Dark day

You may have heard, or just noticed: chunks of the Internet are dark today to protest two bills being considered in Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP [intellectual property] Act (PIPA). I've sent a protest note through the Electronic Frontier Foundation's contact Congress tool, but I'm not taking Giant Midgets down, mostly because I doubt anybody would really notice all that much.

I haven't said anything about SOPA and PIPA here because I haven't had much to say. They're shitty laws, and the President has signaled he probably won't sign whatever makes it through Congress (SOPA is the House version, PIPA is before the Senate), but I suspect they're also more-or-less inevitable. Critics contend that either bill would cripple the Internet and damage innovation; either bill would clearly transform the Internet and could seriously hurt open-source software development, but I suspect those claims are more than a mite bit overstated. Meanwhile, the punch line is that neither bill will save any of the corporations that actually wrote it and/or supported it from their probable obsolescence. Anyway, the result there is that we're going to be getting this sooner or later, and it's going to suck, but we don't know how hard it will suck, and it won't help anybody and might hurt somebody and we'll still be stuck with it; all of that's reason enough not to pass SOPA or PIPA, obviously, but since when did obvious lousiness ever halt a piece of half-baked legislation? (I'll answer my own rhetorical question: never, that's when.)

See, what this can all be boiled down to is this: certain industries dealing with intellectual property are simply doomed and have nothing to bring to the game except lobbyists and lawyers, of which they have plenty. So this is what their death throes look like as they suffocate on the cometary ash or freeze to death beneath the long curtain of indefinite night: they send their lobbyists and lawyers to the capitol to lobby and law, bribe and hobnob. Because that's all some of them can do now, and for the ones that might be able to eke through what's happened to technology in the past twenty or thirty years, well, for them this is all they can think of while listening to the shrill death screams of their cousins; not all the dinosaurs died at the K-T extinction event, you know, some of them flew away, but while they waited for clear air to fold beneath their wings, they must have heard (and must have seen) terrible, terrible things happening to familiar beasts.

The recording industry, for instance, is doomed. I mean, flat-out doomed. If I wanted to commit to prophecy, I'd give them twenty-five years. The publishing houses are in a superficially similar but actually distinguishable situation and gods only know how that's going to work out for them. The movies and television might snake through, but it's going to be interesting for them because they're going to have to work out how to make money at what they're doing.

See, the problem for the record labels is they set up this funny little business where they don't really do what they get credit for doing, or they really only do themselves the parts that have almost stopped mattering. The way it used to work was, if you were a recording artist, the label gave you an advance (generally against future earnings, so it worked as kind of a fucked-up loan with your career as collateral) and then you paid for stuff that was basically subcontracted out: i.e. you rented your studio time from somebody (possibly the label), hired a producer and techs (possibly people the label had an arrangement with), paid for packaging (maybe using the label's house artists, or whomever they hired), and then maybe the label would pick up part of the promotional costs, and of course they'd press your record and pay for trucks to take those LPs to Camelot Musics and WalMarts all over the United States (or planes to fly them to Europe and Japan or wherever). And this was, I think you'll notice, immensely profitable, in large part because the money the label advanced you got paid back out of whatever they tried telling you your sales were and they were usually skimming various fees here and there; this is how you get some sucker you read about getting a million dollar advance in Rolling Stone showing up on a trashy reality show in the only pair of pants he owns and looking like a bus hit him and the driver only stopped to steal his wallet while he was lying there bleeding, bruised and confused; you'll hear it was all drugs and women and expensive crashed cars, but probably you ought to read Steve Albini's "The Problem With Music" if you haven't already.

