In short, [proponents of more aggressive copyright enforcement] made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not oblige them. Copying only got easier following the passage of these laws—copying will only ever get easier. Right now is as hard as copying will get. Your grandchildren will turn to you and say “Tell me again, Grandpa, about when it was hard to copy things in 2012, when you couldn’t get a drive the size of your fingernail that could hold every song ever recorded, every movie ever made, every word ever spoken, every picture ever taken, everything, and transfer it in such a short period of time you didn’t even notice it was doing it.”

I’ve found myself stressing this to reporters who call to ask about what we should do “instead” of SOPA and PIPA, because the framing of this entire debate remains mindblowingly shortsighted. In five years, regardless of anything Congress does now, the current round of garment rending over “rogue websites” is going to seems as comically quaint and irrelevant as old jeremiads against the libidinous excesses of jazz dancing and Elvis lyrics. The big, dumb, obvious technological fact that an awful lot of smart people seem reluctant to grok is this: Copying and sharing information is vastly cheaper and easier than it has ever been at any time in human history. It is also vastly more difficult and expensive than it will ever be again.

This weekend I finally upgraded to the latest version of Mac OSX, Lion. Owing to some weird decisions by Apple, I had to install it from physical media: An 8 gigabyte “thumb drive,” which is really rather misnamed, because it’s actually about the size of two wooden matchsticks. The year I was born, that amount of data storage space—without any software—would have cost more than the office building you’d need to house it. The year I got my drivers’ license, it would’ve cost about as much as a good used car. In 2012, 8 gigs of storage is the kind of thing you give away as freebie conference schwag—like a logo-embossed pen, except a good deal smaller. If I decide to use it for something else now that I’m done installing the OS, it will easily accommodate about 4 feature-length films in high definition. IBM recently announced a breakthrough in storage technology that could increase current capacity by a factor of 100 within a few years, which means instead of just carting half our music libraries around with us in our pockets, we’ll have entire music libraries, and high-def video libraries to boot.

One of the features I noticed they’d added in Lion is Airdrop, which establishes an ad hoc peer-to-peer WiFi connection with other nearby Apple devices. This isn’t particularly useful for my desktop, since anyone who’s actually in my apartment is probably already on my home WiFi network, but one can imagine it being awfully handy for mobile devices. “What am I listening to? Hang on, I’ll beam it over.” For transfers outside physical proximity, the next generation wireless data standard recently approved by the International Telecommunications Union maxes out at about a Gigabit per second. In practical terms, that means about a minute to transmit  an uncompressed music CD (and much shorter for, say, MP3s at the bitrate you get from iTunes) or 90 seconds for a high-definition TV episode.

Existing online social networks, with near universal adoption in many social circles, already provide a trust infrastructure for limited sharing that will make these kinds of transfers almost impossible to police—or even reliably detect. In a world where every teenager in the country is carrying a pocket-sized server, and encrypted wireless VPN relays can run out of palm-sized cubes, an enforcement strategy based on raiding data centers is just going to look cute. Legislators who think “the Internet” means “the Web,” who are too fixated on the problems some lobbyist is complaining about right now to think two steps ahead, are in for a rude awakening. They’re in the grip of the enforcement fantasy: The misapprehension that technology is going to stay still long enough for traditional, targeted law enforcement approaches to effectively limit the scope and scale of copying.

That’s not to say that nothing can be done to avert a near-future world of largely unregulated and unregulable copying and sharing. If we were willing to implement  a comprehensive scheme of innovation-stifling technology mandates and pervasive surveillance so absolute as to  make the People’s Republic of China look like Burning Man, it could at least be delayed. But I assume that the United States is not yet prepared to completely betray its basic principles to safeguard the profitability of Friends reruns.

If we’re not willing to be China, though, then all these discussions about “what we’re going to do” about piracy are just the wonky equivalent of fanboy debates about whether Wolverine would beat Batman in a fight, for all the bearing they have on reality. What are we going to do that makes a long-term difference? Nothing. Anyone who wants to copy stuff without paying for it can do so easily, and it only gets easier and faster from here. Finding this morally outrageous or throwing a tantrum about the deep unfairness of it all won’t make it less true, though the tantrum might break a vase or two.

A slightly more Zen approach would be to “accept the things you cannot change,” as the coffee mug has it, and take the opportunity to step back and reevaluate. We have a legal structure for incentivizing creativity that makes copying and public performance the key points of regulatory intervention. There isn’t some deep moral reason that it’s these points and not others. There are lots of other ways to enjoy creative works without paying the creator, after all: Borrowing a copy, buying used, watching at a friends house, DVRing the broadcast and skipping all the commercials, incessantly singing (to yourself or with a friend) that catchy tune you overheard in the cab. Nobody tries to claim those are “stealing,” mainly because we’ve decided not to try to regulate those activities.

