The Blind Giant (32 page)

The lesson is that hearth rules and social obligations are a more powerful, if more diffuse, way of defining boundaries than we might usually expect. In a strictly professional setting, people will perform the minimum necessary action to satisfy obligations. By contrast, social obligations under the rules of the hearth require a higher standard of compliance: essentially, doing the job to a standard you yourself would be happy with. Hearth rules also tap into the curiously powerful phenomenon of
gift-giving, which
according to research that appeared in
Science
magazine in 2007 is itself inherently pleasurable: ‘even mandatory, tax-like transfers to a charity elicit neural activity in areas linked to reward processing. Moreover, neural responses to the charity’s financial gains predict voluntary giving. However, consistent with warm glow, neural activity further increases when people make transfers voluntarily. Both pure altruism and warm-glow motives appear to determine the hedonic consequences of financial transfers to the public good.’
¹
If you’re covered by the rules of the hearth, of gifting and personal connection, you’re protected somewhat from the predatory side of human nature and benefit from what appears to be a hard-wired (if contextual and conditional) generosity.

Given that the hearth provides that kind of protection, it might seem that taking advantage of hearth rules was an ideal online strategy for content owners, and in a way that’s true; but if you come at it from that perspective, authenticity will start to be a problem. To borrow from Csikszentmihalyi once more – he’s talking about the emancipation of consciousness, but it applies equally here – engagement ‘cannot be institutionalised. As soon as it becomes part of a set of rules and norms, it ceases to be effective.’ You can’t, in other words, fake it. You have to be real.

One of the best examples of people who understand this is
Cory Doctorow. Doctorow communicates freely and personally with a huge following, uses social media aptly and elegantly and in such a way that it’s clear he is genuinely interested in the conversations in which he participates. He makes digital versions of his novels available to download on his website without digital rights management restrictions, on the basis that obscurity is a greater enemy of a writer than piracy. He also asks those who download his work free to buy physical books as presents or archive copies if they like them. A large number do exactly that.
People feel that they’re part of Doctorow’s social circle; default would not be a matter of taking money from a faceless corporate entity, but rather from the man himself, with whom many have interacted, and who has trusted them with the keys to his hearth.

In doing this, Doctorow shifts the ground of his work from a straightforward commercial enterprise to one that is bound up with social responsibility and personal obligation. In a limited but entirely genuine way, he opens his doors, offers himself as host, and his readers and visitors accept a role as guest, and obey the imperative of the hearth by reciprocating. At the same time, of course, his request that readers buy physical books as gifts as a way of recompensing him for free downloads plays to the pleasure of giving. It’s a virtuous circle, and one that is sufficiently powerful that I feel a measure of unhappiness at breaking it down like this: clinical analysis is not 100 per cent compatible with the ethos of the hearth, belonging to a cooler tradition. On the other hand, while I have met Cory and read his writing (I bought a paper copy) I haven’t yet got to know him, so I don’t feel entirely within the hearth circle yet, and therefore perhaps I’m not really transgressing.

Both sides of the
copyright debates online could profitably pay attention to this example. On the commercial side, we need to understand that there is literally nothing worse than a harsh deterrent that cannot by definition be enforced. It shifts the positions to their most adversarial – prompting
deindividuation and increasing the likelihood that people will ignore the rules – but as in the case of the day care centre or indeed the capital punishment debate it fails to provide a sufficient reason not to act. The present strategy in the content industries is so counter-productive as to be almost painful to watch: a desperate attempt to turn back the clock to the pre-digital age by making digital files less copy-able and the penalties for copying them more unpleasant, thereby throwing away any goodwill and creating the worst kind of system of faceless aggression and impersonal disengagement,
while inevitably being unable to punch hard enough to make a difference to the availability of unsanctioned file copies of content. Governments and parliaments have so far quite rightly refused to allow constant warrantless surveillance in the name of television companies. (It was at once uplifting and depressing to see the resistance to the
Stop Online Piracy Act in the United States in early 2012 – the former, because a digitally coordinated populace used the machinery of the conventional democratic state to oppose a ridiculous law; the latter because they did so to preserve the digital status quo rather than, for example, to demand the repeal of the more alarming aspects of recent anti-terror legislation which have rolled back historically hard-won freedoms in the name of questionable increases in national security.) Once again, I come back to the point that there has to be a limit on enforcement strategies, because the alternative is an Orwellian state. That being so, the ‘crushing litigation’ strategy is over before it begins, and we would do better to recognize that and move on.

In the meantime, while many would argue – rightly – that file-sharing can popularize a product and make the creator’s name, it has to be said that it can also run together with wasteful and ungenerous behaviour. Developer
GAMEized created an app for iPhone called
FingerKicks
. The initial indications were that the game was doing well. Two weeks after the initial release, players using the software, measured through Apple’s
GameCenter – the online gaming hub built into the phone’s operating system – numbered around 16,000. Legitimate downloads, though, were only 1,200; the other players were all using copies that hadn’t been paid for. The game was priced at 99 cents. Needless to say, the company did not recoup its investment.

