I put the "boring jargon" into "pornography ninjitsu"

Background: BeckySharper blamed pornography again, this time for the awfulness that is labial cosmetic surgery, I tepidly agreed but claimed that "mainstream porn bad; mainstreaming *of* porn bad in some ways, good in others" was a distinction important enough to be worth drawing; she replied that non-mainstream porn was largely irrelevant in terms of cultural impact, using a striking analogy:

... It’s like saying “oh, when you talk about fast-food, you also have to mention the fantastic taco truck in Red Hook whose food is all homemade with slow-cooked ingredients.” No, dammit, I don’t. When there are millions of Red Hook taco trucks serving billions of people daily, then I will call them fast food. But that taco truck is not even remotely in the same fast-food universe as McDonalds. Same thing with porn. What’s being served up in millions of places to billions of people should be the focus of our discussion.

At which point I put far too much time and effort into an extended reply to be deterred by a spam-filter that seems to really hate me, so hey, now it's a blog post:
I get the fast-food analogy, but I think it's misleading here: what matters is not simply the *magnitude* of the effects, but also the susceptibility of each cultural-influence mechanism to positive interventions that avoid unintended negative side-effects. At the end of the day, cultural critique isn't supposed to be like complaining about the weather, but rather like complaining about global climate change: it's supposed to be a vehicle for (or at least a spur to) *ameliorative action* rather than just griping. (I don't mean to say you're just griping; bear with me!)

So: mainstream porn is bad, both for body-image reasons (here porn has a lot of company, e.g. basically all fashion mags and mainstream 'women's magazines'), as in this post, and for misogynist sexual-script reasons, as you've noted in the past. Ok. And the effect may be large, simply because there's so much out there. Ok.

But the question is how effective cultural critique can be in either discouraging folks from consuming it or helping them resist its negative influence. Moreover, the cultural critique must avoid exacerbating the related, also bad-for-women cultural messages of women's-sexuality-is-shameful, women-ought-to-be-'pure', women's-bodies-don't-belong-to-them-alone, etc. And my worry is that critiquing the consumption of mainstream porn in our culture implicitly calls up or may subtly reinforce those bad messages too, *unless* care is taken to specify what *makes* mainstream porn bad (the misogynist *content*, rather than the pornographic *form* of explicit sex depicted for prurient interest).

My evidence for this claim about cultural causation is anecdotal but directly on point: the fact that so many women, both in the 'feminist sex wars' of the 80s and now the periodic feminist blogosphere sex wars of the 00s, feel like their own choices, self-expression, and even identity are being attacked or undermined by anti-porn writings that, on the surface, are completely *pro*-woman, pro-autonomy, etc. To my mind, this suggests a need to fine-tune one's culture-jamming to a degree that, yes, would be absurd and would sound concern-trollish vis-a-vis fast-food.

In short, I strongly suspect that broadly-targeted 'I blame porn' messages have:

A- almost no effect on het-male porn consumption, and not much more effect on het-male porn 'cultural programming';

B- perhaps some moderate impact on het-female porn consumption, but very little on *total* het-female consumption of bad body-image / sexual-script cultural exposure (again, those lady-mags!);

C- a good chance of doing as much to reinforce the related patriarchal anti-female-sexuality/self-ownership messages that are the often-bundled implicit uptake from these cultural artifacts as they have of defusing the body-image or women-objectified messages. Of course every person is influenced differently; we have to speculate in terms of likely tendencies.

By way of contrast, my not-very-considered position on Cosmo/Vogue/Shape/People (and fast food!) is basically "I blame them!"; I don't think there's much of an argument in those cases parallel to the one I'm making here regarding porn.

Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, or concern-trolling, or confusing blogs with Hypatia: the Journal of Feminist Philosophy, but I really think there's something very specific and very troubling about the way that good-faith and explicitly pro-woman, but anti-porn, arguments *always* seem to generate misunderstandings, drawn battle-lines, and community divisions that long outlast and far outweigh the particular issue.

(Well, I did have a productive day aside from this.)

