Kevin,

Have we changed the original question? Now it’s not whether we can save the Internet, but whether the Internet can save us. You believe that it can. The Internet, you say, will get us off our butts and make us more creative and energetic, thereby transforming traditional top-down culture into a participatory culture. To you, the Internet is a radically emancipatory force, the digital version of the ’60s eruption against cultural conformity, political hypocrisy, and ethical mendacity. The networked computer, you imply, frees us both from our own slothfulness and from the dull conventions of mainstream media. What the counterculture couldn’t do, the Internet is now doing. In contrast, I see the Internet as a mirror. It reflects us rather than reforms us. So what you see as creative energy, I view with nervousness. I believe that the Internet culture reflects our deep cultural and political malaise. What troubles me most about contemporary America—the infinitely fragmented self, our instinctive sense of entitlement and moral righteousness, the failure to respect traditional sources of authority, the cult of childish innocence, the privatization of citizenship, media illiteracy—is compounded by the democratized Internet. Your ideal of emancipation through artistic “prosumption” is a metaphysical seduction. I don’t really understand how it works. Nor do I see much evidence of its efficacy amongst the coach-potato class. All I see is a Web 2.0 self-broadcasting culture grafted onto the cacophonous media of talk-in radio and American Idol–style democratization. I think you and I pretty much agree with what’s wrong with America. Like you, I don’t like crap. Like you, I want an energized, well-informed citizenry willing to take responsibility for their actions. Like you, I would relish a future in which people become genuinely creative citizens and community members. I also agree with your arguments about the profound historical significance of all these changes. Yes, this digital revolution is akin to the Industrial Revolution in both its constructive and destructive potential. And, yes, you are right that “the web is all of 5,000 days old.” It may indeed “take another few thousand days to figure out viable systems of law, business practices, cultural norms, and expectations that will reward audiences, creators, and the middle industries. Or it may take a generation, but that is still a relatively short time in the lifecycle of an economy.” Like you, I want people to get off their couches and become responsible, media-literate consumers. Your final question, while obviously rhetorical, is memorably lyrical:

Who can argue against the goodness of having a billion people get off the couches and start making stuff, even if 90 percent is crap? That means 10 percent is great. And not only is that 10 percent more than we had before, I will argue that eventually some of that 10 percent will be superior to the best we get from the established media industry. And even if the greatest is never made by prosumers, it is still wonderful they are off their butts and using the talents that God gave them.

I hope you are right. I really do. I just finished Benjamin Barber’s engaging new book, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole. I agreed with everything in the first 336 pages of this 369-page book: Barber’s critique of the cultural consequences of the free market, and his observations about media addiction, voyeurism, and the ubiquity of advertising. And then, just when I assumed Barber would have been totally in favor of my argument in Cult of the Amateur, he turned away from me. On page 337, he introduces the ideal of the creative commons as the solution to what he calls “civic schizophrenia.” Barber suggests that “the idea of the civic calling relies on innovative forms of the traditional commons, including a new information commons rooted in new technology.” So maybe I’m wrong and you, Lawrence Lessig, Barber, and the free culture movement have a point. Maybe this new commons really does have the potential to transform the infantilized American media consumer into a responsible grown-up. So how to (re)make this new citizenship? How do we transform a nation of couch potatoes into a nation of creative, media literate prosumers able to digest complex news and appreciate sophisticated culture? And how do we do this while the institutions and business models of traditional media—publishers, newspapers, record labels, and movie studios—are crumbling all around us? Your strategy is libertarian. For you, it seems, all change comes from within. Your proof? Kevin Kelly. When everyone becomes KK, you suggest, the world will be a better place. The problem is that not everyone can be KK. Not everyone can be a successful author like you and earn money giving speeches and selling your intelligence directly to the consumer. You are a remarkably self-motivated, independent person who trekked around the world, fathered Wired magazine, mothered the new rules for the new economy, uncled the Web 2.0 revolution. You are an exception rather than the rule. Where do unexceptional people, the un-KK’s of the world, get the aesthetic sensibility to make movies, the intellectual training to write books, or the reporting skills to accurately cover politics? Who is going to teach us to become good digital citizens? Will it come transcendentally from within, KK-style? Or will it emerge, in a similarly transcendental
fashion, from the free market? No. Neither solution—what I call the libertarianism of the left (countercultural) or of the right (free market)—works. Good digital citizens need to be nurtured by the state, by schoolteachers and university professors, by authoritative journalists, by parents, by peers, by fellow citizens, by both new and old media companies. The good digital citizen is as trained in listening as in speaking. The test of good digital citizenship is silence rather than noise. So can the Internet be saved? Yes, it can. But only when we stop relying on an idealized self and an equally idealized free market to transport us into the promised land. The Internet can be saved if we save ourselves by synthesizing the vitality of the Internet with the professional authority of the mainstream media. As this catastrophic Bush presidency has underlined, media literacy is the key issue facing America today. But to create a truly media-literate and intellectually disciplined citizen, you need to educate him to critically consume content and entertainment. Otherwise, the lazy television couch potato will be replaced by the equally lazy digital opinionator. And instead of entertaining ourselves to death, we’ll end up creating ourselves into oblivion. ak