We decided to regulate copying instead, because copying was a lot easier and cheaper to regulate when we wrote the copyright statutes. Copying a book or record on a mass scale, unlike lending or singing in the shower, was not the kind of thing an ordinary person had the necessary equipment for—and the equipment tended to be bulky enough that you could usually track it down without having to pry into a lot of homes (and bathrooms). But the thing we decided to regulate because it was rare and expensive is now as cheap and ubiquitous as all the other stuff we didn’t regulate because it was cheap and ubiquitous. The good news is, most people are still glad to pay for the content they really like, if it’s provided in a convenient form and at a reasonable price, even when they can (or did!) easily copy it free. But maybe that’s not enough, and there are other points of regulatory intervention that will help creators internalize enough of the value of their output to make the investment worthwhile. That’s an actually productive subject of inquiry, but it’s not one anybody’s putting much effort into as long as they remain in the grips of the enforcement fantasy.

Now,  Brad Plumer reports, there’s research suggesting that online review sites like Yelp are cutting into chains’ bottom line by providing an alternative solution to the information problem. The combination of peer-produced online reviews (which cover local diners along with the big-city restaurants) and mobile, location-aware Internet devices has made it incredibly easy  to figure out where you can find the nearest restaurants with good reputations, wherever you might be. Under conditions of uncertainty, the chain represents a rational maximin strategy. As ubiquitous connectivity and peer-production of information reduce that uncertainty, the chain becomes an unnecessary hedge.

Yet it’s not just chain restaurants that have thrived by using standardization and branding to solve a consumer information problem: Branding and marketing generally often serve much the same function. Frequently, generic or store-branded products (soda, cereal, ibuprofen) are literally chemically identical to the more recognizable name-brand product, and only cheaper because they haven’t been saddled with the overhead of a costly marketing campaign designed to signal quality. (Think of the traditional argument for the evolution of peacock feathers: To survive while paying the high overhead cost of such a gaudy display signals genetic fitness.)

Imagine, then, what effect it might have if, five or ten years hence, augmented reality using sophisticated image recognition were as ubiquitous as Internet-enabled phones are becoming in the developed world. Imagine that, for nearly any product consumers encountered, some kind of aggregate rating—based on whatever criteria the individual has determined are most important—would simply appear, with minimal effort. Simply looking at an aisle of products—or even passing shops on the street—I might effortlessly learn which were deemed most satisfactory by people with tastes similar to mine. My incentive to take the time to rank products would be provided by my desire to give the system a basis for determining which other user’s rankings were most likely to be relevant for me. (Think here of Netflix recommendations or other type of social filtering, where contributing ratings enables the system to make better predictions about what I am likely to enjoy.)

With such information more directly available, marketing would become far less relevant to the buyer—and a far less worthwhile investment for the producer. Products, of course, would still need to be distinguished in some way, but a seller with a superior product would be far better able to compete without investing in a costly national marketing campaign. Advertising might be initially important in raising awareness about a new product and building an initial pool of reviews, but its salience would rapidly diminish.

That’s one way things might go, at least. The picture is a bit complicated because today we often “consume” the brand, and not just the product itself. That is a company like Nike might invest a great deal in slick marketing partly in order to create a series of public associations with their logo, so that part of what I’m buying when I purchase their sneakers is what (I hope) the Swoosh signals about the sort of person I am—or how I see myself, at any rate. But this seems like a major consideration in a relatively limited number of product areas, such as clothing (precisely because it’s displayed on the person). If that’s right, the “Yelp Effect” in world where augmented reality technology has been widely adopted could dramatically diminish the broader cultural prominence of corporate logos and brands.

• Bruce Wayne (Batman)
• Oliver Queen (Green Arrow)
• Tony Stark (Iron Man)
• Ted Kord (Blue Beetle)

Here are the first four CEO supervillains who spring to mind:

• Lex Luthor
• Wilson Fisk (Kingpin)
• Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias)
• Norman Osborn (Green Goblin)

Ok, comics geeks, pop quiz: What do the four heroes and the four villains each have in common?

The answer is that none of the four heroes founded the corporations that bear their family names: Each of them inherited their wealth. In some cases the heroes bear substantial responsibility for the success of their companies, but in the case of Stark and Kord, this is primarily a function of their scientific and inventive genius, not their business acumen. All but Wayne have, for some portion of their history, faced financial difficulties as a result, either losing or surrendering control of their companies at least temporarily.

For the supervillains, precisely the opposite is true. While the TV show Smallville and a handful of one-off comics depict Luthor as born to wealth, he has typically been portrayed as a child of abusive, impoverished parents who rose from the mean streets of Suicide Slum to found LexCorp. Fisk, too, grew up poor and bullied. Veidt describes his parents as an ordinary, unremarkable couple, and it’s implied that they are working or lower-middle class. [Update: As a commenter notes, I'm misremembering: Veidt's parents were actually wealthy, but he chose to give away his inheritance to charity as a teenager in order to start from nothing.] Osborn’s father was an industrialist who raised Norman in relative luxury… but also an abusive alcoholic who lost the business and his fortune before Norman was college aged, requiring him to effectively start over from scratch. [Update: I could have added Stark's bete noire Obadiah Stane—played by Jeff Bridges in the movie—whose "degenerate gambler" single father left him orphaned as a child thanks to a round of Russian roulette.] While Kingpin’s wealth comes almost entirely from his criminal operations, with the “legitimate business” of Fisk Enterprises serving primarily as a front, the others seem to have earned most of their wealth by more-or-less legal means.

