Last month, National Review magazine published a review that I penned of Mark Helprin’s new book, Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto. Helprin’s book is both a passionate defense of copyright law as well as a mini-autobiography. Helprin is one of the great novelists and essayists of the past half-century, and his book A Soldier of a Great War is one of my all-time favorite novels. I cannot in strong enough words encourage you to read that book; it is profoundly moving. (I almost named my son after the lead character in the book!)
Thus, I was quite excited when I learned that Helprin had penned a defense of copyright and I jumped at the chance to review it when the folks at National Review asked me to do so. Alas, as you will see in my review, I was terribly disappointed. I wish Helprin would have stuck with the very reasonable tone he adopted in this excellent podcast interview he did recently with John J. Miller of National Review Online. Unfortunately, he went a different direction in the book, as I make clear in my review:
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National Review
July 20, 2009 “Man, Machine, and Copyright” a review of Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto, by Mark Helprin
by Adam Thierer
It would be difficult to think of anyone more ideally suited to pen a passionate defense of copyright law than novelist Mark Helprin. Helprin has written several of the finest works of modern literature, including his masterpiece, A Soldier of the Great War, a narrative of transcendent beauty. In Digital Barbarism, Helprin sets out to use his formidable gift for the written word to repel the “cyber mob” that has attacked copyright law and called for its curtailment, or even abolition.
Unfortunately, while Helprin occasionally rises to great heights in his defense of copyright, he too often sinks to lamentable lows — by resorting to the same unbecoming rhetorical tactics used by the mob he seeks to condemn. Indeed, his book is filled with gratuitous vitriol and neo-Luddite ramblings about the Internet and Information Age that severely detract from his defense of copyright. This is a shame, because, in places, Digital Barbarism makes a fine case against those critics who wrongly view copyright as an impediment to the creation and diffusion of content. “The availability of information is not and will not be restrained by the copyright system any more than it is or will be restrained by the delivery systems that make it possible,” Helprin argues. Why, he asks, “must ‘content’ be free” when everything else — access to the Internet, digital devices, etc. — costs good money? He notes that the movement that advocates “free,” universal access to all copyrighted material in the name of “openness” and “the public good” would, ironically, “destroy the dream it advocates”: Continue reading →
Berin recently encouraged me to re-read Thomas Sowell’sThe Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, which I hadn’t looked at since I first read it back in 1995 or 96. I’m glad I did since Sowell’s work has always been profoundly influential on my thinking (especially his masterpiece, A Conflict of Visions) and I had forgotten how useful The Vision of the Anointed was in helping me understand the reoccurring model that drives ideological crusades to expand government power over our lives and economy.
“The great ideological crusades of the twentieth-century intellectuals have ranged across the most disparate fields,” Sowell noted in the book. But what they all had in common, he argued, was “their moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government.” (p. 5) These elitist, government-expanding crusades shared several key elements, which Sowell identified as follows:
Assertion of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
An urgent need for government action to avert impending catastrophe.
A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.
You can see this model at work on a daily basis today with our government’s various efforts to reshape our economy, but I think this model is equally applicable to debates over social policy and speech control. In particular, the various “technopanics” I have been writing about recently fit this model. (See 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). For example, consider how this plays out in the debate over online social networking:
I was over at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the other day chatting with someone about various regulatory issues and Rush Limbaugh’s WSJ editorial came up. The person I was speaking with made a comment about how conservatives have really been energized and unified in opposition to the re-imposition to the Doctrine. I reminded them, however, that it wasn’t always the case that conservatives stood together in the fight over the Fairness Doctrine. In fact, when I first came to town almost 20 years ago, there were still plenty of conservatives who actually favored it. I was reminded of that fact when reading a new piece in Engage about “Broadcast ‘Fairness’ in the Twenty-First Century” by my friend Robert Corn-Revere. Bob is one America’s great First Amendment defenders and his new essay offers an excellent history of efforts to micro-manage speech on the broadcast airwaves over the years. In it, he reminds us that:
Given the recent vocal opposition to the Fairness Doctrine in the interest of preserving conservative talk radio, it is easy to forget that many prominent conservatives championed the doctrine before its demise. Phyllis Schlafly was a vocal proponent of the Fairness Doctrine because of what she described as “the outrageous and blatant anti-Reagan bias of the TV network newscasts,” and she testified at the FCC in the 1980s in support of the policy “to serve as a small restraint on the monopoly power wielded by Big TV Media.” Senator Jesse Helms was another long-time advocate of the Fairness Doctrine, and conservative groups Accuracy in Media and the American Legal Foundation actively pursued fairness complaints at the FCC against network newscasts.