NEXT: The Mega-Question of the Coming Centuries

The post Not Everyone Can Be Kevin Kelly appeared first on Jewcy.

Kevin,

You are right, of course, that I’m being intellectually crude (what you call “fundamentalist”) in my polemic on behalf of intellectual property. And you're certainly right that digital thievery seems pathetic when compared with “unjustified war, ethnicide, and infanticide.” However, I never suggested that today’s kleptomania on the Internet is ethically equivalent to human tragedies like Darfur. Indeed, I would happily steal songs myself if it eased the suffering of innocents in Africa. You write tendentiously about “no-middle” debates as if your own natural intellectual terrain is commonsense realism. But I don’t see a lot of middle in your arguments either. I see you as an un-commonsensical provocateur with the intellectual nerve to take outrageous positions while keeping a straight face. That’s what you did in New Rules for the New Economy. And you did it again with your “Scan This Book!” piece, in which you announced the death of the physical book, perhaps the key cultural product in human history. Your obituary for the publishing industry was politely articulated, but that didn’t make it any more palatable to the editors, writers, or publishers who depend on the economic value of physical books for their livelihood. Last May, I was at a prominent publisher’s office on the 50th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. It was the heart of the traditional media economy—ground zero of the print content business. As the publishing executives shuffled into the room, they all carried copies of “Scan This Book!”. In spite of its reasonable tone, your grenade of an article had offended these people to the core. I might be public enemy number one on the blogosphere, but you aren’t exactly a hero to the publishing moguls of downtown Manhattan. “This Kelly cowboy, he wants to get rid of copies. That’s the end of content. He wants to give away books for free,” one of the publishing execs said to me, open-mouthed in astonishment. “Is he serious?” Good question. Do you seriously believe that a “universal digital library” will soon replace the physical book at the heart of the ideas economy? That physical books no longer have economic value and that the author of the future will make money only by monetizing his own brand through public appearances and consulting? Are we really on the brink of what an indignant John Updike called a culture of digital “snippets”? I somehow doubt you genuinely believe any of this—especially since you are a bestselling author yourself. My guess is that your outrageous obituary was intended to provoke discussion about the future of printed content. Anyway, enough trash talk. Let’s get beyond all this good and evil. To regain your trust, let me try to discuss the copyright issue with more subtlety. I like your phrase “paradox of information,” so I'll offer my own paradoxical theory of information in the hope of clearing up our collective muddle over intellectual property. You are right that everyone is confused about what is rightfully theirs in this new economy. I love the elegiac manner in which you describe this bewildered generation:

“They are not cagey pickpockets, but aliens in a strange land; not pirates, but lost pioneers; not devilish, but generous.”

So what makes them aliens in this strange land? What has happened to transform Kevin Kelly into a poet and our youth into a band of intellectual pirates? The paradox is that technology and culture have become so entangled that what we think our debate about technology is actually a debate about culture. My book and my argument are part of a broader critique of popular culture. The ideas about narcissism are borrowed (legally, of course) from Christopher Lasch, my cultural critique of capitalism from Daniel Bell, my defense of high culture from Alan Bloom and Robert Hughes, my polemic against democratized mass media from Neil Postman. These issues have converged because today’s digital technology radically personalizes both the delivery and consumption of culture. Thus Time magazine’s celebration of “You” (as in, all of us) as their 2006 Person of the Year.

We—you and I and hundreds of millions of people with an Internet connection—are all Gutenberg now. But we are 21st-century Gutenbergs, weighed down by the baggage of the 20th-century culture industry. So what does all this have to do with the confusion over intellectual property ownership? The goal of popular culture, particularly in music, has been to make the consumer feel as if he is the rightful owner of the cultural product he is consuming. Mass media obsessively cultivates an intimate relationship between the artist and the audience. The real “cult” in all this is the cult of the audience. When Dylan went electric in July 1965, he was greeted by indignant fans who felt they knew him better than he knew himself. Why? Because, as a popular music icon, his followers felt they “owned” him, his sound, his brand. This pre-Internet confusion over ownership had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with culture.

