Very intimidating audience.
Intelligent.
Illegal.
I was very curious when I first got the invitation, the call from David, and I checked out on
the internet and thought, hmm, hackers.
Never studied hacking.
I'm not going to talk to you about hacking or hacker culture today.
I'm not going to talk to you about you.
I'm going to talk to you about a different type of hacking.
Hacking of meaning.
Digital piracy in the traditional sense looks at things, even though they're digital things,
still things.
My book's sort of focused, I have a little bit to say about digital piracy, a little
chapter in there.
This speech is not about my book.
Some ideas from my book.
I don't want to put the emphasis there, but I'm going to draw some of that out.
To draw a parallel, not a parallel, but to extend the idea of hacking from its, what
I call just off the top of my head, the first generation hackers that were attacking the
code directly to a second generation doesn't mean priority or better, but this new phase
that we see that's often associated with culture jamming where we begin to attack meaning as
private property and the implications of that.
I'm going to surf through a number of ideas, maybe in a McClough-esque fashion, talk a
little bit about myself, what I do, and then I'll give you an example of some of the issues
of what I'm talking about through a brief exploration of Barbie.
I don't collect Barbie dolls.
I have one or two.
I enjoy them.
And use Barbie as an example.
I did work on Barbie back in my dissertation days, looking at how Barbie is used on the
internet and how Mattel tries to control the use of Barbie.
And over the years, I just used that, among other things, as a point of measurement to
see how much control corporations have over their intellectual property.
Lawrence Lessig, you might be familiar with this book.
A number of you I've seen nods hitting.
It's very much up your alley.
He wrote a book called The Code.
He's come up with a number since then.
He made quite a bit of fame among the hacker community in the United States as a liberal
lawyer defending freedom of speech rights in conjunction with the Electronic Freedom
Foundation and such as that.
His book, The Code, I'll very briefly make an analogy to my own work, but he made, I
have a lot of disagreement with Lessig.
I think he pushes things a bit too far when he says that Microsoft and America Online,
his prediction was years ago that Microsoft and America Online were going to take over
the code and own it.
The code of the internet, T-C-I-P, the root, as it were.
And America Online is a bit of a joke right now, and Microsoft has trouble acquiring Yahoo.
Not that Microsoft is irrelevant, but that Microsoft does not command and control the
marketplace.
I have an argument against Lessig's argument that the code was about to succumb and the
internet was about to be privatized, and his argument is not trivial.
He makes some very good points that bit by bit the code could be bought up and what is
fundamentally our largest global open systems could be transformed into a private system.
The threat is always real.
You can't be dismissed or trivialized.
But my argument on that matter is just that three forces, the force of law, where we have
rights and law mediates between those rights, the force of competition in the marketplace,
and the force of technology.
You've got the content makers struggling against the consumer equipment makers, iPods and DVDs
and so forth.
One sector of the economy wants consumers to be able to do whatever they want because
that sells technology.
It could be the same company, Sony owning one product that allows us to engage in piracy
and Sony owning the content as well that they're trying to protect.
That means that there is contradiction built into the system of capitalism itself.
So between all of these contradictory forces to...
Down with capitalism.
Down with capitalism.
Up with...
I was going to say something dirty, but...
Up with skirts.
I was just at the...
Speaking of skirts, I was just at...
I was going to wear a skirt today, maybe a good kilt.
Yves Saint-Laurent, my Jesus, you know.
You have to let the metrosexual in you go crazy and go over and check out the Yves Saint-Laurent
exhibit.
Very lovely.
Beautiful city too, Montreal.
I would sell everything I have tomorrow to move here.
I'm an Anglophone.
I regret that.
I went to high school over on Mont Saint-Bruno, Saint-Hilaire side, 1970s.
Anyway.
So Lawrence Lessig tends to overstate the threat from the marketplace.
He was dead wrong on AOL.
AOL is not stock you want to be owning.
Going down, then slowly going, circling the drain, everything.
Let me just...
Where did I put my clock?
I can talk for five minutes.
I can talk for five hours.
I don't want to do that.
Before I go any further, yeah, a little bit of context.
You know, we've got the three newspapers yesterday, the train station I picked up, the Citizen,
the National Post, and the Globe and Mail.
Or as my friend says, the Shit-a-Sin, the National Piss, and the Gropenflail.
And the copyright business was across all of it sort of thing.
And you know that that is American lobby money that's been hard at work to Americanize our
laws.
And the people that will win over that will mostly be the lawyers, everything.
But aside from it, that is more of a nuisance than anything.
Another aspect of my argument in the empire of mind is that law is a very weak force for
protecting consumer, for controlling consumer behavior in a networked digital age.
What the law says and what we actually do are two different things and all you have
to do is try and cross the street in downtown Montreal.
And you see what the law says and what the drivers do.
God bless us, everyone.
Who am I?
Well, you got an idea of that.
I'm going to bring you through some of, some of, acting culture.
This image up there is a bit of artwork that I did just after 9-11.
I had clipped out a Altoid ad.
It was actually part of a Christmas gift for my wife.
It was one year right.
I have a fence that 4,000 of our citizens will kill like that.
I don't like that.
I have to tell you this.
I don't like that.
That's good because if art doesn't offend, it's probably not worth doing.
How do you fuck you for that?
Well, no, the business of art and up yours too, we'll meet later and hug.
The point is that art, one interpretation of art is it's art's job to offend.