Now this ought to be at least somewhat surprising. Conventional wisdom, and the vast majority of popular film and fiction outside the superhero genre, suggest that the heroic characters—the ones we admire and identify with—ought to be the ones who earn success through their own merits after a long struggle, while the villains are snobbish children of undeserved privilege. When it comes to the most famous businessmen in comics, though, we find that just the reverse is the case! While on the surface, for instance, the rivalry between Luthor and Superman pits cosmopolitan, urban corporate wealth against humble American rural values, it has also often been stressed that Luthor resents Superman for simply being born with spectacular abilities that dwarf Luthor’s hard-won achievements. What might be going on here?

While the pattern in comics inverts the meritocratic ideal that seems to rule in most modern American fiction, it fits quite naturally with a pre-capitalist aristocratic ethos, which persisted at least through the early 20th century in the form of Old Money’s contempt for the nouveau riche.  Jane Jacobs, in her book Systems of Survival, contrasted this aristocratic view, which she dubbed the “Guardian” moral complex, with “bourgeois” or “mercantile” ethics. In this worldview, while wealth and the leisure time it affords may be necessary preconditions of cultivating certain noble qualities (whether that’s appreciation of classical art and literature, or the martial, deductive, and scientific skills of a masked crimefighter), the grubby business of acquiring money is inherently corrupting. The ideal noble needs to have wealth, while being too refined to  be much concerned with becoming wealthy. It’s permissible for Stark and Kord to be largely responsible for the success of their companies because their contribution is essentially a side effect of their exercise of their intellectual virtues. Along similar lines, while the Fantastic Four have plainly become enormously wealthy from the income stream generated by Reed Richards’ many patents, I don’t recall many scenes in which we see Richards stepping out of the lab to apply his intelligence directly to their commercialization: His inventions are presumably sold or licensed to others who concern themselves with transforming Richards’ genius into cash.

A similar pattern holds for literally noble or aristocratic power in comics. Princess Diana (Wonder Woman) and T’Challa (Black Panther) are hereditary royalty. Doctor Doom and Magneto are members of despised and oppressed minority groups (Doom is Roma; Magneto a Jewish mutant) who actively seize leadership of Latveria and Genosha, respectively. Democratic power doesn’t fare too much better: Lex Luthor was briefly president of the United States.

The logic of this, as I apprehend it, is that the hero must wield enormous power in order to effectively perform the superheroic function, but cannot seem to seek it too eagerly, even for admirable ends—perhaps particularly when we consider that they typically make use of their great economic power by translating it into a superhuman capacity for physical violence. Spider-Man is always reminding us that “with great power comes great responsibility”—but the responsibility is the noblesse oblige of one who has (often reluctantly) found that power thrust upon him.

Bruce Wayne is perhaps the most obvious exception to this general pattern. While for Spider-Man, unasked-for power comes with the burden of responsibility, it is the burden of an obsessive sense of responsibility that comes first for Wayne, driving a protracted quest for hard-won mental and physical power. While every superhero has an iconic “origin story,” Batman is  unusual among costumed crimefighters in that his long and laborious efforts to acquire his skills and powers are themselves a major part of the narrative. In Wayne’s case, this deliberate striving after power is at least partially purged of its ordinary villainous connotations because it is itself depicted as an unwanted compulsion, thrust upon him unasked (like a radioactive spider bite) by the ghosts of his murdered parents. It is not, I think, an accident that this most calculating, ruthless, and unsentimental of the major superheroes is also the one super-CEO most commonly depicted as being exceptionally skilled qua businessman. He  is allowed this quality in part because, in sharp contrast to Tony Stark, he is not depicted as deriving much genuine enjoyment from the luxurious playboy lifestyle he uses as a smokescreen to cover his compulsive crimefighting. (It’s interesting, incidentally, to contrast the apparent business savvy of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster with that of Batman scribe and artist Bob Kane—evident not least in the fact that Kane is often given solitary credit as creator, though there’s a pretty ironclad case for considering Bill Finger an equal partner.)

Protagonists in ordinary popular fiction, like most of us most of the time, are allowed to seek their own happiness—and we’re allowed to share that happiness, through our identification with them—in line with ordinary bourgeois morality. But what makes superheroes “super” (and not merely heroic) is precisely their extraordinary capability to exercise coercive power and dominate others. In their case, bourgeois norms have to yield to the Guardian ethos—which, when their power is partly economic in origin, requires turning pop fiction’s ordinary meritocratic ideals on their head, at least in that limited domain.

The thing is, in a sense it didn’t really matter that much what was true and what was made up. The point of these stories—or at any rate, part of the point—was to have engaging and memorable tales of, if not “virtue” in every case, then at least various types of “excellence” to be inspired by or emulate. To be sure, it might be more effectively inspiring if you knew that a story described some achievable real-world accomplishment, but this wasn’t the essential thing. The same goes for parables that illustrate behavior or dispositions to avoid: There’s no shortage of real-world stories one might use to convey the moral “pride goeth before a fall,” but a fictional one will do as well if the point is just to memorably capture an important lesson. Did the historical George Washington really fess up to felling a cherry tree because he “cannot tell a lie”? Almost certainly not, but unless you’re a historian, how much does it really matter whether all your beliefs about the Washington’s life are accurate?

