Program or Be Programmed

by Douglas Rushkoff

  This is the liability of “processing” together. We are living in an age when thinking itself is no longer a personal activity but a collective one. We are immersed in media and swimming in the ideas of other people all the time. We do not come up with our thoughts by ourselves anymore, so it’s awfully hard to keep them to ourselves once we share them. Many young people I’ve encountered see this rather terrifying loss of privacy and agency over our data as part of a learning curve. They see the human species evolving toward a more collective awareness, and the net’s openness as a trial run for a biological reality where we all know each other’s thoughts through telepathy.

  Whether or not we are heading for shared consciousness, this “learning curve” should still be in effect. In short, we need to develop the manners and ethics that make living and working together under these conditions pleasant and productive for everyone.

  In the digital realm, with just a bit of effort, we can see, take, and replicate anything that anybody does. There is no such thing as unbreakable copy protection. If a CD or DVD can be played, it can be copied in one way or another (even if it means losing one “generation” of digital fidelity). But the fact that we can copy and distribute anything that anybody does, does not make it right. Most of us could pretty easily break into a neighbor’s house by shattering a single pane of glass and take what we want with little risk of getting caught. Or we could just look at their personal papers, review their tax filings and bank statements, and maybe check to see what form of birth control they use.

  What stops us is not law enforcement, but the social contract. On some level, through parental training or simple logic, we understand that a world where people broke into one another’s homes wouldn’t be a nice place to live. We respect the concepts of ownership and privacy because we want others to do the same. Restraint is just part of being members of a civilized society.

  These same social norms do not yet apply to the net, where sharing, borrowing, stealing, and repurposing are all rather mashed up themselves. That’s why we tend to apply the otherwise refreshing ethos of openness so universally and, ultimately, inappropriately. Having lived under a tightly controlled mediaspace for so long, its no wonder we experience our digital freedoms this way. The music and film industries have made few friends with their draconian “digital rights management” (DRM) tools and enforcement policies. When we purchase and download certain music and movie files, we also end up installing a program from the publisher that monitors how we use the file—mainly to make sure we don’t give it to anyone else. But none of us wants to have spyware on our computers, even if it’s only to police the illegal sharing of files. It feels like an invasion. Besides, if we have bought a piece of music, shouldn’t we be allowed to share it with our friends and family? Or even just copy it to our many listening devices?

  In a sense, these DRM strategies constitute a kind of robbery themselves. In order to work, these secretly planted programs must actually utilize some of the capacity of our computer’s processors. They steal cycles and memory from our machines, carrying out tasks on behalf of companies without our consent. That’s stealing, too.

  The desperate efforts of big business to protect its copyrights and those of its writers and artists—combined with the simplifying bias of the net—only polarizes the landscape further. Breaking copyright to steal and share music or movies becomes understood as the action of a legitimate openness movement, dedicated to access and equality for everyone. Very specific ideas about collaboration, such as open source development and Creative Commons licensing, are equated with a free-for-all revolution of openness. Down with the corporations, up with the people.

  Following the logic of this side of the net wars, everything anybody does must be posted online, for free, with comments on. Denying the free distribution of everything prevents the hive from having a crack at it, improving it, taking it apart and putting it back together. If you don’t render your work unto the hive mind, then you are seen to be denying society its right to work with and repurpose your creations. Just as smart phone purchasers want the right to tinker with the software on their devices, media consumers want the right to remix and re-release the content they view. Charging money for access or, worse, asking people not to give away or change your work is attacked as selfish disregard for the foundations of open networks and open society.

  What this argument misses is that the very same kinds of companies are making the same money off text, music, and movies—simply by different means. Value is still being extracted from everyone who creates content that ends up freely viewable online—whether it’s me writing this book or a blogger writing posts. It’s simply not being passed down anymore. The search engine company still profits off the ads accompanying every search for a text. Likewise, every “free” video by an amateur requires that amateur to buy a camera, a video-capable laptop, editing software, and a broadband connection through which to upload the completed piece onto a conglomerate-owned video server, along with most of its rights.

  Value is still being extracted from the work—it’s just being taken from a different place in the production cycle, and not passed down to the creators themselves. Those of us who do create for a living are told the free labor will garner us exposure necessary to get paid for something else we do—like talks or television. Of course, the people hiring us to do those appearances believe they should get us for free as well, because our live performances will help publicize our books and movies. And so it goes, all the while being characterized as the new openness of a digital society, when in fact we are less open to one another than we are to exploitation from the usual suspects at the top of the traditional food chain.

  Worst of all, those of us in a position to say something about any of this are labeled elitists or Luddites—as if we are the ones attempting to repress the natural evolution of culture. Rather, it’s the good old spectacle working its magic through a now-decentralized mediaspace. The results—ignorance, anger, and anti-elitism—are the same.

