The Internet Will Always Be Shit Under Capitalism

 

Who can forget this classic moment?

So the first thing to say is, having looked at the options, Secrecy's Jurisdiction will probably, like England is the Enemy, be published through Kindle Direct, though initially as a physical pamphlet rather than a digital one. I know, I know, it's Amazon, but for my purposes it's by far the easiest way of getting the book out there. I plan to sell the majority of copies by hand at gigs etc anyway. Plus, I'd be lying if I didn't admit to being a little amused at the thought of the collection featuring the Jimmy-Savile-possessing-Kier-Starmer-to-shag-the-corpse-of-Maggie-Thatcher poem going out under Bezos' self-publishing imprint. Think of it as injecting a lethal dose of poison...

One side effect of this, however, was I found myself logged into Amazon on my laptop (instead of just my phone or my PlayStation) for the first time in a while, and it occurred to me this would give me a chance to do something I'd been planning to do: get some Sapphire & Steel reaction pics. Well, reaction GIFs, ideally, but I wouldn't be able to do that from Prime Video. Screenshots should be easy enough to get though, and I knew which ones I wanted: the scene in the final episode when one of the Transient Beings barges through a service station door, for which I could see a number of possibly amusing memetic contexts, and the scene in one of the later episodes of Assignment Five when Mulrine's secretary, after having been distracted by Sapphire's charm so that Steel can get information from her computers undetected, angrily exclaims 'That bitch!', which has a narrower range of uses but would absolutely be le jpeg juste in the right context. 

Some of you will already have known I was on a hiding to nothing here when I used the word 'screenshots' because you will have already tried this, but if not...well, you can see the results of my efforts at the top of this post. Because Amazon, you see, has introduced a copy protection system which blackscreens any attempt at screen recording - even something as simple as taking a screenshot. This is, frankly, incredibly wrong-headed: but the ways in which it is wrong-headed tell us a lot about the Internet and its discontents. 

Mr Shape's face has been removed to prevent piracy

It all comes back to something I mentioned in passing in a post back at the beginning of August: the Internet can never function properly in a capitalist society.  The Internet relies, fundamentally, on a sharing model, and has done since as soon as people were able to email each other their favourite passages from Gravity's Rainbow. But the companies that dominate the Internet are capitalist companies, rooted in a capitalist model of enclosure: putting a fence around something and charging people to use it. And the tension between these two mutual positions leads to ridiculous outcomes like not being able to take screenshots of a show I'm already paying an extra subscription to watch. 

The excuse for this, of course, is that the shows are copyrighted material. Somebody owns the rights to them, and by sharing a screenshot of Patricia Shakesby calling Joanna Lumley the b-word I am, in effect, robbing those rights-holders of an infinitesimal portion of the money they paid to acquire them. 

Which is absolute bollocks, of course. Leave aside that I derive no financial benefit from memeing - anyone likely to get the joke will already have seen Sapphire & Steel. Anyone who doesn't might, just possibly, be tempted to look up the show as the result of an explanation. Indeed, they might even be tempted to take out a BritBox subscription to watch it. 

Or they might be less of a mug than me and pirate the damn thing, and then they can take screenshots and make GIFs of it to their hearts' content, and share those around as freely as they like, with BritBox and Carlton media never seeing a view as a result. Because they might as well. Hell, I'm going to have to pirate the damn things to make those GIFs and I pay the bloody subscription! I am literally being forced into an act of piracy by a company's use of DRM software! Make it make sense!

Too right mate

There's been a lot of talk lately about piracy as an archival practice, spurred by news of Warner Bros consigning their recently-completed Batgirl movie to the vaults, as well as deleting a bunch of shows animators have worked on from HBO Max before some of those shows even premiered. And once again it seems likely that brute, bone-headed ideas of economics are responsible: 200 classic episodes of Sesame Street were also deleted from HBO Max, apparently to save money on paying residuals to those involved. One assumes some similar rationale lies behind the other deletions: evidently David Zaslav has decided Infinity Train and Uncle Grandpa won't attract enough subscriptions to make it worth his company rewarding writers, animators and voice actors fairly for their labour. It's the rentier way: squat right on top of a resource and give as little as possible to the people who produce it while charging the highest possible fee you can get away with to anyone who wants a taste. It's the same reason electricity companies in this country can get away with charging prices that are through the roof, the same reason our 'privatised' rail companies suck up millions in government subsidies each year, and, yes, the same reason I can't take a simple bloody screenshot of a show for which, as I say, I am paying a subscription to BritBox on top of my Amazon Prime subscription.

