Chapter 21
In Silicon Valley, the information that wants to be free is almost always the information that belongs to someone else. (Rob Levine)
Mountain view in Silicon Valley is one of those American ‘edge cities’. It is no place for a crowd to gather, yet it witnessed the beginning of the most unlikely rebellion in the history of rebellions: ‘the largest online protest in history’.
Before the 1990s, there were two kinds of industry. The content industry produced books, music, films, news. The ‘tech’ industry specialised in computing and communications and hardware. Originally, there was little competition between these two giants. At the end of the 1990s, they converge upon one another as analogue migrates to digital. The media industry see computers and the whole internet as one vast, out of control photocopying machine, threatening to pirate their content and drive their revenue to nothing. The technology industry see copyright legislation as a potential threat to its business of producing devices, the infrastructure, and the software powering the digital revolution.
Their war spills out onto Wikipedia, which with the support of the technology giants blacks itself out for 24 hours, in protest against legislation which it claims will prevent the distribution of free knowledge. ‘A reckless and burdensome model in Internet censorship’.
Wikipedia supports the technology industry because it needs content which is free, and because content should be free, for there is no such thing as originality. “All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck”. Other ‘New Media’ academics like Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis have argued that we do not need professional journalists because the crowd knows more in its collective wisdom than any individual journalist could. Jonathan Latham argued that all ideas are secondhand “consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them”.
These ideas are at the heart of Wikipedia, which accords no special status for content creators, and which merely creates a ‘garden’ in which such creation can flourish. It is a deep irony that liberals and progressives, who for centuries have hailed artists and poets as the ‘unacknowledged legislators’ of mankind, have dropped their support for their old allies. “The progressive’s support of creator’s rights expressed an optimistic view of society and human nature. But ever since digital utopianism swept through the chattering classes in the early 1990s, this positive view has been replaced by one of misanthropy and paranoia”, says Andrew Orlowski. “Progressives now see the right to be remunerated from cultural production in the digital age as at best an embarrassment, and at worst an anachronism”.
Culture is not the product of the Romantic hero, Manfred-like in his castle of the mind. The new artistic hero of Web 2 is not Byron or Beethoven, but rather the inbred banjo player who duels on the porch in the movie Deliverance.
