Fast Capitalism

Introduction: Napster at 25

2024-10-29T16:06:57-05:00

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Napster “freedom” at Northeastern University: a distanced ethnography

2024-10-29T16:08:03-05:00

This article offers a critical first hand account, from an academic at Northeastern University after Napster's creator Sean Fanniong left the campus in 1999. Reflecting on the impact of Fanning on the campus, drawing on the history of community computer innovation in Boston as a means of activism, the article identifies through Marx, the way monopoly capitalism destroyed Napster's capacity for free music culture. The impact of Intellectual Property law in shutting down digital innovations such as Napster, is considered for the impact it had on the ideals of the liberal university in the United States.

Inciting Infringement and Innovation: from Napster to Now - the dialectic of law and technology

2024-10-29T16:08:59-05:00

The original Napster had only a short life, but what it set in motion has lasted and been significant. From 1999 to 2001(2) the Napster platform offered the first widely known and widely adopted music file-sharing download service; combining internet distribution and MP3 file-compression with its own central server acting to enable user uploading and downloading of music. Whilst Napster was shut down for ‘contributory infringement’ on the grounds that its central server directly facilitated copyright infringing downloading, its closure on these grounds saw the rise of fully peer-to-peer (P2P) services such as Kazaa. When P2P uploaders were targeted for infringement, Torrent based services replaced them with peers-to-peer (Ps2P) sharing sites (most famously The Pirate Bay). Legal targeting of Torrent sites saw geographical distribution of servers, and the rise of temporal evasion by means of live-streaming services (a form of peers-to-peers software). Where Napster directly pressured record companies to do a deal that enabled the creation of iTunes, its longer-term impact was on laying the foundation for today’s legal streaming services, the most famous of which is Spotify. Today’s legal services provide what Napster offered 25 years ago, free access to recorded content and a consequent reduction in opportunity costs that have seen the rise of live performance ticket prices and sales volumes. The cat and mouse battles between law and technological evasion has made recorded content freely available at the same time as increasing the earnings of live performers.

Napster's Mediations

2024-10-29T12:31:23-05:00

While Napster has often been understood as a force for disintermediation, this essay examines three possible levels that Napster could be theorized as engaged in mediation: the level of protocol, the level of interface, and the level of culture. Each has implications for how we understand the politics of Napster, and peer-to-peer more generally.

The Artificiality of Digital Scarcity: Contradictions between Code, Law, Norms, and Value(s)

2024-10-29T16:09:52-05:00

The rise and fall of Napster represented a major turning point in the history of the internet as it simultaneously paved the way for peer-to-peer filesharing as well as ushered in a backlash from incumbent media companies backed by an army of lawyers. This essay grapples with the ramifications of this struggle against filesharing and piracy that forever changed the internet. Much of how and why the internet is structured as it is can be explained through recognizing that this contradictory state of affairs is due to the inherent properties of the internet and digital files when "forced" to fit the capitalist drive for endless accumulation. Here, I examine why, from a critical theoretical perspective, governments and corporations have struggled to “overcome” the “problem” of freedom on the internet with only partial success. To answer this question, it is necessary to explore how digital infrastructures, supported by code and law yet also conflicted by new social norms, have shaped the internet to facilitate capital accumulation despite the ever-present potential for filesharing and piracy. Ultimately, I explain how piracy and filesharing represents a “crisis of value” and how these controversies emerged from the historical dynamics of capitalism that have far-reaching implications beyond online filesharing.

Convenience begets capitalism

2024-10-29T12:31:24-05:00

This is a short polemical piece, and does not have an abstract as such.

A capitalist stranglehold on “artificial intelligence”: a gallop through piracy, privacy invasion, lock-in and a fever dream of democratisation

2024-10-29T16:10:54-05:00

In this paper, I discuss the emergence of personal computing, the rise of platform-controlled smartphones and tablets, and the recent surge in artificial intelligence technologies. I explore how these technological advancements have often been shaped by the interests of capital, with recent trends towards increased platform lock-in, control, and exploitation of users (workers). I argue that without a strong push for open-source, democratised AI, these technologies risk being used to further the globalised colonial capitalist project. I highlight the potential for open-source hardware and software to counter the proprietary and un-hackable future of AI, offering a radical alternative that empowers users and advances human, ecological and labour rights alongside of technology tools. Ultimately, I call for greater attention to the social, economic and environmental implications of computing and AI technologies under capitalism.

