10 July 2002

Conventional wisdom about cynicism is that it is corrosive. It is rude and unworkable, uncomfortable and nihilistic. When I teach, I ask my students to name a popular character that embodies their assumed definition of cynicism. They always cite the character George Costanza from the television comedy Seinfeld.

But the roots of cynicism lie in ancient Greece where Diogenes of Sinope was exiled from Athens for masturbating in the marketplace in the 4th century BCE.

Diogenes was the best-known pupil of Antisthenes, founder of the philosophical current known as the Cynics. The latter had no canon, no schools, no academic lineage, but their teachings have flowed like memes through the cultures of Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Rome. The Cynics held a deep belief in radical freedom and were against sophistry and theory. The idea was to live according to nature, and to avoid being twisted by social convention or cultural power.

When asked which city-state he claimed as his own, Diogenes responded, “I am a citizen of the kosmos”, in other words the universe. He used the word kosmopolites. It is from here we get our notion of cosmopolitanism.

Fast forward 2,500 years

Now, imagine a cynical state – or a cynical state of mind. What could be a more ideal environment, for a cynic to live happily, than in cyberspace? It is a place where members of a borderless polis enjoy total freedom; where they can misbehave rant, parody, and disrupt at will.

Cyberspace really is the ethereal realisation of cynical politics. Diogenes was a hacker. The Internet is a cynical kosmos. It was designed along cynical principles, and serves cynical ends better than it serves any others.

And, as we know, nothing represents nature and the overall substance of the Internet better than the phrase “masturbating in the marketplace”. Where else but the Internet may one book a plane ticket, purchase a book about the history of American copyright, order a bouquet of flowers, write a letter to the editor of the New York Times, and wank to one’s heart’s content – all at the same time?

The word cynic derives from Cynosarges, the place in Athens where the disciples of Antisthenes and later Diogenes gathered. The more frequently-cited derivation is from the Greek word for dog, or dog-like behaviour. The nature of the Internet makes the latter association irresistible, especially when recalling a cartoon from the New Yorker in which a dog, sitting at a computer, says to another dog : “On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog.”

By taking account of cynicism, by imagining cyberspace as a cynical medium, we can assess the challenges that face us as we try to temper the troublesome behaviors that infect the Internet.

Why can’t we limit access to pornography to adults who would view it in private? Why can’t we seem to protect consumer privacy? Why do I keep getting these invitations to invest in business opportunities in Nigeria? Why can’t anyone seem to make money through this space? Why can’t we seem to forge a rich and lively polis out of this powerful communicative technology? And why can’t we seem to convince people to respect copyrights in an electronic environment?

Once we realise that regulating the Internet will be like trying to regulate Diogenes himself, we will become much more modest. We must concede that each of these problems can only be approached through deliberation, debate, and dialogue. Every attempt to guide behaviour on the Internet must emerge from a discussion of ethics. Any other methods – technological or legal – may denature the very medium and destroy the radical freedom that makes the medium so attractive and essential.

However, since the rise of cynical technology, those who are threatened, uncomfortable, or merely unaware of the nature of cyberspace, have been trying to deny, reconfigure, or rein in the more radical aspects of the technologies.

Fears of freedom

Consider some recent statements from three leading critics of cyberspace freedom.

First, Thomas Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, who has written: “Ever since I learned that Mohammed Atta made reservations for 11 September using his laptop and the American Airlines web site, and several of his colleagues used Travelocity.com, I’ve been wondering how the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley were looking at the 9/11 tragedy – whether it was giving them any pause to think about the wired world they’ve been building – and the assumptions they’ve been building it upon.”

Reading this column, I thought, “Why didn’t Friedman ask executives at Boeing how they felt about the terrorists using their inventions to kill 3000 innocent people? Why didn’t Friedman ask the stockholders of Stanley Tools how they felt about their box cutters being used by these murderers?”

The terrorists also used automobiles, photocopiers, and telephones to execute their plans. But only the cynical technologies attract this level of scrutiny – as if they were the only devices capable of fostering abuse.

Second, Jack Valenti, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in testimony to the United States Congress : “The facts are these: the copyright industries are responsible for some 5% of the GDP of the United States, they gather in more international revenues than automobiles and auto parts, more than aircraft, more than agriculture. They are creating new jobs at three times the rate of the rest of the economy…

“Brooding over the global reach of the American movie and its persistent success in attracting consumers of every creed, culture, and country is thievery: the theft of movies in both analog and digital formats.”