It is, and I don't want to come over all Stephanie Sterling here, but there is simply no other way to put it: the problem is capitalism. 

The problem is capitalism, and the pathetic narcissists that capitalism enables, grasping, acquisitive little creeps who think having the most pieces of paper makes them mummy daddy God's favourite special child, or who, like Zaslav, court the adulation of shareholders by showing they can swing their choppers about and make kids cry, brah. These jerks and their desperate addiction to trying to turn everything into a competition only they're allowed to win (and see the recent Rockhopper case for an example of just how far these tantrum-prone babies will go to get their way) are on a collision course with the guiding principle of the Internet's early evangelists, the dictum that information wants to be free. 

Information? Free? Not if these guys (and they are usually guys) can help it. Arguably the entire thrust of the corporate internet for over a decade has been about turning that idea on its head: trapping us all in walled social media gardens where we can be bombarded with adverts in order to try and talk to our friends - not that our friends will see most of our posts, because the algorithm has been tweaked to show us more and more adverts and 'recommended' posts from 'influencers' instead of the people we love. And streaming subscription services as a way to discourage us from just torrenting everything instead - until everyone decides they want their own streaming service to exclusively monetize their IP library, at which point setting sail once more upon the seven seas looks by far the simpler option. 

And it is going to be not just the simpler option, and not just the cheaper option, but pretty much the only option for a lot of people as the cost of living crisis starts to bite. When that happens, companies might regret paying their shills in the media to tell millennials to cut back on Netflix and save for a mortgage, because soon they'll have to do that just to keep paying their rent. And they're still going to want shows to watch, and guess where they're going to go for them? Back to the Bay, bay-bay. Because the only way to disincentivise piracy on the internet, a medium almost designed specifically to facilitate it, is to make the alternative to piracy easier to use. Including making it easier to share. Meme culture is so deeply ingrained now that people expect to be able to turn their media into memes, to recontextualise and juxtapose and edit as much as they may desire. It's what YouTube is built on, and, of course, as any YouTuber will tell you, dealing with copyright strikes is a PITA. Once again, an imperative of digital culture comes up against an imperative of corporate culture with profoundly irritating results. 

During the last election campaign, the same well-remunerated London dinner party attendees who dubbed Ed Miliband 'Red Ed' for suggesting there should be limits on how much the energy companies could charge (boy, guess we dodged a bullet there, huh?) had a lot of fun describing one of Jeremy Corbyn's policies as 'Broadband Communism'. The idea behind this was that the phrase was oxymoronic: contrasted with a sexy, futuristic idea such as broadband internet (you have always to remember that the British journalist is usually years, if not decades, behind most ordinary people in terms of what they consider sexy and futuristic), a stuffy and outmoded idea like communism sounded ridiculous. As usual, of course, they had it exactly the wrong way round. 'Broadband Communism' is not an oxymoron - it is, or at least, if governments didn't deliberately rig the market to help their corporate donors turn a profit, it would be - a tautology.

The usual argument against this is that piracy deprives creators of revenue. But the very studios these creators worked for are depriving them of revenue by keeping their shows off their platforms. And besides, as any artist who's looked at their Spotify royalties can tell you, the percentage of Da Money that goes to the person who actually creates the work is minuscule. The fact is that for most of us trying to make art these days, the current state of intellectual property law oppresses us far more through the restrictions it forces us to observe than it liberates us financially. And that's why I, personally, would like to see the whole thing scrapped. I would rather work as an artist in a world of Universal Basic Income and much more liberal copyright laws than gamble on one day writing something so popular I can live off the royalties and spend the rest of my life writing stories about a ridiculously-named detective who settles scores with thinly-disguised versions of the people who call me names on social media. For example. 

A world where the financial security of artists was taken care of through UBI, and their creative ambitions were enabled through less jealous protection of copyrights, fewer attempts to enclose and charge rents on what ought to be public domain, would be one where artists could create more freely, could engage in more meaningful dialogue with other works of art, could more easily access works of art they wished to see - and could add more new art to the world. Even if only in the form of a GIF of a secretary saying 'That bitch!'