POPPING THE SEAMS

The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism

“DIY is changing our labor markets, and creativity is becoming our most valuable currency.” (p 31)

This book is like the evil twin brother of Anne Elizabeth Moore’s Unmarketable. It too is about the relationship of underground culture to marketing, only rather than a critique it is more of an inspirational/motivational/how-to-compete-in-the-new-world manual. Sometimes he seems to be addressing “the kids,” other times it’s closer to a corporate consulting spiel.

Mason’s idea of “pirates” is broad and he brilliantly weaves together pirate radio, pirated DVDs, graffiti, open source software, illegal downloads, game modding, punk, and a game theory model called “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.” What his pirate examples have in common is that in each one a practice threatens the players in an existing market by doing business outside the rules of the market. This puts the existing companies in a “Pirate’s Dilemma.” Something like this… people pirate just-released movies, press them as DVDs and sell them on the street. The movie industry is threatened. But the fact that people buy these DVDs just proves that that there is a market for low-quality DVDs of brand new movies. The non-pirates have to decide whether to fight the pirates or start to compete like a pirate. If they fight the pirates – for instance, try to shut them down legally – the best the industry can hope for is a return to the market conditions they had before the pirates. But if the existing companies put on their pirate hats and start acting like pirates then they are competing in their old market (say the movie theaters) and in the new market opened up by the pirates (DVDs sold on the street the same week that the movie is released). The pirates look like a threat but actually they do everyone a favor by opening up a bigger market Read more

part of a video-a-day series…

“Thriller” at the US/Canada border in Second Life… performed by the Collective Practice Research Group

This was the product of a class at UCSD called
Collective Art Practice.

This class has three main foci:
* to introduce students to collective practices
* to facilitate student understanding of social issues embodied in the san diego / tijuana borderlands
* to explore online space as public space, its limitations and possibilities

In the 1960s, when Heron first performed the song, it was clear that a narrow pipeline controlled by major media companies was unlikely to transmit ideas that ran counter to dominant interests. The counterculture communicated primarily through grassroots media – underground newspapers, folk songs.people’s radio, and comics. – Hnery Jenkins, Covergence Culture, p. 210

I found this video as part of my research into auto-destruction in rock-n-roll. The artist here (Ted Riederer) has people smash the instruments, then he rebuilds them, then has a band write and perform songs with the re-constituted instruments. Photos on the website show a guitar with pins holding it together like a nasty fracture case. Reiderer describes himself as a survivor of a punk rock youth and this feels like a portrait of the long recovery.secretshape.com

Brain Bress – “Wait” More Brian Bress via the website at brianbress.com.

Rupa Huq writes about the 30-year anniversary of Rock Against Racism.

What we have predominately is a uni-dimensional, commercialized and massified youth culture, not really organized by youth itself but by commercial agents, that has absorbed into itself, and trivialized, all the potentially subversive positions of earlier rock movements. -E. Ann Kaplan

The exploration of which has become the subject of (subversive) (underground (youth)) culture.

panel from Jeffrey Lewis comic.