When Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How
Today's
title="More from guardian.co.uk on Internet">Internet
is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting our Economy
appeared in 2007, its subtitle was music to many ears.
Short on facts and long on hyperbole, it wasn't very
persuasive, but by then the growing fear that elite
culture was capitulating to the vulgar ephemera of pokes
and tweets had turned internet-bashing into something of a
cult itself.
- Free Ride: How
the Internet Is Destroying the Culture Business
and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back - by Robert Levine
-
alt="" height="215" width="140">
it from the Guardian bookshop
- Tell us what you think:
and review this book
In Free Ride, Robert Levine, a one-time
executive editor of Billboard magazine, makes a
much stronger case for an impending cultural apocalypse.
And while he occasionally ventures into the Andrew Keen
territory – "this isn't creative destruction; it's the
destruction of creativity"– he also knows his statistics.
According to Levine, the web took the culture industry by
surprise. Technology companies, on the other hand, were
better prepared, exploiting the ensuing confusion to lobby
for favourable laws. Levine singles out America's Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, which ensures that sites such as
YouTube don't have to pre-screen every uploaded video for
possible copyright violations. Real trouble began when
services such as Napster threatened too many business
models by allowing users to swap files. Worse, a
formidable intellectual lobby – spearheaded by law
professors such as Larry Lessig and funded by Silicon
Valley – tried to rationalise such activities under the
"free culture" banner.
Levine is not exactly a "free culture" man. He argues
that faddish ideas celebrated by internet gurus – for
instance, that newspapers should give away their online
content – are based on sloppy economics. "For media
companies, getting advice from technology pundits was like
letting the fox lead a strategic management retreat in the
henhouse," he writes.
Levine is an engaging, provocative writer, and there is
much to like about Free Ride. His basic insight,
that Silicon Valley's penchant for experimentation may
inadvertently hurt the culture industry, is correct. His
materialistic – almost Marxist – explanation of the "free
culture" ideology as the product of Silicon Valley's
covert agenda is also quite refreshing.
However, Levine's penchant for the conspiratorial –
everything eventually leads to Google! – is a distraction
that occasionally makes him sound like rightwing
broadcaster Glenn Beck. Most likely, he would dismiss the
present reviewer – a fellow at the New America Foundation
and Stanford University, both of which take quite a
drubbing in Free Ride – as shilling for Google.
(Regrettably, I am yet to receive a Christmas card from
Eric Schmidt.)
While it's true that Google has been aggressively shaping
internet policy, this doesn't mean that its interests
always diverge from those of the public. To take an
obvious example: Google is funding work on circumventing
internet censorship – the more people browse the web, the
better it is for Google. Is it reasonable to attack such
efforts on the grounds that Google has a commercial
agenda?
In mounting his passionate attack on Silicon Valley,
Levine often distorts the arguments of his opponents. I
have yet to meet anyone who subscribes to the theory that
"the price of any good should fall to its marginal cost".
Levine believes that Wired's Chris Anderson
wrote just that in his 2009 book Free. But he
didn't: Anderson was writing about firms selling
homogeneous and undifferentiated products, not songs or
movies. (Anderson: "If one product is vastly superior to
another… the primary determinant of price is not marginal
cost but 'marginal utility' – what it's worth to you.")
Or take a recent study funded by the Knight Foundation,
which is blasted by Levine for taking the simplistic view
that universal broadband is the way to solve many of
journalism's ills. Those ills, according to Levine, should
be addressed by generating more high-quality content –
precisely what the Knight study said in five of its 10
recommendations.
While Levine acknowledges the murky nature of most
studies about
title="More from guardian.co.uk on Piracy">piracy,
the studies he does cite paint a more ambiguous picture
than he lets on. He touts a 2010 report showing that a
quarter of all web traffic is piracy-related, but he
neglects to mention that the report also found that films
that could be purchased and legally viewed online are
pirated far less often. Hence his assertion that
"traditional media companies aren't in trouble because
they're not giving consumers what they want" does not ring
true.
Levine's call to arms – "it's time to ask, seriously,
whether the culture business as we know it can survive the
digital age" – betrays a poor grasp of media history. Had
our laws been crafted to preserve the "culture business as
we know it", the photograph, the gramophone, the
photocopier, the tape recorder and, yes, the internet may
have never arrived.
In a chapter subtitled "How the internet could kill
title="More from guardian.co.uk on Mad Men">Mad Men
Levine frets about the future of cable television,
seemingly unaware of the fact that, back in the 1960s,
American broadcast networks did their best to wipe out the
nascent cable industry, which survived only thanks to a
ruling by the US supreme court. Had the judges followed
Levine's conservative logic, a more fitting subtitle would
be "How the networks aborted the parents of Mad Men".
Are new technologies really that much of a threat to the
culture industry? Google TV – one of the projects Levine
lists among the greatest threats to cable television –
seems dead on arrival; at the moment, product returns
outnumber sales. According to a recent survey by
BookStats, in 2011 the publishing industry earned nearly
6% more revenue than in 2008, while selling 4% more books
– in part, thanks to ebooks. The global march of streaming
services such as Netflix and Spotify has made piracy less
appealing.
None of this excites Levine, who complains that the
internet has not encouraged innovation. "Like TV, the
internet is only as good as what's on," he writes.
Statements like this underscore the danger of setting
internet policy based on the interests of the content
industry alone. For those in this group, the internet is
merely TV on steroids – its impact on the Arab spring,
economic and human development and the future of
learning be damned.
However, it is irresponsible to craft effective internet
policy without examining how it will affect areas that
have nothing to do with culture. Do we really want to
build tools to screen online content for copyright
violations, only to discover that dictators use those very
tools for spying on dissidents?
Levine's proposed solutions are not new. He wants to
rewrite or reinterpret laws that shield internet companies
from responsibility for the acts of their users, and enact
new laws to punish both publishers and consumers of
pirated materials. All of these proposals are likely to
trigger unintended consequences – increased surveillance,
stalled innovation and disruption of internet architecture
– that Levine prefers not to dwell on.
Despite these shortcomings, Free Ride is still
an entertaining read, with an entertaining cast. After
all, how often does one get to hear James Murdoch – whom
Levine places among the "saviours of journalism" –
demanding "an enforcement agenda that works and doesn't
turn a blind eye to theft"?
Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion
(Allen Lane)