Very similar to what preachers used to say.
An old school preacher said years, centuries ago that, not centuries, a couple of centuries
ago, a century and a half ago.
It's the job of the preacher to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.
I'm not here to make you feel comfortable.
That image is not there to make you feel comfortable.
What was Time doing when they put that picture on the cover?
They were selling.
That picture became part of the marketplace, a way to sell.
The event was immediately commoditized.
For all the tragedy, all the tragedy, the very real tragedy, I'm not for them, I'm not
for one side or the other side, that's another matter.
But it immediately became commoditized.
What I did was, you see, when you take two separate images and you combine them together,
you change the relative meanings of both symbols.
Principle in art, principle in culture, sort of thing.
I'm not a specialist in art or anything like that, I just dabble in it.
I'm not from being offensive, and I don't, well, no, I wouldn't say I don't intend to
offend.
The whole point is to stimulate that sort of thing.
Is the image is illegal?
My construction as a piece of art is illegal.
Under art, I have a certain amount of rights.
As we know from mashups and so far, you push that too far and you face the power of the
corporations.
Who will?
The typical legal strategy is whether or not you're legally entitled to do what you will,
we will pursue you with an irrelevant lawsuit because we know that you can't afford to fight
it.
That's a standard corporate tactic in these type of characters.
But we've reached a state in culture, we haven't been here before, in modernity, pushing into
postmodernity.
We came here over the past century, century and a half, primarily the last century, where
art expression can be illegal.
That's very curious and it's symptomatic of this trajectory that I'll speak about briefly
of the increased control over intellectual property.
Two primary forces at work in digital society is like these here, the Americanization of
the global, not just Canada being affected by this process, but they're pushing their
legislation, their agenda upon most western, trying to get China to do this and that, the
other thing, so on.
Increased control.
Obviously, the internet is a trajectory in an opposite direction.
Digital rights management has been another failure in the consumer electronics and music
and so on.
It will continue to be so.
Curious point in culture when we arrive at the moment where we have illegal art.
Very curious indeed and I think quite dangerous.
Who am I?
I'm just going to go through, I'm curious also who you are.
I want to find out, I study, what do I do?
I study new media use.
I'm a cultural theorist.
How people use new media, what they do with it and I do that by observing the world around
me.
Things just simple thing.
I'm going to go all the way here, there was a car load, entire car load of teenagers,
young teenagers on a school trip.
16 of them were using some sort of digital device, entertainment or otherwise device,
digital device, information and entertainment device.
In the car with the adults next door, there was less than half that number.
You see that.
Each younger generation more and more involved in digital technology.
My Facebook site, average number of Facebook friends that people have is 127.
I've got 5 million.
No I don't.
How many have Facebook?
Just curious, hand way up so we can see each other.
Way up there.
Curious, yeah.
It's interesting.
Interesting, interesting.
There are many things, there are big identity statements.
People saying who I am.
Who I am.
What we do, whether it's with fashion or consumption processes or consumption of media,
construction of ourself on the internet is saying who I am.
The trajectory over this past century has been the mass of it.
Turn of the 1800s into the 1900s, sociologists and writers started to talk about the mob
and the crowd and the problem of the crowd.
That developed and developed and developed and we've got more and more mass, massified.
That's created a tension within the individual for the tension we're told through the marketplace
to be an individual.
We want to be an individual.
I don't want that gentleman in the blue shirt to believe what I believe.
I want a diversity of belief.
I don't want everyone to dress like me.
I want a diversity of thoughts, feelings.
The marketplace promises us diversity but it lands us in the contradiction of mass production.
We're still in the high age of mass production.
Customization and all that stuff is largely a red herring.
What we find as we move forward in media culture, our contemporary time, is the use of media
to express ourselves as an individual.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, future, anything there.
I use Friendbook, I made a decision a while ago, a small decision, because I get invitations
from students to join them, be your friend and so on.
I don't use Facebook very much at all.
Nothing against or anything like that.
I decided, no, I'm just going to put on my Facebook the friends that are people that
are my friends and acquaintances, so that over time I can see how my circle of friends
connect to the internet and grow, all sorts of different ways of using it.
My website, I use a rocket theme template, get a little technical here for you.
Jumila, content management system is what I use to build it.
I went from web 1.0, 1997 website and I spent two months learning the Jumila and all this.
I'm not a CSS cascading style sheet hacker or anything like that.
I'm able to do a fairly decent job of putting up a website using these tools.
How many have their own website?
Curious again, hands way up, hands way up.
Not too many.
Curious, I just like to know what trends are happening here.
What we found over the past century, very clear trend is, and it's been said many times,
but a trend from words to images.
I teach advertising and society course, an advertising techniques course.
One of the first things I show my students is Coca-Cola ads from the 1940s to the present.
You go back in the past and a page of a Coca-Cola ad would be 50 to 75% words.
Each decade you move forward, the number of words disappear.
That's a well observed trend that we are moving into a society of image over words.
Just as I was doing this process, we're seeing with YouTube and we're seeing the web, so
called 2.0, can't stand that phrase, web move into more visual.
I think that will be the trajectory of the web.
We'll follow the general trajectory in society.
That is words diminish and the visual side will increase.
Flickr, how many have a Flickr page?
Just one.
Don't buy that stock then.
Two.
That red blur crossing the finish line is my wife running her first marathon this summer.
Come on, give her a hand.
She lost six toenails.