  By confronting the biases of digital media head-on, however, we can come to terms with the seeming paradox of ownership in a digital mediaspace. On the simplest level, the problem here is that the laws we developed to protect things used to deal with real stuff. Real stuff is in limited supply. Its scarcity demands protection. Digital content, because it can be copied for free, is in infinite supply. When I steal a pair of shoes from a cobbler, his investment of time and materials have been robbed as well. When I illegally copy a song from an album, I haven’t cost the musician anything; at least I haven’t cost him anything more than if I had never listened to the song in the first place. He loses the opportunity cost of a new customer, but I haven’t actually robbed him of the thing he made. I just copied it. Besides, why should I give him scarce money for something that can be copied infinitely for free?

  The answer, of course, is that I should be paying the musician for his time and energy making the music that I am enjoying. It’s a cost that should be shared by all of us who listen to it, and shared equally. This notion is alien to us. Millions of people use Wikipedia on a daily basis for their work and research, a privilege gifted to them by thousands of writers and editors contributing their time for free. Traffic is huge, but so few think to pay for it that the nonprofit foundation funding Wikipedia can barely meet the costs of maintaining its servers. The openness of the net, and the ease with which we can make use of its resources for free, makes the notion of joining the paying minority look too much like the sucker’s bet in a bad game-theory scenario. But that game is rigged.

  The real problem is that while our digital mediaspace is biased toward a shared cost structure, our currency system is not. We are attempting to operate a twenty-first-century digital economy on a thirteenth-century, printing-press-based operating system. It doesn’t work. As we have already seen, the centralized currency system we still use today was developed by a waning aristocracy looking to stifle peer-to-peer economic growth and install a sys
tem of indebtedness. It is a printing-press-era strategy, in which a scarce currency loaned into existence from a central source generates competition between people for the precious jobs and goods of artificial monopolies.

  Meanwhile, we now have access to a decentralizing technology that permits the creation of value from the periphery as well as the exchange of value in a peer-to-peer fashion. Instead of buying from and selling to one another through highly centralized corporations, we now have the technology required to buy from and sell to one another directly. Beyond using eBay or the less corporate Etsy or Craigslist to make those connections and conduct transactions, however, we also have the means to transcend traditional currency.

  Local currencies, made illegal to make way for centralized currency during the Renaissance, have already regained widespread acceptance following the banking crisis of 2008. Instead of borrowing this money from a bank, users earn it into existence by making goods and performing services for other people in the same community.[6] Peer-to-peer currencies are based in the abundance of production, rather than the scarcity of lending. This makes them biased, as is the net, toward transaction and exchange rather than hoarding for interest.

  Now that digital technologies offer us identity confirmation, secure transactions, and distributed networks, we have the ability to operate local-style currencies on a global scale. Net-based, or “e-currencies,” have already been experimented with successfully in gaming environments, and are now under development around the world for more practical applications across great distances.

  This is not as far-fetched a concept as it may appear. Even former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan sees private electronic currencies as a promising solution to the fiscal challenges posed by the information age.[7] Instead of buying the things other people make through centralized banks and credit card companies, peer-to-peer currencies allow for the direct transfer of value from one person on the periphery to another. Moreover, instead of being biased toward large corporations that can borrow money less expensively than small companies and individuals, e-currencies can be biased toward the people creating the actual value.

  Whether or not we are witnessing a wholesale change in the way money is created and exchanged has yet to be seen. Given the breadth and depth of change in other arenas as we move from an analog to a digital society, however, an upgrade of our currency’s operating system seems within reason. The one we have been using for the past seven centuries, and the banks behind it, appear to be having a hard time keeping up. Meanwhile, if people have the opportunity to directly fund the artists, writers, and other workers from whom they buy digital goods, they might feel more inclined to pay for what they use than they do when such items are supplied by impersonal corporations.

  Until that time, however, we are best governed not by what we can get away with, but how we want to be treated by others. The people on the other side of the screen spent time and energy on the things we read and watch. When we insist on consuming it for free, we are pushing them toward something much closer to the broadcast television model, where ads fund everything. We already know what that does for the quality of news and entertainment. Yet this is precisely the model that the ad-based hosts and search engines are pushing for. By encouraging us to devalue and deprofessionalize our work, these companies guarantee a mediaspace where only they get paid. They devalue the potential of the network itself to create value in new ways. It’s just like free TV, except the writers and actors don’t receive any income. Instead, they just pay for the equipment to create and for access to the servers they don’t own.