Metallica, Napster and the Transformation of Subcultural Capital

2024-10-29T12:31:24-05:00

On June 1, 1999, Napster went live, ushering in profound changes in the music industry and consumer behavior. The new software popularized peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing, which enabled those running the software to search and download files from the hard drives of other PCs on the system. Within months, there were millions of songs available for download from computers around the world. In April, on the heels of a law suit by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Metallica became the first artist to sue Napster for copyright infringement, a lawsuit that, combined with the RIAA suit and another by Dr. Dre, shut down Napster. This article examines the idea of being “indie”, meaning that an artist is not signed to a major record label (which often means that they do not have access to a national advertising and distribution network), as a form of cultural capital before and after Napster. Being indie created subcultural capital for artists and fans whose music lay outside of mainstream taste, and connoted artistic authenticity and independence. When Metallica sued Napster, they had already gone from indie thrashers to a mainstream metal band, but still possessed subcultural capital as progenitors of the thrash genre. In public statements, they leaned on ideas and discourses of independence, artistry and authenticity to make a case for maintaining control over the distribution of their music. These arguments fell flat with many fans, and in the wake of Napster, the growth of the internet and free music, the parameters of subcultural capital shifted to include distribution. In the past two decades a number of artists, from indie darlings to pop hit makers have used the internet to make their music freely accessible to their fans, making the artists’ relationship to distribution a critical cite for the creation of subcultural capital.

Independent Music after Metallica v. Napster, Inc.: Seeking Liberation in the Music Streaming Simulacrum

2024-10-29T16:12:01-05:00

In this brief paper, I note the ways in which being a musician has changed in the aftermath of the digital downloading and file-sharing developed by Napster pioneer Shawn Fanning, through the lens of the music streaming simulacrum—my term for what has unfolded since. I contrast the present environment with the potential that emerged with this technology. I theorize the music streaming simulacrum as opaque, flat, and hegemonic—a parody of both industry and culture that incomprehensible by a single human being, militates against deeper connectivity between artist and listener, and exerts outsized power over human behavior and decision-making in a particular domain. I draw on my personal experience as a critical social theorist and veteran recording artist to describe life and art in this environment. In reaching a dialectical conclusion, that independent artists both gain and surrender greater autonomy than in the past, I sketch alternatives which connect back to the promise and difficulties of earlier modes of musical production and consumption.

Downloading is Killing Music: Napster and The Recording Industry’s Piracy Panic Narrative

2024-10-29T16:12:44-05:00

Beginning in the late 1990s and the arrival of the file-sharing program Napster, the recording industry used a “piracy panic narrative” in an attempt not only to prevent file-sharing, but also, to change the basic parameters of copyright law. In this piracy panic narrative, major record labels and their representative trade associations made the argument that file-sharing is piracy, piracy is stealing, and this stealing hurts recording artists. In this paper, I argue that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) used this narrative in the United States to change public opinion on file-sharing with the ultimate goal of changing the copyright policy regime. By placing the recording industry in the position of a victim, the piracy panic narrative appeals to the average person’s common sense understanding of the political economy of the music industry while advancing a predatory plan to extract profit.

Blood in their Mouths: Lies, Violence, and Fascist Politics

2024-10-29T16:13:33-05:00

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Climate Change Deniers versus Climate Change Decriers: The Pragmatics of Climate Defense in the Age of Disinformation

2024-10-29T16:14:15-05:00

Thirty-five years ago, Bill McKibben published his best-selling popular depiction of climate change, The End of Nature. Nearly a decade ago, Naomi Klein's global best-seller This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate presented her detailed brief: “thought leaders” must resist and reverse the degradation of Earth's climate in the face of denials that this policy change was impossible. As popular activists, McKibben and Klein both believe “more information leads to good and great change.” This gambit presumes when presented disturbing facts on how and why rising fossil fuel use is degrading the climate, like-minded readers will wisely rise, readily organize and rationally stop such destruction. Both authors have thriving careers as “thought leaders,” but the gamble that informative writing would inspire game-changing decisive actions has backfired. In fact, the intensity of their climate decrying for millions of “action laggards” is twisted into disinformation to justify climate denying. Nature has not ended, and climate change has not changed everything. Costly climate disasters are increasing; but habits of embedded symbolic action tied to moralistic decrying suggest McKibben and Klein now play new roles as artful traders in the networks of disinformation. In today’s ESG-guided climate politics, major energy companies nod appreciatively to climate decriers, pledging future perfection at carbon reduction in contrite denialist exchange for sustaining the continued present degradation of their carbon emissions. This is a puzzle. Are answers to the puzzle to be found in Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, which explores to what degree everyday life now is not engaged with the natural world? Instead, denial and disinformation seem to ensnare it in “trips into the Mirror World” where sustainable degradation produces “digital doubles” of fulfilled future pledges of true sustainability in the 24x7 attention economy underpinned by the falsehoods of current concentrated carbon intensity.

