revolution

Score one for the revolution:

I didn’t pay anything to download Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” last Wednesday. When the checkout page on the band’s Web site allowed me to type in whatever price I wanted, I put 0.00, the lowest I could go. My economist friends say this makes me a rational being.

Apparently not everybody is this lucid, at least not in matters related to their favorite British rock band. After Radiohead announced it would allow fans to download its album for whatever price they chose, about a third of the first million or so downloads paid nothing, according to a British survey. But many paid more than $20. The average price was about $8. That is, people paid for something they could get for free.

That’s $8M that the band just pocketed. Very nice. Considering most artists make between $1 and $2 per CD sold (and that’s after the label recoups their contracted recording costs), it’s a safe bet that this will shake up the industry. You can download yours here.

I paid for mine, the first time I’ve paid for recreational music in close to a decade. In the above-linked article, much is devoted to the “crazyness” of this notion, although the author seems to grasp the reasons why fans respond generously:

Some economists suspect that what is going on is that people get a kick from the act of giving the band money for the album rather than taking it for free. It could take many forms, like pleasure at being able to bypass the record labels, which many see as only slightly worse than the military-industrial complex. It could come from the notion that the $8 helps keep Radiohead in business. Or it could make fans feel that they are helping create a new art form — or a new economy.

I would argue that this “feeling” is far more than that. The media-industrial complex is in fact corrupt and culturally destructive, and with an increasing array of established artists coming to the end of their contracts (and more and more up-and-comers looking to not get locked in), I think this album is a very important step towards our collective emancipation from mental slavery.

It’s one of the great tragedies of our time that a primitive notion of economics is the dominant paradigm of understanding among the power elite. The social science of studying barter and truck is a great one, and has revealed some keen insights into humanity and the world, but it’s clearly limited even in its most sophisticated expressions, and downright misleading in the dominant econ 101 formulation.

The way I see it, people are generally motivated by a hierarchy of needs which are vastly more complex than the desire to accumulate money even if in many cases confused individuals sadly fixate on the latter as the answer to all problems. The quest for individual happiness, moreover, is itself quite complex, generally involving the attitudes and actions of other people. Once you move outside of a survival context, social forces matter hugely, and the emphasis within economics on the decisions of lone “rational actors” is a crippling liability in its usefulness in analyzing human nature, even in aggregate.

Anyay, I’ve been a moderate fan since their early breakthrough days on MTV’s “Buzz Clips.” Who among us did not have the hook from “Creep” stuck in their heads in the mid to late 90s? I say moderate because I’m not nearly as into them as others, and because I don’t really like all their stuff. While I respect them enormously as artists, I do find some of their work self-indulgent and boring. It goes with their territory of trying to make art rather than catchy music, but I don’t have to dig it, and that’s also part of the deal. On the other hand, some of their albums and tracks are simply fantastic and I’ve done some of my own art based on their work, so I gotta show them the love.

It’s great to see Radiohead leading the way into the post-record-label universe. I’ve been saying for years that they’re one of the few bands that are perfectly poised to do this, and their example should inspire others to jump ship. Here’s hoping.

Oh. And the album is pretty good too.

So, as regular readers will know, I write occasionally under the subject of revolution (older posts here). What do I really mean by this?

Mark and I have started discussing again an old idea of ours, The New Cultural Freedom Movement. It’s a terrible phrase (though developing) as far as marketing is concerned, which reflects the state of our thinking. After more than a decade it’s still pretty vague; but it’s the best idea I’ve got going, so here’s the shot.

Early on in teenagerdom, those halcyon years when you were immortal and unfettered and when the idea of pure raw rebellion ala ¡la reveloucion! was a lot more plausible, we hit upon a pretty good insight: our ability to individually drive change through direct acts was pretty limited. The real action was in inspiration and empowerment — in turning people on — and maybe the real _real_ action is in inspiring and empowering people to inspire and empower _other people_, making waves and ripples and shit like that. I turned on to movement politics early.

This never took any concrete shape for Mark and I and our peers, but the idea lives and animates many of the things we and other people do in life. My politics has largely been driven by this kind of stuff — inspiration and empowerment — and Mark’s work serves many of the same ends also.

