SIVACRACY.NET

oddly, since reading these books, the “free music” debate has been rendered at least partly moot for one individual: me. It may sound terribly unhip, but I’m getting more satisfaction from a certain subscription music site than I have ever received while navigating the vagaries of the chaotic file-sharing universe. This is, of course, the point that file sharers have been making forever — that if the music industry would just get its shit together and offer better services at a reasonable price, they wouldn’t need to go stomping all over the p2p (peer-to-peer) crowd. That is starting to happen. Meanwhile though, the damage being done by excesses in copyright protection will continue to echo across our civic lives for years to come. (Read Vaidhyanathan’s and Lessig’s books to see how!)

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian and media scholar, is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library (Basic Books, 2004). Vaidhyanathan has written for many periodicals, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, MSNBC.COM, Salon.com, openDemocracy.net, and The Nation. After five years as a professional journalist, Vaidhyanathan earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at Wesleyan University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison and is currently an assistant prfessor of Culture and Communication at New York University. He lives in Greenwich Village, USA.

NEOFILES: Your position is that the digital world is a battle between oligarchy and anarchy and you seek a middle ground. Could you explain this view briefly and tell us if you think we are finding our way towards a middle ground, and if so, how?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Well, as I survey all the big battles in information and technology policy, I see arms races everywhere. I see rabid rhetoric. I see extreme moves. The battle over music downloading is typical and instructive. To both the big music companies and my students, we are talking about fundamental values: commerce vs. freedom. Neither side concedes the slightest point to the other. One side is trying to lock up everything and control every step of the distribution process. The other is trying to pry loose everything and render it uncontrollable.

It’s basically impossible to conjure a middle ground of regulation in the digital world. Digital stuff is boolean: it is all ones and zeros. It is, by nature, subject to extremes. So we can only control ourselves, our behaviors, our expectations.

In other words, we must start checking ourselves and considering the consequences of our actions every time we participate in the information world. Are our actions causing harm? Limiting speech? Limiting commerce? Is that OK? We have only just begun asking these questions.

NF: What’s different here is that these broadly social actions are taking place within what used to be relatively private spaces; people’s homes (or desktops at least). It’s hard to accept that actions I take in my home — indeed by myself — like sharing music with my virtual neighbors can even be subject to debate. And there’s always the question: When is self-policing a sign of maturity and when is it a sign of excessive docility? Any thoughts?

SV: While self-censorship of otherwise minimally harmful activities is potentially harmful, I think our libertarian attitudes exaggerate that. We learn two lessons from being in cyberspace. One, the most obvious, is that cyberspace affords a certain confidence in freedom. It’s not actual freedom. But it’s an assumption of freedom.

The second lesson, the one we are just starting to realize, is connectivity. While pretty free, our actions, even online, affect others. Some actions affect others trivially. Others affect them profoundly. We must recognize the difference. And we must recognize that private real spaces like bedrooms and basements are no longer private when there is a DSL line or WiFi intruding on it. Connections matter just as much as liberties. And with connections come responsibility. I am pretty confident we are not going to grow docile on line. If we do, we have a long way to go.

So is sharing music subject to debate? Well, it really has been the subject of attack and response. We have had very little real debate yet. It’s just started.

NF: To what extend do your metaphors extend to political reality in general? Is the middle ground between anarchy and oligarchy disappearing? And if so, with the same intensity that it is in cyberspace?

SV: Our behaviors and expectations in one area of life necessarily alter them in other areas of life. I am not ready to make a crude association between the extremes of information policy and the perceived extremes of our domestic political scene in the United States. After all, we have been much more polarized that we are now. The Civil War comes to mind. But we have altered our technological imaginations. We consider communities and alliances of different sizes and shapes than we ever have before. Being mediated matters. I am better friends with the characters on “Friends” than I am with my neighbors down the street. And I have a stronger connection with a lawyer in Sweden whom I have only met over e-mail than I do with many of the people in my office. I think this is increasingly true for many people around the world. So where do our loyalties lie? For some, they lie with the cybercommunities of Islamic fundamentalists, or Hindu fundamentalists, or libertarian fundamentalists. For others, they lie with the greater species of homo sapiens. Again, we have not worked through how these powerful new communicative habits will affect our loyalties, expectations, and aspirations. Having such important things in flux and on the defensive affects our political imagination as well. I think it’s safe to say that the violent cybercommunity of Islamic fundamentalists has already reacted quite defensively to the notion of universal human dignity and has affected the real world quite profoundly. There is a big hole in my neighborhood to prove it.

NF: So are we losing our consensus reality? And instead of replacing it with something more expansive and pluralistic, are we “ghettoizing” ourselves into well-defended subcultures?

