Why the Incumbent Hierarchy Hates Computers and the Internet
The real motivation behind EU copyright reform and article 13
It’s hard to talk about because it’s kind of vague, and it seems a bit ridiculous to bring up because it’s also so familiar, but we all know it’s there: a lurking negativity from a particular constituency, not just towards the internet, but towards computers themselves.
You can hear it in the fuel car industry’s description of autonomous driving, which has the potential to save millions of lives, as an effort to turn cars into phones. You can see it where authorities go to extraordinary efforts to stop unwanted email, but unwanted paper mail is celebrated as introducing consumers to opportunities. You can feel it when people complain about how “just anybody” can do things on the internet without some kind of permission — organize social movements, set up businesses, write articles, spread information.
It’s been there from the beginning of the usable web: the East Coast shock at young nobodies or computer nerds making money, and doing so without wearing suits — think of Marc Andreesen with no socks on the cover of Time, or the preoccupation with Mark Zuckerberg’s youth and hoodies.
It’s there in sarcastic attitudes towards obvious improvements to working culture — working remotely, being served good food at work, choosing your own hours.
It’s there in sales tax rules that set higher rates for ebooks than for printed books. It’s there in the language used by this constituency when it describes things having to do with computers as not fully real.
You can hear it in a certain kind of complaint, which sounds like a priest who has watching his pews getting emptier week after week, and takes this as a sign that everyone else is suffering from increased isolation. I think there might be reasons besides smartphones for that.
It’s even there in the conflation of “tech” with “computers and the internet,” as though those giant old newspaper printing presses, or bottling plants, aren’t also technology and, for that matter, examples of automation.
I call this constituency the “incumbent hierarchy” because the constituency itself is vaguely constituted, but it always expresses itself in opposition to the opening up of society and opportunity that computers and the internet represent to them. It speaks as though all people need to be the right sort — that is, sanctioned by the incumbent hierarchy — to succeed or to have a voice. It expresses a genuinely felt, and profoundly unjust, indignation that people are doing things without some kind of permission they’re supposed to seek.
One reason this constituency is hard to talk about is that it is based on something many of us are unfamiliar with: the fact that people who endorse and enjoy the idea of a universally imposed social hierarchy, endorse and enjoy it no matter where they are in the hierarchy. They actually feel pleasure and pride in conforming to the incumbent hierarchy’s codes of behaviour and, crucially, the social license it grants them to personally enforce those codes.
The active perpetuation of an incumbent hierarchy by its supporters regardless of their personal status within it, explains what otherwise seems like a paradox in regulations like those in article 13 of a law on copyright reform that is being proposed by the EU.
That paradox, set out nicely here, is that rules that present themselves as protecting society from the assumed depredations of the internet, are in fact designed to benefit those who are already wealthy and powerful, at the expense of freedom and the distribution of power throughout society.
These rules exploit the generalized, vicious form of indignation directed at people who know how the computers go, that we’re all very familiar with — there in comments about hackers living in their mum’s basement, and a thousand other tropes.
There’s a story I’ve heard that may be apocryphal, but nicely captures what the incumbent hierarchy is so bothered about. Back when machines were invented that could let you watch videotapes at home, a group of executives at a major entertainment company were introduced to the technology. They were shocked and asked, flabbergasted: “You mean just anybody can come into the room and watch the video, without paying?”
What those executives understood was that the real business they were in was not the creation of entertaining or informative content, but the enforcement of control over the space in which that content could be accessed.
That’s what this law, and article 13, is all about. It’s about the incumbent hierarchy controlling cyberspace in a manner analogous to the way it controls access to the physical spaces it owns, the physical things that it makes, and over which it has enforcement authority.
Just imagine if another technology were being regulated this way: the mail. Imagine if the EU were proposing that actual people should open and inspect every letter and parcel that we send, to see if there’s infringing material inside. There would be universal outrage.
But because computers and the internet are involved in what is being proposed in this law, the incumbent hierarchy relates to what they are proposing to do as a good law, because it will only affects things that they feel are not quite fully real, and because those are things towards which they feel a kind of personal, angry, and simultaneously humiliated resentment, as though they are reacting to the violation of a deep taboo.
I’m sure the incumbent hierarchy enjoys the irony in the prospect of using powerful and expensive computer technology to suppress its positive potential to diminish their power. They will not stop with controlling everything we do on the internet, for the sake of enforcing copyright: that is a transparent excuse for a profound encroachment on our freedom.
The important thing to understand here is that “technology” is not just “computers and the internet,” and that all technology presents us with the contradiction, that it may be used for both good and evil, empowerment and oppression, and that progress in technology is no guarantee of progress in anything else.
This is a time of reaction. Understanding the injustices that the incumbent hierarchy - which is comprised of willing and conscious proponents at all levels of economic and social standing, who are angry about changes they perceive to old power structures they enjoy belonging to, and the pervasive sense of personal humiliation they feel in the face of what they believe they are losing - is carrying out right now, is important. Talking about it is important. But doing something is necessary.
If you’re a citizen of the EU, please go here for information about how to contact Members of the European Parliament and tell them to stop this proposed law.