There’s an ethos here too, a not-too-subtle distaste for consumer culture and contemporary risk-aversion, a rejection of fear; a preference for radical transparency, the honesty of outlaws. There’s a healthy endorsement of the old standards of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, but all with a good heart. It’s not about irresponsible excess — we don’t drive drunk — but it is about peak experiences and heady good times.

The idea of the New Freedom Movement is to coalesce these ideas under a common brand or banner, and to begin promoting them aggressively, spreading the word, building alliances and spinning off franchises. There seems to be a real opportunity here. The internet is huge, and there are already hundreds if not thousands of individuals doing this in some form or another. It’s a good time to inspire and empower people to inspire and empower people.

Details remain difficult to determine, but I’m beginning to feel more and more like the time to make a move is now. A more focused vision of what we want to achieve is necessary for the real spark of inspiration, and a more practical plan of action is needed to actually provide traction for empowerment, but the genesis of this lies in the ethos, or maybe a mythos… at any rate, something to believe in.

It starts with us believing in ourselves, which at the tender age of twenty eight is harder than it used to be. But it feels like we’re going to try, and there will be more and better posts about this in the future.

I’ve been noodling around with this script concept for the past couple weeks, the first purely creative writing in quite a while. The gist of it is a disillusioned political operative raising cash money from black-market sources and carrying on an outlaw lobby campaign in DC. Thinly-veiled autobiographical content abounds, but they say you write what you know. My goal here is to start with that, and fill the rest in with what I dream.

The general concept can be exciting and sexy I think, and the rough plot arc I have sketched out should be a satisfying narrative, but I need to fill in some details before I can really finish a treatment. I need to learn more about the specifics of lobbyist culture, find out where and how Republican operatives party, and maybe investigate the rampant rumors about how the Humbold County DA raises money. I want as much authentic texture in the surroundings as possible; I think it will free me up to be more fantastical with the plot.

One of the big questions is “what’s the outlaw lobbyist’s agenda?” I think getting into the wonk zone would probably kill the writing, so the idea here is to sketch out something in broad strokes that has mass appeal, and then find something really specific that can be part of the primary dramatic conflict (e.g. what are the good and bad guys/gals facing off over?).

I’m not sure about this yet, but kicking the whole idea around with Franz, he gave me his wish-list, which actually seemed to be pretty decent:

• Universal Health Care. ‘Nuff said.
• End Prohibition, because it’s not working out, and the prison industrial complex is a modern horror.
• Universal Service (open internet, broadband for all), because this is kind of fundamental to a lot of other things, and it’ll let us have a really positive and participatory culture.

If you can stick in transitioning away from Imperialism and Corporatism, and towards being a Republic again, and embracing Economic Democracy in as bullet points, with the implications for things like energy policy, that’s pretty much the whole revolution as far as the federal government is concerned. I’m a fan of federalism, and with a country as big as this, it seems right and true for Kentucky to be different from Arizona.

I could delve into all that for posts and posts, and maybe sometime I will, but for the moment I’m trying to figure out how to fit that into a realistic narrative structure without losing the suspension of disbelief or getting boring. Should be a good challenge to synthesize like that.

Well, I’ve been stewing, and now I’ll be spewing.

We of Cinema
A while back I got this great DVD from Brazil called City of Men, something of a follow-on to the brilliant film City of God, which delves into the lives of children in a particularly infamous favela.

The series is significantly more positive than the movie. It doesn’t shy away from grit or violentce, but it does manage to pull out a lot of beauty by taking a wider angle and showing the holistic culture and community. It’s really fantastic. You can buy it from Amazon if you like.

One of my favorite aspects of the series is the way in which many episodes include “live” camcorder shots of/by the kids, archival footage (which may or may not be real), and also documentary-style interviews. This form represents next-gen postmodernism at it’s best: a reconstructive narrative. One of the more humorous moments comes in an episode where the two protagonists take a trip to Brazillia to hand-deliver a letter to President Lula, under the auspices of an NGO who’s director has the kids film things in the favela. They’re riding on the bus with the camcorder, talking about how important it is to get on tape so the director can “make her gringo bosses happy.”

In reality, the series comes from just such an organization: the Nós do Cinema project in Rio, which is overseen by Kátina Lund, co-director of City of God. Basically they started doing media and acting training in the favela in order to build the cast for the movie, and the organization was such a hit with the people that they kept it going afterwards.