All this is apropos of a piece by Jonathan Rée arguing that the so-called New Atheists misunderstand religion when they treat it primarily as a set of truth-claims on par with a scientific theory. When we read or watch explicitly fictional stories, we sometimes talk about the “suspension of disbelief” that’s necessary to become truly immersed in a tale. We need to find the story, in some sense, “believable” in the sense that it has a kind of internal coherence, without being committed to it’s literal truth. This is the sense in which it’s “unrealistic” for Booster Gold to win a one-on-one fight against Darkseid, even though, of course, there’s nothing remotely realistic about either character.

Fundamentalists of every sect are, pretty much by definition, strongly committed to the literal truth of all of their scripture. But the garden variety “believer,” I suspect, may often be more accurately thought of as a “suspension-of-disbeliever.” (Somewhere in the back of my head is that CollegeHumor video about religion as a species of fanboyism.) When you think about the actual functions that religious narratives serve in people’s lives, literal truth or falsity is often rather beside the point, and yet suspension of disbelief is a necessary condition of immersion in the story. On this view, Richard Dawkins is a little like that guy who keeps pointing out that all the ways superhero physics don’t really make sense. (Wouldn’t characters with “super strength” would really need super speed as well to do stuff like punching through concrete? Shouldn’t Cyclops be propelled backwards when he unleashes those concussive eye beams?”) It’s not annoying because we literally believed the stories, but because our enjoyment depends on our not attending too explicitly to their unreality. People can, on one level, be powerfully committed to the idea that Han Solo shot first, dammit—while on another being perfectly aware that, really, nobody shot anybody, and it’s actually just Harrison Ford and a dude in a green rubber suit with some laser effects added in post production.

Fanboys, of course, know their cherished fantasy worlds are fantasy, and will admit as much readily if you press them. For many ordinary believers, I suspect the situation is closer to what I think my initial view of Sherlock Holmes probably was: I knew that Watson “was” Holmes’ faithful sidekick, and that Moriarty “was” his archenemy, but if you asked me whether I meant this “was” in the sense of a historical truth claim or only as a “truth” about a fictional narrative, I suspect I would have initially been surprised by the question, because nothing about my relationship to the narrative or my reasons for enjoying it turned essentially on whether the events it depicted had really happened.

Update: It’s clearly true, as a commenter argues, that Dawkins & co. are themselves quite capable of appreciating religious and mythical narratives as narratives. What Rée seems to be positing, though, is that they may underestimate the number of soi-disant Believers who appreciate it on something like the same level. The people most motivated to debate and respond to New Atheist arguments, after all, are almost certainly not a representative sample, but likely to be heavily composed of those with a strong, reflective commitment to the literal accuracy of religious narrative. (Just as the small number of Atheist evangelists are pretty unrepresentative: Most of us don’t have all that much interest in talking people out of their favored narratives, as long as they’re not actively bugging us with them.) I’m not suggesting many believers appreciate their own narratives exactly as Dawkins does—that they’re ironists reciting their credos with a knowing wink, like the nuns at the end of DeLillo’s White Noise or the villagers at the end of Book of Mormon—though there are plainly a few of those. But I think there’s a vast fuzzy space between the ironists and the literalists, where the ontological level of the commitment to the narrative is left deliberately vague precisely because reflectively understanding it as fictional would weaken it, but endorsing it as a literal truth on par with everyday factual claims is unnecessary, and maybe even a little weird.

Update II: Just because so many commenters are focusing on it: I really like Richard Dawkins! I own and have enjoyed many of his books, including the athevangelist ones, and expect to purchase more! I’m just suggesting that it may be more common than we appreciate to “believe” in a way that engages with a story without needing to know whether things really happened that way. (“What a great period movie!” “Was it based on real historical events?” “Not sure, now that you mention it, I was just enjoying the movie.”) If that describes a nontrivial number of nominal believers, Dawkins’ (correct!) arguments may not be relevant to those people.

So here is what I think happened with Netflix’s recent price change (for the record, I have no inside data here, this is just an educated guess). Netflix has for the past several years been negotiating with Hollywood for the digital rights to stream movies and TV series as a single price subscription to users. Their first few deals were simply $X million dollars for one year of rights to stream this particular library of films. As the years passed, the deals became more elaborate, and the studios began to ask for a % of the revenues. This likely started with a “percentage-rake” type discussion, but then evolved into a simple $/user discussion (just like the cable business). Hollywood wanted a price/month/user.

This is the point where Netflix tried to argue that you should only count users that actually connect digitally and actually watch a film. While they originally offered digital streaming bundled with DVD rental, many of the rural customers likely never actually “connect” to the digital product. This argument may have worked for a while, but eventually Hollywood said, “No way. Here is how it is going to work. You will pay us a $/user/month for anyone that has the ‘right’ to connect to our content – regardless of whether they view it or not.” This was the term that changed Netflix pricing.

It does sound bizarre at first blush, but I think it makes a certain amount of sense when you think about substitution effects, and the real reason people choose to own movies rather than rent them.

