Artsculture

'RiP: A Remix Manifesto'

We're all pirates now, so how will films and journalism get made?

By Dorothy Woodend, 27 Mar 2009, TheTyee.ca

RiP: A Remix Manifesto

Brett Gaylor's doc channels theories of Lawrence Lessig.

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If you want to watch Billy Wilder's wonderful film Some Like it Hot, starring the positively luscious Tony Curtis, and Marilyn Monroe looking not unlike a big dollop of whipped cream on heels, you have a variety of choices. The film is screening this Saturday morning at Vancouver's Fifth Avenue theatre. Or your local video store can no doubt supply a copy. And even if you are trapped inside your house, or pinned underneath something heavy, you could probably still creep one hand out and find your computer. On YouTube, some kindly soul has divided Some Like it Hot into 12 chapters, where it is free and available to anyone who wishes to view it. Twenty-four hours a day, every day of the week. At least for the time being.

On YouTube, the ongoing war between the copyright holders and copyright takers keeps raging. Even threats of ridiculous lawsuits haven't worked very well in getting people to stop posting stuff they like online or downloading stuff to share with the world. In fact, copyright law has worked about as well as prohibition did with alcohol, which simply made drinking look more enjoyable. In the opening scene of Some Like it Hot, the speakeasy was the place to be because it was fun. And illegal.

So, what is your point, Dorothy?

Only this. Just because a new way of watching a film has come along, doesn't mean that all the old ways instantly disappear, or might do in the immediate future. The video store I frequent in my Vancouver neighbourhood, Black Dog Video on Cambie Street, still does extremely brisk trade every evening, and not only because they have excellent films and toothsome staff (who seem too happy to actually be working very hard). People like to hang out there and jaw with the clerks simply because it's fun. The same can be said of movie theatres, where attendance has actually gone up in recent months. Despite the fact that you can easily pirate current films at any number of different websites, people still like to go out and see them at the movie house. There are lots of other people there, popcorn and snacks. For now, YouTube and the Cineplex are coexisting just fine.

'No way to kill this technology'

Which brings me to a film about the copyright revolution now playing at the Ridge Theatre in Vancouver. Brett Gaylor's documentary, RiP: A Remix Manifesto, takes the theories of Lawrence Lessig, creator of Creative Commons, and runs madly away with it. The film is so wadded full with ideas that they come squishing out the sides. But one of the film's central chapters revolves around Lessig's TED Talk, in which he argues "That there's no way to kill this technology, you can only criminalize its use." Lessig is speaking specifically about the idea of remix, taking older material and changing it to make it into something new. But the idea applies equally as well to any technology that allows users to share content (Napster to YouTube and beyond).

What is interesting in both Lessig's talk and Gaylor's film is the underlying change not only in how we use content, but how we understand it. Like any good movement, it was born out of love, not greed.

I've been thinking about Rip: A Remix Manifesto in light of an article that has been making the rounds of the Internet these past few weeks. Clay Shirky's piece entitled The Death of Newspaper and Thinking the Unthinkable went viral almost immediately. The piece popped up like a big old mushroom after the rain at The New York Times, Slate and SFGate, among others, where others commented on Shirky's commentary.

One of the central pegs of his story concerns what happens when the gates fall, and the barbarians overrun the place. It's not because they want to kill you and take all your stuff, it's because they too want to be a part of the process of making culture. Thus, a 14-year-old boy makes copies of his favorite Dave Barry column and distributes them widely not because he hates Dave Barry, but because he loves him, and wants to share his love with the world. It is the same argument that Lessig makes, and by extension Brett Gaylor makes: that creators in a read/write culture want to do more than simply passively consume stuff. They want to make it themselves. And lo! Remix was loosed upon the world.

If it's great, will it pay?

Shirky is writing specifically about the decline and fall of newspaper, but you could extend his analogy to most other forms of media as well. Just as freedom of the press has largely been limited to the people who actually own one, to paraphrase Henry Mencken, so too, the creation and distribution of movies was previously limited to people who owned enormous film studios and giant film projectors. Technology made it ridiculously easy to copy and distribute films, as each new technological innovation made clear. From video cassettes, to DVDs, and now immediate online delivery via iTunes, it's easy to get your hands on stuff. But increasingly, the question becomes: Is it is worth watching?

As ad revenues continue to fall, and people move en masse to the Internet, newspapers and TV tremble under the weight. Look to documentarian Adam Curtis's indictment of TV journalism in four pithy minutes to be convinced.