Furnishing other virtual rooms

I posted some comments here, and then some more here and here and here.

I'm starting to think that the biggest problem for global/scalar consequentialism is that, rightly conceived, it tells moral philosophers that they ought not be moral philosophers. (Which is one story to tell about utilitarianism: the fundamental 'moral philosophy' questions were worked out no later than Sidgwick, after which point they all became economists. And soon enough forgot the philosophy.) I've never thought the 'self-undermining' objection a reason to disbelieve consequentialism, but this sociological variant seems to do some explanatory work...

Reserved for Directors

As Matt Yglesias says, all sorts of people bike regularly in Germany, not just students and 20-somethings. Today I saw something that captured this so well, I just had to take a picture:

All of this sounds like a NYC cyclist's dream, but I must admit that obeying traffic laws is really, really weird.

Ok, I confess!

I may have claimed I was moving 4000 miles for my research, but really, it was just to see these sweet Piraatenparty election posters in person. (Also: gosh, Heidelberg is pretty!)

Now, with extra German flavor!

... by which I mean that I'm living in Heidelberg, at least for awhile. So far (~14 hours) it seems pretty neat. Tons of bicycles. Far denser and more walkable than a comparable US city of ~140k. Quite pretty, in that charming European way.

I'll try to actually start blogging again.

Leave to the less discerning the passing fads of moving images and vertebrate companionship

My attempts to restart my libertarianish reading group have, thus far, been a complete failure. This is unfortunate. Perhaps the answer is to break things up a bit--see whether a quorum can be found to read and discuss a single book rather than demand an open-ended commitment. Perhaps it would help, too, if the focus were on creating a blog-based conversation, supplemented by meat-space meetings with any locals I could convince to show up.

I'm thinking Andy Sabl's book, Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics, would be worth focusing on (introduction available for download at the linked page). I've been meaning to read it for ages; it sounds fascinating, and I've heard it's quite good. It's also old enough that cheap used copies aren't hard to find and library copies are less likely to be checked out. Finally, Sabl is an occasional blogger at The Reality-Based Community, and thus might be interested in responding to whatever discussion emerges.

So: if you're reading this, please email me if you are either: 1, in the NYC area and willing to meet up to discuss Ruling Passions in person sometime in the next few weeks; 2, interested in participating in an on-line discussion of the text. This could be neat.

In a dark room we can do just as we like

Earlier I expressed some pessimism about the future of copyright law, finishing with an extended quote from Bill Patry's own gloomy diagnosis. Now Charles Johnson has written a sharp response to Patry, insisting that the proper evaluand is not law but life, where copyright-as-lived is nearly irrelevant. I think Johnson is right in some ways but wrong in others, and my reasons for thinking his optimism misplaced have implications that go far beyond questions of copyright.

To clarify: I agree with the two claims that seem at the heart of Johnson's post: that as a practical matter, copyright law has proven ineffective at barring access to creative works; and that voluntary initiative (think DeCSS, Napster, Bittorrent, The Pirate Bay, IRC channels, etc.) is typically a better use of activists' energy and resources than governmental politics as far as actually enhancing freedom-as-lived. So what's the problem? In a nutshell, I think Johnson is too quick to downplay, 1, the damage that even "unenforceable" policies can do, and 2, the long-term social and political costs of states criminalizing, rather than merely ignoring, the "counter-economy" or radical sector more generally.

There's some truth to Johnson's claim that "a law that cannot be enforced is as good as a law that has been repealed." While jurisprudes might quibble about how precisely to characterise the situation, a norm whose existence is universally ignored by the legal system's officials is of questionable validity at best. The problem is when we turn to norms that cannot be generally or impartially enforced, but are enforced nonetheless, the penalties meted out in conformity to the whims ("priorities") of particular officials. The best examples of this, of course, remains what Lawyers, Guns, and Money call "The War on [Some Classes of People Who Use Some Sorts of] Drugs." As with copyright, vast segments of the population regularly break the relevant laws; doing so is neither practically difficult nor unusually risky; for a certain sort of person, even explicit admissions of criminality have essentially no consequences at all. And yet none of this stops officials from locking millions of their fellow human beings in cages for doing the wrong drug as the wrong sort of person at the wrong time--or voters from eagerly rewarding those officials with higher offices and greater powers.

