User:Eleanorg/1.2/RWR/Essay Draft 2

'Identity Theft' and the Integrity of Natural Objects

When I'm in my pyjamas, I like to read old essays in heavy textbooks that talk about how I should, by now, be having intergalactic body-melting boundary-blurring cultural/sexual/authorial transactions with polymorphic avatars in the neon cathedrals of cyberspace. You can be sure that old-school ideas about authorship and copyright have no power here. All meat-space boundaries are erased; data flows freely, discreet objects replaced by provisional virtual assemblages. Fucking great.

And then the next morning I'm in my work clothes at my laptop reading the news, and I get this: "we look forward to working with... other interested parties in passing strong legislation utilizing the remaining tools at our disposal to protect American jobs and creativity. We continue to believe that DNS filtering is an important tool, already used in numerous countries internationally to protect consumers and the intellectual property of businesses with targeted filters for rogue sites" (MPAA 2012a). This from a Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) press release this January. Far from embracing the unlimited circulation of cultural works, the political climate today is turning more and more in the opposite direction. My question is, why did the dream of unlimited data flow become something to fear and suppress?

When Donna Haraway was busy predicting this cyborg future in the '80s, she certainly didn't envision it as a communal utopia. The erasure of boundaries to data flow would be driven by "a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears" (Haraway 2002, p.112). Politically, this translates as an intensification of the universal equivalence essential to monetary exchange; now, not only are objects exchangeable but "no objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other..." (ibid p.111).

Here is a vision in which maximum porosity is demanded of the interface, its previous "resistance" dissolved through the correct application, like solvent, of "the proper standard, the proper code... for processing signals in a common language" (ibid p.111). Haraway places the motivation for this dissolution of old boundaries with the logic of late capitalism, intensifying and transcending "the universal translation effected by capitalist markets" (p.111). These porous interfaces also "provide fresh sources of power" (ibid p.114) for those who would oppress us; thus "the biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication" (ibid p.113). For Haraway, then, unlimited data flow across an interface is the ultimate free market or totalitarian wet dream, where an impermeable interface is conceptualised as "resistance" which must be broken down.

So how much of this vision has been realized? What is the status of the digital cultural object today?

Jos de Mul's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination' thinks over many of same issues Haraway describes, appearing to confirm her predictions about the dissolution of "the integrity of natural objects" when it comes to cultural works. Just as Haraway sees the porous informational interface as an intensification of capitalist universal exchange, de Mul describes digital remixing and the ubiquity of the database as an intensification and transendence of Benjamin's mechanical reproduction. "In the age of digital databases, everything - nature and culture alike - becomes an object for recombination and manipulation." (de Mul 2009 p.101).

In this scenario, de Mul summarizes, cultural objects "seem to be inherently unstable" (ibid p. 103). And here we start to find our way to the issue at hand. While he had mutant sheep and GM bananas in mind more than torrent files, de Mul puts his finger on something important when he notes that "gradually, we become aware of... the possibility that [new media] will gradually outstrip our skills to add, browse, change and destroy. And that we might become the ultimate object of digital manipulation." (ibid p.104). So it is not all excited remixing. There is an anxiety here holding us in check, a sense of danger, some concern with integrity which resurfaces once all claims to integrity have already become obsolete.

Haraway predicted that in this scenario, "control strategies [will] concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries - and not on the integrity of natural objects" (ibid p.111). A prediction that seems increasingly relevent to today's copyright battles, in which rights holder associations are laying claim to no less than the regulatation of internet traffic in an attempt to preserve the integrity of 'their' cultural works. And to understand the pscyhology of this strategy, it's worth looking at the terms in which such rights holders conceptualise these rates of flow and the objects they connect.

The MPAA devotes significant space on their website to detailing their views on illicit content exchange, for a general audience. One prominent text, "Types of Content Theft", is an interesting example of the discursive strategies used by such groups to frame the way that the integrity of cultural works is understood. A sense of didactic anxiety runs through the text, with shrill sentences such as "all it takes is one camcorder copy to trigger the mass reproduction and distribution of millions of illegal Internet downloads and bootlegs...", and, "if you download movies using illegal peer-to-peer sites, you are often also distributing illegal content... to other peers in the group, who in turn distribute the files to yet others" (MPAA 2012b).

The text paints a picture of a monstrous, spawning network ("all it takes is one..."; "...to yet others") which users are warned not to get caught up in. The peer-to-peer user, for example, is assumed to be innocently hoodwinked by a system in which they would not willingly participate: "While people may believe their files are being exchanged among only a few "friends", these files can be accessed by millions of people around the world" (ibid). There is an assumption that all bittorrent users share rights holders' horror at this prospect, that there is something inherently horrifying about opening yourself to so many connections.

What we see here is a kind of allergic reaction to the unlimited data flow that was supposed to bring power and profit. And it goes beyond financial concern - the primary and most obvious motive for this anti-internet rage. There is a hysterical fear of the network iteslf and its terrifying powers of replication, transmission and modification of previously discrete works.

Thus, we cannot speak purely of "boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries" without reference to the "integrity" of the objects which are connected by these interfaces. What we are seeing, in the increasingly clamourous discourses of lobbyists like the MPAA, is not a forgetting but a desperate returning to the natural object, as opposed to the "inherently unstable" digital replacement.