The curious thing is that even something as blandly stupid as TV seems to have cottoned on to the notion that content works. Shows such as The Wire have inspired epic devotion because they're actually good. How revolutionary is that? If you want to see something great or read something great you will still pay for the privilege. The proliferation of access doesn't mean the death of one form, just more and better means of access. Cell phones spread like a disease because they were convenient and useful, but people obviously still have landlines. They still sound better, and are way more reliable, than cells.

Filmmakers and ink-stained wretches

Shirky argues that although newspapers and journalism have been bound up together in the public mind, they are in fact two very separate and distinct things. People still need journalism, probably more so now than ever before, and if newspapers aren't going to give it to them, then to hell with them. But who will fill void? Bloggers or citizen journalists? The dweeb down the block with an Internet connection and an axe to grind?

Not necessarily, since nothing and nobody can do what print journalists, the foot soldiers of the information age, have done and have continued to do in spite of being systematically downsized. The same can be said of filmmakers, who have traditionally had to work inside an enormous apparatus, in order to do what they do.

But how films get made also has undergone a sea change for the better. Maybe there are a bunch of new Billy Wilders out there, simply waiting to be born, or at least distributed widely. Certainly there is way less control, and way more content, and an extreme polarization between freedom and quality but, by and large, it's the traditional gatekeepers who are panicking because no one needs them anymore.

Things have changed, are changing, will continue to change. We're in the middle of revolution. Meanwhile, content endures, and so does love. Someone has taken the time to carefully post Some Like It Hot online, not because they expect to reap any financial benefit, but because they love it so. I watched the entire film on YouTube and it was still as good right now as it was in 1959, when the World Wide Web was but a glimmer in the distance.

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Dorothy Woodend writes about film for The Tyee every other Friday.

18 Comments:

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  • southdeltawalker

    2 years ago

    Some Like Cherry Blossoms.

    I would be there tomorrow at the Fifth to see "Some Like It Hot" again except we're off to the Cherry Blossom Festival at Van Dusen Gardens.

    Marilyn Monroe hated "Some Like it Hot" yet it remains one of her most beloved roles.

    There will be lots of pink at the Festival-i'll take a minute to remember Marilyn.

  • turb0chrg

    2 years ago

    The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalis

    Check this book out if you're interested in this:

    http://www.amazon.com/Downloading-Sneakers-Reinvented-Capitalism-Innovation/dp/1416532188

  • Tbarnston

    2 years ago

    Our thinking has become so uptight on this

    The media corporations don't really create, they commodify. Once they happen upon a vein of culture that has the potential for mass appeal, they market the shit out of it until it has no soul left to speak of.

    The key terms here are "commodify" and "market" .

    Culture happens and will happen regardless of the fortunes of corporate media. What is changing is the apparatus through which mass popular culture is disseminated.

    It networks people. Networks. Markets are so my parents generation.

    Sure, I'll still by some stuff in "the market", maybe I'll play the "market" a bit now and again. But what really counts is my network. That is number one now.

    Old people just don't get this concept because they have been living their whole life trying to get ahead in "the market" by "marketing" themselves to corporations in return for their livelihood. Sure, they may have "networked" to help be successful, but the focus was the market. It's flipped now.

    Do you think important artists, writers, musicians who care about their craft are going to give a shit about the corporate media? They are the creative class, and I am very confident that they will find a way to develop a livelihood through their networks by living creativly productive lives. In fact, I am willing to bet that it will be the artists who teach the masses the importance/value/role networks play in life in the coming decades.

  • Tbarnston

    2 years ago

    I should also add...

    As the article states, we are in a transition period now. What we are seeing now is the so called pirates, with their new found techno savvy, reversing the flow of the gains from trade in the culture industry from the corporate media and dispersing to the masses. What suffers in this equation is the profit margins of the corporation. Everybody else seems OK with the current transition phase. But this phenomenon won't last forever. Eventually corporate media will be sucked dry and will scale back its investments in seeking out profitable veins of culture. This will disrupt the flow of money in the industry and some artists could get hurt.

    However, I think that the promise of networks is that they build in accountability. I don't think leachers (pirates) will be tolerated as much as they are now. Leachers feed off the excess of corporate profit currently, but when that well has run dry they will find that it will be much harder to leach of off networks because the network will have the power to cut leachers right out. You will only get out of a network proportionate to what you put in. And it is within that context that I think creative people will do very well.