This so widely acknowledged as to be almost banal, especially in Law & Society work, but it bears repeating: laws whose enforcement is possible only when selective are not uncommon, because officials--and not only officials--value the discretion such laws inevitably require. If everyone is guilty of something, officials can effectively target people and not merely behavior. There's a big difference between random enforcement and discretionary enforcement, even when structural factors constrain both to the same aggregate arrest totals, and I worry that copyright law will follow narcotics and "vice" policing into the ugly realm where all is permitted, so long as you don't annoy the wrong people.

Johnson has written some good critiques of the fetishization of our flawed constitution and against law-worship more generally, but I worry that he's too dismissive of the conceptual link between liberty and the rule of law. I don't pretend to have this stuff fully worked out, but I think the republican focus on protected status, a security against the arbitrary will of another, reflects an important dimension of any liberty worth defending. None of which implies that modern nation-states are either necessary to or particularly good at safeguarding this liberty; I merely want to insist that what matters is not aggregate enforcement but individual vulnerability, even if this vulnerability is largely insufficient to deter the proscribed behavior.

My second concern is more speculative, and (blush) rather Foucaultian. What leads to vulnerability is the gap between cultural and legal norms, a gap prompted both by the low (unconditional) probability of punishment and the marginal benefits of rule-breaking. Napster was revolutionary because it provided a service that hadn't before been available at any price--the possibility of getting nearly any song on demand. It's taken the music industry a decade to replicate this feat, but they've basically done it; for a lot of stuff, it's just easier to pay. The cost/benefit calculus has shifted.

So long as you've got the money, that is. I suspect the optimal pricing structure will lead to something of a separating equilibrium; middle class kids pay (and share libraries via sneakernet), poor kids infringe online. Among the privileged, unlicensed downloading becomes much worse than illegal--it becomes tacky and pathetic, like crack (but not powder) cocaine. Or perhaps the parallel is to payroll taxes--convenient because automatic, at least for Dilberts living and working within institutions large and ordinary enough to become bureaucratized; annoying and painful, tempting evasion, for those who walk different paths. (And of course, that dynamic itself disincentivizes deviance.) Even now, a distressing number of people seem to think "he knew the risks" sufficient reason to temper the sympathy one might ordinarily feel for a person facing a 6-digit lawsuit over harmless acts; what happens when today's Organization Kids become tomorrow's prosecutors, governors, judges? (Ian MacDonald's novels Brasyl and especially River of Gods both portray futures with this interesting cultural-juristic twist on "the digital divide.")

One response might be to question my armchair sociology; far from being Foucaultian self-disciplinarians living in a digital Panopticon of Google-powered data mining, aren't Kids These Days selling their virginities on eBay and posting the videos to MySpace (before penning angsty regrets on Livejournal), consequences be damned? Perhaps. But I'm dubious that youthful oversharing in the name of authenticity is in any fundamental tension with copyright, once content owners and manufacturers realize that user experience is everything (think of the cellphone ringtone business).

Ultimately, it's precisely because I agree with Johnson about the importance of social, technological, and cultural change that I question his optimistic conclusions. It may be easier than ever to evade copyright controls, but even aside from the issue of discretionary enforcement, we need to look at the other side of the ledger: the increasing invisibility of those very controls. The defining feature of the Napster era was not simply the yawning gulf between copyright and copynorm but the indispensibility of copyright infringement to participation in youth culture, even for the privileged. This indispensibility is disappearing, and the gulf may go with it; the Google Books settlement promises to skip the Napster stage entirely--heading right to the locked-down iTunes paradigm--as the books of the world join its music in the digital ether. And that would be deeply unfortunate, less for econ 101 deadweight-loss reasons than for the impact on tomorrow's taken-for-granteds concerning freedom, ownership, and authority.