Grand Theft Metro
My friend Pawel was tall, skinny, and camp, and he lived in the house at the bottom of the street. I was eleven or twelve, and visiting his house used to terrify me — his dad always looked so angry with himself, like he could barely contain some sharp, harmful secret. But still, I relished each minute of those after-school drop ins because Pawel knew everything about computers.
We had the same machine, the Commodore Amiga, and Pawel — older and wiser at the grand old age of 14 — had an unbelievable stream of new games that he’d lend me. Whenever you put the disc in the drive, there would be a flash of code on screen, a skull and crossbones, or a graffiti-like logo. I didn’t realise that meant they were cracked: stripped of their copy protection and flagrantly redistributed. To be honest, I didn’t really know what any of these things meant: I just liked trying the new games. It was only later that I realised they’d been copied against the wishes of their creators.
That was the first time I got interested in copying, but it wasn’t the last. I hit college — and the internet — at the same time that Napster turned the music industry upside down. I followed the debates about the rights and wrongs. I travelled to Sweden to interview the Pirate Bay. I researched, and talked about, Mark Twain’s crazy relationship with copyright. And in 2010 I spent a few weeks in China to find out more about the growing mobile phone copying movement known as shanzhai.
But it turns out that mobile phones aren’t all there is as far as shanzhai goes. In fact, China is copying all sorts of elements of all sorts of other cultures, for all sorts of reasons.
About 18 months ago, Der Spiegel reported that an entire village in Austria was being copied wholesale and put into place in Guangdong Province. Unsurprisingly, this peculiar news made headlines around the world. And even more unsurprisingly, I found it fascinating. But I wasn’t the only one, though: two young artists, Sebastian Acker and Phil Thompson, were even more intrigued.
This week I discovered that they actually got a grant to go to China and document several of these so-called “copy towns” — and were now looking for funds to go and visit the European locations that inspired the copycats.
I was already fascinated by the subject before I even rolled up, so their Chinese Copy Towns project on Indiegogo didn’t have to do a lot to persuade me to part with my money.
But their plan to finish the film, produce book, and run an exhibition “about the recent phenomenon of copied Western architecture in China” was a “flexible funding campaign” — a bit of Indiegogo lingo that means they’ll get every penny pledged, even if they don’t reach their target. That’s good news for them: as I write, they’ve got three days left and have raised just £1,441 of an £11,700 goal. If it had been a traditional campaign — the kind where you get nothing if you don’t reach your target — I probably wouldn’t have joined in. They’re too far from the finish line, with too little time to make up the gap. But as it was, I knew my money would be put to use, so I threw in £30.
(An aside: As time goes on, I plan to look closely at the different ways that various platforms allow people to crowdfund. Kickstarter, the platform I’m most familiar with, has a lot of restrictions; I’m interested to see how different systems create other kinds of encouragement… or discouragement for project owners and supporters.)
Still, because I want to see their film about copy towns, I made them the first pick in my year of giving dangerously. Let’s see what happens.
