Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

We’re all criminals in some sense, be it jaywalking, littering or some other petty crime. Laws are rarely followed to the letter; each society and culture has their norms for how much bending the law is OK. Society’s norms need to be quite stable for a society to function, and these norms also guide national ideals (the other way around, too), which in turn guide our identity construction, and thus our consumption.

Of course, there are issues where societies fail to reach common ground and there’s constant debate about the lawfulness of certain types of behavior. One such subject is the use of drugs, which has been raging as a debate for ages, but I doubt we’ll see a resolution soon. The unlawfulness of drugs, the theory goes, is responsible for putting a lot of underprivileged African-Americans behind bars and leaving many children growing up without male role models, which in turn has helped glorify the “thug life” and turning going to jail into a rite of passage for some (this is not to say that outlaws are only glorified in ghettos, quite the contrary). Soon, such markers of said rite being passed (baggy clothes, tattoos) spread to the rest of the society, becoming fashion.

Another legal/cultural issue under debate is copyright law and the act of file sharing. Lawrence Lessig had a great TED talk (below) that touched upon this issue.

Lessig is, as some of you might know, the father of Creative Commons. While Lessig’s argument was mainly on copyright laws stifling folk culture creativity, he also stated that we’re moving towards a polarized society: copyright owners enforce their rights overzealously, and as a result people (especially young people) are unwilling to recognize any rights to intellectual property at all. On one hand, I do feel that copyright owners have gone too far in enforcing their supposed rights, and they’re doing more harm than good to their business. But then again, this kind of behavior has created a truly bloated sense of entitlement among some people who claim that piracy is a almost a birthright.

To illustrate the point, a few days ago I found this on Mashable!:

It’s an initiative meant to support the PirateBay trial where people can upload their face to show support for PirateBay or somehow protest the unfairness of copyright laws. People are embracing criminality, kind of like vanilla versions of thugs. It’s yet another indication of this polarized nature of the whole debate, and I fear that it’s getting more and more polarized. The RIAA and MPAA have recently pledged to stop harassing regular people and their minor crimes, but these concessions might not be enough, at least not yet.

Some of this is just about the growing pains of the internet. Whenever a new medium (yes, I called the internet a medium, for all intents and purposes, it’s a medium of media) emerges, the social codes and protocols take a while to establish themselves (or at least become somewhat stable). To me, this is one of those cases. We have to find a middle ground, for both parties’ sake. We can’t turn a whole generation of people into “career criminals”, but we can’t simply abandon a model of compensation for content producers. Just last week I saw a documentary called RIP: A remix manifesto. It’s an open source documentary that very thoroughly describes what’s at stake with the copyright war. It also gives us a glimpse of how things could be if we embraced remix culture, because Brazil has already done it.

Watch all the episodes behind the link I posted. Here’s the first chapter: