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Doug Rushkoff on Napster (and more)



Doug is the author of Ecstasy Club, Cyberia, Playing with the Future and
most recently Cohersion: Why we do what they say. Here's his take on
Napster and as an added bonus his visit to a mall shoe store where he
thinks about branding.
Enjoy


Napster: The Zipless Download
Douglas Rushkoff

Like the many who've installed the program, I, too, became addicted to
Napster. At least for a moment.

Very basically, here's how it works. The audio information on the CDs that
I play on my stereo can be stored very efficiently on my computer in a
file format known as MP3. Each song is a separate file, that I can choose
to play right on my computer, or on a portable MP3 device - something much
like a walkman, but with no cassette.

Now, thanks to Napster, everyone on the Internet with MP3 files on their
hard drives can effortlessly share their files with one another. That's
right - once I install the program, I can search through and copy the MP3
files on anyone else's computer also running Napster, and they can search
through and copy mine. Estimates of the number of Napster users ranges from
the hundreds of thousands into the millions.

Most of the current debate about the Napster program, as well as the scores
of other "file sharing" programs that are sure to emerge, have to do with
copyright violation. Is it legal, or even fair, for consumers to give away
perfect copies of music and cut the artist and record label out of their
share of the profits?  (Incidentally, as someone whose books are frequently
photocopied for use by thousands of university students worldwide, I can
honestly say it doesn't bother me in the least. But I'm sure it bothers my
publishers.)

The people now suing Napster over this issue have claimed that the moment a
person "uploads" a copyrighted song to the Internet, that user has broken
the law. But Napster users do not actively upload their songs to the
Internet. They simply make the files on their hard drives in their own
computers available to other people. This is not a trivial distinction.
Napster users do not send or upload their songs anywhere; they merely allow
other people to copy the files on their computers. It would be as if I let
you enter my home library with a portable photocopier under your arm.

The program's advocates claim that Napster democratizes the music
industry, giving lesser-known bands a new means for distributing their
music in a marketplace long dominated by monopolistic major labels.
University students, in particular, who do not have enough money to feed
their ever-changing appetites for new music, have found in Napster a way
to rotate their diet of tunes on a daily basis. Besides, many users sample
new music online and then go out and buy the artist's CDs, anyway.

Still, I'm convinced that the popularity of Napster, and the
quasi-addictive behavior of its users, has less to do with the love of
music than it does with hatred of the recording industry. It's a consumer
revolt. Like any revolt, it is not about joy, but rebellion. And, like
anything that has to do with consumers, it's about getting stuff for the
very sake of getting it.

To be sure, the music business created the very monsters it is now trying to
sue out of existence. Back when the record industry made its historic move
from vinyl albums to less-expensively manufactured CDs, the price of albums
did not go down, but up. The extra profit was not passed on to the artists,
but to the distributors. Meanwhile, the recording industry's promotional
arms have whetted an appetite for more music than it can produce, no matter
how rapidly it churns out new cookie-cutter-5-boy vocal bands with funny
haircuts.

Like any computer hack against a government or corporation, a consumer
hack is based in the same sense of frustration and anger. Sure, I got an
overwhelming thrill the first time I realized just how much music was
available to me through Napster at the click of mouse. I downloaded over
50 songs the first night, then ran out of artists to search for and began
using random names like "John" and "love" to find songs I may have
forgotten about.  But this zeal had less to do with appreciation for the
music itself than with the fact that I was getting it for free. (Most of
the music one finds in the Napster libraries is the same pap available on
top forty radio, anyway.) Since that first week, I haven't used the
program at all.

Deep down, Napster appeals to those of us who can't imagine why a line of
people would stretch around the corner unless someone were giving something
away on the other end. These days, thanks to our exposure to an endless
succession of pitches designed to make us think of ourselves as consumers,
this means most of us. Sometimes I worry that the liberation promised by the
Internet has reduced itself to an acceleration of this tendency alone.

Internet enthusiasts - like MTVInteractive's CEO Nicholas Butterworth who
I heard at a conference last month - are quick to point out that the web
disintermediates the music buying and selection process, allowing
consumers to get to the music they want without all the boring research,
and without having to ask their friends what's good.

I certainly hope not. For I don't believe that music, or recordings of
music for that matter, are ends in themselves. I think they're an excuse
to have the very kinds of interactions that people like Butterworth are
seeing as obstacles to effortless consumption. The music is the reason we
get to have those conversations, go over to each other's houses, and hang
out playing records. I went into three different Napster "community chat
rooms" but couldn't get anyone to chat with me, even though thousands of
people were online. I kept typing "hello?" into the chat window, until
someone finally responded "WHAT DO YOU WANT!?!" Everyone was too busy
voraciously snarfing up music from each other's hard drives to do anything
else. We might call it "the zipless download."

