Hubris 2.0

Ever since the economy started to tank there’s been a lot of blather online about whether the so-called Web 2.0 era is coming to an end. To the extent that “Web 2.0” is defined as a business model that relies on user-generated content to drive high-margin profits the answer is clearly “no” – all one has to do is look at the burgeoning growth of Facebook and Twitter to see there is still gold left in them ‘thar hills (though, in fact, neither Facebook nor Twitter have figured out yet how to mine that gold…). The poster child for successful Web 2.0 business is probably craigslist (they prefer the lower case c don’t you know). Last year CNet published [estimates] that the 30 person company generated $80 million in revenue – which works out to an astonishing $2.7 million per employee – and could well double that amount this year. Or maybe not. That estimate was made before craigslist came under scrutiny by various attorneys general and the dreaded mainstream media for their lax oversight of some of the shadier content on their site(s).

Watching the initial [response] of craigslist owner Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster to the shitstorm that erupted following the arrest of the “Craigslist Killer" (who used the site’s prostitution ads to connect with his victims) was remarkable. Cloistered away in their little Silicon Valley bubble they clearly hadn’t a clue about how to manage the scrutiny of meatspace media and ambitious law enforcement officials looking to score. At first they refused flatly to make changes to the way they did business, falling back on the Web 2.0 mantra that the craigslist community would police itself (after all, users provide the content for free, why shouldn’t they also provide the editing for free?). Then, when it became clear that Newmark & Co. were heading to court and maybe to jail on fraud charges, they acquiesced and agreed to change the way they manage listings for adult services – including hiring additional staff to screen out illegal material.

But at least one AG is not satisfied and has threatened to initiate criminal action against craigslist if they don’t remove even more objectionable material from their site by this Friday. Today, Buckmaster [responded] to the Attorney General of South Carolina in a blog post (of course) and just when I thought they couldn’t be more clueless about how to handle this PR disaster he surprised me. Instead of doing what any mature company would do in the face of aggressive policing (think Microsoft and the European Commission…), i.e., aiming to get the moral high ground by swiftly agreeing to meet or exceed demands for cleaning up their sites, Buckmaster demands an apology from the Attorney General, challenges the AG to prosecute South Carolina newspapers that also run off-color ads (and suggesting that he won’t because of cynical self-interest) and offers what I’ll call the “me-too” defense: craigslist shouldn’t be singled out for abetting indecency because all the other kids in the playground are doing it too! The PR trainwreck thunders on.

Sensing that this has the potential to tame the Web 2.0 golden goose that drives so much revenue with so little managerial oversight and cost, some of the New Media machers are weighing in with support: Mike Arrington at [TechCrunch] urges Buckmaster to “Stand firm. Don’t back down. In fact, just turn off the South Carolina site entirely and ban IPs from that state. Forever. And if they press criminal charges, fight it with everything you have.” Then, with a little less bravado, “And if you do end up in jail, don’t worry. I promise to visit at least once a month, even though it will be in South Carolina.”

New Media gadfly Jeff Jarvis takes time out from dancing on the graves of newspaper journalists to [offer], “And so, once again, the internet becomes a threat to the control and power of an elite and they are exploiting craiglist – and the murderer who used it – to reassert their control. But it has the marks of a witchhunt.” Jarvis doesn’t seem to get that the “elite” is law enforcement and the issue is violations of local decency laws. Minor matter.

Perhaps one of Buckmaster’s friends (does he have friends?) could suggest that he take some of that huge profit he makes from the site and hire a decent flack. And a lawyer.

© Paramount Pictures

"Yo, Dad, can I borrow the keys to the Enterprise?" Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Kirk (Chris Pine) aim to fill some big shoes.