One way to solve this problem is simply to adopt a different pricing model – for example, one which allows free download but requires payment to play or to access the full product – a subscription or an incremental payment strategy. While that
works, it also dodges the issue – it’s not a nudge, but an armlock, and it hints at a society where anything which isn’t nailed down will be appropriated. It’s easy to laugh at developers, or writers or musicians, who say that after a certain point they’ll just do something else – but it might be kinder and wiser to wonder at what point they might in fact do so – or, more immediately, at what point they will simply have to turn their talents away from that particular way of working to another where they can actually make money, creating a sort of tragedy of the commons in which a hostile environment deprives us of content – artworks, music, novels, television – we really want. This discussion fragments with depressing speed into mirror-image counterpoints, one side claiming that creatives are financially better off under the digital models, the other side responding that they are not. I suspect that both are true in different situations, but once again, the more important thing is that the outcome of the encounter between philosophies is not set. We can still influence – by ingenuity and entrepreneurship and by legislation and debate – the shape of the cultural market in years to come.

The tragedy of the commons, incidentally, is worth revisiting in connection with this discussion, not least because it brings a dose of reality to all concerned. In the classic version, a shared resource is gradually destroyed by the collective actions of the group. Because no one takes time to maintain it, and everyone seeks to extract the maximum benefit from it, the resource is eventually depleted past the point where it can recover, and the community as a whole suffers. I vastly prefer this way of looking at the issue to the ridiculously shrill approach still taken in many copyright advocacy infomercials, which use the term ‘piracy’. Piracy is robbery with violence, often segueing into murder, rape and kidnapping. It is one of the most frightening crimes in the world. Using the same term to describe a twelve-year-old swapping music with friends, even thousands of songs, is evidence of a loss of perspective so astounding that it invites and deserves the
derision it receives. Unsanctioned file-sharing is not piracy, it’s littering. Each individual action is of no consequence whatsoever, but the overall result is akin to what
GAMEized have experienced: a product can become popular and yet there’s no benefit whatsoever to the maker. There is, therefore, no financial motive to make anything similar (or at least, not with a similar pricing model) again, and considerable impediments to doing so, as the process of developing an app or generating content is expensive and labour-intensive. The creative environment is stifled.

The same applies to books, music and film; the maker puts a great deal of time and self into a project. To find that people are prepared to take it and use it enthusiastically, but balk at paying even a modest fee, is massively dispiriting and sets up the stark divide between maker and user once more, creating an oppositional, hostile relationship of mistrust. At some point, the Ultimatum Game once again becomes relevant: sooner or later, it’s simply so upsetting to be part of the situation that people quit. People generally think that doesn’t happen, but I’ve actually done it: I left the movie industry because I couldn’t, in the end, put up with what felt like a corrosive working environment. It was making me too unhappy. I wrote
The Gone-Away World
as a sort of last gasp at writing: if it hadn’t been well received, I would probably have gone back to university to train as a lawyer. The only way I can see to deal with this situation is to de-professionalize the relationship, creating an environment that fosters engagement between consumers and creators. I don’t mean that the relationship cannot involve financial transaction; rather it seems to me that content creators and content owners must have an appreciable identity, a presence that can be encountered and understood in terms of its place in the world and the people who are a part of it. Companies can do this too; there’s no
a priori
reason why a company’s ethos cannot be strong and welcoming rather than abstract and seemingly uncaring. The time when a company was an expression of a single individual has mostly gone, but if an
organization can develop a coherent, consistent and responsive identity it can be trusted and engaged with.

Google and Apple both benefited from a perception of a unique and positive
character in their early days;
Microsoft, by contrast, suffers from the opposite. All are now encountering resistance because their responses cannot be sufficiently substantive to satisfy the demand for engagement. Like politicians, they have to be wary of what they say, and their hedges and plays for time read like what they are. A personal friend who hedges is doubly unattractive; honesty and openness, on appropriate topics, are part of the hearth relationship. (The first time I saw a strategy like this given life was years ago, in an article about a US realtor. He had chosen to blog his days, including his mistakes. His competition thought he was mad, but his customers enjoyed the openness. They knew he made mistakes – everyone does – and now they knew what those mistakes were. Similarly, in the confrontation between the unnamed PR company and the
Bloggess, the company could at any time have reversed its fortunes with an appropriate apology, turning enmity into appreciation. Quite often in life we are more impressed by those who deal well with mistakes than we are by those who claim to make none.)

For many industries and institutions, publishing included, this kind of venture – enjoyable though it would be, I don’t propose that everyone admit to their blunders – will mean a change of attitude regarding the place of the end-user. For most publishing companies, consumers have historically been someone else’s problem. Communicating with individuals was an unnecessary chore best left to booksellers. Once again, it’s the broadcast mentality. Now, however, it seems to me that there’s an opportunity to use the heritage of each imprint as an independent house to engage with the readership, to create or reveal the identity and history of the various companies – many of which are genuinely fascinating and moving – and allow a natural engagement
wherein people united by a particular sense of taste can find and follow a publisher with interests and styles that meet it.

The alternative is not good. In this environment, not having an identity – or, rather, not being able or willing to engage – equates with being rude or evil. It’s actually not that different from human face-to-face communication in that regard. As I noted before, we use a huge number of non-verbal signals to communicate alongside speech, all vital in reassuring an interlocutor that we are engaged, interested, paying attention and sane. Try fixing your eyes on someone’s ear instead of letting them move around the face and the room, and watch them work to attract your attention. Stare right past them and wait for them to ask outright if you’re ‘still with them’. If you don’t respond with an affirmation and then moderate your behaviour, they will rapidly become upset. If you really stick to it (and by the way, messing with your non-verbal communication is surprisingly hard) they will conclude either that you’re really angry with them or that you’re insane or unwell. Kinesic interviewing uses the same knowledge in reverse to force a rapport between interviewer and subject, mirroring posture, rhythm, even breathing.