The object of the game should not simply be to accumulate more music on our
hard drives. That's a goal befitting only a mindless music consumer,
well-trained by the recording industry whether he's buying his music or
stealing it. In this sense, the Napster addict is no more a rebel than a
victim.

-------------------------


A Brand by Any Other Name
How Marketers Outsmart Our Media-Savvy Children
Douglas Rushkoff

I was in one of those sports "superstores" the other day, hoping to find a
pair of trainers for myself. As I faced the giant wall of shoes, each model
categorized by either sports affiliation, basketball star, economic class,
racial heritage or consumer niche, I noticed a young boy standing next to
me, maybe 13 years old, in even greater awe of the towering selection of
footwear.

His jaw was dropped and his eyes were glazed over - a psycho-physical
response to the overwhelming sensory data in a self-contained consumer
environment. It's a phenomenon known to retail architects as "Gruen
Transfer," named for the gentleman who invented the shopping mall, where
this mental paralysis is most commonly observed.

Having finished several years of research on this exact mind state, I knew
to proceed with caution. I slowly made my way to the boy's side and gently
asked him, "what is going through your mind right now?"

He responded without hesitation, "I don't know which of these trainers is
_me_." The boy proceeded to explain his dilemma. He thought of Nike as the
most utilitarian and scientifically advanced shoe, but had heard something
about third world laborers and was afraid that wearing this brand might
label him as too anti-Green. He then considered a skateboard shoe,
Airwalk, by an "indie" manufacturer (the trainer equivalent of a
micro-brewery) but had recently learned that this company was almost as
big as Nike. The truly hip brands of skate shoe were too esoteric for his
current profile at school - he'd look like he was "trying." This left the
"retro" brands, like Puma, Converse and Adidas, none of which he felt any
real affinity, since he wasn't even alive in the 70's when they were truly
and non-ironically popular.

With no clear choice and, more importantly, no other way to conceive of his
own identity, the boy stood their, paralyzed in the modern youth equivalent
of an existential crisis. Which brand am I, anyway?

Believe it or not, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of youth culture
marketers who have already begun clipping out this article. They work for
hip, new advertising agencies and cultural research firms who trade in the
psychology of our children and the anthropology of their culture. The object
of their labors is to create precisely the state of confusion and
vulnerability experienced by the young shopper at the shoe wall - and then
turn this state to their advantage. It is a science, though not a pretty
one.

Yes, our children are the prey and their consumer loyalty is the prize in an
escalating arms race. Marketers spend millions developing strategies to
identify children's predilections and then capitalize on their
vulnerabilities. Young people are fooled for a while, but then develop
defense mechanisms, such as media-savvy attitudes or ironic dispositions.
Then marketers research these defenses, develop new countermeasures, and on
it goes. The revolutionary impact of a new musical genre is co-opted and
packaged by a major label before it reaches the airwaves. The ability of
young people to deconstruct and neutralize the effects of one advertising
technique are thwarted when they are confounded by yet another. The
liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly
counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to
each individual user's psychological profile in order to maximize their
effectiveness.

The battle in which our children are engaged seems to pass beneath our radar
screens, in a language we don't understand. But we see the confusion and
despair that results - not to mention the ever-increasing desperation with
which even three-year-olds yearn for the next Pokemon trading card. How did
we get in this predicament, and is there a way out? Is it your imagination,
you wonder, or have things really gotten worse?

Alas, things seem to have gotten worse. Ironically, this is because things
had gotten so much better.

In olden times - back when those of us who read the newspaper grew up -
media was a one-way affair. Advertisers enjoyed a captive audience, and
could quite authoritatively provoke our angst and stoke our aspirations.
Interactivity changed all this. The remote control gave viewers the ability
to break the captive spell of television programming whenever they wished,
without having to get up and go all the way up to the set. Young people
proved particularly adept at "channel surfing," both because they grew up
using the new tool, and because they felt little compunction to endure the
tension-provoking narratives of storytellers who did not have their best
interests at heart. It was as if young people knew that the stuff on
television was called "programming" for a reason, and developed shortened
attention spans for the purpose of keeping themselves from falling into the
spell of advertisers. The remote control allowed young people to deconstruct
TV.

The next weapon in the child's arsenal was the video game joystick. For
the first time, viewers had control over the very pixels on their
monitors. A terrain that was formerly the exclusive province of the BBC
presenter was now available to anyone. The television image was
demystified.

Lastly, the computer mouse and keyboard transformed the TV receiver into a
portal. Today's young people grew up in a world where a screen could as
easily be used for expressing oneself as consuming the media of others. Now
the media was up-for-grabs, and the ethic, from hackers to camcorder owners,
was "do it yourself."

Of course, this revolution had to be undone. Television and internet
programmers, responding to the unpredictable viewing habits of the newly
liberated, began to call our mediaspace an "attention economy." No matter
how many channels they had for their programming, the number of "eyeball
hours" that human beings were willing to dedicate to that programming was
fixed. Not coincidentally, the channel surfing habits of our children became
known as "attention deficit dissorder" - a real disease now used as an
umbrella term for anyone who clicks away from programming before the
marketer wants him to. We quite literally drug our children into compliance.

