12/2/11
It isn’t often that the needs of independent artists are aligned with those of men and women in the military; but, as someone who is directly concerned with both, I urge my colleagues in the creative community as well as military personnel and veterans’ organizations to support the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation in the House, and the PROTECT IP and Combating Counterfeits Acts currently being debated in the Senate. (Read More)
Let me say in the interest of full disclosure that my film gone Elvis has been blogged about by the organization Copyright Alliance, that I am one of CA’s members, and that I am on good terms with its director, Sandra Aistars. Immediately, these facts will suggest to some that I am a shill for this lobbying organization that many believe is a “front” for giant media conglomerates and industry trade organizations like the MPAA. But here’s the thing about fronts and shills: they don’t disclose who they are or who they work for.
Every day, I confront someone on Facebook or Twitter copying a blog or news story with a sensational headline about the dangers of the Protect IP Act and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). It’s the End of the Internet! Protect Freedom of Speech! Protect yourselves! Don’t Let Congress Take Away Your Rights! Many of these posts originate with organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and if you go to eff.org, the first thing you’ll discover is that it’s got a long list of staff members, many of them lawyers; and the last time I checked, lawyers like to get paid. So, whose paying these lawyers? You could click on the link to find its sponsoring members, but . . . they don’t have one. Why not? Because, rather than transparency, EFF and organizations like them are actually tech-company funded lobbying and marketing organizations posing as civil libertarians. If you download the annual report, you can see the kinds of companies that support EFF; and it’s important to recognize that tech companies, Google in particular, have a vested interest in turning a blind eye to online piracy.
It’s true that Copyright Alliance is backed by the big media organizations and more. But why do you think CA is more transparent about its supporters compared to a site like EFF? It’s worth mentioning, also, that CA’s membership includes about 8,000 independent artists making modest salaries, who also don’t want to get ripped off. What protections would they, would I, have against piracy without the funding and lobbying muscle of the big content producers to lobby for more effective copyright protections? We operate in a dynamic landscape with billions to be made in piracy, either directly or indirectly; and independent content producers are literally wiped out by foreign-based, enterprise-scale, rogue sites that steal and distribute their content for free.
We’ve become so paranoid about the government and big corporations, that we miss the fact that other big entities are cramming these anti-legislation messages down our throats. Google is funding a great deal of the anti-legislation effort made to look like it’s coming from independent sources. It’s reach is more pervasive and insidious than that of any Hollywood studio. For all the benefits of YouTube, we shouldn’t forget that it was built from a start-up by getting away with copyright infringement for a few years. If I ran a hugely successful furniture chain today that started out by robbing houses to sell stolen goods off a truck, would that seem so laudable?
I think people just read and re-post these articles based on the headlines. We’re so conditioned to think of the government as bad and these so-called freedom-fighting blogs as “on our side,” that we just pass them along to our friends, who pass them along to their friends. The irony is, of course, that it’s so often artists and entrepreneurs who propagate all this nonsense that could kill a law designed to protect their interests. I also sense that those who share these headlines are left-leaning and fearful of a right-wing Congress hell-bent on curbing free speech, but these bills are heavily supported by both parties and the Obama administration. They are good laws that protect content creators like me and my colleagues.
The bottom line is that both Protect IP and SOPA are narrowly written bills designed to go after foreign-based, enterprise-scale websites whose sole business is to profit from stolen, American-made media. Both bills contain language that rejects any notion of a site being capriciously taken down solely for suspicion of piracy.
Take a look at the details of these bills, or at least visit www.copyrightalliance.org, and learn about the issue for yourself before hitting the Like or the Share button. There is nothing in these bills that threaten anything you hold dear.
Headless Horseman July 4, 2011 - Kinderhook, NY
You may rightly ask, what is Wasington Irving’s famous villain doing in a 4th of July parade? The real answer is that the school master (Jesse Merwin c.1809) of Kinderhook was supposedly the inspiration for Irving’s character Ichabod Crane. As such, the horseman makes periodic, incongruous appearances around here other than Halloween. Upon further reflection, though, I must ruefully admit that there could not be a more appropriate symbol for the worst in us Americans than a homicidal ghost without a head. I’ve come to think of the horseman in our 4th of July parade as a cautionary specter, a reminder that as a society we tend to bang around headlessly quite often.
