Meanwhile, here’s a thoughtful piece from Peter Singer in this month’s Harper’s. Singer is famous for Animal Liberation and was relevant in our discussion on food, but here he is talking about another recent Junta topic: Wikileaks.

Singer’s essay revolves around the Panopticon, the conception of a system in which everyone can be observed by a central authority, without knowing if we are being watched at any given moment. (Oddly, this is something I was recently thinking about.) Foucault called it “the perfection of power,” and Orwell dramatized it as Big Brother. Drawing a line from Rodney King to Julian Assange, Singer argues that the technology used to control us can be used against our controllers; therefore the Panopticon, icon of totalitarianism, is actually a great thing. Turns out we all behave better when we think we’re being watched.

This essay being behind the paywall, I’ve posted it here for your reading pleasure.

Rindy is rather pro-Wikileaks and a colleague of mine that should be with us next Tuesday is quite anti. That same colleague is also extremely anti-Facebook and was ranting to me about their friend finder function. That function goes through a person’s contacts and sends out emails to people, even if they are not on Facebook, and suggests they reconnect with that person. My colleague’s latest fit of Facebook pique came because he received such a suggestion to connect with a recently deceased close relative.

Setting aside the awful feelings that such an email can bring up, the implications for our privacy are troubling. Facebook has found itself in this kind of hot water before. Like many people I find those issues problematic while also finding Facebook to have some great uses. Just the other day I got back in touch with a friend from college I was really tight with but hadn’t talk to in around 10 years. I had some big news to share recently and it was great way to let a lot of people I care about know when it all shook out. And then there are the implications of how it can affect societies where the media is constrained and social discourse hamstrung by authoritarian regimes. Roger Cohen had an excellent column this week about the role Facebook and Twitter played in the recent revolution in Tunisia that is a terrific example of people harnessing these new technological tools for the good of mankind.

Like most stories/issues that fascinate it is one with shades of grey, ambiguities, upsides and downsides. The Wikileaks storm has shed light on some dark corners of the world, helped us understand how effectively (or ineffectively) our government is going about the business we have elected it to do, and showed how diligently and intelligently US diplomats operate. It has also made such work for diplomats and intelligence officers potentially much more difficult and could make us less safe as a result. Governments need their secrets, they have a right to them. So do individuals using Facebook and other social media platforms. The balance that we strike on these issues is fluid as new technology shapes access and how we look at the world. Looking forward to talking about it next week.

How will musicians and writers, and other artists and tradesmen whose work is now primarily digital, make a living now that their product can be so easily and freely acquired?

Jeremy poses that the barriers to entry have been removed. Any musician with GaragePro can become world-famous: “The limits are only on ability, marketing savvy and drive.” He argues that the business model of the big labels is defunct, and I’ll grant that Big Music has lost its former sway, but can the model really be outdated if there are still commercial pop superstars making big money with the help of mega-amplified media attention?

But ok, bands don’t make much money from their albums anyway, it’s the record companies who take that home. The artist makes money on the tour, right?. That was true for a band like the Grateful Dead, who made all their money from touring and whose records sold poorly – but new, anonymous artists cannot conjure up legions of fans to follow them cross-country. According to EJ, who should know these things, the labels put the young artists out on tour and take most of the returns for themselves, leaving the artists with the merchandise take. “If you’re out on tour and you’re not selling merch, you’re not making money.”

It seems there’s no money to be made for anyone anymore selling CDs. Around the table, no man could remember the last time he’d bought one. Digital music purchases were also rare. All admitted to downloading free music, often illegally, though some said they had dialled back from the days when they could fill an entire hard drive in an afternoon. “I’ve got way more music than I could ever conceivably listen to.”

One participant brought up software downloads as a comparison. “I had a project for which I needed to have Adobe Dreamweaver. Well I looked it up and it’s four hundred bucks! But within minutes through a simple Google search, I was able to find the torrent, follow the crack instructions to load the software onto my machine and use it. Now, would I walk into a computer store and see this program for $400 on the shelf, put it under my coat and try to walk out? No fucking way! But I’m happy to do essentially the same thing over the internet, because it just doesn’t feel like stealing.” This sentiment was echoed around the table.

Despite the lack of legal, paid downloads happening, we were not hostile to the idea. But for most, it was the price. “Ten dollars for an album is still too much.” I asked what a good price would be, since I felt that $10 for an album is not so excessive. Five-dollar albums? Jeremy said yes, he’d buy albums at that price. But Don was obstinate, and said albums should be a dollar, because then he would just buy them on a whim. What didn’t occur to me at the time was that there could be a service that adjusted the price per album according to how much money each subscriber vowed to spend on a monthly or yearly basis. So I could sign up and guarantee that I’d spend $500 this year on music: at that level I could get albums for $2. Kind of like the BMG mail order service of my high school days, when I started my first collection (CDs) by becoming a member. (Join Now and Get 6 CDs FREE!)