They'll grow back, but that's a big price for a woman to pay.
Free.
The neat thing about Flickr and Hotmail and WordPress, free, free, free, free.
They get to put their advertising in it.
We lose a bit of our rights over our content or whatever that's worth, but so much is free.
I've been studying electronic publishing, scholarly electronic publishing.
This is just an electronic journal, again, using a rocket theme template on a Joomla
content management system.
Both of those, well, the Joomla is free over the internet.
What we find in, this is a journal that I use just to publish some of my students' work
so I can show my other students this is good stuff.
Try to imitate that, try to achieve that level.
Students have tremendous trouble just knowing what the standard of excellence is.
Generally, they've not been challenged so far in our education system.
What the web is doing in terms of scholarly publishing, you're probably aware of, might
be aware of, but it's an old story.
Scholarly and legitimation is shifting to the web, but prestige remains in the printed
form and the two forms will continue.
Print is not going to disappear overnight.
What was it?
Steve Ballard, the CEO of Microsoft?
Is that his name, Steve?
Ballmer, Ballmer, Baldy.
Anyone ever see him in person?
Is he obnoxious as he seems or is he a nice guy?
He seems nice enough.
Yeah.
Energetic.
Yeah, energetic, yeah, when you see energetic, absolutely.
No particular opinion of him one way or another, but he came out and said something remarkably
silly the other day.
He'll kind of think, you think these guys are in charge of a multi-billion dollar corporation
and then they say something like in 10 years, he said, just two, three days a week ago,
he said, in 10 years the newspapers are going to be history.
All digital.
Good grief.
I wouldn't want that man in charge of my money in an investment about, that's not his field
about newspapers.
Newspapers are definitely on a long-term decline.
They're struggling.
Is Rupert Murdoch filthy rich?
Yes he is.
Will he be rich in 10 years?
Yes he will be.
Newspapers are not going to disappear overnight and they're certainly not going to disappear
in 10 years.
Just, you know, a lot of that blah, blah, blah they do is, who are they talking to?
They're talking to their stockbrokers.
They're talking to investors, sorry, talking to investors.
So when you're listening to industry speak through the press, you have to kind of follow
the money.
Who's this message really intended for?
What I find as a teacher at university working with the web and students, not a long time,
six, seven, eight years now, is that the web, there's an interesting article in the Atlantic
Monthly today, this current issue, which is talking about Google and the brain.
Is Google making us stupid?
Is the title of it.
And interesting, has some interesting points to say.
I find that for the average and the lower group of students, the web degrades their
thinking and research and capabilities.
For the excellent, and excellent is usually not about intelligence, it's about effort.
I'm not the smartest candle in the candelabra, the brightest one.
I just sometimes work a little harder.
The web enhances the excellent students because they master, they apply their mastery to it.
They master it and they use it.
You and what?
What I try to do as new forms come, as a study, to study something you've got to use it.
I'm always trying to spend a little bit of time using the internet in different ways
and forms and applying that to my research.
This is a blog that I started recently.
I had another blog on Google some years ago, but wasn't doing anything with it.
I started this blog using WordPress.
Any bloggers here?
Put your hands up.
Two, three.
Interesting, I thought the numbers would be much higher.
Maybe you're all blogging right now, but you're not going to sit.
Guys who secretly film their girlfriends, this little item that ran through the news
the other day.
There was some guy who was filming his girlfriend who was using the Wii fit and she was doing
the hula hoop thing with the Wii.
Anyone have the Wii?
I have a WiiWii, but I don't have the Wii.
She was doing the hula hoop and he was filming her lovely butt from behind and he put it
up on the internet.
She exploded in fury, but then after she saw the numbers, about two million people now
have seen her butt.
She was wearing underwear.
It's very sweet in a way.
Any guys here who secretly film their girlfriends?
Or partners or otherwise.
You okay back there, honey?
What is the transformation of the private into the public?
A sociologist years ago in the 70s, I can't remember his name, can't remember the book,
but he was speaking in the age of television and he was talking about how new media forms
like television is transforming the private into the public.
The internet is obviously doing a lot more of that.
You could be filming right now.
You could be walking down the street.
You could be doing something bad.
You could be doing something good.
You could be lecturing in a university.
You could be getting mad at someone.
You could be making love and someone could be filming you and recording it and up on
the...
We're entering into this age of...
Is that a hand there, sir?
Yeah, I was just going to say that I actually found out that the video was made by an advertising
company.
Yeah, there was a lot of speculation about that.
It's a link to a company that's being paid by the internet.
Yes.
It's becoming one of the number one, not number one, but it's becoming a big game on YouTube
is to ferret out the fake videos type of thing.
When you get that two million hit for something that's fairly mundane, the right away there
was speculation on it.
Thank you, sir.
The old lonely girl, 16, type of thing.
Yeah, yeah.
She does have a fine choice of clothing.
Yeah, yeah.
Transformation of the private into public.
Is this a problem or not?
Well, it has some good things that it's going to do.
It's going to have some bad things that it's going to do.
One of the curious things is we can lose sight of the history of the private.
Privacy is a modern invention.
It doesn't mean it's good or bad, but it's something that came out of the industrial
era.
The industrialization did something to our homes, segmented the home and so on and so
forth, and over the centuries we ended up with this sphere of experience we call the
private, which to a great extent in pre-industrial society there was no sense of the private.
Not in the modern world, but you can say that about so many things.