Now, if you have any kind of smarts and learning--say you're Trent Reznor or a member of Radiohead, for example--maybe you finally figure out that if you're going to basically pay the record label for stuff they're going to pay somebody else to do, you could just cut out the middleman and maybe rent your own studio and hire your own friends, and, hell, with all this fancy computer recording gear, maybe you don't even have to hire out the studio. And then you think that maybe you still need to have a label for marketing and distribution, until you realize that for the latter you could just upload the stuff to your own website or arrange for digital distribution via iTunes, Amazon, et al., and that your buddy Sam (or whatever his or her name is) can do all sorts of boss marketing for you and they're your buddy, and good at it, and they get you, and you're not only (perhaps guiltily) spending a little less, you're also putting money into your own people's pockets instead of some label stooge's. And the only thing that's left that the label can do that you (and Sam) still can't do for yourselves is get the song on the radio, but does anybody need radio anymore when there's YouTube, f'r'instance? And if you don't need the label for "let's-not-call-it-Payola-let's-call-it-being-friends" sorts of shenanigans with the suits at Clear Channel and you don't need their pressing plants and freight trucks, what do you need them for?

But those labels will tell you it's piracy that's killing them. It isn't piracy. Piracy isn't helping, don't get me wrong. But what's killing them is that there's this technological renaissance that's going to deny them the ability to fuck their artists in the ass, which is basically what their business model boils down to even when you're talking about the labels that actually care about music and aren't just subsidiaries of liquor companies that were looking to diversify back when.

The funny irony--or maybe it isn't funny, sorry--about the publishing houses is that they actually do a lot more in house and aren't merely glommed on to a process that would only need them for manufacturing, marketing and distribution. That is, to be clear, the publishing houses share the record labels' problem that a big part of what they do does involve activities that the Internet may render obsolete, like printing up thousands of copies of something and trucking the something to retailers, but the publishing houses are also where you traditionally find people like editors, copyeditors, typesetters, layout artists and other such persons in the sorts of roles the record labels have almost always farmed out. Where the record labels still get credit for things they're not actually doing themselves, the publishing houses really don't get credit for things they really do and that are actually kind of vital to generating a worthwhile final product. People have this idea, though, that you could just word-process your Great American Novel and self-publish it on Amazon; this is absolutely true, although what will really help you with this accomplishment is not giving a shit about how it reads or looks. It's possible to record A Pretty Good Song in your basement on a digital multitrack recorder and upload it to YouTube without needing much by way of a second opinion, it's not really the same thing to upload a four-thousand-word short story to your blog and nobody else has ever read it or pointed out that a character doesn't seem fully developed and here are some paragraphs that ought to be cut while over here, what the hell is this supposed to be and why?

They're just different beasts. I hope there's not a whiff of parochialism about this, because I used to be a sort of serious musician and interested in pursuing it (though I haven't picked up an ax in ages) and now I'm a (I hope) sort of serious writer and interested in pursuing it (though pulling out the words sometimes seems like getting a particularly nasty clog of hair out of a slow drain); the deal here isn't that publishers are somehow better than labels or necessarily have a better chance of survival; indeed, I suspect publishers, at least as they're presently constituted, are about as doomed as record labels (it's always been a marginal business anyway).

I think the real point is that serious writers are going to end up realizing that they can or have to or possibly should do what recording artists are already doing: getting their own business associates, colleagues, friends, artistic peers, etc. to do the things they used to negotiate through the labels. I.e. just like a band might go ahead and hire their favorite affordable producer to come out to the rental house for a few days to record their record, writers might go ahead and form their own contract with their preferred available editor. Etc. The difference between publishers and recording labels being that editors generally work at publishing houses (yes, I know, there are plenty of freelancers) while producers don't generally work for labels anymore (again, yes, exceptions; the major point still stands, I think). Trying to sell your book to a publisher isn't just how you get your book onto shelves, it's also (and perhaps more importantly) how you get your Polished Final Draft turned into a Real, Actual, 100% Booky Book that has been edited and typeset and laid out and everything that makes the difference between a stack of typed pages and something somebody reads on a beach somewhere (perhaps, yes, on their Kindle).

I wonder if the next evolved form of the publishing house in the Amazon Age is smaller, faster, feathered and definitely warm-blooded? If Random House in 2050 will be a company that doesn't own a single press or print a single book, but rather contracts with authors to edit, etc., and then negotiate the business end of digital distribution and print-on-demand for the remaining "real books are made of paper!" crowd; it seems to me that most publishers are in a better position to take this step than all but a number of indie record labels.

(I also wonder if I'm full of shit, but moving along....)