SV: Wow. That’s the big, heavy question of our times. Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago certainly thinks that ideological fragmentation is a necessary effect of the customization of our mediascapes. But I disagree. Our “ghettos” intersect and interact. If you read right-wing blogs, they are always commenting of left-wing blogs, and vice-versa. And blogs of all persuasions comment on mainstream media outlets. But we are not lurching toward consensus in any way. We are bubbling and boiling along, connected yet unaffiliated, united by division. This is Georg Hegel’s America now, caught in the vortex of the dialectic imagination. And it ain’t pretty. The ideal of the democratic ecosystem is John Dewey’s: We argue and argue and argue and agree on the little points just enough to progress toward some elusive consensus. We need to do much work to move from Hegel to Dewey.

So to answer your question without gettin’ all philosophical on it: We are fracturing the potential for consensus. But we are not hiding within well-defined subcultures. Our subcultures are contingent and in flux. They are constantly breaking down and building themselves anew. And they intersect. An anarchist can work with a liberal political organizer for a weekend. And they can share rare live recordings of Rage Against the Machine over Wi-Fi. But they can move away pretty quickly, bickering over the designated hitter or the Second Amendment.

Of course, my answer is way too grounded in the currents of America in 2004. The situation is different (but not that different) in Egypt, India, Russia, and Brazil. In each of these places, and everywhere else that is changing rapidly, we are seeing that the changing expectations that are the clearest yield of globalization are generating social tension and ruptures. Fundamentalisms of all type are rising, but only in response to the potential of global human connections.

NF: Lawrence Lessig clearly believes that copyright law is the greatest threat to free speech and discourse in America. You seem to agree with that view to some extent. How would you differentiate your views on this from his?

SV: Copyright is the most pervasive threat to free speech in America. By that, I mean that it’s the instrument of censorship most likely to stifle the most Americans. Other instruments of censorship — USA PATRIOT Act, secret detentions of immigrants and uncharged terrorism suspects, restrictions on public demonstrations, the thugs who arrest mothers of soldiers at Laura Bush campaign stops — are more acute and more deeply troublesome than copyright. But they are rather narrowly targeted and thus less influential within this big, teeming democratic culture as a whole. Which is the greatest threat? It depends on whether you are a man with a foreign name and olive skin or a kid trying to break through as an artist. I think we should be concerned with all these threats yet keep them in perspective. They are connected by the sense of moral panic that has infected our information worlds.

The only important difference between Lawrence Lessig and me involve our attitudes toward the civil courts. My basic complaint about the current copyright system is that Congress and the copyright industries have driven copyright regulation out of the domain of human interactions like courts and into machines themselves. They have tried to make copyright enforcement cost-free and risk-free. Taking someone to court costs money. I think this is a dangerous, technocratic trend. And Lessig agrees with me so far. But he thinks music companies suing potential infringers over peer-to-peer usage is a bad idea. I see the lawsuits as the proper way to deal with accusations of infringement. The fact that the lawsuits cost something — legal fees, public face, etc. — show that the music industry secretly considers the Digital Millennium Copyright Act a complete failure. And the widespread horror stories of college kids, grandmothers, and 12-year-olds having to fork over $3,000 to billion-dollar corporations have only helped reveal the absurdities of the copyright moral panic. So I am glad the music companies have chosen the responsible tactic, the lawsuit. They will pay a heavy price for being bullies, and so will those unfortunate enough to get sued. But both peer-to-peer users and music companies must assess the risks of their behaviors. That sounds harsh. I don’t like the idea of my students losing $3,000 for doing something relatively harmless. But over time, the industry will see that the public cost of the lawsuits outweigh the imagined deterrent effect of them.

My differences with Lessig are slight and almost trivial. I applaud everything he has done in this area, especially Creative Commons,

Can there be a middle ground between oligarchy and anarchy?
which is brilliant and important. Unlike me and just about every other scholar, Lessig has actually built something. We should all thank him.

One thing that Lessig and I are both interested in doing is connecting these copyright issues to the more familiar (and easier to understand) battles over media ownership and political power of media companies. In public discourse, copyright issues have been expressed as “theft vs. justice.” We have done a great job of complicating this false dichotomy and sparking a discussion of users’ rights. Now we have to broaden the movement and the discussion. The concentration question is being directly addressed by organizations like FreePress.net. A D.C.-based group is linking the copyright issues to these issues that both Lessig and I are involved with: Publicknowledge.org. I think both these efforts are about to crest. People are finally starting to pay attention and we have finally achieved the proper vocabulary and strategies. I am confident that in the next five years the public will take back its copyright system in this country.