At one point during the new Star Trek movie it occurred to me that perhaps the most amazing thing about it was the fact that I was seeing it at all. Forty years after the original TV series went off the air and thirty years after the first film version was released here I was again watching the redoubtable starship Enterprise fly across another screen. It was interesting, though, to note how the starship was represented here compared to its first big screen appearance back in 1979. Back then, before Hollywood had hit on the formula for milking a property to death, it had taken ten years to sort out the production path for the theatrical version. When it finally appeared it was practically a religious experience for faithful fans who had invested so much in the characters and ideas from the series. One of their rewards came in their first view of the Enterprise after the ten year drought: director Robert Wise spent a full five minutes of screen time displaying the new ship, the camera caressing every detail of the model starship with clear fetishistic delight. In the new film by director JJ Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman there is no such doting on the venerable spaceship; views of the Enterprise are for the most part reduced to establishing shots taken from a great distance in space or extreme close ups of firing weapons. Similarly, internal shots are restricted to scenes filmed on a stark overlit bridge or brief scenes in an engineering section that consists oddly of industrial-looking hydraulic tubes and steel scaffolding. The Enterprise, itself a major presence throughout the Star Trek saga, is here relegated to mere backdrop, a somewhat haphazardly designed set upon which the interpersonal dramas of the main characters play out.

I think that’s significant because it indicates where the priorities for the film makers lie and what they do and don’t understand about a cultural inheritance of which they are the latest custodians.

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A couple of events occurred last week that might have seemed completely unconnected but were, I think, flip sides of the same coin: in the first case, a Swedish court convicted the owners of the Pirate Bay file sharing site of copyright violations involving facilitation of theft, sentencing them to fines and prison time, and, in the second case, Oprah devoted valuable on-air time to the Twitter phenomenon, introducing her legions of fans to the service and calling out Ashton Kutcher as the first Twitter user to gain over 1 million followers. What ties these apparently disparate events together is the fact that they demonstrate in unique ways the mainstreaming of the internet as a medium and its changing character(s).

Piracy 2.0

As an invention of technology, it makes perfect sense that the early proponents of the internet were members of the “technorati” – the geeky folk who build and fund tech start ups and those who buzz around them. Back in the 90’s as the commercial internet was just taking off, one could read one after another manifesto from these folks proclaiming the nascent medium a digital Valhalla, revolutionary in its potential. A good example was [“Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age”] in which futurist Alvin Toffler, venture capitalist Esther Dyson and others attempted to spell out the game-changing nature of this new technology and what was needed to foster it:

To start with, liberation – from Second Wave rules, regulations, taxes and laws laid in place to serve the smokestack barons and bureaucrats of the past. Next, of course, must come the creation – the creation of a new civilization, founded in the eternal truths of the American Idea.

Likening themselves to frontier settlers, they wanted complete freedom to reinvent commerce on the web any way they saw fit. Such freedom would, of course, lead to the unfettered creation of enormous wealth and that is exactly what happened (well mostly for well-connected technocrats, anyway). But the lack of oversight also led to a Wild West ecosystem online where hordes of thieves committed untold abuses of intellectual property. Sadly, some who should know better even sought to undermine claims of intellectual property by basically implying the [inevitability of theft] and [apologizing] for it under the rubric of “free culture”.

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Who’s that girl? NYU artist Michael Cavayero examines our obsessions

If you’re in downtown Manhattan between now and April 19, stop by the [Broadway Windows] exhibition space to check out the work of [Michael Cavayero], a senior honors art student at NYU, who uses bold color and exaggerated line to deconstruct the tabloid princess. Lindsay then, now and — assuming she makes it — future.

A month following it’s release, it looks like Watchmen – while hardly a smash hit – has done respectably. At this writing, BoxOfficeMojo [estimates] that it has earned about $178MM, which means it will likely make back its costs (estimated somewhere between $120MM and $150MM), plus a modest profit. Still, that’s pretty impressive — considering it’s an R-rated movie, targeted to hard-core fans of a dark and violent story populated by not-very-nice characters, that was almost universally panned by critics. What impresses me most of all is that the movie was even made. I’m tempted to call it an act of love on the part of Hollywood – except we’re talking about Hollywood here. More likely, a few people who loved the graphic novel upon which the film is based managed to slip one by the suits. I’m glad they did. I’ve seen the movie twice and have been thinking about the value of comic dramas in general and this one in particular.