  • Tbarnston

    2 years ago

    And one more thing...

    Say I'm a troll who lives under a bridge and command payment from all those who cross just because I own the bridge. How many friends am I going to have? How big is my network going to be? Sure, I might know the troll upstream and the troll downstream, and we might get along well enough that we can fix the price of the bridge tolls, but other than that I don't have many friends. I sure would be screwed if the bridge crossers all bought canoes or figured our how to build their own bridges.

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    2 years ago

    Tbarnston

    I'm trying to imagine how you and your upstream/downstream troll friends could be so ready to fret bridge-crossing canoe-buyers. Don't you guys use canoes as toothpicks? Make waves that would capsize a galleon, let alone a wee canoe? (You can't load up a canoe with a canon, can you?)

    I like your attitude, your determination, but maybe don't underestimate how many people are readying themselves to cling EVEN MORE STRONGLY to established power. If the coalition had succeeded, the day of the novel and interesting would be here. Instead, the public wanted Harper, who is likely getting stronger, and an energized Ignatieff, another strong man leader of the hunt, who does not share power.

    It may actually be that the next phase is of more interesting (or at least more openly rebellious) independents, but fewer of them, and a reinvigorated, crusading, and formidable, mainstream, intent on obliterating independent opinion.

  • VivianLea Doubt

    2 years ago

    Canoes

    Apparently you can't put a cannon (or a canon) in a canoe: some of us are up the proverbial s*** creek with trolls on all sides...
    I'd like to hear more about networks, Tbarnston, and about the next phase, Patrick McEvoy. This is the best read I've had in days...

  • morechatter

    2 years ago

    I'd be lost with out my newspaper

    You build up a relationship over the years and its like that morning cup of coffee you can't live without. And despite the Internets ability to bring you the news in several different languages as its coming up, its nice. But it doesn't matter thats only the news as the paper has so much more to offer like tradition, the feel, the look as like those addicted to cigarettes its that first puff as you sit back and relax and take it all in. So I'm a fan that hopes the newspapers doesn't entirely go away.
    I just had flashbacks as a young kid selling newspapers at the corner in front of the drugstore hollering "Get Your News Here Folks" or shouting the days headlines what ever seemed sell the News.

  • morechatter

    2 years ago

    And I know you'll say Internet Cafe

    Its just not the same as you sit in front of a computer screen as you connect with the metal box. No the newspaper has that look, read me, play with me, touch me as it spreads itself out reveling the daily's news an the intamacy unfolds before you very eyes as reader and paper are feeling the pangs of a love gone astray.

  • realisticman

    2 years ago

    No Way to Kill the Technology. Quite.

    You Tube brings a new dimension. This week we were treated to a kerfuffle over the interesting George Galloway being declared inadmissible by our Border Agency. You Tube gives us some insight into this complex character.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ButQKpZ3uzg&feature=related

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    2 years ago

    Short reply, VivianLea

    VivianLea: Just a few words. The article (and the key one by Shirky, Dorothy links us to) would have us see the current time as revolutionary. Old certainty is being replaced by the new, VARIANT, and unsettling. Dorothy here becomes akin to Addison and Steele--18th-century "journalists" who lived at a time in England's history, when England dramatically shifted the weight of its culture away from the court toward parliament and commerce--in her articulation of the need of efforts by diligant, civilized, sober professionals (gentleman, in Steele and Addisons' case) to backbone all the new sinews of commercial society.

    But this just doesn't feel like such an open, expansive time, for me. Rather, I'm one of those who think that we've been through a long period of circumscribed play, of people under watch, which has worked to LIMIT the range of the possible (in favour of the professional). And as for what follows, if Canada is about to become militarist, nationalistic, fascist, then there will be a further narrowing, as many people dissassociating into group think, look to the SINGLE leader. Before people merge into groups, there's a lot of chatter and random milling about. Is this the period we're now going through, maybe? I think this is what's happening now in the U.S. Even (really, I mean most especially) the republicans will unify behind Obama, as they come to like rather than fear, his tailoring of the unified state.

  • VivianLea Doubt

    2 years ago

    Spectator

    A short thank you, Patrick.

  • morechatter

    2 years ago

    Realisticman?