The two principle actors in City of Men Douglas Silva (Acerola) and Darlan Cunha (Laranjinha) were participants in this program. Both played central characters in City of God. They, along with most of the other child actors, are quite talented, and it’s really something to watch them grow up over the four years of filming.

I really like the idea of Nós do Cinema. It is in keeping with the absolutely fantastic Brazilian pedagogical tradition of Paulo Freire, who’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed I discovered by way of Auguso Boal and his Theatre of the Oppressed, which I studied a bit at NYU. In brief, Freire (much like my man John Dewey) asks us to ditch the “banking” concept of education — in which the role of student is to be “filled” with “facts” — and stresses the need to develop indigenous forms of intelligence, critical thought and articulation.

For me, these ideas echo many of the more positive aspects of my own non-traditional education; they have come to form a core set of values for me in evaluating the world around me and in thinking about how to improve the human condition.

The Means of Communication
I’ve repeated the notion so often that it feels tired to me, but it seems undeniable that future human progress depends on the continued democratization and decentralization of our means of communication. We need to talk more and more meaningfully to more of eachother. This isn’t your average cliche call for increased dialogue; I believe we actually have a chance to make a quantum leap in terms of our global communication, and significantly improve the whole world situation in the process.

To be sure, human progress also depends on a lot of other more tangible things — things closer to the Old Man’s means of production — being more equitably and efficiently parsed out as well. However, I and many other see strong rights and freedoms and powers around information to be fundamental, even necessary, pre-coursers to a more equitable distribution of material wealth; media justice as a means for social justice, if you will.

Indeed, without the critical ability to independently communicate, we’re condemned to being herded (for better or for worse) by our social elites, and I don’t think that’s where we want to be. Recent history shows the weakness of elite/centralized control structures from the Soviet Politburo and their sham command economy, to our own decadent political establishment in Washington and the corruption and failure that’s come from ever-greater corporate consolidation.

Indeed, there are few if any established institutions which have not seen their credibility degrade in recent years, including the press and religious institutions. And not without reason: they’re failing us. If we’re to navigate the perils of the 21st Century with any hope of making the world a better place, let alone preventing catastrophe, it’s inarguably necessary to explore new forms of organization and interaction. What we have now is not working.

People are not stupid. They know that things are getting worse in the world, but I think most people — myself included — feel largely powerless. And, individually, we are. Certainly there are all manner of important individual acts that run along the theme of “think global, act local,” and yes it’s a good thing to conserve and recycle, to be kind and engaged with your own community. However, more is needed, and the first step towards getting more is to overcome that sensation of individual helplessness by connecting with like-minded people to engage in larger-scale projects.

What Do We Imagine?
One of the reasons City of Men impresses me is how well it communicates a distinctly different culture to my own, better than any foreign film I’ve seen. And in spite of the omnipresent threat of drug-traffickers, crushing poverty, disintegrating families, etc, the cultural “message” of the show is overwhelmingly positive and attractive.

I think a lot of this comes from the strong sense of community that’s carried though the show, the sense of camradre and shared ownership of the physical and social environment. The US is very much a dog-eat-dog place, excessively individualistic, competitive and fearful to the point of paranoia and genrally lacking in public/community space. We’re missing that quality of fraternity, to go with our liberty and (supposed) equality. Traded it in for the pursuit of happiness we did. Kind of a shame.

Something as simple as Acerola’s favela funk-dancing group doing a little routine about peace and love stikes me as something that would seem out of place, if not laughable, in a mainstream American context. As someone who’s a big proponent of both peace and love, this is a little disheartening.

It strikes me in my art-heart that a lot of our problems are bound up with the crass commercialization of our culture. Human beings, including those who create, tend to have a 360-degree range of experiences and expressions. While everyone’s got their own style and I’m all for darkness, blood, sex and profanity, it’s the need to fit into economic niches or appeal to marketing segments that drives the mindlessly low common denominator of so much contemporary culture.

On the other hand, if people didn’t buy mindless inhumane and degrading products at such reliable rates, this wouldn’t be an issue. There are cycles at work in culture, just like in family life, and they can spin either upward or down.

