplier in this false force of non-news, which is probably what led the social media giant to declare war on fake news sites a year or so back. So how’d that go? Well, the results as analyzed over at Buzzfeed seems to suggest that Facebook has either lost this war it declared or is losing it badly enough that it might as well give it up.
To gauge Facebook’s progress in its fight, BuzzFeed News examined data across thousands of posts published to the fake news sites’ Facebook pages, and found decidedly mixed results. While average engagements (likes + shares + comments) per post fell from 972.7 in January 2015 to 434.78 in December 2015, they jumped to 827.8 in January 2016 and a whopping 1,304.7 in February.
Some of the posts on the fake news sites’ pages went extremely viral many months after Facebook announced its crackdown. In August, for instance, an Empire News story reporting that Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sustained serious injuries in prison received more than 240,000 likes, 43,000 shares, and 28,000 comments on its Facebook page. The incident was pure fiction, but still spread like wildfire on the platform. An even less believable September post about a fatal gang war sparked by the “Blood” moon was shared over 22,000 times from the Facebook page of Huzlers, another fake news site.
So, how did this war go so wrong for Facebook? Well, to start, it relied heavily on user-submitted notifications that a link or site was a fake news site. Sounds great, as aggregating feedback has worked quite well in other arenas. For this, however, it was doomed from the start. The purpose of fake news sites is, after all, to fool people, and fooled people are obviously not reporting the links as fake. Even when a reader manages to determine eventually that a link was a fake news post at a later time, perhaps after sharing it and having comments proving it false, how many of those people then take steps to report the link? Not enough, clearly, as the fake news scourge marches on.
Another layer of the problem appears to be the faith and trust the general public puts into some famous people they are following, who have also been fooled with startling regularity.
Take D.L. Hughley, for example. The comedian, whose page is liked by more than 1.7 million people, showed up twice in the Huzlers logs. One fictitious Huzlers story he posted, about Magic Johnson donating blood, garnered more than 10,000 shares from his page. Hughley, who did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment, also shared four National Report links in 2015.
Radio stations also frequently post fake news. The Florida-based 93XFM was one of a number of radio stations BuzzFeed News discovered sharing Huzlers posts in 2015. Asked about one April post linking to a Huzlers story about a woman smoking PCP and chewing off her boyfriend’s penis, a 93XFM DJ named Sadie explained that fact-checking Facebook posts isn’t exactly a high priority.
In other words, people and organizations that the public assumes to be credible sources of information are sharing these fake news articles, and the public turns off their collective brains and assumes them to be true. After all, if we can’t trust D.L. Hughley then, really, who can we trust? But when even major outlets such as the New York Times have included links in its posts to The National Report, do we really expect people to cast a wary eye towards such an established news peddler?
Well, we should, because the ultimate problem here are the equal parts of a polarized American public coupled with a terrifying level of credulity. Many of these fake news pieces contain headlines for stories that some people want to believe, typically for ideological reasons. This is why a family party recently saw me trying to explain to my grandmother that, no, Michelle Obama probably does not in fact have a penis. That’s a true story, friends, and it stemmed from a fake news article. The willingness to believe such a thing is extreme, certainly, but stories of the Boston Bomber getting beaten in prison fuel the same desire for such a story to be true.
The war is lost. Fake news goes on unabated. Long live Michelle Obama’s penis.
Filed Under: algorithm, fake news, journalism, parody, reality
Companies: facebook
We recently had an article about how intellectual property makes people pretend to be stupid, by forcing us to pretend that digital works act in the same way as physical products do, even though we know that they don’t. This seems silly, but it goes beyond just copyright. There’s been a lot of hubbub recently concerning 3D printed guns. While there’s been some discussions about them in the past, it went into overdrive last week when the first fully 3D-printed gun was unveiled. The plans were uploaded online and… over 100,000 people downloaded them.