Another noted the proliferation of auctioning sites like eBay and asked why there was not a platform for auctioning mp3 songs and albums, or tickets to movies. “Why is every movie the same price? Some movies are clearly worth more than others.”

What about cash donations? I related a recent story in which I had “otherwise acquired” an artist’s album and was so moved by it, and listened to it so often, that I decided it was absolutely criminal that I hadn’t paid this guy – I went online and bought the album I already owned, just on principle (and as a result, probably transferring about $0.89 to the artist in question). And it’s true that people support art they love with their dollars even when they don’t have to. But the argument that won the evening was, “altruism is not a business model.”

If not charity, what about “Artistic Freedom Vouchers” from the government? Each of us gets $100 from Uncle Sam to spend on art and art alone… I leave it to you, gentle reader, to pursue that thread or not.

***

As for the news, we discussed James Fallows’s recent piece on Google “saving the news”, and it seems that the best news for the journalism industry is that everyone inside Google assumes that “users” (“readers”) will once again pay for their newspapers and magazines – and pay willingly – it’s just a matter of how. The argument is sound, because it also depends on the news changing somewhat. No longer will newspapers and media be able to provide the same stories as everyone else. They will have to provide something unique.

“Usually, you see essentially the same approach taken by a thousand publications at the same time,” [Krishna Bharat, the engineer who designed Google News] told me. “Once something has been observed, nearly everyone says approximately the same thing.” He didn’t mean that the publications were linking to one another or syndicating their stories. Rather, their conventions and instincts made them all emphasize the same things. This could be reassuring, in indicating some consensus on what the “important” stories were. But Bharat said it also indicated a faddishness of coverage—when Michael Jackson dies, other things cease to matter—and a redundancy that journalism could no longer afford. “It makes you wonder, is there a better way?” he asked. “Why is it that a thousand people come up with approximately the same reading of matters? Why couldn’t there be five readings? And meanwhile use that energy to observe something else, equally important, that is currently being neglected.” He said this was not a purely theoretical question. “I believe the news industry is finding that it will not be able to sustain producing highly similar articles.”

I think that maxim could be applied equally to producers of art and media everywhere.

Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance

What kind of disc jockey would telephone the wife of a competitor and, over live radio, belittle her and her husband about her recent miscarriage? What kind of patriot would con his listeners into donating $450,000 to finance a series of Rally for America events that turned out to be nothing but a personal promotional tour? What kind of talk-radio host would falsely describe the president of the United States as a communist and black nationalist out to enslave Americans? The purveyor of such tactics—and worse—can only be America’s newest household conservative name: Glenn Beck.

In Common Nonsense, investigative reporter Alexander Zaitchik traces Beck’s personal history, from his troubled childhood through his years as a “morning zoo” DJ to his sudden and meteoric rise to the top of the conservative media heap. He pays special attention to Beck’s transformation from alcoholic, cocaine-snorting, failed disc jockey without a political thought in his head to wealthy, bile-spewing, right-wing demagogue whose radio and television shows form the core of a multimillion-dollar media empire.

Drawing on interviews with Beck’s childhood friends, radio coworkers, and TV colleagues as well as Beck’s own published accounts of his life, Zaitchik reveals the cracks in Beck’s personal creation myth. He pinpoints the moment when Beck, then working in Tampa and about to be fired from his first-ever talk-radio job, discovered right-wing rabble-rousing as his route to long-sought fame and fortune. He shows how Beck adapted the timeworn gags and manipulations of radio hucksterism—including the audience donation drive—into powerful tools for propaganda and personal enrichment. He also demonstrates how Beck’s screeds about ACORN, czars, and socialists are carefully honed to intensify his listeners’ fears and spur them to action at a time and place of his choosing.

Beck’s manipulations are not aimed exclusively at conservative Tea Party activists. One of his favorite gambits, Zaitchik reveals, is to make outrageous statements—such as calling President Obama a racist—to provoke angry and overwrought reactions from the Left. He knows that nothing burnishes his reputation as a right-wing hero victimized by political correctness more effectively than a barrage of scoldings from the “liberal elite.”

You can laugh at his crocodile tears, shake your head at the “facts” out of which he spins his wild theories, gape in wonder at his abrupt transitions from cheap sentiment to vicious attack and back again—but do not underestimate Glenn Beck. Read Common Nonsense and discover how this smart, ambitious self-promoter and his devoted flock poison our political discourse and weaken our democracy.

This meeting will be held Wednesday, May 19, at 7:30pm. Details to follow.