    What has Mr. Galloway's hangups got to do with anything its just dirty laundry. Not criminal activity, promoting hatred or violence, war, or child porn but this does not make the man a danger to pussycats or people for that matter. So what gives with the gag stuff as clearly there was no problem airing the piece and a lot of things make me sick? Like war and blood and the killing of baby seals now thats somekinda horror for sure.
    http://www.ifaw.org/ifaw_canada_english/join_campaigns/save_baby_seals_end_the_seal_hunt/index.php
    In this new medium media is under going a revolution as many jump ship and start out on their own and virtual unknowns also flock the medium and become instant stars. Making it also a new day for a different type of leader to appear with out being caught up in the local message machine as more and more independent voices appear on the horizon.
    As clearly the guys who thought they had all the answers still haven't changed their tune, will that be Master-Card,American Express, Visa, etc.. So good news is we will get our news as the story goes.....
    I also see a market for the local paper it will just have to change its delivery somewhat. As costs could be reduced because papers like hrs and metro are headliners. So usually if something attracts the readers eye they will search it out. So downsize the paper make if lite weight, with out forgoing crosswords and horoscopes and other daily ritual stuff while placing the rest of the story and stuff on the Internet. Its a new frontier and although it almost seems like we are going back wards as lone news people tell the news it truly is a step forward....

  • morechatter

    2 years ago

    and oh yes and the co operative

    Will become part of this new day of communication which ironically is taking new pioneers of the online medium back to the basics, of telling the news.

  • PatrickMcEvoyHalston

    2 years ago

    Your welcome. Keep us

    Your welcome. Keep us abreast of your journeys.

  • Tbarnston

    2 years ago

    Network effects

    OK, my troll rant was a simplistic jab at the media companies. .

    The reality is that corporations are very aware of how valuable networks are. The fact that the US can double its debt in one day by bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or that Flaherty can buy $50 billion in mortgages from the banks without parliament approval demonstrates that certain corporations do have powerful, profitable networks.

    There is a lot of cross pollination between markets and networks. To wit: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/03/guest-post-banks-were-profitable-in.html

    The link is a bit of a mind bender but point of it is that Wall Street is a network. The working class got smart a hundred years ago and created our own networks: unions. By agreeing not to cross picket lines we all became stronger. The link demonstrates the same principle applies to the elite, powerful corporations.

    The key to the corporate elite's success is they are focussed on one thing only: profit at the margin. They are highly pragmatic entities that are willing at any time to sell there soul for a more profit or for a smaller loss.

    The left, in contrast, is focussed on many diffuse issues. We are also not even close to properly understanding how our own our own savings are used against us, or how our own material desires are twisted and fed back to us in order to make us spend our hard earned dollars.

    If us working class people want to get out of the rat race for real and enjoy a life not beholden to wage slave economics, we are going to have to discover a core set of values we can work together toward, disengage with the publicly traded corporate world as much as possible, and build in that space our own institutions that are responsible to the stakeholders, rather than shareholders.

    So we have work to do. The template is there from our grandparents generations and from other countries who have had the corporate sector destroy their livelihoods. Here are the steps to get started:

    1) Redefine wealth: the Tyee is covering this, and Vancity's current board is focussed on it too:
    http://re-electyourboard.ca/

    2) Learn about the mechanisms (ie speculative capital markets) that cause wealth transfer from the working class to the wealthy. Here is where I go to get a better understanding of who I am up against. Ignore the occassional anti union rhetoric, we are reading this to learn about the capital markets http://www.ritholtz.com
    http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/

    3) Watch the segments with Noam Chomsky
    here:
    http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=36&Itemid=74&jumival=12

    Digest this. Think it over. Figure out where you interface most with corporate networks via the market. Understand what parts of your life you would be willing to work cooperatively toward attaining. Then put it out there. We can build our own bridges, and we can do it on our own terms. Just don't tell Kevin Falcon...

  • VivianLea Doubt

    2 years ago

    Thanks, all

    Tbarnston, my canoe riff was simplistic because I had yet another paper to finish... I don't disagree with your cooperative premise, but the point I was making is that some of us gave up on being able to pay the toll troll a long time ago, and have been adrift on the water since. It is hard to network with all the other canoeists paddling madly to keep afloat...
    If we are going to discover those core values we can all work towards, we will have to include the unheard and the marginalized in our networks...the ones who have absolutely no control over where they interface with corporate networks...
    Enjoyed your links, thanks for the pleasure.

  • Tbarnston

    2 years ago

    VivianLea

    "If we are going to discover those core values we can all work towards, we will have to include the unheard and the marginalized in our networks...the ones who have absolutely no control over where they interface with corporate networks..."

    Hey, we gotta start somewhere.

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