Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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The world of crypto is full of scams, grifts, and absolutely foreseeable flops. The underlying ideology of cryptoâââthe much-vaunted âsystem designââââstarts from the principle that systems are most stable when they appeal to each participantâs self-interest, rather than their solidarity, generosity or empathy. This is an extension of the âgreed is goodâ / âthereâs no such thing as societyâ ideology of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution. Itâs an ideology grounded in empirically false propositions about how people actually behave in markets.
In a recent interview, Yanis Varoufakis describes his experience running an economy in God-mode when he was chief economist of Valve, overseeing game economies with âaccess to the full data set in real time,â lured by the prospect of âplaying âgod; i.e. being able to do with these digital economies things that no economist can do in the ârealâ world, e.g. alter rules, prices, and quantities to see what happens.â
The U.S. Copyright Office has issued a Notice of Inquiry, seeking comment on whether online services should be legally required to filter all their usersâ communications to block copyright infringement, as part of a âStay Downâ system.
The idea is that once a copyright holder notifies a service provider that a certain work canât be legally posted, the service must filter all their user communications thereafter to ensure that this notice is honored.
I think that creators and creatorsâ groups should oppose this. Hereâs why.
The âstandard measuresâ being discussed are not standard. Indeed, theyâre largely found in just two companies: Google (through its Content ID system for YouTube) and Meta/Facebook. Thereâs a reason only two companies have these filters: They are incredibly expensive. Content ID has cost $100,000,000 and counting (and it only does a tiny fraction of what is contemplated in the proposed rule).
That effectively cements Googbook as the permanent rulers of the internet, since they are the only two social media companies that can afford this stuff.
A nearly identical proposal to this one â Article 13 of the Copyright Directive, since renumbered to Article 17 â went through the EU Parliament in 2019, and both Facebook and YouTube came out in favor of it. They understand that this is a small price to pay for permanently excluding all competitors from the internet.
(Itâs worth noting that actually implementing Article 17 with automated filters is likely a violation of both the e-Commerce Directive and the GDPR, both of which ban automated judgements of user communications without explicit opt-in and consent, and thereâs every chance that Article 17 will not survive a constitutional challenge in the European Court of Justice.)
Now, some people may be thinking, why should I care if Googbook get to take over the internet, so long as theyâre forced to police my copyrights?
I think those people are going to be very disappointed, for three reasons:
Few labor markets are as dysfunctional as the market for creative labor. Writers, musicians, graphic artists and other creative workers often produce because they feel they have to, driven by a need to express and discover themselves. Small wonder that creative workers are willing to produce art for lower wages than theyâd accept for other types of work. This leads to a vast oversupply of creative work, giving publishers, labels, studios and other intermediaries a buyerâs market for creative labor.
For the most part, arts policy pretends this isnât true. When economists and business-people talk about labor markets, they lean heavily on the neoliberal conception of ârational economic actorsâ who produce when it makes sense to do so, and move on to another form of work when it doesnât. Homo economicus is a nonsenseâââbehavioral economics has repeatedly demonstrated all the ways in which âeconomic actorsâ donât behave the way economic models predict they willâââbut itâs especially absurd when applied to creative labor markets.