And then the US government freaked out, as the State Department argued that the company that put the files online may have violated export control laws.
The government says it wants to review the files for compliance with arms export control laws known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. By uploading the weapons files to the Internet and allowing them to be downloaded abroad, the letter implies Wilson’s high-tech gun group may have violated those export controls.
“Until the Department provides Defense Distributed with final [commodity jurisdiction] determinations, Defense Distributed should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled,” reads the letter, referring to a list of ten CAD files hosted on Defcad that include the 3D-printable gun, silencers, sights and other pieces. “This means that all data should be removed from public access immediately. Defense Distributed should review the remainder of the data made public on its website to determine whether any other data may be similarly controlled and proceed according to ITAR requirements.”
Remember, this file has already been downloaded over 100,000 times. It’s not going to be removed from public access. That’s reality. But the laws that demand we pretend to be stupid include pretending that something like this is stoppable, when plenty of sites are still making them available.
As Rick Falkvinge notes, the whole idea of pretending you can delete these files from existence and keep it under control suggests a very confused US government. Not only is the concept impossible, but even stepping in like that has only drawn much more attention to the files. Falkvinge points out that this highlights how the US government is “unfit to set and shape Internet policy, due to their simply not understanding of what the internet is and how it works.” Of course, that hasn’t stopped them before.
I recognize that a 3D printable gun freaks some people out. But just because some people are freaked out, it doesn’t mean we should deny reality and pretend it’s possible to disappear these plans when it’s clearly not. I don’t know about you, but I prefer a government that deals in reality, rather than one that chooses to act stupid on purpose.
Filed Under: 3d printed gun, 3d printing, guns, reality
Here are two words that have no business hanging out together: “used MP3s.” If you know anything about how computers work, that concept is intellectually offensive. Same goes for “ebook lending”, “digital rental” and a host of other terms that have emerged from the content industries’ desperate scramble to do the impossible: adapt without changing.
These concepts are all completely imaginary, and yet we treat them as if they are real, and have serious discussions about every last detail of how they function — like a debate about the best mutant superpower, but with multimillion dollar lawsuits. Copyright necessitates that we all pretend we don’t know any better. It makes us act stupid.
Take “used MP3s” for example. The idea is instantly nonsensical, and proposing it seems on par with asking how all those people fit inside the television. A “used MP3” is indistinguishable from a “new” one, and on the internet there’s no such thing as an individual, discrete copy of an MP3 that gets “moved” from one person to another anyway. Speaking even more broadly, a “file” is not a “thing” at all — it’s a concept that we use to help organize and visualize the even more abstract concept of “information” in many different places and states, whether magnetically inscribed on a hard disk platter or being transmitted via radio waves (not to mention the internal operation of a computer, where pieces of the information are shunted around between multiple different components and caches).
A “file” is an analogy, and like all analogies, it’s incomplete. It breaks down when taken too far, and then it must be discarded, because analogies only exist for our convenience. “Moving” a file is also an analogy — in reality, we are copying it and then deleting the original. Even deleting a file is usually an analogy — the data is still recoverable, the computer has just been instructed to pretend it’s not there anymore.
The purpose of these analogies is not to impose limitations on reality. We don’t give up the ability to copy a file because we simulated the ability to move it. We don’t have to pretend information degrades like physical objects just because we chose to conceptualize it that way. If we want to describe something as “the size of 10 football fields”, we don’t demand there be gridiron lines painted on it. There’s a reason that stubbornly sticking with analogies is referred to as torture, and every discussion about “used files” or the difference between moving and copying is another turn of the screw.
Because of copyright, we are constantly asked to pretend that these analogies are binding. When we “lend” a Kindle ebook, we must pretend that we gave a thing away and don’t have it for a while, when in fact our device is just refusing to let us access it. When a library wants to lend out ebooks, they must pretend they have a “limited number of copies available.” When we buy software with an activation code, we must pretend that we “only bought one” and thus can only have it in one place at a time. When we rent a digital movie, we must pretend that we “have to give it back”. We have to pretend we’re stupid and that our devices have limitations which don’t actually exist.
