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Bankers and Bureaucrats vs. Internet Freedom
The bankers and the bureaucrats have discovered the Internet, 20 years too late, and they don’t like it
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Posted by Peter Wicks on 02/06 at 02:07 PM
OK I’ll bite. You’d be disappointed if I didn’t. (Or at least Hank would.)
As you know perfectly well, Bankers are not all greedy sharks, and the idea that bureaucrats - generally, without exception or nuance - “love paper more than people” is an even more nauseating prejudice….or would be if I really thought you came close to believing such nonsense.
So what you’re talking about is not “bankers” and “bureaucrats” (who ARE people, you know, with feelings, and a right to be protected from scapegoating, witch-hunting rhetoric), but caricatures of these categories, which bear some resemblance to the actual attitude and behaviour of a subset of them. Can we agree on that?
I’m not going to comment further re bankers, since it’s a profession about which I know relatively little. But I will, from my own experience, say a few words about bureaucrats and the Internet.
Bureaucrats come in many shapes and sizes. The term “bureaucrat”, when not applied in a strictly abusive (and therefore useless for the purposes of serious discussion) sense, can refer to anything from somebody processing (say) visa applications to top-level heads of agencies and ministries. For sure, we (I use the first person since I have not yet completely severed links with my own “bureaucracy”) are not the most innovative of souls, so we probably did, many of us, take longer than some to wake up to the Internet. And how did we react when we did? By and large like most people: gradually integrating it into our way of life and work, and being slow to grasp its real implications.
Are some bureaucrats scared of the internet? Sure. We’re human beings. Are some of us power-crazy? Sure. Ditto.
But really, we don’t take forward the important debates about freedom of information, privacy, policy capture, financial regulation, role of government, etc, etc, by resorting to caricature.
I’ll say one thing about your suggestion to “boycott the entertainment industry” though. One of the many good tips I got from reading Tim Ferris’s gloriously brazen and iconoclastic Four-hour Work Week is the so-called Information Free Diet, where for one week you go without all forms of information - radio, newspapers, basically any verbal input from media channels - that you don’t need for immediate purposes.
Because it’s true that we’re all brainwashed (remember what I was saying about mass hallucination in Hungary?). Compared to the stone age our language instinct is massively overstimulated, and while this “sea of language” in which we’re bathed, more or less from birth, gives us access to knowledge that goes way beyond what we could ever have attained through simple observation of our immediate surroundings, it also exposes us to all sorts of distortions and misinformation, whether deliberate or (most of the time) not. Taking steps to break free from that addiction definitely IS worthwhile, and would (I think) go a long way to reduce our tendency to positively cry out to be exploited.
Much better than blaming the “bankers and bureaucrats”.
Posted by Giulio Prisco on 02/06 at 02:59 PM
@Peter, as usual I am using the “bankers” and “bureaucrats” categories to indicate *mentalities*, not people. I have not said that bankers are only in banks and bureaucrats are only in the civil service. A movie star can be a bureaucrat and a baker can be a banker (remember Jim in my Joe and Jim story of a few weeks ago).
I have provided my definitions of the “bankers” and “bureaucrats” categories. Unfortunately, I don’t believe these descriptions are entirely caricatural, because they do apply to some persons quite precisely. I know some of these persons, and you know them too.
Of course I know that many people who work in banks are not “bankers”, and many people who work in the civil service are not “bureaucrats”. I did not say it… because I knew that you would say it! This is a collective soapbox, and the debate is the best part of the essays.
Re the entertainment industry boycott, or the information free diet. When I was an outrageously underworked and overpaid bure… oops civil servant, I used to waste money on useless things. Since I joined the 99% a few years ago, I am much more careful with money: I don’t buy music or DVDs, I don’t go to the movies, I basically take all my content and entertainment from the Internet, and I am happy this way. I make exceptions for the books of a few authors that I really cannot do without, but I only buy e-books.
Posted by Peter Wicks on 02/07 at 05:55 AM
Douglas Adams coined the term “gastard” to mean a child born out of wedlock, to be distinguished from “bastard” which means someone who just overtook you on the motorway.
In a similar vein, can we coin the terms:
“ganker”, meaning someone who runs or works in a bank, and who may be a perfectly decent person, and
“gureaucrat”, a public office worker who, likewise, may be a perfectly decent person?
Posted by Peter Wicks on 02/07 at 06:03 AM
By the way, re “Internet freedom”, I found this column by Bill Keller in today’s International Herald Tribune excellent. You don’t have to be a fan of Big Entertainment to see the current craze around Internet freedom as something of an unholy alliance between Big Tech, unsavoury hacktivists and naive libertarians.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/opinion/steal-this-column.html?_r=1&ref=billkeller
Posted by Giulio Prisco on 02/07 at 07:38 AM
@Peter re Bill Keller’s NYT column, it is not as bad as I feared from your description. Keller concludes with:
Content-makers would be crazy to let the Internet be stunted as a force for invention, mobilization and shared wisdom. It’s the sea we all swim in.
Of course I agree, and I think most content-makers do. It is the bankers in the content industry, and the bureaucrats in their pockets, who don’t. Content makers frequently report that “piracy” doesn’t harm, and often improves, their ability to make a living with their creation. The “content and entertainment” industry, instead, is opposed to Internet freedom because their obsolete ways and their insane profits are disappearing.
At the same time, online companies would be crazy to let piracy kill off the commerce that supplies quality material upon which even free sites like Wikipedia depend.
Nobody wants to kill commerce, and of course I think that content creators must be able to make a living with their work, otherwise they will be forced to stop creating and do something else to put food on the table. But it is unreasonable to expect that readers pay 20 euros for a book when less than one euro goes to the writer. Publishers can only survive if they dramatically reduce prices by switching to modern ways of distribution. I very much approve of Amazon’s self publishing program for Kindle, and I approve even more of the DRM-free publishing model of Smashwords, and I think this is the way to go. If I can buy a book for 3 euros knowing that 2 euros go to the writer, I am more than happy to do so.
Re “gankers” and “bureaucrats”, I love it, but we already have the perfectly good terms like “civil servants”. I hope many civil servants are not bureaucrats similar to my caricature, but unfortunately many civil servants are.
Posted by Peter Wicks on 02/07 at 08:04 AM
“@Peter re Bill Keller’s NYT column, it is not as bad as I feared from your description.”
Now that REALLY made me laugh! 
“No nobody wants to kill commerce”: and yet to hear some people talk you would think they did. Or they favour approaches that _would_ kill commerce of they were implemented, and indeed which DO, in practice, stunt commerce and economic growth. So the comment that Keller makes is not, in my opinion, a straw man.
That said, I don’t really have any issue with your comments about artists vs publishers and industry sharks. Except perhaps this: in his article Keller mentions that this, like everything in Washington DC, has become a full-blown culture war. My question is: should we be weighing in on the side of the “free internet” brigade, as you seem to favour, or should we rather be trying to inject some sanity into the battlefield? My preference is rather for the latter, but perhaps that’s just my cognitive style…
Posted by Giulio Prisco on 02/07 at 11:39 AM
@Peter re weighing in on the side of the “free internet” brigade vs. trying to inject some sanity into the battlefield
I think both approaches are useful and needed, so perhaps we have both chosen our side wisely.
If I were running things, I would probably favor “sanity” and a negotiated solution as fair as possible to all the parties involved. But I am just a writer, and the free internet is closer to my heart than the old world. If one of the two must go, it is the old world.
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