So the question really is, what do we imagine, and who are “we” in imagining it? Recently, the we has been a pretty small cabal, and the what has largely been whatever will sell. That’s changing, and increasingly quickly, as the media industry becomes one of the first to come apart under the pressures of massive consolodation, like some black hole imploding.

Like the T-shirt says, it’s fun! In spite of “the coarsening of our public discourse,” as the circle of participation has widened and more people from more walks of life have become cultural producers — whether we’re talking independent film, hip-hop, blogging, or Nós do Cinema — there have been some great results. I find a lot more to like in the contemporary cultural scene than I do in the sanitized past of Hollywood and Broadway, and it seems harder and harder to pass of rank bullshit in the public square these days.

This trend of decentralization, the decline of gatekeepers and rise of independent producers, also brings to life the great hope of a more equitable cultural balance: a civilization which truly exists in a state of conversational interconnection rather than some kind of internally constructed hegemony. It’s been a long road out of serfdom, but it seems like we’re getting close to a watershed.

Jaded skeptic that I am, I still hold out an innocent, faithful belief that people will do right more than they’ll do wrong. It seems to me that the more we get people into making culture for, of and by themselves, the closer we’ll get to a just and equitable world, and the better chance we’ll have of living in peace.

Well, it looks like two of my favorite peer-level politics organizations are making a run at financial independence. This is a great thing, as one of the major lessons I’ve learned over the years is that the Revolution cannot progress on an allowance from daddy.

I’ll write a real blog about this for Future Majority at some point soon, but for now here are some links if you want to get on the bandwaggon:

First there’s Chris and Matt from MyDD, who provide some of the most diligent, honest, insightful and inspiring political blogging around, and who I sort of think of as comrades. I just sent them $50.

Then, a bit more ambitious, Living Liberally, an organization which has build real social capital all over the nation, is turning pro and running as an LLC. I like the enterprising angle, and will be giving them money as soon as I figure out how deep I’m in hock to the IRS and what I can affort.

If you feel moved, you can give as well. I’ll also post a link to my piece on FM explaining why this matters whenever I get around to writing it.

UPDATE: Even moreso, what Justin says:

And at that time, a number of collaborators seemed paranoid when they were nervous about infiltrators…we were asked a number of times how we would deal with agents provocateur. I’m happy to say that we didn’t give in to that type of fear in our planning…but it’s odd to realize that in our photos and videos from that week, there are probably a few faces we never saw again, once they returned to NYPD HQ.

In addition to feeling like our privacy was invaded and our loyalty questioned by this senseless spying, I also smile a little…our movement has such a level of transparency, what did these police spies think they were going to find that we weren’t already advertising over every list-serve and blog that would have us?

This is a really important point vis-a-vis my Vanguard thoughts below. To the extent that there is organizing going on which has credibly “revolutionary” potential (sorry, the wanna-be Maoists aren’t that), it’s being done with an unprecedented degree of transparency. This is actually a major difference vs. most power-organizing schools of thought of the past, and beyond just being novel, may actually represent a major step forward in our capabilities to undermine, subvert, collapse or control entrenched and malign power-structures. Here’s hoping.

What Mike says:

It wouldn’t surprise me to find MFA, myself, or people I know in those files. Sometimes thinking about where we’re at as a country can get a little abstract… this article today hit me a lot harder than a blog or article about the latest administration scandal ever could.

Sort of flattering. Sort of spooky. It makes me wonder about all those people who wanted to “make documentaries” about the stuff we did during the RNC.

At the end of the day I still fall back on Brautigan — you can have security or you can have sanity; pick one — and I think it’s more important to trust people than fear them. But still, it’s not a Good Thing that this kind of covert surveillance is allowed. Begs to be abused.

The political season has begun heating up, and I do a lot of back-and forth at Future Majority these days. However, it’s a pretty nuts and bolts kind of website. As Mike says it’s not as sexy as Revolution!, but not insignificant either. I tend to agree, but I still miss the sexy part.

One of the things I’ve been considering for a while is the notion of Vanguardism, especially in relation to how I and others foresee potential social change as a result of the increasingly globalized and decentralized flow of information (to wit: the internet). There’s a sense of Revolutionary spirit in this, if not always Revolutionary action, and this R-word gets kicked around by all sorts, some in a sort of square business context, but by many others in a more heartfelt and (quasi)radical way.