I’m certainly not the first to recognize the paradox that the “information age” has rendered citizens less informed than ever. And there’s nothing politically discriminatory about rampant headlessness. There seem to be about as many liberals propagating nonsense out there as conservatives. While I lean toward solidarity with the folks occupying Wall Street right now, I am also fully aware that the majority of that crowd couldn’t tell you any more about how Wall Street works than a Tea Partier could tell you about, well, the “Boston Tea Party,” for example.
Obama’s getting pounced on by FOX News types for saying that “Americans have grown soft and lost their competitive edge…” They claim that he’s trying to shift the blame from himself to the public for the ongoing economic crisis; and FOX will no doubt rally its hard-working viewers into a frenzy by convincing them that the president just called them all “lazy.” FOX is labeling it Obama’s “malaise” moment, referring to an address to the nation by President Carter on the flailing economy of the 1970s. The opportunity to compare Obama to Carter is too good to pass up because we all know Carter was such a bad president, don’t we?
Of course, one of the reasons people didn’t, and still don’t, like Carter is because he has a head. In fact, Carter is worse than an intellectual; he’s been downright prophetic about some things; but that also means saying things that people don’t want to hear. Remember Reagan laughingly tearing down Carter’s (admittedly symbolic) solar panels from the White House? That was a wonderfully headless moment in American history. Who knows where we’d be if we’d invested in renewable energy in 1978. If you think Americans resent cold facts that don’t square with their biases of the moment, then anything tending toward prognostication will send them into an absolute headless tizzy.
Unfortunately, we’ve got nothing but prognostication at the moment. The here-and-now is a disaster and will probably get worse; and there are no policies that will mitigate the disaster in the span of a single presidency. As a result, the GOP are burnishing up a slate of some of the most headless individuals ever to grace the political stage; and the democratic base is angry and disappointed without any particular direction — again.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a very American tale, but one without any heroes. Ichabod Crane is a cad and a freeloader; Abraham “Brom Bones” van Brunt is sort of an obnoxious jock; and Katrina is a scamp, who uses the cad’s affections to stoke the ardor of the jock. It’s basically a high school horror story in which the horseman becomes a kind of dark angel of judgment, destroying a character more worthy of pity than empathy. Perhaps it’s no accident that this phantom is a slain Hessian, symbolizing a revolution not yet won.
Copyright Alliance is a D.C. based organization that works to keep copyright laws relevant in the ever-changing distribution landscape. Copyright is, after all, what makes it possible for an artist of any kind to make a living with his or her work, so indie filmmakers should remain aware of these issues. At the same time, CA likes to focus on the work of independent artists in order to educate their audience, including lawmakers, about some of the unknown details of our work. Recently, CA Executive Director Sandra Aistars interviewed me about how the money was used for gone Elvis and about some of my observations on small film financing in general.
Read the interview on the CA website here.
To conclude my observations about the economy predicated on my appliance woes, I have to at least give credit to Whirlpool at this point for saying that they will replace my washer rather than force me to go through more attempted repairs. I had to call corporate instead the “customer service” line in order to circumvent official policy, but at least they are doing the right thing and deserve recognition for it.
Nevertheless, I stand by my observations regarding the policy of crap and its impact on the economy. The products are simply not built to the quality standards of their predecessors; and this is a conscious choice by manufacturers. Even the very friendly woman at corporate who helped me out said, “I have one of these models [maybe it's true] and it hasn’t given me any trouble, and I’ve had it for about a year.” I had to laugh at the fact that she said this without a hint of irony, and then she laughed, too. Maybe she was saying what she was told to say, maybe not. Either way, both our washers are going to be junk in less than a decade along with mountains of other products; and there’s no way that’s a good thing for her company, my household, jobs, or the environment.
So-called conservatives like to imbue market forces with the potency of a panacea. Limited government and market competition are the hallmark, companion solutions to our every economic woe, so they say; but here’s the truly insidious thing about the aforementioned policy of crap that I believe exists in a large segment of American business: it’s really a conspiracy of crap.
In order to have real competition in a market, businesses must strive to outdo one another in ways that better serve the consumer. Better reliability, better pricing, better customer service are all methods by which manufacturers traditionally compete for market-share; but now that the majority of companies have instituted a policy of crap, we consumers can no longer threaten Brand A with a switch to Brand B. It’s almost as though each brand knows our experience won’t be any better with their competitors. And that’s because they do know, which makes it a conspiracy, even if it’s not a coordinated one.
