Uncelebrated 2008 Deaths
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009It’s 2009 and I think it’s time to come to grips with the fact that the following things are dead. I hope none of you will mourn their passing for too long.
Copyright-The war is over. We won. Appealing directly to ISPs is a last ditch effort to do an end-run around internet culture and any ISPs stupid enough to try and stop illegal downloads deserve the irrelevance they’re dooming themselves to. It’ll still take a few years for laws to catch up so don’t stop donating to the EFF but copyright is more toothless than it’s ever been and the gatekeepers of media are finally figuring out that everybody went in through the hole in the fence already. If you’re in a business that’s untenable without limiting the copying of something, get out of it.
Reviewers as Tastemakers-More on this soon since it’s the death I have the most immediate plans to do something about. Suffice it to say that there’s little point in somebody telling you what to think of the new Beck album when anybody can steal the new Beck album.
The Right to Privacy-We’re not taking down the CCTV’s and nobody cares that Google has more information on us than the DHS. I’m sorry Cory Doctorow, you fought the good fight on this one but it’s over. The privacy debate now needs to be framed along the lines of a capitalist exchange. People need to be educated about what they’re gaining for the loss of private control of their data. The right to privacy should now be considered the right to fair compensation for loss of privacy. If Google can search my e-mail to figure out I’m interested in buying a new DVD and I get free e-mail storage, and multi-user calender and document sharing in exchange I’m okay with that. If the government records my phone calls and I get an undefined amount of “safety” then we have a social contract to renegotiate.
The Politics of fear-I thought about just writing “the modern Republican party” but in theory they could survive this blow. However nobody votes their fear anymore because nobody’s a useful kind of afraid. Fear politics hinges on the idea that the person making you afraid can protect you from whatever boogeyman they’ve set up. But after years of it everybody’s too exhausted to be afraid anymore. Their either consentrating on our new hopeocracy or they’re so completely terrified about how fucked we are that they don’t think anybody can save them from the boogeyman and aren’t really useful for political capital. For an abject lesson in this watch Norm Coleman scream his head off about the horrible undemocratic danger Al Franken is over the next few weeks while NOBODY CARES. Note to the democratic party: You’re not immune to this, if the economy is slow to pick up and you try to use fear politics in 2010 to make up for it you WILL lose seats in congress.
The Golden Age of TV Drama-The writer’s strike killed it, sorry everybody who’s waiting for the next Lost. It isn’t coming any time soon. This isn’t to say you’ll never watch a good TV show again, but you’ll increasingly be watching things that are cheap to produce and have little authorial voice. In other words you’ll be watching a lot of reality TV because the writers strike had the opposite of its intended effect. The networks were supposed to see that online entertainment was the future and the writers were supposed to realize how much they love having a large corporation helping them with promotions and funding and all that annoying stuff. Instead the Networks ignored the internet entirely and decided that writers were getting to be a fairly risky proposition in any medium that they could maybe do without. Meanwhile writers figured out that it’s getting easier every day to just fund and promote your own projects and then you don’t have to listen to that annoying goblin in the corner who’s worried that an atheist character is “too edgy.” What happens when Joss Whedon gets canceled and he decides he’s making another web-series not a movie? What happens when JJ Abrams decides that his next series is more interesting as an ARG than an actual show? I don’t know but I expect we’ll be finding out shortly. Oh…HBO and Showtime will still be okay.