It’s not just me either; check Markos:

On our own, bloggers can do little. But by educating and motivating grassroots activists, we can truly help effect change. The real change is on the ground — the heroes of this battle were those Democrats busting their ass for their party — the precinct captains and party volunteers.

Sounds a lot like the task of a Vanguard to me, complete with rhetoric saying that the “real heroes” are the proletariat, or street-level grassroots activists. I don’t mean this in any way as a dis. In fact, I agree wholeheartedly.

Still, Vanguard organizations generally have huge problems. The whole concept of trying to lead any kind of mass movement from within a smaller clique is prone to failure, to being authoritarian and patronizing, exclusive and elitist. It can go wrong in many ways, and yet it is where we seem to find ourselves, for better or for worse.

My thinking got kicked up a notch last night watching Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, which fairly clearly shows how a few individuals were able to ride a wave of elite sentiment — loosely, the belief in “the magic of the market” — and defraud a whole lot of people including their employees and most of the State of California, out of billions of dollars. Skilling, Lay, Fastow and their gang used a lot of the same techniques as the Bolsheviks, whether they were conscious of that or not.

Given where we’re at, how can we try and avoid the pitfalls that plague most Vanguard movements? Here’s a short list of ideas:

• Make our actions, decision-making, organization and motivations radically transparent. One of the biggest problems is when there are covert leadership structures or “noble lie”-type deception as to intent.
• Keep moving it around and avoid ossification. A Vanguard which becomes a collection of the same old faces trends inevitably towards elitism.
• Stay humble. Hubris is consistently a downfall of movements which seek change, let alone revolutionary change.

Practically I think we can duck the usual problems. Our vanguard is fluid. Many of its members engage in direct local activism. We also embrace an anti-bureaucratic set of organizing principles. We’re also talking about a much more high-capacity environment — in real terms, almost any American can grok our shit if they give it a few hours — and a much more decentralized group of thought-leaders. We’re closer in many ways to a cultural avant-guard than a political “Vanguard party.”

Our goals are still too hazy to run many risks. As things get sharper and more focused over the coming years we’ll see what happens. Lenin went more than 15 years from writing What Is To Be Done to leading the October Revolution. A lot can change.

Home tattoos.

This is one of the oldest things we as people do: we cut our hair and draw on our body (and pierce things) and (eventually) wear specific clothing as a means of signaling our cultural identity and expressing ourselves.

Now that I’ve got one…

67% oppose the war in Iraq and 70% disapprove of Bush’s handling, but nobody is talking about taking a hard stance against the Bush/McCain/Lieberman tactic of escalation.

Likewise, everyone knows the health care system doesn’t work and understands that the only entity which has a shot at fixing it is the federal government, but we’ve yet to hear anyone step up and catch that 70% of public opinion in their sails.

Finally, clear majorities want to invest in efficiency and alternative energy sources, and yet our leaders are stuck dicking around with ANWAR and a few underfunded pilot/mostly-for-show projects.

My point is, the Public is actually not that fucking stupid. Our leadership is just timid and out of touch — if not outrightly corrupt — and our organs for articulating Public Opinion have fallen so far from the Jefferson/Franklin ideals that they’re closer to the state propaganda machines in the USSR than a legitimate Free Press.

People in this country are a little out of shape and kind of materialistic, but “big dumb America” actually has much a better grasp of what the fuck is going on than the elite leadership.

We’re going to see some serious realignment over the next decade, with either a major shift in “national prorities” from the power-elite, or the rise of localism as cities, counties, states and regions begin to abandon the ossified and ineffective federal system in favor of their own problem-solving.

Hopefully we get both. ;)

Zack Exley, a much bigger fish than me, is calling for the revolution (part 1, part 2), which is pretty neat. I haven’t had my head there in a while.

There’s this old post from MFA that was a stab at an agenda, and there’s this old saw, plus wordpress blog posts filed under #revolution, which didn’t really get off the ground.

But it’s hot that Exley is beating the drum. He’s a sort of elder statesman here. I’ll see if maybe this can synch with The LC 2.0…

UPDATE: The game inside congress is going to be HOT too.