But here’s the real kicker: the moment there might be any benefit to the consumer, the content companies toss the analogy out the window, and suddenly want to talk about reality. Thus you get things like ReDigi, the would-be used MP3 market that recently lost in court. ReDigi attempted to make MP3s simulate discrete items by enforcing the analogy of “moving a file” using a monitoring system, such that when you sold an MP3 to someone, it would make sure you deleted your own copy. Though we always suspected it was doomed, it was at least rather fascinating from a legal and policy perspective, potentially creating a clash between copyright and first sale rights. After all, if we are expected to treat digital files like physical property, we should at least be getting the rights that come with that.
But this time the record labels wanted to focus on the fact that there’s no such thing as moving a file, and pointed out that ReDigi involved making copies whether or not it also involved deleting other copies — and the judge agreed. This is actually correct, technically and realistically — just don’t tell them that next time, when it doesn’t benefit them and they’re back to calling infringement theft. As if to underline their masterful doublethink when it comes to the nature of property, the labels are all about having their cake and eating it too.
ReDigi is hardly the only example. We’ve written before about the insane situation with TV and movie streaming, where companies do things like set up a warehouse full of separate DVD players that stream from individual discs, or install a separate TV antenna on the same rooftop for every customer who wants an online stream. They are forced to willfully ignore technological capabilities, engineering principles and simple common sense just to conform to all these broken analogies — and they still face massive opposition from content owners and broadcasters every step of the way.
The real issue, when you get down to it, is that copyright itself is imaginary. A “song” or a “novel” is just as analogical as a “file”. Originally, copyright law was very concerned with separating the expression of an idea from the idea itself, and in theory that’s still the case, but in practice the line has proven almost impossible to draw. So first we conceptualize an abstract thing like “content” as discrete pieces, then we conceptualize all the abstract rights associated with those pieces, and then we conceptualize the discrete units of distribution and ownership within those rights.
These are all imaginary concepts, built on top of other imaginary concepts, built on top of still more imaginary concepts. It’s turtles all the way down.
This does not necessarily mean that there’s no place for copyright in the world. But in order for it to function, we have to remember that it’s an analogy — it’s something chosen and used to achieve a purpose, not something that binds and shapes reality, or that we must conform to at the expense of our better judgement. Originally, copyright was just that: a choice by society to employ the analogies of ownership and property in limited, specially-tailored ways in order to achieve a desired result — a flourishing intellectual and artistic economy. Today, copyright is worlds away from what it was then, and it does more to hinder that goal than help it… but many people seem to have forgotten that it’s a just a tool, and we can always put it down.
In all the discussion about the various reasons people give for violating copyright, I think there’s one that goes unmentioned: a lot of people just refuse to pretend to be stupid.
Filed Under: analogies, copyright, intellectual property, reality, services
Companies: aereo, redigi
The UN’s Internet Governance Forum had a gathering to discuss rethinking copyright, in which WIPO made the case that it should lead “multi-stakeholder” discussions on how to reform copyright. WIPO, of course, has a history of having a rather one-sided view of copyright and who the “stakeholders” are. But now, it insists that it can hear all voices:
Trevor Clarke, assistant director general for the Culture and Creative Industries Sector of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), said during a workshop on “Rethinking Copyright” today that the multi-stakeholder environment is “the best and and most appropriate” when it comes to the debate on copyright in the digital age. WIPO is preparing for such multi-stakeholder discussions, Clarke told Intellectual Property Watch.
Clarke said the WIPO director general and secretariat has added their voices to the call for a reexamination of the copyright system and have not shied away from the fact that some aspects of the law need to be revisited. Not only law, but also culture and infrastructure of the system, have to be considered, he underlined. Member state positions vary considerably on the issues, and it would make sense to include the private sector and also civil society into the talks, he said, adding, “We need that dialogue.”