Today’s Internet technology—with its interactive, personalized tools of intimacy—is simply catching up to cultural reality. Today, we (the culture businessmen and the alienated youth) are equally lost in a “strange land.” Today’s digital tools give consumers the means to appropriate content, which, in their minds, was rightfully theirs in the first place. Ownership and authorship have been turned on their heads. Thus the remix, mashup ideology in which the effort to free our culture from the grip of media oligarchies has been confused with a “free culture” campaign to completely eliminate the exchange value of cultural products. So what is the answer to this paradox of free culture? How can we escape from a mass culture in which intellectual ownership has been so radically democratized that it’s lost all economic value? I believe we should return to a more traditional understanding of artist and audience, one rooted in Locke’s idea of intellectual ownership. We need to remember that it is the artist who labors, and the audience who consumes. To subvert the 20th-century mass media subversion, we need to give up
the narcotic of cultural intimacy that muddles up author and audience. The most lasting works—by Hitchcock, Van Gogh, or Mozart—are owned and created only by the author himself. Sure, they were all influenced by other traditions, thinkers, and artists. But great art does not come from delving into the (il)legal grayness of intellectual property law to steal from others. You, I suspect, will disagree. And that’s the crux of our debate. You seem to believe that the ideas economy is a social phenomenon, driven by sounds, images, and words that are collectively owned. You don’t believe the modern artist can avoid intellectual theft. But why is 2007 different from 1907? Why should artists find the digital economy so much grayer than the analog economy of the early 20th century? Is the law really so different today than it was a hundred years ago? (And do you know anyone arrested for singing “Happy Birthday” in a restaurant?) You write:

“In the last hundred years, the mass—the physical weight—of exported economic goods has dropped in proportion to their economic value. We make more desirable and useful things with less material. As goods have dematerialized, they have become more valuable. However, it is not the loss of mass per se that makes them valuable; it is the acquisition of intelligence, design, interaction, and ideas. We are embedding our creations with a bit of ourselves: some of our mind, some of the intangible spirit that makes us alive. So, now, rather than having an economy governed by the movement and cost of matter, we have an economy that is increasingly governed by the movement and cost of ideas.”

This is a fascinating paragraph, and it deserves a book-length response. But I'll leave aside the metaphysical and industrial implications of your statements and just point out that you appear to have gotten sucked into the cult of the audience. When it comes to a contemporary book, a film, or other creative work, how is the product “lighter” than a hundred years ago?

I don’t agree that books or films today have any more “intelligence, design, interaction, or ideas.” In 1907, the physical or intellectual act of writing a novel, a song, a symphony, or a play was no different than it is today. Were these creations embedded with any more of “ourselves,” with our spiritual “intangibility”? No. (Btw, aren’t you stealing from Emerson and Thoreau here?) You might be correct in terms of the value of software, but culture is no more (nor less) valuable today than it was in 1907. Culture has always been unbearably light. That’s what makes it so hard to pin down. So can the Internet be saved? Yes, it can. But not with your argument that digital technology has revolutionized the economy of ideas. The Internet is a great marketing tool for the creation, distribution, and sale of ideas. But the Internet hasn’t changed the intellectual labor of creating ideas. Nor has it made intellectual products any more or less metaphysical. The physical copy of a book is neither ambiguous nor intangible. It has a cover, pages, and a lot of words. It is written by an author and read by an audience. And it is exchanged for cash. Long may that continue! ak

NEXT: You call them amateurs, I call them a miracle

The post The Cult of the Audience appeared first on Jewcy.

Kevin,

You say that my book should be called the “Cult of Anonymity” rather than The Cult of the Amateur. :-) Yes, the cult of the amateur and the cult of anonymity do indeed seem to be opposite sides of the same coin. The Web 2.0 amateur, that digital narcissist, seeks to endlessly broadcast himself; the anonymous Internet commentator seeks to endlessly broadcast somebody else. One is all self; the other is no self. Both are toxic. What, I wonder, is the cause of this cult of anonymity? I’m less concerned with spammers, who are no better than common criminals, and more interested in the anonymous reviewers on Amazon who want to express themselves without revealing their real identities. I’m concerned that this cult of anonymity—by fragmenting the self into a series of invented beings—is transforming identity into a hall of mirrors. In a world in which we have no center, what becomes of such traditional epistemological anchors as religious belief, citizenship, or secular morality? Speaking for once like an engineer, I’m not sure that human beings were designed to be driven with such reckless abandon. I’m intrigued by your idea of using code to fight anonymity. You say:

But there is one very effective tool in diminishing anonymity: code. The folks who create online social systems and marketplaces can regulate the degree of anonymity by coding it in or not. Through technological means we can tweak how much anonymity we have. Not by laws, but by code.