Many reviewers make the mistake of judging films taken from comic novels against the standards of a storytelling tradition that stretches back into the history of Western literature. In that context, the truer a movie stays to its comic origins the weaker it looks as a work of art: characters seem one-dimensional, plots are simplistic and the treatment of character motivation and emotions is clumsy. But, to me, comic novels stand outside of the literary canon. They’re more like Kabuki: representing the world through a brightly-hued prism that hardens edges and reduces subtlety. While there may be some conventional literary references (e.g., the tag line “Who watches the Watchmen”, taken from the Roman poet Juvenal) and appropriation of historical facts, comics are sui generis – designed for an audience that has not yet consumed the great works of literature. I suppose their success could be considered an indictment of a culture that cannot reliably transmit to its youth the collected genius of its classic literature, but it’s also evidence of an ingenious adaptation – reassuring us that even amid a cultural breakdown the important questions and challenges that humans must address (“What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of justice? What good is love?”) will be addressed anew by artists with aggressive imaginations. Their starkly drawn characters stand in for ideas that are contested on fields of epic proportion – those still standing at the end of the battle win. And make no mistake, the ideas that Watchmen takes up and the characters that represent them are big.

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(Bad) karma, Chameleon…

Time has not been kind to Boy George. Sentenced last week to 15 months in jail for brutalizing a hooker, The Mirror [gleefully reports] — courtesy of a loose-lipped fellow inmate — the pathetic state to which George O’Dowd has been reduced: blubbering in a corner of his jail cell and fearful for his life once he joins the jailhouse rabble. Ironically, according to the report of jailhouse insiders, upon his debut at the jail he was mobbed by inmates seeking his autograph, not his blood. The chatty inmate who provided The Mirror with their quotes remarks upon how he tried to comfort the distraught singer:

“I joked that it wasn’t all bad and said he might even find himself a new boyfriend inside prison. But he just started crying again.”

He could take a lesson or two from Martha Stewart on how to manage the slammer. Tears are probably not the best bet. One wants to laugh at the pathetic spectacle of it — and many will — but one also wants to kick O’Dowd’s fat arse from here to kingdom come for orchestrating this stunningly Grand Guignol downfall (he is currently on suicide watch in the prison). For many people (read “straight” people), Boy George was always something of a clown, but for some of us (read “queers”) he was a bona fide hero back in the day. My first awareness of him came while I was still living in my backwater town in upstate New York. One day while listening to the radio, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” came on. I enjoyed the unique, blowsy sound of the singer’s voice but what got my interest more was the brief exchange between the DJs that happened after the song. “So, is that a guy?” one asked. “I don’t know,” said the other, “the picture on the album looks like a girl, but I think it’s a guy!” I was hooked. I liked the music, but I admired George more, who pushed queerness so far into people’s faces that they couldn’t avoid it. What I admired most was that he didn’t hedge — in a decade when the most flamboyant characters could still play “Is he, isn’t he?” about their identities, George had the balls to accept Culture Club’s Best New Artist Grammy in 1984 by telling the world, “Thanks America, you’ve got style, you’ve got taste, and you know a good drag queen when you see one.” Heroic.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald published the story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” in 1922 as part of a collection entitled Tales of the Jazz Age. As with so much of his work, the story, a fantasy about a man who ages in reverse, was a clever way of addressing pet themes concerning class, social standing and our tenuous hold on the conventions that root us to life. But, as Fitzgerald acknowledged, it was also about the meaning and value of maturity in a disordered world following the end of World War 1 where an entire generation of young men were robbed of the chance to grow old. The story begins in arch satire and ends in melancholy reverence of (lost) innocence.

Eighty-six years later, Hollywood and its special-effects wizards have discovered the story and brought it to the screen with Brad Pitt playing Benjamin Button and Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton playing his loves. Director David Fincher and his screenwriters depart from the original story fairly significantly and, sorry to say, not for the better. The film starts out promisingly with a parable — not in the original story — of a blind watchmaker who loses a son in the Great War and, out of his grief, builds a clock for the city that he lives in that runs backwards, as a tribute to all the boys who have lost their futures. It’s a moving little story unto itself, but the movie that follows doesn’t do it justice.

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