In other words, the loss of the private doesn't mean the end of the world as we know it.
It is very curious, very curious about our compulsion, the modern compulsion seen on
YouTube.
YouTube is now like the, almost the focus has shifted from the web to YouTube.
Number third most visited, and we're probably moving into an era where we transform from
a written based society to a video based society.
My next book is going to be on YouTube and the use of amateur video.
Not looking at corporate video, but looking at amateur, what we do.
I'm not really interested in what corporations do.
We see them, we know what they're doing, we figured out what they're doing.
What are we doing?
It's what the internet enables us to do as individuals.
That's where the real force of change is most likely to come, is how the internet enables
or disables individuals.
Usually it's an enabling force.
Lost my train of thought there.
Just moving through, my god does this guy have a lot of web stuff.
I was just going through and I realized, whoa, I've been a busy.
Another blog, this one I decided to, Anne and I, my wife, for years we talked, we're
kind of little foodies and love our restaurants and so on.
What about writing a review?
And so WordPress, you know, you want to start a blog about really good crap that I had the
other day.
Dot wordpress.com and there it goes.
Ottawa Flavor, so we're doing that.
The formation of taste.
You see, we've come through a century of corporate media where the taste makers at East Saint
Laurent, when you're looking at a fashion taste maker, corporate media has mediated
taste to the masses.
And taste, according to at least one theorist, of course any theory has a counter theory
or something like that, but Pierre Bourdieu, you might know of his work on taste, but he
related the construction of taste, what's good, what's bad, what's high class, what's
low class.
Taste has a thousand and thousands and thousands of different typologies to it.
The taste is related to class.
Upper classes use the systems, institutions and media and so forth to ensure that their
tastes are different.
When you differentiate, you create class divisions and that reinforces power structures.
Whether or not his theory is right or wrong, we'll put that aside, it's an interesting
theory.
Now what happens if the elite and the corporate media system lose a certain amount of their
ability to establish taste, if taste is connected to power and class?
It's what I find time and time again that what the internet is doing, it's doing something
that subverts issues like maintenance of power.
In the empire mind I say it could go either way, it's not about a digital utopia, it's
not about a dystopia, it's about what we do with it.
There's a lot of neo-Nazis out there, there's a lot of wing nuts out there, there's a lot
of hate out there and so the potential for the internet just unleashing chaos upon us
is very great.
My YouTube channel.
Anyone with a YouTube channel?
Come on people.
Just about YouTube, anyone put something up on YouTube?
Anyone at all?
Okay, curious.
Anyone going to put this up on YouTube?
What we see a lot in YouTube, many things going on in YouTube but one of the most, one
of the more obvious things is the democratization, democratization, take democratization and
you can slap it to just about any social dynamic and you're talking about some aspect of the
web, you can't overstate that, it's not about some democratic utopia opening up and it's
me and I'm not exactly a fan of democracy.
I think democracy is largely a myth.
Subscribe to Chomsky's view of democracy.
Democracy is largely a mythic thing that we participate in so that the power remains located
in some other place.
Anyway, democratization of fame.
We have the failure, the failing of the American dream and it's not just the American dream,
it's the promise of capitalism that we may all someday be rich or we may all someday
make it into that and America's certainly having trouble with that dream and Canada's
you know, 30 years, the story is 30 years of no substantial increase in earning power.
That's the Western story right now.
So I think what's going on as the celebrity culture rises that the, and the failure of
the American dream across Western civilization is that people are seeing the pursuit of cultural
capital.
If I can't have economic capital, maybe I can have cultural capital, fame and then turn
that into money.
A lot of people are on the YouTube trying to generate the next big hit.
It's one of my Barbie dolls.
Digital cameras make art so easy.
If it's blurry you say I meant that.
If it's obscure you say it's postmodern.
That's a piece of hair from an ex-girlfriend.
My wife's back there gritting her teeth.
And a meatballer, or something for making meatballs.
I call it Meatball Barbie.
Digital technologies are democratizing art, the ability to make art.
Art in the past was a realm of very special people with hard to learn techniques, years
of study, etc.
The camera, earlier the analog camera was one of the first technologies to democratize
in the theories of cinema and photography.
They speak of the early reception of photography as a lesser art form because it was so accessible.
Art is supposed to be something that's difficult.
And you walk through a modern contemporary art museum and you think not only could I
do that, my children could do that.
And to a certain extent you're right.
There's more to it than that.
Jean Baudrillard, I may be mispronouncing it, I'm curious how many of you have heard
of Jean Baudrillard?
One of you?
Again, curious.
He's the thinker.
He died I think last year between two or three concepts that are now embodied in the movie
The Matrix.
Whenever we think of the hyperreal, that's right out of his work.
He's a renegade thinker, existed more or less despised by the academic community in large,
very, very influential but very much on the outside of academia, extremely difficult to
understand, very controversial.
I dabble in him the way to, I'm trying to get more out of him, he's a person that you
can hate and love at the same time.
He wrote about the death of art in his book called The Conspiracy of Art and he was also
writing about the death of meaning as well.
God died earlier in the century and then meaning died.
His notion is that art itself has died.
Art, I'm not going to try and explain that because I don't fully understand it yet, but
he says that because of the democratization of art in society, it's so accessible for
so many reasons and so many people are doing it and other forces, that art has lost its
privilege, which is interesting.
That's where theory, what's good theory?
Theory presents a model that either fits and helps you understand something, if it doesn't
you throw it away and get another theory.