While it’s nice to “include the private sector and also civil society,” that’s really ignoring the larger point. The only real “stakeholder” in copyright is the public. The private sector may be beneficiaries, but the system is supposed to benefit the public. And while “civil society” may represent the public in some areas, which is helpful, it seems that any real discussion on reforming copyright should be very, very open to the public.
Yet that never seems to be suggested by anyone.
And, really, when you look at what’s happening in reality vs. what’s happening in these discussions, you realize that the public has already made its position pretty clear. People are more than willing to pay for a certain amount of content if it’s convenient and not hindered/locked down. They’re willing to pay for content when they know they’re directly supporting artists they love. They’re willing to pay. But, if things are annoying and limited, expensive or inconvenient, they certainly might take matters into their own hands. On top of that, certain aspects of copyright law seem quaint or simply so unrealistic that they’re consistently ignored (such as with people making mashups and videos and the like). Yet, no one seems to want to address how the public is actually dealing with all of this, preferring to try to make up new rules based on artificial claims about copyright.
There’s no need for “multistakeholder” debates when the public has already said “here’s the deal: offer us what we want and we’ll pay and everyone’s happy.” The job of any governing organization right now should be to stop ignoring the public and start paying attention.
Filed Under: copyright, internet governance, public, reality, stakeholders, un, wipo
It appears that the same arguments that many of us have been fighting for many, many years are suddenly playing themselves out again in the National Review Online. It started with a really fantastic article by Reihan Salam and Patrick Ruffini arguing that legislating to deal with “piracy” doesn’t work and is the wrong approach anyway, because innovating and providing better solutions simply works better. If you’re a regular Techdirt reader, you won’t be surprised by the Salam/Ruffini piece — it hits on many of the key points we’ve raised. However, it is nicely packaged up in a single article that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand why fighting piracy through legislation is the wrong approach.
In response, Robert VerBruggen, an associate editor at the National Review decided to write a rebuttal that isn’t so much a rebuttal at all. As Tim Lee rightly points out, the two sides appear to be arguing totally different things. Salam and Ruffini are pointing out that enforcement isn’t working (and isn’t workable), while also leading to collateral damage. But, at the same time, innovating and providing solutions that people want do seem to work — and create new opportunities for content creators and consumers alike. VerBruggen, on the other hand, is pulling out the famed “but… but… piracy!” argument we’ve seen too often — as if the fact that “piracy exists” suddenly makes all logic pointless. As Lee notes:
VerBruggen responds by insisting that piracy is wrong. He’s right, but this doesn’t get him as far as he thinks it does. This isn’t just an abstract exercise in moral philosophy. The government has limited resources, and a long list of problems to deal with. The question isn’t “should the government try to stop piracy,” it’s “how many resources should the government devote to combatting piracy as opposed to other problems.”
And VerBruggen never really grapples with this question. He seems to believe that the right amount of enforcement is more than we already have, but he doesn’t offer any principled basis for deciding how much more, or how to tell when we’ve passed the point of diminishing returns. Without such a principle, we’re just going to have this debate over and over again, as each new anti-piracy measure fails and Hollywood comes back for still more restrictions.
This is a key point, and I don’t know if VerBruggen is just new to this debate and therefore trotting out silly, long-dead tropes because he doesn’t know any better — or if that’s just the best the “other side” can do these days. Either way, I wanted to dig a bit deeper into a few of VerBruggen’s really questionable claims.
When brick-and-mortar bookstores complain about the threat they face from Amazon.com, they are complaining that customers will leave them for a superior alternative; when Hollywood complains about piracy, they are complaining that customers have left them for an illegal alternative. They have stopped paying for Hollywood products yet are still consuming them. These are not even remotely similar situations — morally, legally, or economically.
