This is an archive post from my previous blog, first published in May 2008:
As a brief history of counter culture over the last fifty years, Matt Mason‘s ‘The Pirate’s Dilemma‘ is a tight read. Richard Hell, The Situationists, Radio Caroline, Duke Reid‘s dub excursions, Taki 183 (arguably the first graffiti artist), David Mancuso, Richard Simmons, Dizzee Rascal - all them play a role in Mason’s theatrical study. Part Freecomonmics, part punk fluro-ride; it’s not often linear, and the ideas sometime over-reach (the parallels between hip hop and neo-classical economics are a little on the abstract side) – but it thunders along at such a gallop, that you take all that in your stride. Mason’s central premise is not dissimilar to Mark Pesce‘s closing presentation at last year’s Web Directions South which read: “The net regards censorship as a failure, and routes around it” – in Mason’s world, youth culture regards closed doors as an ‘failure’, and route around them. And therein lies the lesson that informs the book’s subtitle, “How Youth Culture Is Re-inventing Capitalism” – fighting piracy is far less effective (in economic terms) than stepping up the challenge and playing pirates at their own game.
Case in point – Just as pirate station Radio Caroline ultimately begat BBC Radio One back in 1960s, so too did Napster and its ilk lead directly to the birth of iTunes. Apple is now the number one music retailer in the U.S. (ahead of Wal Mart) for a good reason. Everything about iTunes – the architecture, the interface and the sensibiltity – all ripped off from P2P software clients. Apple looked at the how the pirates were performing (and with over 35 billion illegal music files currently in circulation, they’re performing well) – and they played them at their own game. They walked into the pirate’s territory, stole their tools, stole their strategy and stole some – but not all – of their audience, (certainly enough to make their business undeniably viable). The RIAA on the other hand tried the opposite tactic – to fight the pirate. Absurd fan-bashing law suits, millions of wasted dollars and an entire cultural backlash later, the RIAA now represents institutions on the death-ward slide.
‘The Pirate’s Dilemma’ is full of such stories, although the chapter that interested me most was ‘Ethernomics’, which opened with an exchange from William Gibson‘s novel ‘All Tomorrows Parties’:
“Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilisation in the previous two centuries… But they became instinct.”
“Instinct?”
“We started picking them before they could ripen.”
As Mason puts it “every area of life is being mined for cultural value”, and whereas in the past subcultures and ‘movements’ would have had the oxygen of time to morph and grow, many are now being strangled quickly at birth – strangled by a marketing and advertising industry driven by the need to find an ‘authentic’ voice, to ‘connect’ with the so-called ‘youth market’. By way of swift and imprecise example, here in Australia baile funk hipsters Bonde Do Role have already soundtracked an underwear commercial for Bonds without any airplay outside of community radio and Triple J, and blogger-favourite Santogold is already being used sell make-up on primetime TV, on the same day that her debut album hits the stores. From near-obscurity to absolute overground commercialism without taking a breath. But should we really be grieving? With the auto-aggregating might of Last.fm and Hype Machine, is there really such a thing as ‘underground’ anymore?
Well, of course there is – it’s just very well hidden. Mason’s pitch is that it’s a cultural movement that can be found in any number of non-Anglo-American urban sprawls around the world. He’s pinning his hopes on the artistic cultures that remain hidden by way of geography and, given enough time and clicks, they will be exposed to the world. But surely, once even slightly exposed, they’re just as – if not more – susceptible to the tentacles of the marketing machine?
Truth is, it’s deeper still – the next great ‘youth movement’ is already in the canals, motherboards and cables that connect like-minds to like-minds. It started with P2P and we’re already living through its golden age. It’s a silent revolution, yet it’s a worldwide expression of total dissent. It’s not a musical innovation or a revolution in visual style, it’s far greater – all over the world, the next generation are quietly tearing down the statues. How? By turning off. Turning off the old media (commercial broadcasting, newspaper mastheads) and shying away from old models of both commerce and cultural engagement (multinational retail stores, major record labels, old-school institutions) – the foundations of the 20th century are crumbing around us in favour of new ideas. The ways in which we work, play, learn and love have all changed dramatically in the last ten years, and all such notions (and more) are still in the process being rewritten from the ground-up in a massive, cultural open source project.
To me, it’s nothing less than a total paradigm shift in human engagement, driven by the emerging web-enabled generations who know nothing of a pre-broadband, analogue world. We all know this because we’re living it, and as the light of recognition makes its way across the planet, Dizzee’s going to seem very insignificant by comparison.
