Paying the Piper 2006-03-26

Richard Poynder (RP): “Digital Rights Management may not prove workable in the long-term and can always be circumvented, so most creators are probably moving (like it or not) into a give-away world”

I don’t know whether all that’s true, practically and statistically, but if so, I’m not sure the outcome will be grounds for cheeriness. It turns creativity into a pop, distributed enterprise (which has some plusses, in some cases) but removes rewards from a kind of individual creativity that has brought us much great work in the past. Selfless creators there have been too, in the past, not motivated by desire or need for personal gain. But does that cover all, most, or enough if it?

[from another interlocutor] ‘Obviously, some artists of all kinds will always produce because they must; but if they have to do it as amateurs because they must earn their bread as janitors or professors of geology, then they will do much less work and it will be far less developed (as well as using only cheap materials). As all of them will be isolated from a (nonexistent) mainstream of common understanding and encouragement, styles will not develop, nor will there be any building upon others’ achievements. Each artist will remain a wild tree with small hard fruit, rather than a cultivated and well-fed tree giving a lot of fine sweet fruit.’

RP: ”Apart from the isolated eccentric, all creators want their creations to be as widely distributed and read/listened to/seen as possible.”

Yes, but not necessarily at the cost of forfeiting any prospect of being able to make — or even to aspire to make — a fortune (or, in some cases, even to make a living). I have no idea about the true proportions, hence the statistical uncertainty, but I do raise a point of doubt, about a potential loss of a form of individualism that, on the one hand, resembles the materialist capitalism neither of us admires or embraces, but that, in the Gutenberg age (like religion, which I admire just as little capitalism!) managed to inspire a lot of immortal, invaluable work. Where mass-market subsidiaries/services (not exactly the hub of most human creativity) are the only real revenue sources, collective efforts and wide exposure are not necessarily incentive enough to keep attracting enough of the selfish-gene-pool’s higher-end gaussian tail to making the kinds of contributions that have been the (inevitable, gaussian) glory of the history of human culture until now. Yes, new (collective, collaborative, distributed) forms of creativity are enabled, but I am lamenting the disabling of some of the older ones. It is not at all clear that they were spent.

And although collective, distributed adaptivity is perfectly congenial to our (blind-watch-) Maker, that is not in fact the basis on which He fashioned our current (selfish-) Genome. Apart from inclusive-fitness fealty to kin — which occasionally sublimates into selfless generic humanitarianism and altruism — most of our motivation is, frankly, individualistic, which is to say selfish, hankering for territory, dominance, and the tangible material rewards that can still engage the tastes instilled by the ancestral environment that shaped us. That’s what makes apples taste sweet, and sweetness desirable.

Scientists and scholars have always been a minority, and exceptional, in that they sought a cumulative, collective good: learned inquiry. Learned research was (at least since dark monkish days) a public, distributed, collective — and thereby self-corrective — enterprise. So, as I say, not much change there, in the PostGutenberg Era. But not so for music (which I hardly lament, since music as art has already died an unnatural premature death anyway, with the arrival, and departure, of atonalism, no thanks or no-thanks to digital doomsday), nor for literature (which was already suffering from block-buster economics before the digital day, but may now be dealt the death blow, leaving only the pop, How-To and movie-wannabe genres viable); film, I would say, has already done itself in.

So, as I say, it depends on the statistical proportions, on which I have no objective data. So too for hacking — the new kid on the block — for which it is still not clear whether individualism or collectivism is the most fruitful procreative mode.

RP: “The digital world allows diffusion, access and collaboration in a way never before possible. Not only does DRM threaten to take away all those benefits but, given the current status of the technology, it generally imposes even greater restrictions than were experienced in the pre-digital world. That’s bad news for creators.”

Bad news for : certain kinds of creators. The rest is the statistics of the kinds. Let me put my cards on the table: I’m not defending the divine right of the McSpielbergs of Gaia’s Gollywood to make limitless bundles on their showy, empty pap. They are not my models. Shakespeare and Mozart are.

RP: “Cory Doctorow did some calculations showing that the potential earnings of the average scribbler (we’re not talking J K Rowling here) have been on a downward curve for a long time, indeed long before the digital world. This is a product of something else, but can surely only be exaggerated by the introduction of digital technologies.”