The simplest answer might be that it’s a straightforward function of how many times you expect to watch a movie. If the price of purchase is lower than the number of expected viewings multiplied by the rental cost, it will be cheaper to buy. 

Except I don’t think that adequately captures why people buy movies. I have a reasonably large DVD and BluRay collection—somewhere in the ballpark of 100 movies and TV seasons. There’s a handful I never seem to get sick of—The Big Lebowski, The Dark Knight, Brazil, episodes of Firefly—and maybe 20 all told that I’ve watched (or am likely to watch) five or more times, which I’d guess is the average rent/purchase break-even point. If that were the only consideration, the other 80 might seem like irrational purchases. Quality is another factor—a BluRay still looks and sounds noticeably better than a streamed movie on a big screen with good speakers. But that’s not all there is to it either.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of purchase over rental is having ready access to a collection. That is, if I’m lounging around with my girlfriend on a rainy Sunday evening, and decide we want to watch a movie right then, we have a pool of 100 movies to choose from without either of us having to truck out to a store or rental kiosk. Maybe we’ll never get around to watching Apocalypse Now or Repulsion five times, but the point is that we could watch them anytime. 

Netflix streaming changes the calculus by giving you a huge pool of instantly-available movies without requiring you to own a large collection. For the 20 or 30 favorite movies, I might want to own them anyway, especially if they’re not necessarily going to be perpetually available to stream. But the “long tail” of my collection consists of a lot of movies that I own because I want to have the option of watching something pretty good in that genre anytime, not necessarily that particular movie. With Netflix available, I’m more likely to buy the 30 percent of favorites, and then assume they’ll have something acceptable streaming when we want to watch something new. There’s no need for a big collection of physical discs.

Now it’s easy to imagine the studios initially seeing streaming as primarily displacing rentals. That’s pure gravy for them, because the First Sale Doctrine means they’re not making any revenue from rentals after the initial purchase. Then—whoops!—they realize it’s actually displacing sales, because ready access to a pool of movies is actually a pretty good substitute for ownership. So it’s not so mysterious that they might suddenly want a fee based on the total number of subscribers with access to a streaming film. Because some percentage of those, even if they don’t end up watching a particular movie more than once or twice, will think: “I could buy it, but why bother if I can just stream it whenever I feel like seeing it? Even if that one movie gets pulled from streaming, there will be plenty of others about as good to choose from.” The mistake—perhaps natural for folks who spend their time making and marketing individual films—was not seeing that consumers often aren’t so much interested in watching some particular movie as they are in the ability to watch something. Just as many people spend hours “watching TV” rather than watching any particular show, people often just want to “watch a movie”—de dicto, rather than de re, as the philosophers say—or rather have the option to watch any one of a number of movies, more than they want to see any particular one.

Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves.
Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.

Now, I don’t know a lot of “best friends” who share bedrooms in an apartment that size, but fine, let’s roll with that part. What I want to note is that the (presumably somewhat tongue-in-cheek) observation that puppets “do not have a sexual orientation” is just manifestly false. Lots of the puppets on Sesame Street are portrayed as having a “sexual orientation,” insofar as they’re shown in romantic couples.

Oscar has his girlfriend Grundgetta. The Count has been involved with a series of different Countesses. The Twiddlebugs are your standard nuclear family. And of course, there are no shortage of one-off songs and sketches centered on families or unmarried couples. Muppet squirrel girl groups sing about their boyfriends. The human characters Gordon and Susan were married from the outset (and later adopted a child), while Maria and Luis famously got married on the show.

What all of these have in common is that they’re heterosexual couples. Because it’s regarded as the default, that “sexual orientation” is invisible. But, of course, it’s still there—and nobody imagines that simply depicting all these straight couples and families somehow counts as injecting inappropriate “adult” or sexualized material into a children’s show.

What Sesame Street gives us, then, is a picture of reality (in New York, of all places) where loving coupled relationships are exclusively presented as heterosexual. That exclusion is a choice. And the implicit message sent by that choice is that the very existence of same-sex couples is, like swearing or violent street crime, an aspect of urban reality that’s inappropriate for children to be exposed to, unlike all the normal, unremarkable heterosexual couplings depicted on the show.

That omission is not neutral. The refusal to acknowledge the existence of same-sex relationships on a show that otherwise routinely celebrates family is, in itself, a message and a value judgment. It relegates them to the category of shameful or unpleasant topics that are not to be mentioned in front of the children. Obviously, this cannot keep children from noticing that Uncle Ron and Uncle Pete live together, or that Heather from kindergarten has two mommies. But they will surely notice, at least subliminally, that those relationships never seem to make their way into the idealized world of Sesame Street—where the air is sweet, and evidently the sun chases away the gays along with the clouds.

That doesn’t mean Bert and Ernie, or any other particular pair of Muppets, need to have a coming out party. [And to clarify: Having been depicted as best friends for so long, it would probably be a mistake to retcon them as gay.]  It does mean that the makers of kids shows should probably think harder about what message they’re sending when they embed in their scripts a double standard about what types of affectionate relationships are “appropriate” for children to see.

Update: Doug Mataconis articulates what I think is the natural reaction to this kind of argument, which is that “the mission of Sesame Street doesn’t really have much to do teaching children about sexuality at any level.” Whether it’s the “mission” or not, however, that’s what it does. It’s just that when it teaches us about heterosexuality, the teaching is invisible.

