Free Ride: Digital Parasites and the Fight for the Business of Culture

What the French ideology from 1791 has to do with creative meritocracy and the future of information.

As the editor of what’s essentially a public-service curiosity portal, ad-free and supported through reader contributions much in the way public radio and libraries are, I’m the first to cry “Wolf!” at any oversimplified insinuation that putting content behind paywalls is the way to make journalism and entertainment sustainable endeavors. I am a firm believer in content meritocracy and the pay-what-you-will model as the future of publishing, but I am also profoundly saddened by the way editorial and curatorial merit are being hijacked, regurgitated, and spat out as sellable commodities not benefiting the original creator or curator in any way.

(In fact, just this week, the Huffington Post took my recent piece on this Victorian map of woman’s heart and did with it what’s referred to as over-aggregation — reposting a reworded article with no substantive additional reporting and no prominent via-link for proper source attribution.)

So when I came across Robert Levine’s Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back, I was ambivalently intrigued. One one hand, it opens with such binary war cries as:

By making it essentially optional to pay for content, piracy has set the price of digital goods at zero. The result is a race to the bottom, and the inevitable response of media companies has been cuts — first in staff, then in ambition, and finally in quality.”

Implicit to this argument is the assumption that if we did indeed make it optional for people to pay, most wouldn’t. This needn’t be the case — the disconnect between price and value is as much about price as it is about value. Most people won’t pay for mediocrity but, at least in my experience, will gladly pay if they see value.

But Levine then takes a deeper look at the complexity of the issue, starting by correcting the popular misquotation of Stewart Brand’s infamous argument that “information wants to be free.” (That’s the same Stewart Brand, by the way, who in the 1960s campaigned to get NASA to release the then-rumored satellite image of Earth — something hard to imagine was a point of contention in the age of breathtaking satellite timelapses available to the layman online.) As Levine points out, the full Brand quotation is much more nuanced:

On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

Levine goes on to argue that the real conflict of the web is between the media companies slaving away at the true value-creating work of journalism and entertainment, and the tech companies racing to distribute their content, be it legally or not. But the idea that information will inevitably be free is based on the theory that the price of any good would fall to its marginal cost, and the marginal cost of digital distribution is exponentially approaching zero, bringing down the marginal cost of media along. Levine pokes two main holes in this argument: it’s not only a theory, but also one economists developed for commodity goods, and implicit to it is the admission that if the price of culture fell to zero, content creators like movie studios and investigative journalists would have no way of covering their production expenses. At the root of this paradox is a dangerous conflation:

Much of the enthusiasm for free media comes from mistaking the packaging for the product. If you believe people once paid $15 for silver plastic discs, it’s only natural to think online distribution will revolutionize the recording business. But if you realize people were paying for the music on those discs, it’s obvious that someone still has to make it — and that someone probably wants to get paid.”

On the other hand, Levine points out the uncomfortable reality of the tools for extracting value — tools not of device drivers but of human drives:

Reporters can access online databases and interview sources by Skype, but they still have to read the documents and ask the right questions. In cases like this, ‘information wants to be expensive.’”

In criticizing the questionable and often outright illegal practices of aggregator sites, Levine scathes:

In Silicon Valley, the information that wants to be free is almost always the information that belongs to someone else.”

He wryly observes the predatory paradox of the early ecosystem that laid the foundations for today’s information value systems, including the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998:

For media companies, getting advice from technology pundits was like letting the fox lead a strategic management retreat in the henhouse.”

For my part, I started Brain Pickings more than six years ago as what’s commonly referred to as a “passion project” (though I don’t like the fleeting noncommittal relationship this phrasing suggests) and didn’t have a business model — but I did have a crystal-clear editorial model, which remains the same today: get people interested in meaningful cross-disciplinary things they didn’t yet know they were interested in, and in the process empower their networked knowledge and combinatorial creativity; break out of the filter bubble, if you will, though conceived long before we had the very vocabulary to articulate it. So when an aggregator like the Huffington Post, a business-model wolf wearing an editorial-authenticity sheep’s skin, takes my (ad-free) content and regurgitates it on its (ad-plastered) site, it lives up to the term “parasite” at the heart of Levine’s argument, derived from the Greek parasitos and used to describe “someone who ate at someone else’s table without providing anything in return.”

While Levine rightly recognizes the remarkable creative empowerment that affordable technology has effected, he also observes the flipside:

This explosion of creativity has enriched our culture immensely. But many bloggers face some of the same problems as newspapers: it’s hard to make money if half the people who read your stories do so on another site.”

Or, to put it more crudely:

How can any company compete with a rival that offers its products but bears none o the expenses? The free ride has become a road to riches.”

And while I have the luxury of not caring about the “traffic” such parasites are stealing — because I’ve made the choice not to measure the quality of merit of content and the quality of audience, you, in pageviews and ad revenue, the basic currency of the Internet and arguably the reason for the brokenness of it all — there’s still something to be said for the theft of creative and intellectual labor here.

