Bootleg Economics
PHP: You’ve also pondered, having kind of “derezzed” the work, what exactly the collector of something like Rebirth of a Nation is to buy. But it’s coming out this year on DVD. Is that part of the solution?
PDM: Yeah. There’s different kinds of multiples, you know? And the scale of the art world is much smaller than the scale of a music scene. Music’s more of a democratic medium. In the art world to become successful you have to have maybe a little under 2,000 people think you’re cool, and you have a career.
I’m just thinking about the various critics, editors, key art collectors who have your work and so on. If those 2,000 people give you a thumbs up, you’re a branded figure. It’s usually very hard to all of a sudden fall out of favor once there’s so many people invested in your career, you know?
PHP: I was just bemoaning to someone else all the commodification in art now, and you’re so relaxed about it! [laughter] Is that just part of it to you?
PDM: Yeah, it’s the way we live and breathe. I think it would take massive deprogramming of people’s brains to get out of that. It could happen; like I loved it when the electricity went off a couple years ago, you know. People could relax, hear the birds, and we suddenly had a different kind of social relationship to one another.
PHP: So as for collecting in an open source culture, then, this vast archive anyone can access, slice any way they want: just as with that great Marx quote about everything melting into air––
PDM: He was using an iPhone when he said that. [laughter]
PHP: ––similarly, what becomes of the work as a legal entity? Or do you care?
PDM: Let’s put it this way. If you were to enforce copyright law on the Internet in the way that it’s written? The whole thing would come crashing down. On the other hand, you have an informal relationship where if you get a cease-and-desist letter, most people will pull files down, take an image down, whatever. That’s if you’re in the US.
In Germany if you get a cease-and-desist from somebody in California, you’re gonna say “Fuck you,” and keep making art. Or you’ll do a mirrored site in Fiji or somewhere. The way the law is written and the way we live are parting ways. Who’s going to enforce it?
PHP: What if you’re in California already, and you’re Google, you know, master of the universe, and you get a letter from China saying, “Hey. We don’t want some of this stuff coming up on Chinese screens”?
PDM: Well, it’s notorious. They said “Sure! Why not?” [laughter] You know? They were like, “O.K.!”
PHP: So do you see that as The Empire Strikes Back? Is the Internet going to be clamped down on?
PDM: Well, it is. I mean, there’s already nation-states clamping down on certain political stuff. South Korea’s President Lee Myung-Bak just had these huge rallies organized against him on the Internet, and it blew his mind even though he himself had participated in pro-democracy rallies as a kid. He didn’t even process it. It just blew his mind, and he changed position.
Now, in North Korea they would just be like, “Fuck you”. They would throw you in a jail someplace to rot for the rest of your life, and/or kill you. The same with Saudia Arabia, China. Various nation states are engaging in this kind of engineering of public forums on the Web. There’s companies that specialize in that.
PHP: That brings to mind the ISPs that recently began deleting child pornography. Obviously nobody’s going to stand up for child pornography, so that’s the precedent: if we don’t like it, we can close the pipe.
PDM: They’re probably always going to use something odious like that and then have in the fine print “And every other Web site that we don’t like!” [laughter] The devil’s in the lack of details. These days, if you get like 20 pages of legalese on your new iPod, most people just pull the icon all the way down to the bottom where it says “I agree”.
PHP: I don’t think I’ve ever read a single one of those! [laughter]
PDM: They could put anything in there! “I agree to Apple’s right to confiscate my computer if I have bootleg software,” you know?
PHP: Or brick my iPhone if I try to unlock it.
PDM: Actually, there’s a great place in Chinatown that will crack your iPhone so it can work with other networks.
PHP: Oh, really!
PDM: I might buy the new one. The other one was too expensive to get into a situation where––how shall I put it? If it gets bricked you’re out $400. For $200 I’m willing to experiment a little bit.
This store in Chinatown cracks iPhones for immigrants to take back to China. They’ll do it for like, fifty bucks, and they guarantee––well, a guarantee in Chinatown… [laughter]
Anyway, even if it gets bricked they have some technician guy who knows how to change it back. There’s all sorts of fun, little, quirky tricks.
The thing that I love about China, Russia and so on is that they’re bootleg economies, and they’re very irreverent toward this kind of control. At least on a grassroots level they have much more technical savvy than your average American, because we’re used to throwing everything away. If it breaks, just throw it away and buy a new one. In China or Russia, you just can’t afford to do that.