And then there's theory that works like brain candy.
Ah, just the idea of art losing its privileged position.
Yves Saint Laurent wanted to make fashion accessible.
He wanted to make fashion that people could buy and he was quite a success at that.
I don't have any Yves Saint Laurent myself, but I'm looking at a few dresses.
You're nobody if you're not on Wikipedia.
Oh, good Lord, eh?
Wikipedia, again, one of these free, collective, accidental successes.
I don't know the whole story of it, probably no more of it than I do, connected to the
notion of gut people talking about the wisdom of the crowd and collective intelligence.
I don't buy into those notions of the collective intelligence and wisdom of the crowd because,
well, no particular because just yet.
Crowd can be intelligent and the crowd can elect Stephen Harper.
I don't see wisdom there.
Problem with collective intelligence, like Wikipedia, is that it lacks authority.
That might be a good thing.
First, I teach two, if I had children and I don't, I teach them two things.
Say respect authority and disrespect authority.
Very careful balance.
Gotta respect authority.
Stop sign is authority.
But also authority can be very much abused.
What Wikipedia lacks, what collective intelligence in the building of Wikipedia lacks, it's a
wonderful introduction.
I tell my students, use it to understand something quickly.
Use it in your papers, in your research, and I'll nail you for it.
And here's why.
Because in research, you use your sources to establish your credibility.
To show that you recognize the depth of the discussion and argument and controversy and
complexity surrounding what you're talking about.
Wikipedia is great as an introduction.
Trying to get students to read beyond the level of a blog is the biggest challenge that
professors face.
So they want to get them away from Wikipedia-style knowledge to actually engage in the world
of hard, hard research.
It's hard work.
Hard work.
Nobody likes to do the work.
Google.
Google Maps.
Now, how many of you use Google Maps?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very cool.
You know, and that came along, wow.
I had a similar feeling when I saw Google Maps when I first saw the web in 1994.
Wow.
I'm doomed.
Wow.
I was in business then.
How am I going to keep up with that?
I don't have the right word for it here.
Geodata.
Data that's connected to space coordinates.
But you get this ability.
I'm going to try that.
So there's my apartment down below.
That's where we live.
And then this is a photo that I took at the height of that big winter storm we had of
my balcony.
I just threw it up there.
The ability of the masses to add data.
That's something.
And scientists are totally onto that now.
They're using a long recognized power.
Most of what we see in museums are there because of amateur archaeologists, amateur fossil
hunters, amateurs doing work in conjunction.
So there's a whole pile of new, of ongoing scientific work over the internet that they're
encouraging the input of amateurs to augment knowledge.
But what happens when at that one little space on Google, 1,000 of my neighbors want to put
a picture up there too.
Clutter noise.
So an issue here is, and I don't know the answer to it, but is this type of system where
we all contribute to, is it sustainable?
And how long of course, okay, I'm going to put a picture up there of me naked.
Nobody wants to see that.
I'm going to put an ad up there.
I'm going to start to hack it, spam it, that type of thing.
There's some interesting to see how Google maps scales what they do.
There's ways of dealing with that.
So what we have here too is increased detail and resolution.
That's the trajectory in digital technology and the internet and the whole network world
is we will get increased detail, increased resolution, more and more and more information
available and that information tied into all of these systems.
And the last one as far as me goes, and then my book on Amazon.
The neat thing about Amazon is this really funky little one-click buy system.
It just makes it so easy.
You just click on that and you buy.
You can click on it and buy one copy.
You can click on it and buy 30 copies.
I don't care.
I'm not here to...
I'm not here to...
I get 50 cents for a book.
No, selling a book is not...
I'm very flattered when people read the book and can understand something from it.
It's a thick, my first major work thick sort of thing.
But I love Amazon.
My wife ordered a DVD.
At lunch, it arrived at lunch the next day.
It doesn't always happen that way, but oh my God.
The cover of the New Yorker magazine today has a picture of a woman receiving a box,
covered in the New Yorker magazine, of receiving an Amazon box of books and a storekeeper coming
out locking his store and it's a bookstore and he's looking at the woman.
The decimation of retail, it's hurt retail.
There were predictions this was a whole dot com bubble.
The dot com bubble was based upon the belief that retail was dead, retail was doomed and
retail is still with us.
So in hacking culture, one little thing that I want to focus on, I'll have to go quickly
here, is the public transformation of privately owned meanings.
Why is that significant?
It's significant because capitalism relies on two production systems, production of things.
That's what Marx wrote about.
The media system was barely there.
Marx had very little to say about media, a lot to say about the production side.
But he recognized that if you control media, you control a substantial chunk of behavior.
I'm not by any stretch a Marxist.
I know he's totally commoditized.
You have to recognize the irony.
I wear things like a Nike shirt when I'm talking about the social control through advertising
and my students don't get the irony.
Pardon?
You should see what's on my underwear.
Hallelujah, brother.
I appreciate the feedback.
I'm going to move on quickly.
Why is this topic at all important?
Because the reproduction of capitalism through consumption depends upon capitals.
When I talk about capitalism, we're talking about the whole system, the economic system.
It's daily reproduction.
Society has to be reproduced through our activities.
Basic anthropological principle.
It just doesn't happen.
It happens through our activities.
Depends upon capital's ability to control the meaning of things.
That control is never complete.
When we talk about ideology or hegemony, words you might be familiar with, those things are
never complete.
