Our valuable heads

Valu-Disc

Recently, I've been thinking a good deal about internet "piracy" and the free download culture that has so infected our generation. We take for granted that music should be free. We assigned all the value of recorded music to the physical element used to convey that music to us. I don't know how it happened, but it's true. If we're not buying a physical disk, or tape, we figure we shouldn't pay for it. This is new to the information age. For the first time we can receive information without any physical transaction being a necessary part of the process. Maybe it's just because we are hard wired to pay for the physical thing we pick up at the store. I'm beginning to question how right that is. I do believe that the artistic work of all these individuals has value in itself. At least musicians have ways to make money outside of record sales. Besides, popular music is becoming so heavily singles-driven that the idea of the record as a whole is nearly extinct anyway.

The ongoing "discussion" about what constitutes intellectual property certainly doesn't help settle this issue. The sides vary widely, from the free-for-all-to-use side to the morally-obligated-to-charge-for-every-brain-fart crowd. As usual, I disagree with both camps, and find all the fun, juicy stuff occupying the gray area in between to be far more interesting. First of all, the extremes discount the intent of the work's creator in assuming how it should be distributed. Few would believe that the Abbie Hoffmans of the world intend for their works to be marketed and sold efficiently and savagely by huge book store chains and music retailers. Alternately, it is also fair to assume that the Lars Ulrichs of the world do not intend for their work to be absorbed for free by people too lazy or cheap to pay anything for it. So, intent does matter. Second of all, and this applies particularly to music but also increasingly to ebooks and software, the old economic standard of "voting with your pocketbook" no longer matters, because when the majority of music being downloaded is done so without a penny changing hands, using a monetary exchange as a means of analyzing anything at all about the good itself, the transaction, or the consumer is useless. As a side note, there are economists out there who argue that ultimately it still boils down to a dollar value, because any means of quantifying the value of something the consumer gives up for the benefit of owning the song, like hard drive space for example, can lead to a dollar value. I think that is so abstract an argument as to only be useful in economic theory and not at all applicable to consumer behavior. When is the last time you actually thought about the hundredths of a penny's worth of disk space that song you're downloading will occupy? Never, right?

Reprogramming

Of course, there is no pretty, easily manageable fixed value we can assign to something creative, especially something as intangible as a song, because the enjoyment derived from its consumption, and thus its value to the individual, is entirely subjective. This makes the most obvious solution difficult, but also inevitable. A disconnection has to take place between what we value about creative "goods" and the physical components that are less and less necessary to convey those goods to us as consumers. We have to make ourselves understand that the $12 we used to pay for a CD did not go towards paying off the $.035 worth of plastic we just purchased, but rather the hundreds of hours and many thousands of dollars worth of work represented by the disc's content.

I started writing this in April. I think I have a time management problem...

Mor[t]ality

Morals of the Faith(less)

We no longer have a set of consistent morals in American society. Not as a whole, containing both body and structure. We have laws, and we have social mores, but not morals. Codes of faith and religious doctrine provided the basis of morals for most of written history, and it's really only been since the enlightenment that secular society was thought to be possessed of moral conscience without the rudder of faith to keep it in line. Of course, it's also only been since the enlightenment that one could publicly state a disbelief in God and not be burned at the stake that same afternoon. I guess we have to take the good with the bad.

Religious doctrine, while monstrously restrictive in many ways, did help designate and apply morals to society at large. We are losing more and more of these designations with each generation. This is not always a bad thing, but it certainly can be, and technology is only accelerating this circumstance. It used to take at least a generation to go from the puerile masturbation of "Home Improvement" to the amoral hedonism of "Family Guy", but those specific examples are separated by less than a decade now.

Terminal Velocity

There has to be a point where this acceleration stops. I'm not trying to make a moral point by saying that, but what I hope is a factual observation. Much like an object cannot fall any faster when wind resistance becomes so great it equals the accelerating force of gravity, I hope there is a point where western society can shed enough of the moral burden to feel truly free, but not shed so much that civility is abandoned entirely. It may already be too late for the upper echelon in our financial world, for they never truly abandoned the "greed is good" ethos that was so rightly cast off by the rest of us after the failure of the Soviet Union. That entire micro-culture of captains of industry modeled themselves on Gordon Gecco, and just never let go.

It's important to mention here that I am not saying we should step back five decades. As nice as it would be to have dinner on the table the moment I come home, the prospect of beating my wife with impunity and having my son's hair cut to match that of every other lilly white student at his school kind of makes my stomach turn. While it is fun to pretend that the old days were good, it is not honest. In all reality I think our morals were lacking in many more significant ways, but we were better at hiding them. Technology is an odd weapon in this sense, because it helps expose our moral failings in faster and more explicit ways, allowing for quicker recognition and repair, while also dulling our sensitivity to moral lapse and accelerating our natural inclinations toward amoral behavior.

The Accountability of the Artist

Can we live in a secular yet moral society? I think we can, but we have to get out of this petulant artistic age where our rebellion against the oppression of religious domination and discrimination is fueled by burning their codes of conduct. We can separate these doctrines and try to understand them for their secular value. We should not set out to kill others and dishonor our parents just because the Bible forbids it. These are still objectively good ideas. Tearing them to pieces and calling it Art is the reaction of an indignant brat. It can also be argued, however, that the very idea of morality itself is so intertwined with oppressive religious institutions that the only way to hit the reset button is to do away with it entirely. I see that as a knee-jerk reaction without much thought for the continuity of organized society.

Artists can claim their rightful position at the top of the new moral heap by no longer dulling the blade of sensitivity, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and admitting that the consequences of their art go far beyond what the original intentions were. Just because we can does not mean we should.

Old friends, like old Liquor

*This post is written from a straight, platonic male perspective. Please bear this in mind.*

The one that got away

I find it odd how old friends I haven't seen in years can get grouped into the same categories as crazy old girlfriends. "The one that got away" or "The one who was too smart for her own good and gave up on my chump-ass". Do I base the friend classifications on my "ex" categories, or vice versa? Which group do I hold in primary esteem? I hope it's somewhere in the middle, but realistically I believe it's not.

"The one that got away" is an especially tricky category for old friends. I think we have been raised to act on social tendencies that romanticize old friendships, which were probably mean to fail from the start. Childhood friendships were exactly that. Merely elements of childhood. When we try to make them into anything more, we do it to validate ourselves, and maybe even to validate some emotion that was too complicated to describe properly at the time.