I don't know if it's obvious that movies and television are a different animal altogether. There is, first of all, the fact that even a small, low-budget movie is ridiculously expensive and generally requires lots and lots of people to make. (Yes, you have your arthouse and documentary flicks where the director is the cameraman and the editor and the sound guy and does all the interviews or whatever and he also wrote it--does anybody really watch any of those and are any of them really any good? Again, I'll answer my own rhetorical questions: hardly ever and hardly ever.) There's an interesting technological thing in that the digital revolution has done for film gear what its done for musical gear: you can get buy (or rent) some reasonably affordable pro-quality gear--it isn't like the early days of film where purchasing (or manufacturing!) a camera was, in and of itself, a small business venture--but where a digital recording desk might be something you can sit at with your guitar and record something with the sonic clarity (if not polished performance) of Dark Side Of The Moon, odds are high you still need someone on your movie set to hold the goddamn boom mic along with gaffers to get your lights set up.

There's also a secret weapon the movie studios have, which is that seeing a movie remains, despite television and home video, a special sort of social experience in which lots of people huddle in darkness and watch the shiny lights. Reading a book on a tablet versus reading a book on paper may or may not be a truly fungible experience (people will always argue over this), but the differences between words in pixels and the same words in ink aren't nearly as profound as the difference between seeing a movie eighty feet wide in the midnight hush of an auditorium and watching in on your 40" set at home on the couch. Even the rituals are different, what with "going to the movies" involving the queuing for entry and (perhaps) purchasing the popcorn, things that profoundly change the experience of the work even if it's the same goddamn Hollywood fluff on the Metroplex screen as you'd see two months later if you rented it from Redbox. You, yourself, can possibly attest to this if you've ever had the experience (and you know you have) of being utterly blown away by the sheer tremendous spectacle experienced under the sort of sensory deprivation a darkened movie theatre offers and then found yourself crushed a year later after purchasing the DVD by the discovery that the very exact same movie, viewed at home in the homey environment of the family room, is in fact a bit shallow, hollow, and almost exactly like another, better movie, aside from that other movie not-sucking, I mean.

Again, this isn't to say movies and TV shows are better. Actually, they have a bigger problem, in some ways, since they have to figure out how to monetize and profit on those secret weapons (expense and uniqueness of experience). The fact that an amateur can't make a little movie as readily as an amateur might make a little song or little story isn't really helpful if nobody sees your expensive professional picture. Indeed, it's possible your secret weapons can turn in the hand and put you into a death spiral in which you decide to only make movies that look like they have a good past performance/future success indicator, e.g. a lot of people went and saw Muscular Guy Blowing Things Up, so it stands to reason (supposedly) that just as many people (maybe more!) will go see Muscular Guy Blowing Things Up 2: Sidekick With Huge Tits, and if that line of reasoning bears out and generates a win, MGBTU 3: IN SPACE becomes inevitable (and when it fails, you can throw the director under the bus and/or see if MGBTU IV: Return Of SWHT will sell on Blu-Ray and PPV, right?). Of course, you've already noticed the problem with this--namely, the law of diminishing returns ("You do realize, don't you, that MGBTU 3 is just MGBTU except they struck out the words "sports car" and "submarine" and replaced them with "rocket ship", and now the villain is a vaguely-Middle-Eastern terrorist instead of an approximately-South-American drug dealer, right?"); if you did, then you're smarter than just about anybody who's helmed a movie studio since, oh, 1983 or thereabouts.

Anyway. As you already know, much of the above is what the studios are already doing. The whole point of 3D as it's currently being used, for instance, is pretty much to take a bad movie you could watch on TV and turn it into a bad movie that looks really swell and costs extra money to see. That's not a sustainable strategy; I think the erratic box office receipts for 3D pictures are bearing that out. But the idea, at least, is in the right ballpark insofar as Hollywood has sort of dimly grokked that their future is going to lie in offering the experience versus the product (and then selling the product--on home media, streaming video, etc.--as luscious gravy). I don't know if they can make that work, but it's at least a valid concept. (C.f. the music industry's golden goose of the '80s: re-selling consumers inferior versions of what they already owned--poorly remastered compact disc reissues cheaply manufactured into quasi-defective discs subject to bit rot and sold with tiny, poorly-printed booklets and a lack of features taking advantage of the potential of digital media (e.g. track indexing, digital labels, data sectors, CD video, bonus tracks using the additional running time available); followed by the industry's collective shock when their milking contributed to the backlash that came with the advent of computers capable of burning and ripping discs--because why buy a CD if you're getting basically the exact same thing for free since the official version has nothing going for it; hell, I've seen bootlegged CDs that had better packaging and more features than their official counterparts, which is a great example of You're Doing It Wrong as far as the record companies are concerned.)