We always dispute it.
The culture war in the United States is a dispute over ideologies.
My basic primary thesis through the empire of mind is that the internet represents a
substantial threat to the control of meaning within capitalism.
If meaning is subverted substantially, then consumer behavior and political behavior under
the ideological regimes, under the way we're supposed to behave, becomes destabilized.
There's a possibility of substantial destabilizing the stability of the social order if capitalism
loses control over meaning.
Digital piracy is like the other side of the piracy of meaning.
There's no easy word for it.
The situation room.
I love CNN.
It reduces the world to two fundamental problems, terrorism and illegal immigrants.
Lou Dobbs, immigrant, immigrant, immigrant, immigrant, immigrant, immigrant, immigrant.
Oh no, I'm not prejudiced.
I'm not biased.
What a jerk.
What a racist jerk.
He's probably responsible for more hate.
People like that, probably responsible for more hate.
Why is this important?
Holocaust capitalism.
I'm not going to try and convince you about it, but I think we're circling the drain.
I think because of this capitalism, we've degraded the environment in an obvious manner.
We've degraded the social system.
Now we have toxins in mother's milk.
We've come to that point.
Substantial.
It's important because we have a slow burning holocaust that we've unleashed upon ourselves.
The situation, the situation room, the situation is disputed.
We see that dispute in the core of the center of empire.
If you disagree with me, that's great.
Email me, tell me you disagree with me sort of thing.
I ask my students not to study, to come to agreement with me, but to study, to learn
how to express their ideas in a scholarly fashion.
Because in the punditry, the age of punditry, the general belief is your opinion is as good
as my opinion.
Well, it's not.
It's not.
I wouldn't try and argue some arcane side of your field.
Not at all.
Not at all.
You are the experts there.
It's a failure in our culture to recognize that expertise exists.
Then we end up with the punditry of the blogosphere sort of thing.
The situation is disputed.
It's a cultural constant.
All cultures are constructed over through a dispute over what the culture should be.
That dispute is waged by the contenders.
Who gets to argue in the corporate capitalism of the last century that contenders were those
who had a voice in the mass media, the elite, the representatives and so on.
Now we've got the internet.
We've got a whole new set of contenders entering into the dispute.
Really what we have in a corporate media system, corporate media culture is an unequal power
to define the situation.
Freedom of speech is a farce.
Why do we value freedom of speech?
I always challenge my students to question dominant values, private property and freedom
of speech.
Those are two of our core values.
They're both there because they reinforce the inequality of capitalism.
If we believed in not private property but equality, I'm not a socialist or this or that
or the other thing.
I just think there's some problems here.
Why do we privilege freedom of speech instead of equality of speech?
Well, if equality of speech was our primary value, we wouldn't be so willing to support
a system that says Murdoch, Conrad Black.
Sometimes there is justice.
Unequal power to define the situation.
What is culture?
There are many theories of culture.
It's a very difficult term, one of those highly disputed terms.
But fundamentally, culture is patterns of meaning that organize, missing a word in there,
patterns of meaning that organize patterns of thought and action.
Patterns of meaning, patterns of thought and action.
If you can influence or control the patterns of meaning, then you influence and control
the social order.
What's fundamentally at stake in this transformation that we're going through, and we're going
to go through it for the next couple of centuries, we're on a long road here.
We went through a 500-year transformation of the Gutenberg Press.
Don't have time to talk to you about that, but we're still coming to terms with what
happened because of the Gutenberg Press.
Largely what happened was the invention of our modern notion of democracy, private property,
the modern state.
Not all solely because of the Gutenberg Press, but because of that one technology, it had
this domino effect across the social system.
Did it bring peace and prosperity?
No, not at all.
First thing that Gutenberg Press, 50 years after the Gutenberg Press, we had the bloodiest
religious war outbreak.
We had new religion invented, Protestantism, and then they went after each other.
So that McLuhan was right.
McLuhan said that new media comes with war.
I'm paraphrasing him here.
He said it better than that.
He said, what new media brings is new form of warfare.
We could look at the telegraph to come up with another parallel, but we'll get on with
that.
So the code, we've got an idea of the code, the code, definitional control.
Anyone familiar with what's her?
Rachel Ray, I don't know who she is.
I'm not, I'm probably too old to know who she is.
I forgot to bring my kaffia.
I was going to wear my kaffia and then see how many I could fish off.
Anyone hear this dispute at all?
Rolled through the media a little while ago.
So she was in an online ad for Dunkin' Donuts on some American website, and that's actually
a Paisley.
It's not a real kaffia, but close enough, and they said, oh, and of course the Republicans
went crazy and said, Muslim, terrorist.
Republicans wanted to find anything related to Muslims as terrorists.
They're not dressed like us, terrorists.
Right away, the major Republican blog thinkers, blah, blah, blah, and what they failed to
understand is that that bit of clothing is universal.
Everybody wears it in the Middle East.
The definition of the situation, struggle to define things unfolding over the internet.
War over the meaning of things and events.
War, not a struggle.
War over the meaning of things.
I love this one here, the person of the year and then Time magazine.
Forgive me, the language.
I think we're safe here.
This is stuff I just pulled off of Google.
My favorite one.
The Americans, CEOs, the elite use the media.
They construct an environment, whether it's an aircraft carrier and a flight suit, to
convey authority.
The internet and digital technologies, we can tamper with those images and send out
messages that are, think of it as hacked messages.