In reassessing the vision for art and commerce thriving together, a vision purveyed at the dawn of the digital revolution, Levine laments that it’s time to acknowledge this isn’t happening and won’t “until we turn the online free-for-all into a free market.” (Cue in my faith in a pay-what-you-will meritocracy.) Levine drives the disconnect home:

Traditional media companies aren’t in trouble because they’re not giving consumers what they want; they’re in trouble because they can’t collect money for it. It’s the natural outcome of an online economy that transfers wealth from ‘each according to his ability’ to ‘each according to what he can get away with.’”

And parasites certainly try to get away with a lot. With their masterful search engine optimization — which produces what I call the HuffPostification of headlines, titles that sound like a fifth-grader or a caveman (or, in the most successful of cases, a fifth-grader caveman) composed them and frequently feature the word “awesome” — they have perfected the craft of giving machines what algorithms think people want, then collecting money for it. Never mind the cultural footprint.

Having just returned from the annual Futures of Entertainment summit for my MIT fellowship, where Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain brought back the now-infamous web-age adage, “If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product,” I was particularly taken with Levine’s thoughtful argument that this entire imperfect information economy, with its parasites and its promises, was “a choice of design, not a requirement of technology.” As editors, curators, and publishers, we choose how to measure our merit, collect our money if we so choose, and, most importantly, serve our audience. As Levine puts it,

Like TV, the Internet is only as good as what’s on it.”

Levine goes on to examine the many facets of information value and intellectual property, from the devastation of the music business to Google’s war on copyright to how Europe is handling censorship, and in the end reminds us the tough calls that shape the future of the Internet will not be made with technology R&D breakthroughs but with ethical decisions on how to use that technology and what to value. He offers a poetic reminder by citing the first French copyright law, circa 1791:

The most sacred, the most unassailable, and the most personal of all properties is the composition, the fruit of the writer’s thought.”

Ultimately, I completely agree with Tyler Cowen when he says, “Everyone who follows cultural economics should read this book.”

I, by the way, was happy to pay $13.99 for a Kindle copy of Levine’s book — and would’ve happily paid much more had he offered a pay-what-you-will option.

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The Innovator’s Cookbook: Great Minds on the Power of Serendipity

How to win the future, or what 3D printing has to do with Twitter, Brian Eno and Obama.

Steven Johnson is easily my favorite non-fiction author working today, his writing pure mesmerism and his thinking an epitome of the cross-disciplinary curiosity I so firmly believe is central to creative and intellectual growth. On the heels of his excellent Where Good Ideas Come From comes The Innovator’s Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What Is Next — a formidable compendium of essays, interviews, and insights on innovation by big thinkers like Richard Florida, John Seely Brown, Peter Drucker and many more, alongside Johnson’s own ever-enchanting writing and new material by tech darlings like Google’s Marissa Mayer and Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, dethroning innovation from its status of buzzword royalty and approaching it instead with a lucid, thoughtful, cross-disciplinary lens refracting across education, art, science, economics, urban design, and more.

Underpinning the anthology is a message about the essential role serendipity plays in innovation — or, as Johnson puts it, “the importance of getting lost.”

But as a lover of fine book trailers, I was particularly taken with this stop-motion gem on the making of the book’s cover, 3D-printed by MakerBot, one of these 7 open-source platforms changing the future of manufacturing.

It may not be possible to ‘win the future,’ in President Obama’s words, but if we’re going to encourage more innovation, it’s not enough for us to just dig in and work harder. We also need to encourage surprise and serendipity. We need to play each other’s instruments.” ~ Steven Johnson

The Innovator’s Cookbook is part Follow for Now, part Culture, part An Optimist’s Tour of the Future — but, mostly, something entirely original and wholly potent, the way only Johnson can deliver.

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Digital Humanities Spotlight: 7 Important Digitization Projects

From Darwin’s marginalia to Voltaire’s correspondence, or what Dalí’s controversial World’s Fair pavilion has to do with digital myopia.

Despite our remarkable technological progress in the past century and the growth of digital culture in the past decade, a large portion of humanity’s richest cultural heritage remains buried in analog archives. Bridging the disconnect is a fledgling discipline known as the Digital Humanities, bringing online historical materials and using technologies like infrared scans, geolocation mapping, and optical character recognition to enrich these resources with related information or make entirely new discoveries about them. As Europe’s digital libraries open up their APIs, techno-dystopian pundits lament that these efforts diminish “the mystery of history,” but such views are myopic and plagued by unnecessary nostalgia for a time when knowledge was confined to the privileged cultural elite. Instead, here are seven fantastic digitization projects that democratize access to and understanding of some of our civilization’s most valuable cultural assets.

