TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Review: The Pirate’s Dilemma by Matt Mason

By Chris Meadows

If anybody has street cred to talk about “piracy” and youth culture, it is probably Matt Mason. He started out as a pirate radio and club DJ in London, and later founded the grime culture magazine RWD. With that experience to build on, his book The Pirate’s Dilemma is an interesting tour through the disruptive effects youth culture has had on society through the last few decades—starting earlier than you might think.

There are a number of people who complain at the use of the term “piracy” to encompass the illicit downloading of mp3s and other digital media—because they feel it muddles the issue with the street vendors who sell knock-offs for profit, or even with the predatory ships that still ply the seas around Asia and Africa. (I try to avoid using the term as much as possible myself.)

Those people may not be pleased with this book, as Mason extends the definition of “pirate” to cover anyone who carves out a new niche outside of established markets, threatening the models of businesses already in those markets. This includes the punk music scene, graffiti artists, disco, rap and hip-hop artists, pirate radio and rave clubs, the Free Software movement, peer-to-peer, flash mobs, and others. In fact, as often as “piracy” is thrown around to describe peer-to-peer these days, readers may find it pretty surprising that peer-to-peer only gets a fairly small portion of the book.

The Dilemma Then

The dilemma that Mason discusses is a “remix” of the famous “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” a famous element of game theory that suggests people will tend to act in their own self-interest. In short, businesses faced with “piracy” (whether it’s illicit MP3 downloading or an entirely new genre of popular music) face the choice of trying to shut the pirates down legally or else to out-compete them at their own game—that is, whether to try to beat them or join them.

Through the different movements Mason covers, a pattern emerges: a new countercultural movement is founded, takes the “establishment” by surprise—and is then co-opted by the establishment, after which the original movement more or less dies out.

Just a few examples: The ripped-up clothing and outrageous hairdos of the punk scene, whose entire purpose was to rebel against consumer culture, suddenly started being sold in stores—and punk bands signed with major record labels. Advertising agencies started using methods and styles pioneered by graffiti taggers. Disco’s beginning as a serious dance club scene was eclipsed by the cheesy polyester excesses of Saturday Night Fever. The BBC shut down pirate radio stations only after starting their own station to play the genres of music popularized on pirate radio.

And—eventually—the widespread downloading of mp3s led to the creation of Apple’s iTunes music store, which has since become one of the largest retailers of music in the world.

The Dilemma Now

It is not hard to see the sort of dilemma Mason talks about playing out now—in the continued problems the record labels claim are caused by music “piracy,” the problems the movie industry has with movie “piracy”, and the widespread opposition to the Google Books/Authors Guild settlement. In all of these furors, the establishment is attempting to “beat” the “pirates”. Is there a way they could “join” them instead?

If The Pirate’s Dilemma has a problem, it is that it is put together (as one Amazon reviewer notes) like a textual version of the “mix tapes” that Matt Mason would have created as a pirate DJ—a collection of unrelated anecdotes from all over the map, tied together thinly with connecting material. They do share common elements, but sometimes the unifying theme is a little hard to get at.

On the other hand, all of these anecdotes contain interesting information. I learned a number of things about these different youth movements that surprised me—for instance, I had never considered graffiti as an actual art form before, as opposed to a bunch of hooligans tagging out of malice or gang affiliation. On the whole, the book is a fascinating read. I highly recommend it.

As pointed out in the info box above, a PDF of The Pirate’s Dilemma can be downloaded free from the author’s website. Other e-book forms, however, must be purchased—and, ironically, are all encumbered with Digital Rights Management. Mason has harsh words for DRM himself (in a footnote on page 156, he says it is “flawed” and “treats fans as criminals”), but this has not stopped every e-book publisher from instituting it on his book.