It's indistinguishable from corporate communication.
You kind of know that it's not Time magazine, but it looks like the Time magazine cover.
The techniques used to visually construct authority and legitimacy in the last century
are now being used by the heretic.
That's part of the undermining of the subverting of authority.
When we adopt techniques, same in warfare, you adopt the enemy's techniques or you invent
new techniques.
Definitional control.
Gain through control of media, that's fairly dead obvious.
Subvert it through uncontrolled speech.
I make the argument in the empire mind that the internet has reached a stable state.
A very dangerous, I may be proved wrong on that, but what do we mean by stable state?
Excuse me for a moment here.
I mean stable in terms of the level of unconstrained speech.
Unconstrained.
I'm constrained here.
I can't take my pants off.
I'm more constrained when I'm speaking.
I don't want to take my pants off.
I could take my pants off.
Social decorum.
Social decorum, the institutional controls, the context, we're always constrained.
The more we move into the institutional framework, institutions, the more we are constrained.
The more we're outside of these institutions, the less we're constrained.
Within the internet, we have 10 minutes, plenty of time.
Thank you.
I will finish on time.
Thank you for your attention.
We have a higher level of freedom of speech on the internet than outside of the internet.
That's fairly, and we have this subversion.
My argument about the stability is that since the beginning of the internet, and in spite
of the Lawrence Lessigs and the numb chucks on Parliament Hill and all that crap, year
after year after year, our communicative abilities expand on the internet.
They don't decrease.
I can think of, and I found no significant, substantial instance of someone communicating
something on the internet that was removed.
It's not a library where a book can be taken out and removed forever.
We know that.
I describe the internet as holographic in character.
I may have this wrong, not an engineer, but a holograph, you've got a holograph, you've
cut a small chunk out of the holograph, and you have all of the information in that small
chunk that you have in the rest of the holograph.
It's not infinitely, but it's redundant throughout the system, kind of like the brain.
They're finding out that the brain has a certain level of redundancy built into it.
Not total, but certain.
It makes the internet for all intended purposes for an uncensurable system.
We've established that way back in the early 90s, so I'm not telling you anything new there,
but there's always this constant fear because there are real forces against that freedom.
Historically, we go back to the Romans, we know this.
Historically, we absolutely know that a crowd is a threat to authority.
That's a historical constant.
Unconstrained public speech has always been perceived of as a threat and always been subject
to control.
That means that...
This was a very interesting news item that came out in the Globe.
I don't have the date here.
There was that big debate after 9-11 about culpability, where many American intellectuals
and intellectuals across the world spoke of culpability, that things don't happen in an
isolated circumstance.
You can't be empire and totally innocent, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
It's a very touchy issue.
The majority in Canada think the United States is to blame for 9-11.
Just a woman grieving at the ground zeroes there, and I took this little doll symbolizing
masculinity strength, the warrior, and stuck it in front there, that there's culpability
in there.
A curious thing happened in Canada in the months following 9-11.
Noam Chomsky wrote by January the next year a book called 9-11, a thin little book.
I'm not gonna ask if anyone read it.
It was on the Globe and Mail bestseller list of nonfiction for about three months.
What does that mean?
That means that the vast segment of the intellectual community in Canada, the reading community,
was reading a book where in that book 9-11 Chomsky says, the United States is the leading
terrorist state.
He has a very interesting argument to make that.
I'm not here to defend that argument or anything, but Canadians turn to Chomsky.
People don't read books that they disagree with, generally speaking.
Canadians turn to Chomsky to understand the nature of that culpability, where the American
media clamped down very quickly on it.
One of the first things we saw in...
Right after 9-11, I started to get jokes.
We're gonna see some of those.
Jokes about 9-11.
There's an old joke about someone making a joke about someone that did, and he said,
oops, too soon yet?
It was too soon to make jokes about 9-11.
We're gonna make jokes about 9-11 eventually.
We make jokes about everything.
I'm dead.
Make jokes about me.
Make jokes about me now.
We do that.
It's part of the process, that humor.
There's a right time and a wrong time.
But on the internet, bam, right away, a subversive, politically incorrect interpretation started
to float through the system.
I talked about the two types of production.
Increased interaction with corporate media.
That's just a trend.
We're spending more and more time with corporate media.
We are also spending more and more time with amateur culture, user-generated content and
all that sort of stuff.
This is an example of a subversive use of...
Five minutes?
A subversive use of...
Very sophisticated, but given time, we could all do this...
Oh.
Let me see if I can...
I'm not a Mac user.
It's a spacebar.
I want to click on that screen.
I don't know.
The big button under there.
Oh, that big bar?
Yeah.
Okay, no, it's just not working.
We'll get back to it.
It's 1984 commercial, probably seen.
And instead of Big Brother speaking, it's Hillary speaking.
And it made big waves.
It was an example of YouTube becoming a significant...
YouTube very quickly became a significant factor in the election.
I wouldn't say it's the deciding factor in the whole process, but very interesting.
These are social trends, current social trends.
We know these things very well.
Increased surveillance and information gathering on both sides, on behalf of them and us.
Increased programming of consumption.
Postmodernity is not anti-capitalist.
Postmodernity is the main factors taking place in the dynamics of advertising techniques
are postmodern advertising techniques.
The big chunk, the biggest important of the consumer market is the postmodern consumer.
And we're in the high age of hyperconsumption.
