The Pirates' Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism
by Matt Mason, available for download at
http://thepiratesdilemma.com/download-the-bookThis book was a pure delight to my little media studies soul, and I give it five stars. If you are interested in cyberculture, remix media, and the subversive uses of technology, you should read this book. If you purchase it through the author's Web site, he's only asking $5 for an accessible PDF version (I think this requires PayPal), but you can also find it on Fictionwise, granted at a higher price.
I originally read about this book on the TeleRead blog, which described it as "an interesting tour through the disruptive effects youth culture has had on society through the last few decades..." The big surprise for me was that Matt Mason begins his story with a discussion of punk music which he connects to the DIY movement. Later chapters discuss connections between such topics as the hippie counterculture and computers, hiphop music and street fashion, graffiti and virul marketing, even disco and remix culture. You might think that some of these connections sound pretty unlikely, but Mason knows his stuff, and he includes hundreds of links to online articles to verify his sources. In addition, he has done a lot of reading from academia, although he makes the process pretty painless.
Another source for Mason's text is his work as a music journalist, and many of the quotes and comments which pepper the book were originally from interviews Mason himself conducted with the musicians. In addition to these conversations with the musicians, Mason includes interview material from street artists, pirate radio DJs, club MCs, and more.
A lot of these technologies and media have been around for a decade or two now, and yet a lot of the mainstream remains ignorant about how the tech works or the motivations the artists and fans have for adopting these subversive modes of creating and sharing media. What's more incredible is that a lot of the people who are making the laws regarding media technologies are still ignorant of what precisely they are creating laws for.
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In the United States in March 2007, Congressman Mike Doyle
made a speech defending remix culture in the House, schooling his fellow
politicians on the new rules of twenty-first-century creativity. He
said at a hearing discussing the future of music:
I hope that everyone involved will take a step back and ask themselves
if mash-ups and mixtapes are really different or if it’s the
same as Paul McCartney admitting that he nicked the Chuck Berry
bass-riff and used it on the Beatles’ hit “I Saw Her Standing
There.”
Maybe it is . . . or maybe mixtapes are a powerful tool. And
maybe mash-ups are transformative new art that expands the
consumers’ experience and doesn’t compete with what an artist
has made available on iTunes or at the CD store. And I don’t
think Sir Paul asked for permission to borrow that bass line, but
every time I listen to that song, I’m a little better off for him having
done so.
The speech was inspiring. It seems the powers that be are beginning
to get to grips with the Pirate’s Dilemma. But to illustrate how much
work needs to be done before politicians everywhere understand how
valuable the remix can be, consider the opening remarks of congressman
John Shimkus of Illinois who spoke after Mr. Doyle. He said:
“Hey, Mr. Chairman, I was just trying to figure out half of the words
that Mike Doyle just mentioned. I am clueless.”
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