You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto (17 page)

The transition would not have to be simultaneous and universal, even though the ultimate goal would be to achieve universality. One fine day your ISP could offer you an option: You could stop paying your monthly access charge in exchange for signing up for the new social contract in which you pay for bits. If you accessed no paid bits in a given month, you would pay nothing for that month.

If you chose to switch, you would have the potential to earn money from your bits—such as photos and music—when they were visited by other people. You’d also pay when you visited the bits of others. The total you paid per month would, on average, initially work out to be similar to what you paid before, because that is what the market would bear. Gradually,
more and more people would make the transition, because people are entrepreneurial and would like the chance to try to make money from their bits.

The details would be tricky—but certainly no more so than they are in the current system.

The open culture crowd believes that human behavior can only be modified through involuntary means. This makes sense for them, because they aren’t great believers in free will or personhood.

For instance, it is often claimed by open culture types that if you can’t make a perfect copy-protection technology, then copy prohibitions are pointless. And from a technological point of view, it is true that you can’t make a perfect copy-protection scheme. If flawless behavior restraints are the only potential influences on behavior in a case such as this, we might as well not ask anyone to ever pay for music or journalism again. According to this logic, the very idea is a lost cause.

But that’s an unrealistically pessimistic way of thinking about people. We have already demonstrated that we’re better than that. It’s easy to break into physical cars and houses, for instance, and yet few people do so. Locks are only amulets of inconvenience that remind us of a social contract we ultimately benefit from. It is only human choice that makes the human world function. Technology can motivate human choice, but not replace it.

I had an epiphany once that I wish I could stimulate in everyone else. The plausibility of our human world, the fact that the buildings don’t all fall down and you can eat unpoisoned food that someone grew, is immediate palpable evidence of an ocean of goodwill and good behavior from almost everyone, living or dead. We are bathed in what can be called love.

And yet that love shows itself best through the constraints of civilization, because those constraints compensate for the flaws of human nature. We must see ourselves honestly, and engage ourselves realistically, in order to become better.

There was a time, before movies were invented, when live stage shows offered the highest production values of any form of human expression.

If canned content becomes a harder product to sell in the internet era, the return of live performance—in a new technological context—might be the starting point for new kinds of successful business plans.

Let’s approach this idea first by thinking small. What if you could hire a live musician for a party, even if that musician was at a distance? The performance might feel “present” in your house if you had immersive, “holographic” projectors in your living room. Imagine telepresent actors, orators, puppeteers, and dancers delivering real-time interactive
shows that include special effects and production values surpassing those of today’s most expensive movies. For instance, a puppeteer for a child’s birthday party might take children on a magical journey through a unique immersive fantasy world designed by the performer.

This design would provide performers with an offering that could be delivered reasonably because they wouldn’t have to travel. Telepresent performance would also provide a value to customers that file sharing could not offer. It would be immune to the problems of online commerce that have shriveled the music labels.

Here we might finally have a scenario that could solve the problem of how musicians can earn a living online. Obviously, the idea of “teleperformance for hire” remains speculative at this time, but the technology appears to be moving in a direction that will make it possible.

Now let’s think big. Suppose big stars and big-budget virtual sets, and big production values in every way, were harnessed to create a simulated world that home participants could enter in large numbers. This would be something like a cross between Second Life and teleimmersion.

In many ways this sort of support for a mass fantasy is what digital technology seems to be converging on. It is the vision many of us had in mind decades ago, in much earlier phases of our adventures as technologists. Artists and media entrepreneurs might evolve to take on new roles, providing the giant dream machine foreseen in a thousand science fiction stories.

A songle is a dongle for a song. A dongle is a little piece of hardware that you plug into a computer to run a piece of commercial software. It’s like a physical key you have to buy in order to make the software work. It creates artificial scarcity for the software.

All the tchotchkes of the world—the coffee mugs, the bracelets, the nose rings—would serve double duty as keys to content like music.

There’s a green angle here. All the schemes that presently succeed in getting people to pay for content involve the manufacture of extra hardware that would not otherwise be needed. These include music players such as iPods, cable TV boxes, gaming consoles, and so on. If people paid for content, there would be no need for these devices, since commonplace
computer chips and displays would be good enough to perform all these tasks.

Songles would provide a physical approach to creating artificial scarcity. It might be less difficult to make the transition to songles than it would be to implement a more abstract approach to bringing expression back under the tent of capitalism.

You might wear a special necklace songle to a party, and music enabled by the necklace would come on automatically after you arrived, emanating from the entertainment system that is already providing the party with music. The necklace communicates with the entertainment system in order to make this happen. The musical mix at an event might be determined by the sum of the songles worn by everyone who shows up.

• To make the music business more romantic:
  That’s not just an enhancement; it’s the central issue. Romance, in the broadest sense, is the product the music business sells. Contracts and credit card numbers are not romantic.
  

• To lower the cost of promotion:
  Music production and distribution costs have become low, but promotion costs are limitless. Since a songle is an object instead of a contract, its value is determined by the marketplace and can vary over time, even if traded informally. In order to be effective, songles must come in limited editions. This means that a songle can be an object for speculative investment. A fan who takes the trouble to listen to obscure new bands might benefit from having speculated on buying some of the bands’ songles when they were unknown. Songles harness the psychology that makes lottery tickets sell to get people to listen to new music acts. Even better: once a person buys a songle, she is motivated to join in promoting its music, because she now has a stake in it.
  

• To broaden the channels by which music is sold and share promotion costs with players in those channels:
  High-end, rare songles can be sold as accessories at fashion stores, while low-end songles might come bundled with a six-pack. Coffee mugs, sneakers, toothbrushes, dog collars, pens, and sunglasses would all make fine songles.
  

• To raise the margin for high-prestige but low-volume (in the business sense!) music:
  The stupidest thing among many stupid things in the music business is that the product always costs about the same even when a market segment would naturally choose a higher price if it were allowed to do so. For instance, a well-heeled opera fan pays about the same for a CD or a download as does a teenager listening to a teen idol of the moment. Songles for opera or fine jazz would be made by craftsmen from fine materials in much more limited editions. They would be expensive. Low-end songles would be manufactured by the same channel that provides toys. An increasing number of consumer items that might become songles these days have radio-frequency identification anyway, so there would be no additional manufacturing expense. Expensive limited-edition songles would probably accompany the introduction of new forms of pop music—in parallel with cheap large-volume editions—because there would be a fabulous market for them.
  

Unlike the previous two sections, this one addresses the problems of the lords of the clouds, not the peasants.