Valenti goes on to blame hackers, universities and the Chinese for the woes of the American film industry – woes that seem hard to digest in the light of his opening statement about the global success of the film industry.

He makes a nationalistic claim and demands government protection against the perils of the free market and global flows of information. Specifically, Valenti was asking congress to consider two policy moves that would protect his clients: Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), which would require hardware manufacturers to prevent the unauthorised digital reproduction; and an as-yet unarticulated move to embed watermarks (detectable only by technology) on analog signals that emanate from digital content, forcing hardware manufacturers to prevent unauthorised recording of these analog signals.

Valenti wants to use the power of the US government to restrict the machines that Americans make, sell, and use – all to protect his little industry.

Third, please consider Richard Stallman’s response to Valenti. Stallman invokes global concerns. He appeals to values such as freedom and progress. He expresses his positions in such a way that those concerned with the greater good might agree with him.

Richard Stallman is a cynic, a person who lives strictly according to his beliefs, a man who values freedom over convenience, commerce, and control. Stallman lives like Diogenes. In fact, he dresses a little like Diogenes.

Like Diogenes, Stallman is sometimes disagreeable, unkempt, ill-mannered, and blunt. But also, like Diogenes, Stallman is deeply concerned with the health of the global polis, and the freedom of individual within that polis. And he revels in exposing hypocrisy wherever he finds it. He peppers the world with radical emails about anything he feels passionate about.

The Internet, as it is now, is a much more hospitable place for Richard Stallman than for Jack Valenti.

So let’s look at what Jack Valenti has wrought. Let’s look at what’s happened to copyright in the past decade, as digital technologies and networking have radically changed the terms of discussion.

The cost of having it all

Copyright used to embody a balance of interests. Within American copyright, there were four dramatic safeguards that mitigated the censorious power of copyright.

First, fair use, which is the ability to flexibly use the portions of copyright material for various purposes of benefits to the public; second, first sale, which is broadly speaking the notion that once you buy something like a book, you can resell it or lend it to who ever you want. Third, a democratic safe-guard that says you can’t protect facts or ideas. And finally, there’s the idea of a public domain – the notion that copyright should only be executable for a limited period of time.

In various complicated ways, all four protections are currently under threat.

Copyright regulation is being taken out of human hands, out of courts, and built in to information systems. The domain of copyright regulation has shifted from the human and democratic to the technocratic and dictatorial. And simultaneously made it illegal to circumvent these technical protections under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

I think we can conclude the DMCA has been a complete failure. It has not achieved what it set out to do, which is limit the digital distribution of copyrighted material. But it has done what its critics feared it would, which is create a chilling sense of censorship, as well as real examples of censorship. If the DMCA worked you wouldn’t need Valenti’s proposal for the CBDTPA.

As Stallman points out in his interview, the terms of access, distribution and copying are now dictated entirely by the copyright holder – and are not negotiated through the market nor negotiated through the law. Simultaneously there’s been a massive copyright revolt. We’re eroding faith in the social contract of the copyright system.

Between 1995 and 1998, as copyright has been discussed in global and national organisations, Jack Valenti and his cohorts have actually abandoned copyright. They decided copyright was no longer relevant or optimum for the business. They have convinced the World Intellectual Property Organisation and the U.S. Congress to essentially scrap copyright, in favour of technological regulation. Yet they still summon the gumption to defend the ethics of copyright adherence. They want to have it both ways. They want to abandon the democratic safeguards of copyright, such as fair use and a rich public domain – yet they still want the public to romantically embrace the prohibitions embodied in copyright. And frankly, we’re having none of it. The fact that there were 1.7 million Napster users is proof of this.

Valenti’s vision is oligopolistic. He wants a handful of companies and states to dictate the terms of exchange for digital content. Stallman’s vision is anarchistic. He wants freedom first – and convention, stability, and predictability be damned.

I hope the future of copyright lies somewhere between the extremes. In a perverse way, Valenti’s technocratic abandonment of real copyright – cynical in the George Costanza way – undermines the social contract that supports the copyright system. And until we come up with a set of reasonable protocols – an ethical cynicism, in the Diogenes sense – we will find ourselves losing all the benefits of a reasonable copyright system.

Copyright © Siva Vaidhyanathan, 2002. Published by openDemocracy. Permission is granted to reproduce articles for personal and educational use only. Commercial copying, hiring and lending is prohibited without permission. If this has been sent to you by a friend and you like it, you are welcome to join the openDemocracy network.