  We accept this model only because we don’t know enough about how these systems work to make decisions about them intelligently. Creative Commons[8] —an alternative to copyright developed by Stanford Law professor Larry Lessig—is not a free-for-all but a social contract through which content creators can declare under what conditions someone else may use and repurpose their work: in whole, in parts, or not at all. It amounts to a statement made by an author and attached to her work. While one of these statements may ultimately be legally enforceable, it is a system depending not on the courts but on the culture. To function, the community must agree to abide by its standards.

  Likewise, open source is not an invitation to take whatever you want, whenever you want it, no matter who created it or how much it cost to produce. It is a working relationship among programmers to develop software together and even capture some of the value they create. Instead of maintaining a competitive advantage by keeping their code closed and encrypted, developers keep their code open and visible for others to improve upon it. Instead of working in competing silos, programmers build off one another’s innovations. Participation is dependent on knowing both the programming code necessary to make valuable additions and the social codes necessary to do it in ways that respect the contributions of others.

  Digital society may always be biased toward sharing, but a real understanding of the codes through which it has been built makes stealing a nonstarter.

  * * *

  6. See the LETSystems home page at http://www.gmlets.u-net.com/ for some simple explanations of how this works. Or see the currency chapter in my own Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take it Back (New York: Random House, 2009).

  7. See Alan Greenspan, “Fostering Financial Innovation: The Role of Government” in The Future of Money in the Information Age (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1997). Or watch any of Greenspan’s later testimonies to Congress.

  8. See CreativeCommons.org for more detailed descriptions of these choices for publication without traditional copyright.

  X. PURPOSE

  Program or Be Programmed

  Digital technology is programmed. This makes it biased toward those with the capacity to write the code. In a digital age, we must learn how to make the software, or risk becoming the software. It is not too difficult or too late to learn the code behind the things we use—or at least to understand that there is code behind their interfaces. Otherwise, we are at the mercy of those who do the programming, the people paying them, or even the technology itself.

  One of the US Air Force generals charged with building and protecting the Global Information Grid has a problem: recruitment. As the man in charge of many of the Air Force’s coolest computer toys, he has no problem attracting kids who want to fly drones, shoot lasers from satellites, or steer missiles into Persian Gulf terrorist camps from the safety of Shreveport. They’re lining up for those assignments. No, the general’s challenge is finding kids capable of programming these weapons systems—or even having the education, inclination, and mental discipline required to begin learning programming from scratch.

  Raised on commercial video games that were themselves originally based on combat simulation technologies, these recruits have enviable reflexes and hand-eye coordination. They are terrific virtual pilots. Problem is, without an influx of new programmers capable of maintaining the code and fixing bugs—much less upgrading and innovating new technologies—the general cannot keep his operation at mission readiness. His last resort has been to give lectures at education conferences in which he pleads with high schools to put programming into their curriculums.

  That’s right: America, the country that once put men on the moon, is now falling behind most developed and many developing nations in computer education. We do not teach programming in most public schools. Instead of teaching programming, most schools with computer literacy curriculums teach programs. Kids learn how to use popular spreadsheet, word processing, and browsing software so that they can operate effectively in the high-tech workplace. These basic skills may make them more employable for the entry-level cubicle jobs of today, but they will not help them adapt to the technologies of tomorrow.

  Their bigger problem is that their entire orientation to computing will be from the perspective of users. When a kid is taught a piece of software as a subject, she’ll tend to think of it like any other thing she has to learn.
Success means learning how to behave in the way the program needs her to. Digital technology becomes the immutable thing, while the student is the movable part, conforming to the needs of the program in order to get a good grade on the test.

  Meanwhile, kids in other countries—from China to Iran—aren’t wasting their time learning how to use off-the-shelf commercial software packages. They are finding out how computers work. They learn computer languages, they write software and, yes, some of them are even taught the cryptography and other skills they need to breach Western cyber-security measures. According to the Air Force general, it’s just a matter of a generation before they’ve surpassed us.

  While military superiority may not be everyone’s foremost goal, it can serve as a good indicator of our general competitiveness culturally and economically with the rest of the world. As we lose the ability to program the world’s computers, we lose the world’s computing business as well. This may not be a big deal to high-tech conglomerates who can as easily source their programming from New Delhi as New Hampshire. But it should be a big deal to us.

  Instead, we see actual coding as some boring chore, a working-class skill like bricklaying, which may as well be outsourced to some poor nation while our kids play and even design video games. We look at developing the plots and characters for a game as the interesting part, and the programming as the rote task better offloaded to people somewhere else. We lose sight of the fact that the programming—the code itself—is the place from which the most significant innovations emerge.

  Okay, you say, so why don’t we just make sure there are a few students interested in this highly specialized area of coding so that we can keep up militarily and economically with everyone else? Just because a few of us need to know how to program, surely that doesn’t mean we all need to know programming, does it? We all know how to drive our cars, yet few of us know how our automobiles actually work, right?