Remixing Social Change - A Synopsis of The Pirates Dilemma..

Warning long post. (quotes from The Pirate's Dilemma - How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, by Matt Mason)

"For the last sixty years, capitalism has run a pretty tight ship in the West. Pirates are rocking the boat. As a result people, corporations, and governments across the planet are facing a new dilemma: How should we react to the changing conditions on our ship? Are pirates here to scupper us, or save us?

"The big bang happens when a strange new idea suddenly makes sense to a handful of people, who then transmit it to others. Experiencing one is like a revelation, a glimpse into the future."

"Rappers such as 50 Cent can make $50 million a year without even releasing a record; a graffiti artist such as Marc Ecko can develop his tag into a multinational brand worth more than $1 billion."

"The remix is changing the way production and consumption are structured. open-source ways of working are generating a wealth of new public goods, niche markets, knowledge, and resources—free tools for the rest of us to build both commercial and noncommercial ventures"

"Punk, empowered ordinary people. Not only did they encourage others to start making music, but also to design their own clothes, start fanzines, and set up gigs, demonstrations, record stores, and record labels."

Capitalism responded by selling us punk.

• In 1989, 58 percent of the U.K. population claimed they were happy, but this figure had fallen to 45 percent by 2003, despite a 60 percent increase in average incomes. Punk combined altruism with self-interest - punk made the idea of putting purpose before profit seem cool to an entire generation.

• Sealand went from being the world’s first man-made sovereign state, but also the first global capital of Internet anarchy.

• The American Founding Fathers pursued a policy of counterfeiting European inventions, ignoring global patents, and stealing intellectual property wholesale. Europeans began referring to them with the Dutch word “Janke,” then slang for pirate, which is today pronounced “Yankee.

• "You need a computer for social change. we now associate good deeds with good shopping."

• "we manipulate an existing media format to create what he wanted, regardless of the conventional wisdom"

Mason's seven abundantly clear things about abundance:

1. If you want to beat pirates, copy them.
2. "Good business is the best art." - Andy Warhol
3. The art of storytelling is changing because of abundance.
4. Don't let legal ruin a good remix without talking to marketing first
5. Abundance is better than advertising.
6. Some good experiences will always be scarce.
7. In an economy based on abundance, your business model needs to be a virtuous circle.

Piracy is how inefficient systems are replaced

Cut-’n’-Paste Culture

Humans have always created new things by repurposing old ones.

1. Tom Moulton - remixed dance tracks for Gloria Gaynor, but did them initially without her permission.
2. The Phantom Menace - Fan Edit began to circulate online in early 2001, a new unofficial version that severed more than twenty minutes of the original, leaving the elements that had bugged many fans—namely the character Jar Jar Binks and young Anakin’s childish dialogue—on the cutting-room floor.
3. James Brown is the most sampled man in the history of music, undoubtedly boosted by the hip-hop generation’s obsession with sampling him.
4. The BBC has introduced the Creative Archive, a copyright-free library of video and audio available for anyone to use for noncommercial purposes.

The Battle for Public Space:

1. "Coca-Cola, Newport, Pepsi, Tagging -  it’s the same thing. You see my logo a million times, I will be famous.”
2. guerrilla marketing or culture jamming
3. Talk Back - to advertising
4. "Less Fences = Better Neighbours"
5. This isn’t about undermining their ability to earn money. What’s actually being undermined is the very idea of why we work. Our work ethic is more of a play ethic.
6. LL Cool J name checking a rival brand in a Gap commercial
7. Weaker Boundaries = Stronger Foundations

"It’s easier than ever to get ideas out there, but “there” is a lot more crowded.."

Memes:

"A meme is when a thought goes out and becomes part of consciousness.

“It took 40 years for radio to have 10 million users...15 years for TV to have 10 million users. It only took 3 years for Netscape to get to 10 million, and it took Hotmail and Napster less than a year....The time it takes for an idea to circulate is approaching zero.”

How to Look After a Virus:

1. Let the audience make the rules.
2. Avoid the limelight; talk only to your audience.
3. Feed the virus according to its size.
4. Let it die.