Likewise, as computer interfaces were made more complex and opaque - think
Windows 98 - the do-it-yourself ethic of the Internet was undone. The
original Internet was a place to share ideas and converse with others.
Children actually had to use the keyboard! Now, the World Wide Web
encourages them to click numbly through packaged content. Web sites are
designed to keep young people from using the keyboard, except to enter in
their parents' credit card information.

But young people had been changed by their exposure to new media. They
constituted a new "psychographic," as advertisers like to call it, so new
kinds of messaging had to be developed that appealed to their new
sensibility.

Anthropologists - the same breed of scientists that used to scope out
enemy populations before military conquests - engaged in focus groups,
conducted "trend-watching" on the streets, in order to study the emotional
needs and subtle behaviors of young people. They came to understand, for
example, how children had abandoned narrative structures for fear of the
way stories were used to coerce them. Children tended to construct
narratives for themselves by collecting things instead, like cards,
bottlecaps called "pogs," or keychains and plush toys. They also came to
understand how young people despised advertising - especially when it did
not acknowledge their media-savvy intelligence.

Thus, Pokemon was born - a TV show, video game, and product line where the
object is to collect as many trading cards as possible. The innovation
here, among many, is the marketer's conflation of TV show and
advertisement into one piece of media. The show is an advertisement. The
story, such as it is, concerns a boy who must collect little monsters in
order to develop his own character. Likewise, the Pokemon video game
engages the player in a quest for those monsters. Finally, the card game
itself (for the few children who actually play it) involves collecting
better monsters - not by playing, but by buying more cards. The more cards
you buy, the better you can play.

Kids feel the tug, but in a way they cant quite identify as advertising.
Their compulsion to create a story for themselves - in a world where
stories are dangerous - makes them vulnerable to this sort of attack. In
marketers terms, Pokemon is "leveraged" media, with "cross-promotion" on
"complementary platforms." This is ad-speak for an assault on multiple
fronts.

Moreover, the time a child spends in the Pokemon craze amounts to a remedial
lesson in how to consume. Pokemon teaches them how to want things that they
can't or won't actually play with. In fact, it teaches them how to buy
things they don't even want. While a child might want one particular card,
he needs to purchase them in packages whose contents are not revealed. He
must buy blind and repeatedly until he gets the object of his desire.

Worse yet, the card itself has no value – certainly not as a play-thing. It
is a functionless purchase, slipped into a display case, whose value lies
purely in its possession. It is analogous to those children who buy action
figures from their favorite TV shows and movies, with _no intention of ever
removing them from their packaging!_ They are purchased for their
collectible value alone. Thus, the imagination game is reduced to some
fictional moment in the future where the will, presumably, be resold to
another collector. Children are no longer playing. They are investing.

Meanwhile, older kids have attempted to opt out of aspiration, altogether.
The "15-24" demographic, considered by marketers the most difficult to
wrangle into submission, have adopted a series of postures they hoped would
make them impervious to marketing techniques. They take pride in their
ability to recognize when they are being pandered to, and watch TV for the
sole purpose of calling out when they are being manipulated. They are
armchair media theorists, who take pleasure in deconstructing and defusing
the messages of their enemies.

But now advertisers are making commercials just for them. Soft drink
advertisements satirize one another before rewarding the cynical viewer:
"image is nothing," they say. The technique might best be called "wink"
advertising, for its ability to engender a young person's loyalty by
pretending to disarm itself. "Get it?" the ad means to ask. If you're
cool, you do.

New magazine advertisements for jeans, such as those created by Diesel,
take this even one step further. The ads juxtapose imagery that actually
makes no sense - ice cream billboards in North Korea, for example. The
strategy is brilliant. For a media-savvy young person to feel good about
himself, he needs to feel he "gets" the joke. But what does he do with an
ad where there's obviously something to get that he can't figure out? He
has no choice but to admit that the brand is even cooler than he is. An
ad's ability to confound its audience is the new credential for a brand's
authenticity.

Like the boy at the wall of shoes, kids today analyze each purchase they
make, painstakingly aware of how much effort has gone into seducing them. As
a result, they see their choices of what to watch and what to buy as
exerting some influence over the world around them. After all, their buying
patterns have become the center of so much attention!

But however media-savvy kids get, they will always lose this particular
game. For they have accepted the language of brands as their cultural
currency, and the stakes in their purchasing decisions as something real. No
matter how much control kids get over the media they watch, they are still
utterly powerless when it comes to the manufacturing of brands. Even a
consumer revolt merely reinforces one's role as a consumer, not an
autonomous or creative being.

The more they interact with brands, the more they brand themselves.

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