VerBruggen says this as if “an illegal alternative” and “a superior alternative” are mutually exclusive. They’re not. And that’s the issue. History has shown, time and time again, that infringement is a way for consumers to express that they’re not satisfied with the official versions and have found “a superior alternative.” That the said alternative is “illegal” is an issue, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the best response is a legal one. Why VerBruggen makes these assumptions is unclear.
With this distinction in mind, one might find it rather odd for Salam and Ruffini to insist that the solution to piracy is “innovation” rather than law enforcement. By “innovation,” they mean primarily that Hollywood should make it easier and cheaper for customers to buy their content digitally, citing studies indicating that when digital content becomes readily available through legal channels, piracy goes down. But even assuming Hollywood can discourage piracy by cutting prices and offering its content in different ways, since when do we tell crime victims to appease their tormenters?
As far as I can tell, this is the craziest part of VerBruggen’s argument. It is, effectively, “so what if everyone can be better off by innovating out of this mess, this is wrong wrong wrong!” As we’ve pointed out for years, if you have a solution where everyone is better off, there is no moral argument. It seems silly to be arguing what VerBruggen seems to be arguing, that it’s more moral to have everyone worse off with no piracy, than to have everyone better off with some piracy. It just doesn’t add up.
Moreover, in no other industry do we allow consumers to force prices down by taking products for free whenever they, personally, think the legal versions are too expensive or inconvenient. Any customer may refuse to buy a product that’s undesirable, or even organize a boycott — but then that customer needs to go without the product.
The problem here is easy to spot. It’s in the word “take.” That’s not what’s happening here. The truth is that, as in every other industry, consumers force down prices by finding “a superior alternative” as he suggested earlier. Taking implies something is directly taken from the creator and they no longer have it. That’s simply not true.
Salam and Ruffini provide no justification for singling out industries that sell intellectual property — and little evidence that these industries’ disproportionately young, bratty, and entitled consumers are better equipped than the free market to decide what a “fair” price is for an album or movie that cost thousands or even millions of dollars to create and market.
I won’t even bother discussing the fact that he appears to be calling the industry’s customers, who they’re supposed to be trying to win over, as “young, bratty and entitled,” and just focusing on his bizarre definition of “free market.” He seems to miss that this is the free market. Setting up a centralized government-granted set of artificial monopolies over non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods is a price restriction on a free market. A “fair price” is what the actual market sets — and that means the market of everyone, not just the customers that VerBruggen likes.
For starters, while making content widely available for low prices does seem to reduce piracy, it hardly eliminates it.
Er. Enforcement and new laws every two years has hardly eliminated it either — in fact, it’s been shown to increase the rate of piracy. So, I’m at a complete loss here. If VerBruggen is arguing that the only proper solution is the one that “eliminates” infringement, well, then he’s living in a fantasy land, because no such solution exists. The argument that Ruffini and Salam made (which is backed up with pretty significant evidence) is that innovating and providing “a superior alternative” does a better job to reduce piracy than enforcement (which doesn’t appear to work at all beyond an initial hit until people scramble and find alternatives). Again, we’re back to VerBruggen basing his entire argument on “piracy is wrong wrong wrong,” without taking into account what his preferred solution actually does compared to Salam and Ruffini’s alternative.
Spotify’s payment formulas are not public, but various leaks indicate that on average, artists and labels are paid around one-third of one cent every time a user listens to (“streams”) a song. By way of comparison, artists and labels make 70 cents when a song is purchased for 99 cents from iTunes. Thus, a user has to listen to a song on Spotify more than 200 times before earning ad revenue for the artist and label that’s equivalent to a sale.