Returning to my Whirlpool washer again, which is still not fixed, I am now trapped in a vicious policy requiring continued attempts to fix the machine before the retailer, Lowes, can “request” Whirlpool “consider” replacing this piece of crap that is under warranty! On Monday, I’ll call Whirlpool and tear some cubicle-automaton a new one, but to what end? That poor dope doesn’t make policy; he just reads from a script. So, I’ll call corporate HQ and blast away at some lobotomized VP of “Customer Experience,” or whatever they call it; and then what? The lobotomized VP of Customer Experience has been trained to politely take my abuse and calmly explain their replacement policies while apologizing for the inconvenience and thanking me — THANKING ME!! — for being a customer.
And the can of rage I’ll open up on this toady will be to no avail for one simple reason: I, the consumer, no longer have a bargaining chip. I can no longer threaten to buy another brand and tell all my friends to do the same. The VP of Customer Experience will simply say, “I understand how you feel, Sir” because she doesn’t give a shit if I switch to another brand because she knows I’m going to get egregiously rogered by them, too. Manufacturers aren’t actually competing for market share so much as they’re gang-raping consumers, and swapping them around like doped up sorority girls. Sorry if that’s a bit graphic for your taste, but the next time you hear some analyst use the word churn, what it really means is gang-raping consumers, and swapping them around like doped up sorority girls.
Instead of competing on legitimate, tangible values (e.g. reliability), most products compete on the illusion of value. As indicated in my last post, what manufacturers call “innovation” is often some bullshit feature a product never needed in the first place and one that literally makes the product itself unreliable. Does your dryer really need a setting that says “delicate, white socks with frills on the cuffs” or whatever? Not only are these new “features” bullshit, but the electronics that support this “innovation” are delicate, cheap, built to fail — and bloody expensive to replace if you didn’t pay the extortion money for the “extended service contract.”
I believe competition is central to a healthy economy in a free society. But as consumers, we no longer have the freedom to legitimately vote with our pocketbooks,when it comes to some of the goods and services on which we truly depend. You think you’re angry because there’s too much government? The reality is there isn’t enough government. The idea of consumer protection in everything from the machines we use to the food we eat has been eroded by political forces who claim that the market will solve what the government has no business meddling with in the first place. So far, this policy has led to a corporate conspiracy to market homogenous crap, differentiated solely by logos.
If you really want to understand why the American economy is in so much trouble, don’t look at the politicians on either side of the aisle; look at the company you work for and ask yourself whether or not it has a policy of producing crap. Here’s a hint: if you work for a business that makes consumer products, there’s a really good chance that such a policy exists. Take for instance, a category that for reasons passing understanding, we still call “durable goods.” This includes major appliances, and we call them durable goods because they’re meant to be the kind of purchase a consumer makes once every decade or more as opposed to, say, an iPod which, although it is fairly expensive, we have somehow accepted is semi-disposable after a couple of years. To a certain extent, this is Apple’s policy of crap at work inasmuch as it is almost always more cost-effective to replace several of their products than it is to try to repair them unless they’re brand new. That said, they make excellent computers relative to the rest of the market, so I’m not picking on them.
Appliances, of course, are very different from iPods for two important reasons: 1) they’re expected to last at least a decade or more (your grandmother’s lasted three decades, but let’s not get crazy); and 2) they are devices that keep your life functioning in modern society. Anyone who’s ever had a major appliance conk out on them for a few weeks knows how utterly disruptive it is to the day-to-day needs of a contemporary family. I say this wondering if there is a middle-class family that hasn’t experienced this disruption because as far as I can tell, all appliances are now crap.
I guess the top-shelf stuff – SubZero, Viking, etc. — that most middle-class families can’t afford is pretty good — I wouldn’t know as I haven’t been in a position to buy these brands yet — but the middle to upper-middle grade products, which are by no means cheap, are absolute crap, and the manufacturers who make them know it; and here’s how you know they know it: the service contract. You can’t buy a ballpoint pen anymore without a retailer offering you an extended service contract, and do you know what’s really going on here? The retailer is really saying, “This thing you’re buying is crap. We know it, you know it, and the manufacturer knows it. You’ll be lucky if its first failure happens within the year’s warranty, but odds are it will happen in sixteen months, so why don’t you pay us another two hundred dollars now to hedge against the ghastly cost of fixing or replacing this piece of crap?” Every time I’ve been offered an extended service contract, I feel like a village merchant being shaken down by the local mob. “Nice oven you bought there. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.”