So software coders should regulate social systems and marketplaces in order to eliminate anonymity? Interesting idea. But aren’t you then turning codemakers into lawmakers, crowning them as digital engineers of the human soul? In his Republic, Plato wanted to turn philosophers into moral legislators. I suspect a dash of Platonic idealism in your faith in the moral wisdom of coders. But why do you so trust the honesty of coders? Shouldn’t we fear their economic, political, or ethical agendas—especially since they are neither popularly appointed nor transparently accountable? Unlike you, I am not against the top-down legislation of morality and civic virtue. But, in our representative democracy, this legislation needs to be created openly and unambiguously—by elected officials, by accountable judges, and by civic leaders such as schoolteachers and op-ed writers in daily newspapers. I don’t trust codemakers to distinguish between right and wrong any more than I trust American lawmakers to write software code. Let’s leave ethics to the ethicists and code to the coders.

You cite Jeff Bezos’ regret at “allowing anonymous book reviews” on the Amazon site. And you’re skeptical that morality can be effectively imposed from above, by schoolteachers or op-ed writers. But I trust legislation from a schoolteacher or an op-ed writer much more than from a plutocrat like Bezos, whose only responsibility is to his shareholders. You say you aren’t an anarchist and that you recognize the need for “some laws” on the Internet. But, leaving aside Jeff Bezos and his coders, how would you suggest we determine the moral criteria with which we craft these laws? You reject the regulation of morality and civic virtue, suggesting it is neither “effective” nor “sustainable.” You don’t believe in social contracts as a foundation for an ethical consensus. You want laws that are “few, concise, and minimal,” “like the Ten Commandments.” And you seem to believe that this moral code will come out of what you call a “technological matrix”:

My problem with national laws for fixing Internet problems, at least in America in 2007, is that this is a very slow, overly broad hammer for problems that can be addressed faster and more effectively by rewriting, reinventing, and re-imagining the technological matrix that holds them.

Please explain how this “matrix” works. How will it help us save both the Internet and ourselves? I agree that the Ten Commandments represent a simple, concise, and attractively minimal moral framework. Remember #8: Thou shalt not steal—a particularly unambiguous state
ment, which, if applied to the Internet, would find intellectual pirates guilty of blatant criminality. And yet, in your section on digital piracy, you insist on the ambiguity of intellectual property law. For you, the remix artist and the file-sharer exist in the moral “gray zone,” “awaiting clarification of law.” Meanwhile, the music and movie industries are collectively losing tens of billions of dollars a year from intellectual piracy. I don’t see anything gray about this zone. People steal music and movies from their rightful owners. Once again, you see the answer in technological tools, rather than in morality:

The solution for the ambiguity of ownership in an idea economy will come as we develop further tools for regulating people’s behavior, such as digital rights management technology, new instruments of property protection (between patents and copyrights), new methods of adjudicating priority, and new emerging societal norms for fair use. Only then can the law cement—codify—what technology and society allow.

I’ve been in the Internet entertainment business since the mid-nineties, and I see little, if any, evidence of “emerging societal norms for fair use.” I suspect more music is stolen on the Internet today than in 1999. Broad social problems such as rampant intellectual property theft require broad hammers. Instead of “tools” to regulate our behavior, we need to develop a common collective morality that distinguishes intellectual theft and plagiarism from genuine authorship and ownership. Tools don’t regulate people’s behavior; people regulate people’s behavior. Speaking of intellectual-property ambiguity, let me end with a question. What, exactly, do you mean by an “idea economy”? I think I understand the “idea” part, but I’m having trouble with the “economy” bit. Is this your provocative “Scan My Book” vision that you laid out in last year’s New York Times? The one that almost killed old John Updike? Is this an economy in which we give away our work for free and collect money through speaking or other entrepreneurial punditry? I understand the logic of this vision. But aren’t you concerned that it will turn all creative artists into sales and marketing hucksters? (Btw, everyone should buy my book The Cult of the Amateur). Will your vision mean the death of the serious professional creative artist, rather than his salvation? And is this discussion an example of the idea economy? ak Next: What Fundamentalism!

The post Don’t Scan My Book appeared first on Jewcy.