Comparing a Spotify play to an iTunes purchase is meaningless, because they’re not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, why not compare Spotify to radio? In some ways, that may be more comparable. In the US, musicians get paid a big fat nothing for radio plays. Yet, somehow, it’s been pretty damn important for artists to get on radio. Because it helps them make money elsewhere. Looking at Spotify in isolation misses the point… but VerBruggen does that again and again:
But piracy does “put pressure on profit margins,” as Salam delicately put it on National Review Online recently. By one estimate, per capita, inflation-adjusted spending on recorded music has fallen 64 percent since its peak in the late 1990s, and is lower today than at any time since at least 1973, despite the fact that every other person you pass on the street is wearing earbuds.
Again, he’s looking at one small aspect of the music business in isolation: how much is spent on recorded music. But he leaves out every other aspect of the music business — including things like live — which has grown at an incredible rate over the same time. More importantly, he leaves out that artists earn a larger chunk of revenue from live than they do from recorded music sales — most of which go to the labels, not the artists. Why focus on that anyway? It’s like complaining that automobiles are terrible for transportation because fewer buggy whips are selling. When you have dumb metrics, you’re going to get silly results.
The numbers change little when one uses total rather than per capita revenue, and home-video sales are falling as well.
Oh come on. Home video wouldn’t even exist if Hollywood had its way and banned the VCR 30 years ago, so I’m sorry if I find complaints about the home video market shrinking as evidence of a problem. As we saw with the VCR, new markets develop, and they seem to develop against Hollywood’s own wishes — and then become a huge revenue driver for Hollywood. The best solution, if we look historically, is to get Hollywood out of the way and just let those new models develop to save Hollywood from itself.
That in itself should be troubling to anyone who thinks the profit motive matters — with less profit, presumably, will come less creative output.
Thing is, we don’t need to “presume” anything. We have data. And the data shows that more music is being created and released and monetized than ever before. And the data shows that more films are being created and released and monetized than ever before. You can presume all you want until the cows come home, but if reality says you’re wrong, it’s difficult to take those presumptions seriously.
As commentator Eduardo Porter noted in the New York Times, while the total number of music-album releases rose between 2005 and 2010, releases of albums that sold at least 1,000 copies — a rather low standard by which to judge whether an artist is making a significant contribution to the world of recorded music — declined about 40 percent. Of course, like Salam and Ruffini’s, Porter’s data are highly debatable — he relies on the Nielsen sales database, which excludes some independent releases and does not count sales of single songs.
It doesn’t just exclude “some” independent releases. It excludes tens of thousands (potentially hundreds of thousands) of independent releases. If you just look at TuneCore and CDBaby alone, you’d realize how silly relying on SoundScan is as a proxy. And, once again, this is only looking at “recorded music” sales in isolation. The fact that fewer albums sold 1,000 copies ignores the massive explosion of new music (which just paragraphs earlier, VerBruggen “presumed” was impossible), meaning that there’s a ton more competition. Furthermore, it ignores that recorded music is not the main way that many artists monetize these days, and looking at it in isolation is pretty pointless. Finally, many of those artists who sold less than 1000 albums would have made a big fat $0 under the old system, because no major label would have bothered with them and they wouldn’t have had any other outlet. Aren’t we all (including, most importantly, the musicians) better off in a world where a whole bunch of artists get to make something rather than nothing? But, again, the “but… but… piracy!” argument blinds VerBruggen to this reality.
The finer points of entertainment economics aside, if widespread and increasingly popular illegal behavior is costing American companies business, and possibly reducing artists’ creative output, it is first and foremost a law-enforcement problem, not an “innovation” problem. It is entirely reasonable for Hollywood to petition the government for better anti-piracy efforts, even if the industry has lobbied for bad legislation in the past.
Almost nothing in this paragraph is supported by… anything. If law enforcement doesn’t work, how is this possibly a law enforcement problem? This is yet another example of someone trying to be right rather than realistic. It’s a recipe for disaster, but it’s the same recipe that the legacy entertainment industry has been cooking up for decades to no effect. Who would ever double down on that strategy?
Filed Under: business models, copyright, innovation, morality, piracy, reality
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