So whatever postmodernity is, and it's not something to be dismissed the way the conservatives
say postmodernity, bah.
Well, it's a very important set of factors talking about deinstitutionalization, fragmentation
of meaning, indeterminacy.
It might mean this.
It might mean that.
In a modern circumstance, it always meant one thing.
So we have all sorts of forces at work to enhance hyperconsumption, which is interesting
because our standard solution that we're given to the environmental problem, the standard
solution is technology.
Technology will save us.
Technology.
I don't believe, I think that's a pile of horse shit.
Technology is not going to dig us out on its own of the environmental problem.
We need a parallel change in values.
And it's not going to come from the corporate media system.
As long as the corporate media system controls the social programming code, we're going to
continue to circle that drain at a faster rate because there's no interest there in
reducing consumption.
Ten percent here and ten percent there is not going to do it.
Increased legal control over intellectual property.
Well, at the same time, decreased actual control over intellectual property because of the
internet.
So the real world of laws, how the laws are actually used often symbolically.
Ah, there we nailed someone's ass.
We're doing something.
That's the political purpose of these laws.
We're doing something.
Business.
Government says we are doing something.
We hear you.
This law is a law made for business.
And the front page of the Citizen says, for consumers it's a win-win situation.
How in the hell can it be a win-win situation when it would criminalize daily behavior like
copying your own DVDs?
No, that type of, I hate that type of PR speech.
But I say it's irrelevant because in the end what we have is a constant loss of control
over intellectual property on the internet.
Some stuff right after 9-11.
George Bush wearing the ring of power.
Let's get to some culture jamming stuff.
Very sick and twisted here.
But looks very corporate, doesn't it?
First thing you think, hey, that looks like a Nike ad.
Then it's, you see, it's some, might be Hasidic Jews.
I think they're the ones that are usually responsible for they take up the business
of cleaning up the tragedies of terrorism in Israel.
And a Nike sneaker there and it says you may not survive the blast, but your shoes will.
Very morbid.
Morbid is actually one of the postmodern techniques that is now very high in high use in advertising.
If we go back 20 years ago, there was no morbid in advertising.
Now in corporate media they're using the morbid.
Now this is the stuff that was circulating by email almost immediately, all within weeks
of 9-11.
And it would be many months.
I don't know when the first joke came out in mass media, if it even came out yet, about
9-11.
Has anyone seen a comedian make a joke about 9-11 on television?
Here.
Okay.
And that was, that was when?
Four or five months.
So fairly fast.
I stand corrected.
Here we go.
More than a month.
I stand corrected.
We use mass media to interpret events around us because it is the code.
We've got paybacks there.
And Condola certainly does, she does look hot in latex.
Who wouldn't really?
It's quite obvious in cyberspace everyone wears latex.
We've got the, some street artist in New York, something there.
This is one I did one day.
Senators want pot illegalized and I slapped my wife's Barbie doll there and put a little,
got off the Google a little joint there.
Here she's smoking up.
My little mother, my Barbie work.
But let's, what we have, Barbie, a central icon.
And on the internet we have the redefinition of Barbie.
These are illegal images.
You couldn't publish these images.
The only place they could show up, I know they're offensive.
They're also anthropologically rich.
These represent real things.
They represent a misogynist society that has tremendous violence towards women.
Represent ghettoization of single mothers.
They represent the male attitude towards the car as a sex symbol as a she.
And the advertising and then just the trivial, the artistic and so on.
I'm out of time.
Yeah, yeah, but finish up.
Yeah.
Just wondering why this door opened.
I'm sure no one's going to pick the door.
This was on the internet, but the artist who initially did it, every time she showed it
up, every time she put it on display in the United States, it was censored.
The gallery would take it off.
The communities would, it's not the first female form to appear on a cross by any means,
but it just shows the extent to which master symbols are controlled and how people react
to them when on the internet it can circulate freely, but in the real world, even in the
art situation.
And you can certainly find worse than this, I mean, not more offensive than this in the
art world.
This here, very clever.
This is by, this showed up in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
So we're in the world of legitimate art here.
And it was by a American-Japanese, Japanese-American artist called Suicide Bomber for All the Family,
2007.
And just get the reinterpretation of Barbie.
And then back to our everyday reinterpretation of Barbie.
Again, Mattel is extremely litigious and has been, I did Barbie, I looked at Barbie on
the internet in my dissertation.
I looked at it again years later in my book and the issue was, was the use of legal force
successful in reducing the illegal use of force?
In fact, the more pressure, the more force is applied against a use of a symbol, intellectual
property, the more resistance there is from the internet community and the more it disperses.
So the worst thing corporations can do is apply force to control things on the internet
because it invites resistance, a community forms and the thing globalizes.
Problem gets bigger.
This guy's a professional artist.
He did Barbie.
He made a book of Barbie photos.
I'm not gonna say anything about the nature of the art.
I'm not really qualified to judge that, you know.
But he had to go to the Supreme Court to fight Mattel for the right to photograph Barbie
as what do we do as children?
We play with these toys.
We break them up.
We do things with them.
But we do not have the right to represent our own cultural activities in a world that
is owned under a system of private property.
I don't know what the answer is, but I have a pretty clear idea what the solution is.
A pre-definition of private meanings.
You've been very attentive and patient and forgiving for my idiocy last night.
My wife told me I'm forbidden to sing a song, so I won't.
She said don't sing.
Thank you again for the invite.
And thank you very much.
Thanks.