The nature of this panic is revealed by the warnings given to internet users about the perils of file sharing, in which "you are... potentially exposing your computer and private information to strangers. By allowing strangers to access files on your computer, other sensitive information, such as bank records, social security numbers and pictures, could also become accessible and put you and your family at risk of identity theft or worse" (ibid). The concept of the family is conservatively invoked here to denote what should be a private, impenetrable unit. The 'stranger' is juxtaposed with it as a potential intruder - with abstainence from contact, rather than better security, assumed to be the best protection. It's interesting that 'identity theft' is the danger singled out here, rather than the more likely outcomes of viruses or spam. The Pirate Bay leecher is threatened not just with a malfunctioning computer, but an actual disintegration and appropriation of the self.

There are obvious financial motives for lobbyists like the MPAA to stoke such fears. But the question we face as artists is why their anxieties are mirrored by so many creative producers; why "all rights reserved" remains the stubborn default of artists who are afraid of admitting to the vulnerability of their works to re-appropriation once shared online. We cannot continue to rely only on financial or cultural arguments for free culture when faced with such clearly pscyhological resistance. There is a valid realization in the MPAA's text that the internet spells death for the integrity of a cultural work and thus for its authorship. The anxiety their text evokes is a genuine one, albeit misleadingly projected onto others. The threat of identity theft is real, but not for bittorrent users as they imply: rather, this is the psychological prospect facing rights holders in a setting where their propriety - read, authorship, read, integrity - has been dismantled.

The death of the author can no longer be realistically denied in this scenario, despite the MPAA's best efforts. So, how can we move from denial to productive grief and perhaps even to acceptance and an embrace of the possibilities open to us? How do we come to terms with the instability of our works and our authorship without covering our ears either with draconian copyright laws or increasingly elaborate Creative Commons licenses? What would it mean to really come to terms with a world in which "no objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other" (Haraway p.111)?

I will turn for pointers on this one to a useful lecture by Judith Butler, 'Beside Oneself', in which she discusses the nature of grief, and both the terrors and possibilites of the "identity theft" inherent in all social relationships.

By starting with grief, Butler identifies the risk inherent in our desire to connect with others: it "exposes the constitutive sociality of the self" (Butler 2004 p.19). Perhaps bittorrent and the remix expose this sociality and this risk too. Perhaps they, also, make unavoidable "the way in which we are in the thrall of our relations with others... in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control" (ibid p.19). Indeed, she notes with concern the temptation "to shore up sovereignty and security to minimize or, indeed, forclose this vulnerability" (ibid p.22). The attempts of rightsholders to bring the internet down with them certainly employ this strategy. The dense constitutive web of social interactions Butler describes is a clear parrallel to the threatening P2P networks keeping the MPAA awake at night, in which digital works come into being, are traded, reworked and remade. And her psychology of relation offers a convincing explanation for their identity theft panic: "there is always a dimension of ourselves and our relation to others that we cannot know... I am other to myself precisely at the place where I expect to be myself" (ibid p.15).

Butler summarizes: “Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. ...One does not always stay intact” (ibid p.19). In its exposure of our constitutive sociality, the "inherently unstable" digital work brings both excitement and fear. Specifically, the fear of "being undone" – an ever-present anxiety Butler knowingly alludes to. ("Let's face it".) Yet despite this, she urges us not to abstain from contact in the way that the MPAA do. To be undone is not only inevitable but essential. If we refuse, "we are missing something". As she herself notes, "There is a more general conception of the human at work here, one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other" (ibid p.23). This is in itself neither 'good' or 'bad', but it raises dilemmas and anxieties which we can either ignore, or attempt to engage with productively.

I believe this approach offers a useful way of reflecting on the anxieties provoked by the spectre of the limitless network, and its treatment of the cultural works circulating there. We can concieve of this impure transmission and modification as a theft, as the MPAA do; as the introduction of impurity which transgresses the properly inviolable boundaries of the work and its author. Or we can embrace the unstable digital work as a mirror of our social situation more generally: a provisional assemblage which is constituted only through its transactions with others and moreover cannot come into being without them. Such an approach does not require us to deny the anxiety provoked in so many artists by the loss of control over their works, or necessitate a compensation for it in legally binding attribution requirements. It does, however, give a glimpse of the gains to be had by opening our eyes to the situation as it stands: one in which the boundaries between self and other are unclear; a scenario which is both terrifying, and rich with potential.

Bibliography

Butler, J. (2004) 'Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy' in Undoing Gender (London: Routledge).
de Mul, J. (2009) 'The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination' in van den Boomen, M., Lammes, S. et al (eds) Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press).
Haraway, D. (2002) 'A Cyborg Manifesto' in Spiller, N. (ed.) Cyber Reader (London: Phiadon).
MPAA (2012a) MPAA Statement on Chairman Smith's Comments Regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act (press release, 13 January) [online]. Available: http://www.mpaa.org/news/pr (Accessed 7 April 2012).
MPAA (2012b) Types of Content Theft [online]. Available: http://www.mpaa.org/contentprotection/types-of-content-theft (Accessed 7 April 2012).