This isn't so much the future we're talking about as it is the emerging present. Facing a choice between adapting and dying, the media industries are largely sticking their fingers in their ears like spoiled toddlers yelling, "Nononononononono--". Dignified, it isn't. Worse still, with things like SOPA and PIPA, they're likely to take something useful down with them. The media industries have already made it clear, for instance, that they are morally opposed to Fair Use even when they sometimes say they aren't; quite frankly, I think there's a good argument that Fair Use is one of the only things making copyright law sufferable at all (the other is expiration into the public domain), and that while copyright law is a necessary evil, a copyright regime without Fair Use would generally be more evil and less necessary than no copyright regime at all (indeed, I would say that an indefinite copyright regime lacking both Fair Use and a public domain is intolerable and measurably worse than letting creative people starve for theft: copyright must be a compromise between the needs of creative persons and a functioning culture's need for free-flowing information to be worth anything at all). SOPA or PIPA or whatever we get instead (and we will get something) won't stop the decline and demise of pre-contemporary business plans and technologies, but they already threaten contemporary ones.

As a quick f'r'instance before I finally wrap this piece up (and thank you if you've made it this far): much of SOPA and PIPA deal with "streaming", by which the proposed legislation means video and audio streaming, which are one kind of use for disassembling a file on one end, sending it through wires as bits, and assembling it on the user's end while he's already started using it. This is very clever technology, actually. And the thing to pay heed to re: how clever it is is that computers have no idea whether a file being picked apart, transmitted, and put together on the fly is a media file, a data file, an application; from the computer's POV, everything is just a one or a zero and ones and zeros get decoded in a certain way by the local ones and zeros. What this means, if you're not seeing it yet, is that there's no reason (at least in theory) why movies and albums and books are the only things that can be streamed (for those unaware: the Kindle, Nook and other modern e-readers stream text, allowing you to read a book before you're done downloading it); you could, perhaps, figure out a way to stream a cloud-based application, allowing a user to begin word processing (for instance) before he's finished installing his word processor. Or a game (I will be unsurprised if Valve isn't working on ways to do background downloads of game content while a user plays the game, if it isn't already a feature that I just haven't noticed yet; there is no earthly reason I can think of that the next level of a game has to live on your computer until you're entering it). Or something else. Do you have to have a complete operating system on your machine, or can you manage with an amorphous OS that expands and contracts as applications demand and release different bits of hardware? (One notes that already modern OSes often don't come with a complete driver library, only downloading necessary drivers when they detect a component's been plugged into the system.) Of course, the media industries could care less about the future to the extent that they won't be a part of it; that's the whole problem.

I'm cynical and pessimistic about all this, however. Hopefully--hopefully--the backlash and furor over PIPA and SOPA have at least killed this incarnation, but that's just a setback to the industries, who will still have the lobbyists and lawyers and no future I previously mentioned. They will regroup and will go back to contributing to political campaigns, by which I mean bribing legislators, and, having paid for access, will be back again with another drafted bill. (I'm assuming SOPA and PIPA are effectively DOA. If I'm right, and the industry lawyers come back with SOPA II--Electric Boogaloo, don't be surprised if it "solves" a lot of problems with SOPA by doing the exact same things SOPA does, only they've changed the words a bit so that it sounds different. Clever ladies and lads, those industry lawyers.) We're not done. We'll never be done. Well. We will be done if the holding action stalls the industries past the point of collapse; that might happen. I give the recording industry, like I said, twenty-five years.

I don't know. Can we hold out that long?