From: Andrew Keen To: Kevin Kelly Subject: Can We Save the Internet?

Hi Kevin, We are supposed to be discussing whether or not the Internet can be saved. But I’m not sure that this is a helpful way of thinking about the Internet. A better question is whether humankind can be saved. The authors of the Internet are you, me, and the rest of us; information technology has no will of its own, no spiritual autonomy, no existence independent of us. So when we look at the Internet, we are looking into a mirror, we are gazing at ourselves. The salvation of the Internet is, therefore, a human question. It’s no good blaming technology for the corruption of the Internet. We have to take responsibility for our own collective invention. That is the first and most essential step toward digital salvation. To save the Internet means saving ourselves. When I look at today’s Internet, I mostly see cultural and ethical chaos. I see the eruption of rampant intellectual property theft, extreme pornography, sexual promiscuity, plagiarism, gambling, contempt for order, intellectual inanity, crime, a culture of anonymity, hatred toward authority, incessant spam, and a trash heap of user-generated-content (whew, what a mouthful!). I see a chaotic humans arrangement with few, if any, formal social pacts. Today’s Internet resembles a state of nature—Hobbes’ dystopia rather than Rousseau’s idyll. For most of human history, this state of nature has been theoretical—a fiction which thinkers like Hobbes or Rousseau have had to invent. With the Internet, however, we get to see a non-fictional state of nature. In real-time. Just go to an unregulated bulletin board or a sex chatroom. Take a quick tour of the blogosphere, that echo chamber of digital narcissism. This is an introduction to primeval man, Homo sapiens 1.0. It’s how we behave when there are no social customs or formal laws governing our behavior. Can we blame the Internet for all this human corruption? Of course not. There has always been and always will be extreme pornography, illegal gambling, hubris, sexual promiscuity, contempt for meritocratic hierarchy, shameless narcissism, and political, sexual, and racial hatred. But, on the Internet, such corruption is exaggerated, and it is always on. Now we can gamble 24 hours a day on our networked computers. Now we can consume pornography without ever experiencing the social humiliation of going into a sex shop. Now we can taunt and insult and threaten our enemies anonymously without looking them in the eye. Now we can twitter to the whole world about what we ate for breakfast. Now we can steal our neighbor’s wife, his credit cards, indeed his entire identity, with one click of our mouse. So can the Internet be saved? Yes, I think it can. But we need laws, a series of social contracts, to constructively regulate our behavior on the Internet. Even though I live in Berkeley, I’m not a digital Maoist and I’m not suggesting the imposition of draconian Internet laws. But I think we need some laws and certainly more aggressive social policing to control our worst impulses. I am in favor of laws that unambiguously punish digital piracy, more controls to stop kids accessing pornography, a tighter rein on online gambling, and tougher punishment against the spammers and the marketing scammers who are even ruining good old email.

We are all responsible for saving the Internet. Parents must teach kids self-control to resist the addictive nature of Internet gaming. Teachers need to clamp down
aggressively on intellectual plagiarism. We all need to go back to paying for our content and replacing the Web 2.0 cult of the amateur with Western civilization’s traditional cult of the author.

And we must (re)learn the ability to be silent, to listen to others more learned than ourselves, to value the wisdom of the expert. How else can we save the Internet? We must resist the siren song of anonymity—perhaps the greatest of all digital curses. The Internet holds much promise for social interaction. But this potential is undermined by the culture of anonymity. Much of the Internet’s lack of civility is caused by our unwillingness to accept responsibility for our own words. We behave badly when we can hide behind fake identities. We are naturally obnoxious when we don’t have to face the consequences of our own action. So, if we are to save the Internet, we need to confront the curse of anonymity. Let’s all agree to discard our masks and end anonymity once and for all. The alternative is the statist Chinese model that makes anonymity punishable by law. And nobody—not even a kvetch like me—wants that. There’s one other thing too. The Internet can be saved if we resist the education of virtual life, that opiate of online existence. David Weinberger is wrong. Not everything is miscellaneous. There is a difference—epistemologically, existentially, phenomenologically (and every other long word I can think of)—between physical life and virtual life. Internet sites like Second Life are not versions of alternative reality. This digital salvation is no better than that old wives’ tale of heaven and hell. Being human doesn’t mean transplanting our identities to an invented digital being. As I said before, when we look at the Internet, we are looking into a mirror, at ourselves. And when I look in my mirror, I don’t want an avatar grinning back at me. I hope this makes a little bit of sense to you. And I hope it can help us save the Internet. andrew k Next: Kevin Kelly on The Cult of Anonymity

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