As long as human relationships are depicted, though, something is being modeled and taught. We’re learning something about sexuality when Telly contemplates the possibility that Bob and Linda (who, incidentally, was for a long time the most prominent deaf character on television) will get married and have babies. We’re learning something about the nature of family when Herry Monster and his relations sing about the physical features he has inherited from each of them, or when a family of Anything Muppets sort themselves by age and gender. Not teaching about “sexuality” in the broadest sense is just not an option as long as recognizably human couples and families are shown with any regularity.

That doesn’t mean there needs to be overt discussion of sexuality, any more than the presence of black characters requires an explanation of the horrific conditions under which African slaves were transported to the new world, or how their ancestors won civic equality decades later. It just means that having a cast with human characters of multiple races is a choice, even if “race” is never discussed, and a choice that implicitly “teaches” something different from a show where non-white faces are never glimpsed, or where characters of different races are present, but never interact (even if, again, this fact is never mentioned). If the show had nothing but Muppets, of course, the question wouldn’t arise at all. But if, for 40 years, every human adult or child face on the show were white, we would not be much impressed with the defense: “Well, it is not Sesame Street’s mission to teach kids about race relations.” If the ideal community represented by Sesame Street were 100% Anglo-Saxon in a country that’s about 64% non-Hispanic white, the complete absence of race relations would be teaching kids something about race relations. That’s one reason Sesame Street has always maintained a diverse human cast—and taught kids something precisely by showing all these friendly neighbors who don’t ever have to bring up the topic of race.

Update II: From the comments:

I’m a straight, 42 year old, at home father of a 4 year old girl. She happens to have 2 loving aunts that have been in a committed relationship for over 10 years.
Watching Sesame Street a few months ago she actually asked me why there is “nobody who look like aunt Erin and aunt Sara”.

The film follows two protagonists: One is a recent recruit to an elite antiterrorism unit (think 24), the other has just stumbled upon (and effectively, if grudgingly, joined) an underground resistance movement that is fighting against what they believe to be an alien invasion conspiracy (think V or They Live). The alternating scenes are shot in different styles, and genuinely hew to the different conventions of gritty-realistic-thriller and mindbender-scifi.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the terrorist group sought by protagonist A is the resistance group joined by protagonist B. While A is given to understand that the group is planning to release a lethal biological weapon that will kill millions, B believes that it will be harmless to humans, but render the environment toxic to the aliens, who are on the verge of implementing their genocidal takeover plan.

As the story moves back and forth between the two protagonists, evidence that seems to confirm one character’s view (spectacular alien technology, and even a real-live alien) is debunked in a later scene (cinema-grade special effects with a dose of psychedelics employed by a sinister cult to gull its members, the antiterror chief explains), and then de-debunked again (a clever hoax by the aliens to ensure none who discover their plan will be believed). By the time of the grand denouement, the audience should be thoroughly confused as to who is the dupe—though it should be clear that each believes himself to be the hero.

At the climax, protagonist B agrees to act as a decoy while he sends off another member of the resistance group/cult to activate the dispersal device that will release the biological agent. He is, of course, apprehended by protagonist A, who attempts to extract the location of the device by a series of increasingly desperate threats and physical assaults. (But couldn’t he lie? Well, fine: He needs to speak the code phrase to remotely deactivate the device, which makes confirmation instantaneous.) Though horrified at each step, A insists he will not let millions die because he was too squeamish. Protagonist B is, of course, in terrible agony at this point, but “knows” everyone on earth will face a still grimmer fate if the aliens aren’t stopped.

Realizing he can’t do much to step up the physical pain without causing B to lose consciousness (which makes it less likely the information will be obtained in time), A finally has B’s young children brought in and—though clearly nauseated by what he’s been forced to resort to—begins threatening them in B’s presence. Because they are too young to be persuaded to act convincingly, he ultimately has to begin harming them. Unfortunately, because B at this point knows A to be somewhat honorable, ruses will not be effective: B must see some kind of non-trivial harm really inflicted in order to believe that A is truly capable of it.

As it seems that A is on the verge of dealing a horrific, fatal injury to one of the children, a clearly broken B finally agrees to cough up the information. Fade to black.

Suppose that, back in the 70s, DARPA had developed two revolutionary networks. In addition to the precursor to the Internet we all know and love, they had also developed a teleportation network enabling small, inorganic objects to be instantly transmitted via miniature wormholes from any point on the network to any other point. The effect can even be time-limited, so that objects will snap back to their original locations after a predetermined number of minutes, hours, or days has elapsed.

Among the many areas of life transformed by this technology is the entertainment industry. People quickly realize how inefficient it is that all our homes are packed with books, DVDs, and CDs that we’re legally entitled to be reading, viewing, or listening to as often as we like—but in practice only really make use of for an infinitesimal fraction of the time we own them. 