MAPPING THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

Long before there was Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, there was the Republic of Letters — a vast and intricate network of intellectuals, linking the finest “philosophes” of the Enlightenment across national borders and language barriers. This self-defined community of writers, scholars, philosophers and other thinkers included greats like Voltaire, Leibniz, Rousseau, Linnaeus, Franklin, Newton, Diderot and many others we’ve come to see as linchpins of cultural history. Mapping the Republic of Letters, which we first looked at last year, is a fascinating project by a team of students and professors at Stanford, visualizing the famous intellectual correspondence of the Enlightenment, how they traveled, and how the network evolved over time, bridging humanitarian scholarship and computer science.

The project pulls data from the Electronic Enlightenment database, an archive of more than 55,000 letters and documents exchanged between 6,400 correspondents, and maps the geographic origin and destination of the correspondence — something we’ve come to take for granted in the age of real-time GPS tracking, but an incredibly ambitious task for 300-year-old letters.

For more on the Republic of Letters, its cultural legacy and the networking model it provided, you won’t go wrong with Dena Goodman’s The Republic of Letters : A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment — a book controversial for its feminist undertones but nonetheless fascinating in its bold reframing of the Enlightenment not as a set of ideas that gave rise to “masculine self-governance” but as a rhetoric that borrowed heavily from female thought.

LONDON LIVES

London Lives offers a fascinating record of crime, poverty and social policy in one of the world’s greatest cities between the years of 1690 and 1800 through 240,000 fully digitized manuscript and printed pages from 8 London archives, supplemented by 15 datasets. The nonprofit project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and implemented by the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield and the Higher Education Digitisation Service at the University of Hertfordshire, provides access to historical records containing over 3.35 million names, allowing you to link together records relating to the same individual and to even extract entire biographies of the best-documented individuals.

A wiki invites users to contribute to biographies of 18th-century Londoners, track corrections and monitor activity on pages to which they’ve contributed.

BIBLION

From the New York Public Library comes Biblion — an ambitious iPad app putting NYPL’s 1939-40 New York World’s Fair collection at your fingertips. Though the app is free, its documents, images, films, audio, and texts make it a priceless piece of historical fascination.

From essays by beloved writers like Karen Abbott, William Grimes and Henry Jenkins to the wild restaurant ideas that never made the cut at the Fair to the extravaganza’s designs, uniforms and buildings — including Salvador Dalí’s controversial Dream of Venus surrealist pavilion — the app takes you on an extraordinary journey of wonder and curiosity, not only making previously exclusive artifacts and knowledge available to the world at large, but also presenting them through the kind of rich, immersive storytelling never possible while strolling through the aisles of the physical library. How’s that for the mystery of history, Tristram Hunt?

(In that vein, Alexis Madrigal over at The Atlantic recently wrote a fantastic, must-read article on what big media can learn from NYPL.)

CHARLES DARWIN’S LIBRARY

Charles Darwin is easily one of the most influential scientists who ever lived — so much so that entire collaborative albums have been written about him — and now, thanks to The Biodiversity Heritage Library, the intellectual fuel for his work is accessible to the rest of us. Charles Darwin’s Library is a digital reconstruction of the surviving books Darwin owned, complete with full transcriptions of his annotations and marks — the kind of marginalia essential to fleshing out our thoughts as we ingest ideas. (More voyeurism of great thinkers’ notebooks here.)

The initial release, launched earlier this year, features 330 of the 1480 titles in his library, focusing on the most heavily annotated books, with an ongoing effort aiming to further digitize his book collection.

SALEM WITCH TRIALS PROJECT

Though decidedly unsexy and anything but sleek, the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project from the University of Virginia offers a rich online archive of materials relating to the Salem witch trials of 1692 — court records, books, notable people, and images of the original court documents, indexed according to various archival collections.

A regional accusations map displays the geographic chronology of the accusations, a Salem Village accusations map shows the day-by-day accusations in the month of March, 1692, and a complete alphabetical list catalogs every person mentioned in the court documents.

THE NEWTON PROJECT

Thanks to The Newton Project, 4.2 million published and unpublished words by Isaac Newton are now online as interactive diplomatic transcriptions that show every addition, change or revision the great scholar made to his texts, browsable by subject.

From Newton as a historian to his character and personal habits, the database spans materials as diverse as Newton’s gum water recipe and a list he made of 47 sins he could remember having committed in his lifetime. (More on the love of famous creators’ lists here.)

QUIJOTE INTERACTIVO

From the National Library of Spain comes Quijote Interactivo, a project we first examined last fall — an impressive interactive digitization of the original edition of Miguel de Cervantes’ cult 1605-1615 novel, Don Quixote. Though the site is entirely in Spanish, the sleek interface, rich multimedia galleries and thoughtful sound design make it a joy to explore whatever your linguistic heritage.

A social widget even makes each of the 668 pages from the book shareable via email or on Facebook, and a transcription overlay makes the original 17th-century manuscript legible in Times New Roman.

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