Thoughts on Megaupload (and soap)
1. Other filesharing alternatives are available (I’ve always found Mediafire, although to a slightly lesser degree recently, to be very user-friendly - and by user I mean exactly that, contributing nothing to it except theoretical eyeballs for crappy but reasonably unobtrusive internet ads), and probably will continue to be barring major shifts in the elements of supply - including restrictive legislation, if enacted and enforced - and demand - assuming people will never stop downloading if they can and no inherently superior alternative presents itself. However, there is a particularly important moment at work here in both cultural and economic terms, where we can have access to a near-universal range of ‘content’ at a near-zero barrier of cost and time; whether we assign value to it in the sense that we should pay per item of a infinitely reproducible product, in order to support its original creation, is almost a separate issue and in most cases is contingent on us having already consumed the product in question (making a post-facto judgement rather than the increasingly rare concept of ‘taking a punt’). Apart from (re-)creating artificial barriers to access, it’s difficult to solve the second issue by avoiding the first. The parallels are not exact, but would we shut down the library system to safeguard the income of authors and publishers? Or would we celebrate the astounding opportunity that - in this case - the digital file-sharing paradigm offers for all forms of culture, and construct some other norm or incentive for ‘consumers’ to pay ‘producers’: because even if it’s technically possible to put this particular genie back in the bottle (many would doubt it, but equally they might predict a lot of frustrating attempts along the way) why on earth would we?
2. Yet insofar as filesharing offers such opportunities, if they are to be maintained then there is the obvious challenge to be addressed of fair pay and conditions. Basically, as leftists we are typically in favour of restrictions on free economic activity if it’s necessary for greater social ends - why shouldn’t this apply to filesharing as it does to physical manufacturing (and if the answer seems clear, then is the materialist paradigm integral to the industrial basis of socialism, and what does a digital form of socialism look like?) Barthel had a very interesting post on this recently, albeit one which I feel suffers for the classic American confusion over the concept and identity of ‘liberalism’, but which nevertheless posed the same awkward and necessary question: where are the unions for the content creators?
(3.) As for SOPA, I’m not that interested because it is after all only American legislation. No doubt it would not only affect the majority of the web that I access that is US-centric, and drive a large shift in policy international - although since the EU seems to be operating on a collective if not federal level on these kind of issues, it almost presents an equal counterbalance. And it’s not like we live somewhere with actual web censorship, like China or parts of the Middle or Far East. Essentially, in line with some of the argument in the point above, the campaign against SOPA seems very like a non-class-conscious, purely liberal concern which while in itself may have made a valid stand (I’d also be suspicious of some of the more exaggerated claims of its significance or the effectiveness of the response) it doesn’t say much about where the digital product/labour question goes beyond the reactive, anti-regulation position. Which might as well be called Digital Republicanism.