Libraries and video rental stores already take advantage of the fact that most people are happy to read a particular book or movie once, then let someone else enjoy it. But the teleportation network, combined with the power of the Internet, suddenly allows millions of individuals to make their personal copies of these works available for instantaneous loan to others. Every book, movie, or album you’re not currently using, or just about to, is listed publicly as available for borrowing. (Maybe borrowers feed their credit cards into the system, to ensure that you’ll be bought an immediate replacement if your copy should be damaged while on loan.) The massive waste of letting a book or DVD sit unused on a shelf for months or years for every few hours it’s actively enjoyed is suddenly eliminated—to the delight of everyone but the companies in the business of selling those books and movies.

Since the system doesn’t involve copying, but only the transfer of physical objects, it is plainly legal under the First Sale Doctrine: No copyright is even arguably infringed at any point in the process. Because it’s so obviously legal, nearly everyone participates in the system. Possibly some small fee is paid into the system by those who borrow vastly more than they loan out, and transferred to those who do the most loaning. Over time, this evolves, so that when a work is in high demand but short supply, people who don’t want to wait can pool small amounts of money to buy a shared copy (to be resold once everyone’s read/heard/seen it as much as they care to). 

This proves understandably vexing to copyright owners, who find that many fewer copies of each book, DVD, and CD are sold once large numbers of potential buyers are able to get all the satisfaction they wanted from a single, widely-shared copy. The MPAA and RIAA launch a major public relations campaign attempting to persuade people that “lending is theft,” which prompts widespread public ridicule and is, predictably, an enormous flop. Reluctantly, creative industries begin looking for new business models that will allow them to thrive in the changed technological context, while policy makers contemplate whether alternative incentive mechanisms are needed to ensure that creative works continue to be produced. 

Obviously, this fanciful scenario isn’t exactly analogous to unauthorized file sharing, which allows many different downloaders to simultaneously use each particular work—though it’s not clear how great a practical difference this would make, given that each copy still sits fallow most of the time it’s in any individual’s possession. It’s actually not far off at all from a “cloud storage” model we could see emerge over the next few years, however, provided each privately-purchased song, movie, or book can only be used or accessed by one device at a time. (Access might be allowed only to devices incapable of making a permanent copy—though nothing physically prevents me from making a personal copy of a book or CD I have borrowed from a friend.) Henry Farrell points out that it’s also almost exactly the model Zediva is employing for remote DVD rentals (in contrast with the more familiar Netflix streaming).

A situation like the one I’ve imagined might be considered a major policy problem, and it might not.It might have less effect on sales than BitTorrent does in our world, and it might plausibly have more because of higher rates of adoption. But if it were a policy problem, then the problem would have nothing at all to do with the moral properties of “illicit copying,” nor would jeremiads against “theft” from artists be relevant, or likely to be regarded as anything but risible. 

The policy problem would just be this: New technology had multiplied the number of people who were able to enjoy each copy of a work—in itself an obvious and enormous benefit—reducing the number of people prepared to buy individual copies of those works, and calling into question whether the traditional business model predicated on mass individualized sales would continue to supply enough revenue to incentivize production of (enough) new works. Here is a solution no sane person would propose to this problem, if it were a real problem: Prohibit people from using the teleportation network to loan books and movies to their friends, and monitor it to ensure they did not do so.

Some readers, of course, are probably bouncing in their chairs with eagerness to interrupt that my thought experiment is quite irrelevant: In our world, people are shamelessly copying rather than loaning works. True enough. But there’s nothing morally special about copying. It’s a method we regulated to solve an incentive problem, because given the available technology in 1909—when statutes first sought to control “copying” rather than “publication” and “sale”—that was the most efficient point at which to regulate in order to solve that problem. If technology had evolved in order to make mass loaning, rather than copying, instantaneous and frictionless and easy, the underlying problem wouldn’t be any different. Any moral baggage “copying” has picked up is a pure artifact of the chance fact that “copying” is what it seemed to make sense to restrict given early 20th century tech.

So here’s one way to think a little more rationally about copyright policy: Pretend that instead of BitTorrent, we’d invented the Teleporter Library. Then think about what business or policy solutions would make sense in response. It’s a neat way of clearing from consideration a lot of charged rhetoric about “stealing music” that should have been irrelevant all along.

Addendum: Taking the Teleporter Library notion seriously on its own terms, and not just as a kind of allegory about IP, it’s worth noting that in some ways, it would put many consumer goods suppliers in the position our content industry is currently in. Maybe it would continue to make sense for everyone to just continue to own (say) their own screwdrivers and such. But there are a lot of things we only need (at most) a few hours of the day, or even a few days of the year. Some of these things we might nevertheless have various reasons for wanting to own (I don’t want to hook up and then disconnect a dishwasher every time I run it, even if it’s only every other day) but many would more sensibly be shared. Just glancing around my apartment, things I would probably “subscribe to” rather than own in a world of nearly-free teleportation include: Luggage, a printer, a bicycle, toaster, blender, vacuum cleaner, television set, Playstation (and Rock Band controllers)… hell, even my sofa, reading chair, and coffee table don’t really get used more than a few hours a day—and some days not at all… though in the latter cases the convenience of just flopping into them after a long day without waiting even a short time for a “download” might weigh in favor of owning. I can imagine you might see an increase in investment in innovation as each Teleportation Library competed to distinguish its catalog of subscription appliances—and maybe appeal to the broad group of people who’d pay a few extra bucks to have a fancy espresso machine for their dinner party, even though they’d never dream of buying one.

