Blogless

An interesting story in Wired last week about the rise and fall of a certain Firefox extension.

Here’s the plugin in question. For those unfamiliar with Amazon.com, there’s not usually a giant “Download 4 free” bar on the product page.

The extension in question hijacks pages on Amazon.com and inserts in them a (large) link to the product a user is currently viewing as free download on The Pirate Bay, an "illicit torrent-tracking service," if it is available there. The net effect of this is that if you are viewing a CD on Amazon (and thus presumably considering its purchase), you are alerted to the fact that by clicking "here," you can download the same product for free.

While it’s not exactly stealing candy from a baby, there are some alarming similarities between the monolithic media monopolies this extension exploits and our proverbial infants, vis á vis powerlessness, in this scenario. Doubtless feeling a kind of pressure from those unaccustomed to this experience of powerlessness, Amazon has apparently responded to the so-called "Pirates of the Amazon," the coding group who wrote the extension, with threats of litigation.

The Pirates have subsequently taken their extension down, although Wired reports that it is still available elsewhere. The Pirates themselves have posted some information on their site about the history and reactions to the project. The standard reaction, as you might expect, is a sort of knee-jerk appeal to free speech, which I think is the right kind of reaction in a general sense (as it was right from a corporate-philosophical sense for Amazon to want to stop the distribution of the plugin, albeit, I think, wrong in a strategic sense).

However, I think the person who comes closest to really understanding this phenomenon is Jon Ippolito at the University of Maine, who says:

“[..] I think there is an ulterior, perhaps unconscious motive in Digg users condemning the project. Most of them pirate games and movies when they’re not at their respectable Web 2.0 jobs, but they don’t want artists calling attention to such “radical approaches” for fear that they’ll lose free and easy access to the entertainment that makes holding down a job more palatable in the first place.”

This seems to just about capture the real spirit of this debate to me. My take is that the idea for the extension itself is not only obvious to every web savvy user, as many commentators have noticed, but it was implemented in an inelegant way, and doubtless even more inaccessible than the Pirate Bay itself to the kind of unaware user in whose life it would have made a significant difference. In other words, in a rational world, it would have been a blip on the radar.

However, I’m certainly not here to argue that this is a rational world, and in fact this extension resulted in something like a widespread frenzy. I suspect that this is the case because nobody likes the status quo. Neither the pirates, for whom I imagine every incident of this type results in days of bullet-sweating repentance in the face of a potentially impending wave of irrational MPAA/RIAA exuberance, nor the media moguls who still haven’t quite figured out to get consumers to give them money without having to deliver content to them.

In sum, the whole situation stinks and everybody knows it. And this fact results in an MA art project from a few kids in Rotterdam ending up under threat of litigation by the world’s largest online retailer and the threat of coverage from the New York Times. For my money, then, (pun intended) the relevant discussion here is "What’s wrong with the bigger picture?"