Fighting for justice in the neoliberal university: The promise of reflexive and flexible solidarity

2024-10-29T16:15:27-05:00

In the neoliberal university, faculty are encouraged to build strong connections in virtually every way except one: as workers. In this paper, we will discuss our experiences as leaders of the XXX chapter of the American Association of University Professors, with a focus on our campaign to build across-campus labor coalition connecting faculty, students, staff, and contract workers in the struggle for economic and social justice. We will begin by examining the constellation of structural forces and professional hierarchies that amplify labor exploitation on campus, subvert shared governance and academic freedom, and cultivate a campus culture of disconnection, competition, and alienation. Finally, our conclusion will argue that addressing these long-standing and emergent threats to public higher education will require a project of flexible and reflexive solidarity. In this project, those who enjoy the most protections and resources will be called upon to leverage their power and join in solidarity with those marginalized by unequal systems to revitalize the university’s public mission to serve the common good.

Shut your cake hole, you over-educated whore: The misogynistic weaponization of the PhD

2024-10-29T16:16:08-05:00

The (higher) education of women is a pinball in the arcade game of contemporary masculinity. Andrew Tate, while often proclaiming the irrelevance of university degrees, has deployed their nomenclature through his Facebook page, titled the Tate University. One of his ‘courses’ was described as a PhD (Pimpin’ Hoes Degree). Why is the education of women discredited, yet the language of education summoned and activated to build the ‘alpha male’?

This article does not (only) investigate Andrew Tate, alpha culture or the black pill ideology. It explores why the higher education of women – and university-educated women – is a focus of sustained, brutalizing name calling and abuse in the manosphere.

“Rise of the Resistance” and the Demise of Social Being: The Autolysis of Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century

2024-10-30T16:00:54-05:00

Structural transformations in the 21st century necessitate radical rethinking of the category of subject that underlie the notions of autonomy, agency and individuality. This paper depicts an onto-genetic transformation of the subject— its autolysis—in the historical present by building on representations and the mediation of categories of social life. The paper first delineates the notion of representation as a central element of critical ontology as a form of social theory by building on Hegel and Durkheim. It then draws on a recent product from the culture industry, namely The Disneyland theme-park ride called “Rise of the Resistance,” which involves a representation that has a significant illustrative value for apprehending contemporary form of subjectivity, and asserts that critical ontology that builds on representations points to onto-genetic transformation of subject, its autolysis, in the historical present.

“You Are Not Independent in Any Way”: Biopolitics, Gig Economy Work and the Emergence of Illegible Antagonisms

2024-10-29T16:17:49-05:00

In this article, I examine the qualitative dimensions of gig economy work, labor power, and potentiality using two categories of biopolitical subjugation developed by Lazzarato (2012; 2015): social subjection and machinic subjugation. As Lazzarato defined and elaborated these techniques in the wake of the financial crisis, I also contextualize gig economy work as the evolution of economic processes that Marx and subsequent post-workerist scholars have analyzed, namely, circulation and formal and real subsumption. I claim that it is through Lazzarato’s two techniques of biopolitical subjection and subjugation that the gig economy attempts to manage workers’ subjective dispositions while extracting data for the intensification of the management of labor power’s alternate potentialities. In this way, I contend, the gig economy’s attempts at managing labor power both subject and set free a field of forces that, as Deleuze and Guattari have shown, are deterritorialized and reterritorialized, processes which open onto and reveal lines of flight or modes of resistance. Since the two processes of subjection/subjugation that Lazzarato develops are ultimately disjunctive and incompatible, I see a line of flight opening through the desubjectification of the ideal individualized worker, revealing horizons of resistance through the production of an illegible subject of labor power escaping the production of guilt and responsibility. I cose by connecting these claims to a gig economy worker, Willy Solis, whose experiences with gig economy work exemplify these dynamics.