So, for instance, maybe I’m having a beer with a couple neighbors on my porch, a bunch of other folks are across town where a BBQ I plan to swing by later is getting into gear, and another friend is stuck in a hotel room in the Midwest on a reporting trip and doesn’t want to totally miss out. Most of us are probably talking to our co-located people, but the experience is shared without anyone having to retreat from socialization to tap at their phones. If I want to know when a critical mass of folks I know have arrived at the BBQ, there’s no need to keep checking Twitter, and no need for them to go out of their way to announce their arrival—I just notice out of the corner of my eye that folks are there and, hey, maybe it’s time to hop a bus over. Our friend in the hotel can do his work, but also perhaps welcome the occasional distraction as a friend walk by the Stargate and checks in. Could be a short-lived fad, but I think it could also be as socially normal, in the relatively near future, to have social gatherings connected by virtual windows as it is to text friends about what you’re doing.

(2) The feature most immediately likely to be useful is huddle, which facilitates more conventional text/IM style communication with a select group in a kind of mobile-friendly chat room—handy when you’re trying to coordinate plans with a dozen people.

I note though, that there may be some interesting side effects of integrating virtual social networks more closely into actual socialization. With social circles—as opposed to Circles—the boundaries are fuzzy and ad-hoc. Even among a somewhat well-defined group of friends, it’s always somewhat a matter of happenstance which particular subsets of people end up communicating and making plans on any given day. A person may gradually drift out of touch with once circle and into another in a gradual and almost imperceptible way, ideally with no hard feelings on either side.

Making it technologically easy to communicate with groups means that, for activities involving more than a relative handful of people, that technology becomes more likely to be the default mechanism of interaction. Individuals will define their own Circles, but there will be a tendency toward convergence. But these aren’t fuzzy-bordered circles, they’re Circles in which membership is really an either-or. I wonder if we won’t find ourselves feeling the need to make uncomfortably explicit, conscious decisions about who’s in the “folks I meet for drinks after work” or “always invited to parties” group—which seems rather more freighted than the question of who happened to get asked to come out for a specific round of drinks or a particular party.. People, of course, don’t see which circles anyone else has included them in, but to the extent they’re the basis of actual group interaction, it should be readily apparent to everyone quickly enough who is and isn’t part of the conversation. I’m guessing this sets up some potential awkwardness as people figure out how to navigate all that.

(3) Finally, as Mike Masnick observes, some people are already worrying about a potential privacy “loophole” in G+: Items shared with one “circle” can, by default, easily be RE-shared by the members of that circle. I agree with Mike that it’s weird to treat this as some kind of disturbing privacy violation on Google’s part: After all, in general, everything we share with one set of friends might be shared by them with others. Something you say in conversation might be repeated; a photo you e-mail can be forwarded. Normally, the solution is to ensure that your friends know when you don’t want a specific bit of informatoin shouted to the four winds.

That said, a lot of privacy has more to do with ease of information sharing than whether it’spossible, and more to do with the clarity of norms than explicit prohibitions. Someone could copy the contents of a private e-mail (or, by hand, the contents of a private letter) and forward it to hundreds of friends. But that would be both effortful and rude. If I share a photo with my “Friends” circle, I realize they could save and reupload it if there’s not sharing functionality built in… but they’d have to be big jerks (and ergo probably not “Friends”) to make the effort to do so, in particular if I’ve signaled via my settings that I don’t expect these pictures to be more widely circulated.

It’s not a question of Google “violating my privacy,” which is the unhelpful frame of stories about social networks much of the time. But what Google can do is facilitate social signalling about the information norms we expect friends, peers, and colleagues to respect. On most Twitter clients, for instance, while you can always copy-and-paste text into a retweet, the one-click retweet button is inactive for tweets from locked accounts. Obviously, that doesn’t literally prevent anyone from sharing a message on a private feed—it just means it’s hard to do it thoughtlessly, and the very fact that you’ve got to take the unusual extra step of doing it manually reminds you that, hey, your friend doesn’t actually expect this stuff to be more widely distributed. Increasingly, I think, having “good privacy practices” as a social networking site isn’t going to be so much about what the site does with your information (important as that is), or even about the literal control they give you—since “control” over information in any really strong sense is always pretty chimerical—but how fluidly and organically they allow us to establish norms and articulate expectations about how our peers will use the information they have access to.

• Beach House, “Teen Dream”
• Warpaint, “The Fool”
• Janelle Monae, “The ArchAndroid”
• Best Coast, “Crazy For You”
• Steve Reich, “Double Sextet”
• Hume, “Penumbra”
• Swans, “My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky”
• Sufjan Stevens, “The Age of Adz”
• New Pornographers, “Together”
• Girl Talk, “All Day”

Honorable Mention: Broken Bells, “Broken Bells”

Incidentally, the album links (except for the Girl Talk, which is free) go to Amazon’s MP3 downloads, which I now notice (too late!) are in most cases substantially cheaper than the iTunes price. Scanning the lists that seemed close to mine, I apparently need to pick up Allo Darlin’s debut & the new Superchunk.