But Tell Us What You Really Think
I’ve found myself missing the LiveJournal “format” — which is to say, private musings written for the public. There isn’t really a good “space” for it anymore, but I’ve found myself mostly taking notes the past couple years, rather than writing much for public consumption. So, if you haven’t noticed, Medium has taken on this function a bit… until further notice.
The last couple months I have been reminded why I initially got involved in anti-copyright and uh let’s call it “piracy activism” in the late 90s — early 2000s. While I was probably pigheaded and naïve about it at the time, the way young people can be, on reflection a whole lot of my instincts were… maybe not all that far off the mark after all. This seems to be one of them.
So, a few thoughts.
I believe that attribution is important, and don’t think there’s anything good or interesting in taking one person’s work and claiming it as your own. (100 might be another story — is what you did with it interesting to me?) But beyond that, if I had my druthers, copyright law as it currently exists isn’t written in the benefit of artists, and should be burnt to the ground.
But tell us what you really think, right?
There are various proposals for how this might work. The one given in this video is a pretty common one — that there would be a cultural art fund or funding mechanism for supporting the production of work, then when it’s finished, it’s… you know. The People’s. There are others, although I don’t see a lot of use in sketching them all out in a blog post, since corporate interest will undoubtedly continue to be the 400lb gorilla, and artists such as myself are forced to fall in line or else. There’s what “should” be, and there’s what is.
Even on the level of the basic ideology behind existing laws, I have never vibed with it. There has always been something that feels categorically wrong about the idea of owning the ideas “inside” what I create. None of what I’ve done starts with me, and hopefully none of it ends with me. Ideas are not zero sum. Do I want credit for my contributions? Sure, even if on a personal level it’s mostly just a courtesy. It has a historic function as well, which is probably more important. As an artist, I’ve only ever been trying to be part of the weaving.
Quote from Corinthians:
“The body is not one member, but many.”
Now are they many, but of one body.“
I was just trying to stay a part of the body now.
For a number of years I also tried to take on that salesman / ownership POV, because it’s pretty much demanded by the marketplace, but like I said, it never sat right. And frankly it did weird things to my ego in the periods that it started to gain a little traction — gave me a bit of insight into what can happen if you really feed that demon, which thankfully I did not. No wonder so many art/media celebrities are cracked right down the middle, despite having “everything”. No wonder so many never made it to 30.
I’ve said before that I see creative work as a process of invocation followed by banishment. By the time post-production is wrapped, that door closes in my head. Likely 3 others open somewhere else. Reminiscing or saying “oh yes I wrote about that in this book…” etcetc aside, my attention is already on to those other things. I may bring up my work, but it’s not really salesmanship, it’s just what happens when you live some“where” for a number of years. (I guess the books/albums/comics etc I’ve worked on are a bit like those friends that you can’t help but mention to new friends, even though they may have never met them).
This seem be strange to those who have known me as a great self-promoter. Maybe I was, at times — mostly by treating myself something like a role-playing character based “in world” within my work. Maybe convoluted, and certainly seemed to give some people a strange idea of who I was outside that context, but it was the only way I could see to get these things out there.
Avoiding salesmanship isn’t a moral “thou shalt not” thing for me, (little is, really). I don’t consider artists who are better at it “sell outs” on this account, and truthfully have often wished I had a bit more of the salesman in me. But it’s certainly not the reason to get into this work, and it’s even less of a reason to stick with it.
This is why I make anything I retain the rights to free outside of zero sum formats after that critical 6–12 month phase after release, to those who ask. For a while I put out a bunch of Creative Commons-only releases, but found it closing a lot of doors for those projects, without leading to any particularly creative remixing or re-use. If I had my druthers everything would be some version of Creative Commons, and remixing and re-contextualizing would be common and prolific. Laws that remain necessary would support this, rather than actively trying to restrict it.
This line of thought is spurned on by the general debate about so-called AI art lately, but really it goes back to a larger pattern I’ve been seeing — while the “pandemic experience” has been life-changingly isolating and disrupting, I’ve seen a number of benefits from it, and one of those has been extracting myself a great deal from trying to perform to any sense of expectations… not that I was ever really particularly good at that! But there were still many ways that I did, I think, without even realizing. I’m as concerned as I’ve ever been with pursuing my own work, but I feel in many ways that I’ve come full circle in terms of how I see that fitting into society. If it does, it does. If it doesn’t, fuck it.
So yes, “we live in a society”, supposedly. We arguably may not, at this point, but that’s another story. People have to deal with circumstances as they are, not as we would have them be, so I’m not and haven’t been saying I don’t get why some people feel threatened right now. But I’m also not interested in fighting toward an ultimate destination that I don’t believe in.
Dedicated artists not having to depend on their work to have the “right” to access clean water or shelter or food (&etc) is monstrous, as is the case with literally any profession, or people who don’t have professions for that matter, many if not most of which are going be threatened by automation soon, if they aren’t already. On top of that, climate change gives us a very tangible window within which “capitalism” as such needs to be replaced with something “better”.
Do you see what I’m driving at? It’s probably not going to be easy, it may not even be possible, but it seems pretty clear to me what the problem is here. (Hint: it’s not AI visualization apps or GPT-3). And the solution is absolutely not even more restrictive IP laws. If anything, case in point, with entire streaming shows being pulled from the networks that created them and memory-holed simply to save some money on residuals, it seems like media corporations have been trying really hard to get people back into piracy. Shall we oblige them?