I don’t know the works of CD or JKR, but I’d bet they’re not quite of the rarefied calibre of the WSs and WMs I had in mind! (What’s the point of regressing the rare masterworks on the menial mean?) Nor do I think WS or WM would have ever done an analysis like that, in reckoning whether or not to go OA with their work… (Actually, I think both WS and WM earned most of their rewards from the analog world of performance, not the digital-code-world of composition, but I’m certain that wasn’t true of Beethoven.)

RP: “Most (if not all) are (by the standards of main street) a little reckless about their careers. Many also seem to have a disdain for money. Given that we currently live in a world far too dominated by market forces and bean counting, I find this very encouraging. As the bard said ‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers’.”

A (big) part of me resonates with this too. But don’t forget that hackers are demographically anomalous, being a ant-hill of Aspergians and worse; it’s all you can do to get them to change their underwear, let alone balance their bank-accounts. And there have been selfless geniuses in other fields too. I just worry about the potential loss of the future ones that are not blind to the presence/absence of the very possibility of material glory, alongside spiritual!

Hal Varian, by the way, made similar statistical calculations about the likelihood of big-bucks for most authors. And I countered with the same dream-of-apples argument I raise with you: How many genotypes are not driven by that? are they enough? and would the loss of the potential “market” for the rest be insignificant, in the scheme of things? (Without statistics on this impalpable stuff, I don’t think anyone can say.) Reducing it all to McDisney re-use rights for high-schoolers, as LL does, just goes to show how the world of “creativity” looks to a well-meaning philistine: a reductio ad absurdum.

RP: “You are right to say that we don’t really have the necessary statistics to reach any firm conclusions, and so it is speculation. You are also right to say that there is no cause for cheeriness in this. But then each decade that passes we seem increasingly like ants in an anthill (Raymond talks about this in terms of the scaling up of society), and individualism features less and less. Maybe that’s just the way it is going to be.”

Ok for autists, but not for all artists…

RP: “It occurs to me, however, that if your model is the likes of Mozart, then will not future Mozarts continue to do what they always did, regardless of material reward? From what I know of Mozart (not enough by far) he didn’t seem too driven to do what he did in order to pay the bills; and when he did earn money was it not from playing the piano, rather than composing?”

That was still early days, and off-line coded composition had not yet become an autonomous livelihood, as distinct from on-line analog performance; but by the day of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Beethoven and Brahms it had (and Beethoven in particular was quite a copyright maven!)

RP: “If so, is that not again the same model (to all intents and purposes) of giving away your creation and making money from associated services. As I say, I may be wrong about Mozart, but is it not the case that people who are really gifted and driven to create just get on and do it, and rarely think about how they will pay the bills?”

The ones that survive to be heard from. (And do not under-estimate the prospect of potential riches as an extrinsic motivator. The failure of DRM would wipe that out as well, and thereby perhaps render a wealth of human promise still-born. I’m not saying there will not still be some intrinsically motivated stout-hearts. I’m just worrying about how many, and which, and, most important, which ones will be lost.)

RP: “Of course if the universe is, as you say, a “mindless, feelingless machine” (in which we are all trapped), then none of this really matters and individualism and creativity are all for naught right?”

That’s not quite what I said! The universe is mostly feelingless, but organisms are not. Functionally speaking, they may as well be, since their feelings can have no independent causal power, on pain of telekinetic dualism, but feelings they are nonetheless. So whereas aesthetics, like all other feeling, does not “matter” functionally, in that it has no causal role, it not only matters but is what we mean by anything’s “mattering” at all, affectively. “Mattering” is an affective matter!

RP: “ (I was listening to the World Service the other night, which was talking about Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene — currently celebrating its 30th birthday I believe — and he was saying how people used to write to him and say that they hadn’t slept for three weeks after reading the book, and could see no point in continuing to live). ”

Well, the handwriting was already on the wall with cosmology; the biosphere is just a bit of it. If they want to wile away the sleepless hours, they should puzzle over the mystery of how/why matter feels after all, albeit ever so superfluously!