My most recent disaster product is a washer that is less than a year old. Good news is it’s still under warranty; bad news is it’s still under warranty, which means the manufacturer (in this case Whirlpool) calls the shots on repair and/or replacement. The repair guy, Steve, replaced the motor but then discovered other problems throughout the circuitry of the control panel. So far, we’ve been washerless for about three weeks, and Whirlpool has paid the repair company about 90% of what I paid for the machine at Lowes. More new parts sit next to me in boxes as I write this, and the repair guy is due back in the middle of this week, which means Whirlpool will pay even more to repair this machine than I paid to buy it new. But they have a policy of three attempted repairs before they’ll replace a product, so there it is.
This might seem counter-intutive, right? Why would Whirlpool spend more to fix a product than it would cost them to replace it? I suspect it has something to do with the short-term balance sheet on which most companies seem to operate these days. See in the 1980s, before my generation started buying durable goods, a lot of American businesses seemed to shift their focus from steady growth to quarterly increases in share price; and the legacy of this is a policy of crap. The most affordable means by which more crap could move off the shelves each quarter became the m.o. of nearly every business from consumer goods to food to pharmaceuticals and financial services; and the mutant child it spawned was what the business world laughably calls “innovation.”
Go online right now and look at how many different types of clothes dryer you can find. A zillion features, each one with a price point for a machine that basically turns a drum and blows hot air through it. That’s pretty much all your grandmother’s dryer did, which is why it lasted 30 years and had to be hauled out of her house by a pachyderm when it finally died. Your dryer, my dryer, has settings — lots of settings that are controlled by delicate electronics that fail if you look at them wrong. Not that there aren’t some improvements that aren’t good ideas, if they were well constructed and assembled, but they’re not. And when your over-complex, shoddily assembled dryer does fail you for a week or two, take notice of the dryer at the laundromat you’ll inevitably visit. It tumbles, blows hot air, and has three settings – high, medium, and low. Put a consumer dryer in a laundromat, and they’d be out of commission in a month.
Speaking of the pre-80s market and appliances, remember the Maytag repair man campaign? Of course you do. It was a solid piece of advertising and, I supposed, based on a fairly solid claim. Funny how such a campaign doesn’t exist anymore. In fact, I don’t think too many companies even try to engender such brand loyalty based on reliability claims (even if they pay it lip-service) because they know that consumers will switch from brand in the futile hope that one of them isn’t crap.
One might argue that so many crap products are actually good for the economy. The repair companies get more business; the help desk people who are no help at all stay employed; the retailers inevitably turn more volume because replacing crap products is often preferable to any attempt to fix them; the marketing and advertising guys keep busy making claims that Whirlpool’s crap is better than Kenmore’s or GE’s (and according to Steve the repair guy, they’re all the same); and of course my local laundromat picks up a few bucks from me for a couple of weeks or so. Sure, the individual consumer suffers frustration, but overall the policy of crap doesn’t look so bad from an economic standpoint, does it? In the big picture, it’s a disaster.
Whirlpool will lose money on my washing machine, especially if they ultimately have to replace it, but they won’t care because of the amount of crap they’ll move off the the shelves while they stall me on the replacement. In fact, I’d love to know how much crap they’ve sold just between service calls to my house. I bet it’s a lot. Of course, a large percentage of all that other crap is going to fail, too; but as long as the cycle keeps going, it’s all good on paper even if not in real dollars. Now, in order to keep that cycle going, to keep the steady conveyor of crap in constant motion, Whirlpool and its competitors have to make stuff cheap and fast; and that mostly means make them someplace other than America, which means loss of manufacturing jobs, which means a shrinking middle class, which means fewer families who can afford quality appliances, which means more “innovation” by manufacturers (i.e. even crappier crap).
I worked in corporate communications for 20 years and have been privy to what we’ll call the mindset (companies like to call it “culture”) of about a hundred or so corporations. My observation is they’re mostly the same, psychologically speaking — short-term focus on share price instead of long-term attention to solid growth based on real value, thereby leading to a culture of greed and selfishness. Whether it’s crap appliances disrupting the flow of a household or crap securities nearly crashing the global economy, we have institutionalized a corrupt mindset into an American value based on the idea that if it makes money now, it’s good. What happens later, is the next guy’s problem. Well, welcome to later.
Wail all you want about government stimulus — good, bad, or otherwise. Our economic woes are cultural and deeply ingrained into the psychology of both consumer and producer. It may take drowning in a sea of crap before the next generation decides to start making shovels.