Parkour turned into a corporate circus almost instantly because Madonna, James Bond, and the BBC are already into it. Increasingly, when new forms of youth culture survive, it’s because they are things the media wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole - we are pushing people into the margins in order to express themselves. Did Happy Slapping have anything to do with Ultimate Fighting, or Jackass?

Youth cultures and fads have become marketing tools, but deeper underground, something else is happening. Seth Godin points out in Unleashing the Ideavirus, “It took 40 years for radio to have 10 million users...15 years for TV to have 10 million users. It only took 3 years for Netscape to get to 10 million, and it took Hotmail and Napster less than a year....The time it takes for an idea to circulate is approaching zero.”


Remixing social change
Activists, artists, entrepreneurs, and economists are championing an alternative worldview based on sustainable, democratic, decentralized networks. Multinational corporations now have to move as quickly as underground music scenes.

Three guys in their twenties started YouTube, sell it to Google for $1.65 billion twenty-one months later, and revolutionize the way television works.

Looking at the differences previous generations made with simple things such as hairstyles, turntables, and spray cans, it’s difficult to comprehend just how much new generations and youth movements are capable of, despite the relentless pursuit from corporate cool hunters. A change is gonna come.

1. Punk made it very clear that we could do everything ourselves, and purpose should be at least as important as profit. 
2. Pirates, like offshore radio DJs, create periods of chaos and anarchy, but improve things for the rest of us by doing so. 
3. The millions of us who remix video games, music, films, and fashion designs are expanding and improving on those industries, forcing those who make the laws to reexamine how we treat intellectual property. 
4. The new breed of street artists seeking to enhance our surroundings as opposed to vandalizing them act in the public interest, if only unintentionally, by counteracting the advertising cluttering public spaces. 
5. Thanks to the influence of 1960s and ’70s counterculture, and the rave revolutionaries of the ’80s and ’90s, the dream of creating an all-powerful social machine has been realized in the personal computer. 
6. Open-source technology has proved to be just as effective as—and in many cases more effective than—free-market competition or government regulation when it comes to generating money, efficiency, creativity, and social progress. 
7. Hip-hop was born out of a desire to improve society for a marginalized few, but because of its ability to communicate so effectively, now has the potential to improve it for the marginalized many. 
8. And just as mass culture thought it had figured out how to control and use youth cultures, they evolved again. Mass culture needs to learn from the ways youth cultures behave and think, not just use them for their good looks.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma:

self-interest will always result in each prisoner being worse off than if they had cooperated with each other. The most basic assumption—that we all act only in our own self-interest—is simply not true.

Imagine Players A and B are drug companies, and the pirates are those producing generic pills in a developing country. By fighting the pill pirates in this case, neither player stands to make a great deal of money, because the new market doesn’t have much. But not allowing people access to life-saving drugs means people will die needlessly, piracy will be inevitable, and the company’s image will be tarnished. But if Player B starts producing drugs in this market and competing with the pill pirates, they will gain market share (which could become profitable in time), save lives, and improve their reputation as a brand.

Conclusions
"Pirates are taking over the good ship capitalism, but they’re not here to sink it. Instead they will plug the holes, keep it afloat, and propel it forward.

"Looking at the history of youth movements, the social experiments that took hold by figuring out new ways to share, remix, and produce culture, in the long term, the benefits of this new, more democratic system seem clear. It is down to every one of us to approach the Pirate’s Dilemma from our own unique perspective and to apply the best option to our particular situation.
Over the past few decades in the West, we have entered a period of hyperindividualism, which has its pros and cons. But the power of billions of connected individuals, now flexing more power than markets, governments, and corporations using new ideas our economic model cannot yet comprehend, should be welcomed.

"Piracy isn’t just another business model, it’s one of the greatest business models we have.
Acting like a pirate—taking value from the market, or creating new spaces outside of the market and giving it back to the community, whether it’s with free open-source software or selling cheap Starbury sneakers—is a great way to serve public interests and a great way to make an authentic connection to a new audience.
Where are we going..?

http://thepiratesdilemma.com/category/uncategorized