Likewise, in our book, A Manifesto for Media Freedom, Brian Anderson and I note that some other prominent right-leaning politicians, such as Sen. Trent Lott, favored the Fairness Doctrine. Moreover, even though most of those conservative individuals and groups have now turned against the Fairness Doctrine, some Republicans still defend (or even seek to expand) the same underlying regulatory concepts that served as the foundation of the Fairness Doctrine. As Corn-Revere notes: Continue reading →
This afternoon at the New America Foundation, Jonathan Zittrain and I engaged in a spirited debate about his provocative new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. As always, Jonathan gave an us an interesting and highly entertaining show, and it was a great honor for me to be given the opportunity to provide some feedback about his book. I’ve been quite critical of the thesis that Jonathan sets forth in his book, and I have discussed my reservations in a lengthy book review and a series of follow-up essays here and elsewhere. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
Jonathan opens with about 45 minutes of remarks and I come into the conversation around the 49 mark of the video. Michael Calabrese of NAF also has some comments about Jonathan’s book after I speak and then there is some interaction with the audience.
In this little manifesto, we highlight one of the central ironies of the Information Age. Namely, that despite “the breathtaking abundance of new and old media outlets for obtaining news, information, and entertainment…”
many people hate this profusion, and never more than when it involves political speech. The current media market, they charge, doesn’t represent true diversity, or isn’t fair, or is subject to manipulation by a small and shrinking group of media barons. They want the government to regulate it into better shape, which just happens to be a shape that benefits them. Doing so… would be a disaster, a kind of soft or not-so-soft tyranny that would wipe out whole sectors of media, curtailing free speech and impoverishing our democracy.
In other words, instead of celebrating the unprecedented cornucopia of media choices at our collective disposal, many policymakers and media critics are calling for just as much media regulation as ever. We itemize these threats in our chapters and they include: efforts to revive the “Fairness Doctrine”, media ownership regulations, “localism” requirements, Net neutrality mandates, a la carte regulations, cable and satellite censorship, video game censorship, regulation of social networking sites, campaign finance-related speech restrictions, and so on.
In each case, we advance a pro-freedom paradigm to counter the advocates of media control. What do we mean by the “media freedom” that we advocate as the alternative to these new regulatory crusades? Here’s how we put it in the book:
Today, PFF has released my latest book: Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods. The entire publication is online and can be downloaded at http://www.pff.org/parentalcontrols (Note: I will be making constant updates to the book in coming months and will post them to that site).
As the title implies, the report provides a broad survey of everything on the market today that can help parents better manage media content, whether it be broadcast television, cable or satellite TV, music devices, mobile phones, video game consoles, the Internet, or social networking websites. I put this report together to show policymakers, the press and the public that many constructive options exist that can help parents control media in their homes and in the lives of their children.
While it can be a formidable challenge to be a parent in an “always-on,” interactive, multimedia world, luckily, there has never been a time in our nation’s history when parents have had more tools and methods at their disposal to help them determine and enforce what is acceptable in their homes and in the lives of their children. And that conclusion is equally applicable to all major media platforms. In the past, the OFF button was the only technical control at a parent’s disposal. Today, by contrast, parents (like me!) have myriad tools and methods to restrict or tailor media content to their own household tastes and values. Those restrictive tools include: the V-Chip and TV ratings; cable and satellite set-top box screening tools; DVD blocking controls; cell phone blocking tools; video game console controls; Internet filtering and monitoring tools, instant messaging monitoring tools; operating system controls; web browser controls; search engine “safe search” tools; media time management devices, and so on. You will find an exhaustive discussion of all these tools and many others in my book.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
National Review magazine published a review that I penned of Mark Helprin’s new book, Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto. Helprin’s book is both a passionate defense of copyright law as well as a mini-autobiography. Helprin is one of the great novelists and essayists of the past half-century, and his book A Soldier of a Great War is one of my all-time favorite novels. I cannot in strong enough words encourage you to read that book; it is profoundly moving. (I almost named my son after the lead character in the book!)
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
