The Pirate's Dilemma - Ch 1

WARNING - This was written for my punk rock friends and those who like to think. The summary ended up being far longer than I realized, but I don't feel I can do the topic justice by cutting more parts out. At this point I am not sure it I'll publish comments on the rest of the book, given the time and length of all of this. Enjoy, or don't...

I was at the public library a bit ago and was looking for a book. It was supposed to be in the new books section but was not to be found. While looking, I happened upon a book called "The Pirate's Dilemma: How youth culture is reinventing capitalism" by Matt Mason.

I have really gotten to like the information presented in the book and will be posting highlights of the first chapter here. Before doing so, you can get the book free from the author here.

Intro

"For the last sixty years, capitalism has run a pretty tight ship in the West. But in increasing numbers, pirates are hacking into the hull and holes are starting to appear. Privately owned property, ideas, and privileges are leaking out into the public domain beyond anyone’s control. Pirates are rocking the boat. As a result people, corporations, and governments across the planet are facing a new dilemma—the Pirate’s Dilemma: How should we react to the changing conditions on our ship?"

"This is the story of how pirates might save this sinking ship. Often pirates are the first to feel the winds of change blowing."

"For more than sixty years, teenage rebels have been doing things differently and working out new ways to share information, intellectual property, and public space. Behind youth movements familiar to us are radical ideas about how we can compete, collaborate, and coexist in an environment where old assumptions about how we treat information do not hold. The Pirate’s Dilemma will chart the rise of these radical ideas— ideas that started with individual mavericks conducting crazy social experiments which eventually enter everything, influencing business, politics, and many other areas."

"We rebel through youth movements because we recognize that things don’t always work the way they should. They are a way of communicating alternatives without inciting bloody revolutions, a way to reorganize systems from the inside, which isn’t easy to do."

"I use the term Punk Capitalism to describe the new set of market conditions governing society."

Punk Capitalism

Richard Meyers, know as Richard Hell is credited with single handedly pushing punk dress, and through that punk lyrics and mindset, to the forefront of our culture. A runaway from Kentucky, he went to New York as an aspiring writer. He realized that he could be more influential through music than writing.

"Part of what I liked about music was all these other means for communication,” Hell told me. “In rock ’n’ roll it’s always been important how you looked. How you looked said something. And it was usually something about rejecting convention and the nine-to-five, and any kind of control, but you could get really elaborate with how you used the way you looked to communicate stuff. You’re always being interviewed, your album covers, your live shows, it was so broad, the areas for getting your message across. I wanted to use all of them."

"He looked at the Beatles’ bowl haircuts and asked himself, what are they really saying? “Well,” he explains, “they really say five-year-old kid. So I thought, ‘What was my generation’s haircut like when we were five years old?’ Where I grew up, the most popular hair-cut was called the ‘Butch.’ Short all the way around, and you’d maybe wax up the front of it. But of course being kids, we wouldn’t get to the barber that often, and we wouldn’t keep it neat, it would just be kind of raggedy....I wanted it to be do-it-yourself. I wanted it to not be something you’d go to the barber for."

On why Hell doesn't wear the same hair and leather jacket like other aging punk rockers: "The interesting thing is to not remain the same,” he muses. “To me that’s what’s boring; I don’t really care to see fifty-year-old people going around in punk leather jackets. The point is to stay unclassifiable. Then they [the establishment] don’t own you."

Some interesting history from the book: Richard Hell was seen by Malcolm McLaren at the CBGB. Malcolm was managing the New York Dolls [musical precursors to Richard Hell, but with a glam rock look] at the time, but took the look Hell had with him when he took over managing The Strand, which later became the Sex Pistols. Their first album Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols released the single Anarchy in the U.K. [notice how Johnny Rotten looks like Draco Malfoy] which rocked to the top of the charts, but also cost them 3 labels in as many years. Their single God Save the Queen was timed to release during the Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee, resulting in most magazines and newspapers not printing the name of the new number one song, opting instead to leave the spot blank. Somewhere in here they are picked up by Sir Richard Branson when no one else wants them.

All the World's a Stage (and it just got rushed)

"Fifty years ago the world operated like a conventional rock concert. Some of it still does, and many of us still view it that way. Picture your-self in the crowd at such a concert. The producers, bosses, and owners are the rock stars above, generating the goods, services, salaries, and content we the fans consume from below the inaccessible stage, singing along obediently with our lighters in the air."

"You can see that the stage is surrounded by barriers to entry and mean-looking roadies, stopping us from climbing up. These barriers might be a lack of skills or technology; they could be financial. But often they’re made of nothing more than our own perception of what’s possible."

"Looking around the stadium,you see the thousands of others who would also like to get up on that stage, and it’s painfully clear you’re just another face in the crowd without a chance."

"Under punk, the concept of a gig totally changed. Punk despised the one-way flow of information typically found at a rock show. At punk shows the band and the fans occupy the same space, as equals. There is no hierarchy. Everyone is part of the performance. Instead of worshiping a big-hair rock idol from the cheap seats at the back of the stadium, fans now found themselves crammed into smaller venues interacting with the band, shoving and pushing them like other fans."

"Our world today is starting to look a lot more like a punk gig (okay, maybe with slightly less spitting). The barriers to entry are being kicked down, and this new breed of fans-turned-performers, including you, is rushing the world stage. Technology is cheap; information is every-where; and the roadies are gone (who takes advice from roadies any-way?). The only thing left to do is to stop defining ourselves by the old hierarchy and run up on-stage. Think about something you have always wanted to do but haven’t. You probably didn’t do it for a good reason; maybe you didn’t know how, couldn’t afford it, or didn’t think you could get your foot in the door. But with the wealth of information now available to us, we can easily find out how to give most things a try, for the price of access to a computer. And in fact, the less formal knowledge we have of an area, the better we may be at discovering new ways to innovate within it."

Punk Capitalists

The author points to the founders of VICE magazine: "When you start doing music for just you and your buddies, you don’t care,” Smith tells me. “You do it for you and a couple of your friends, and if some other people come then great, but you don’t really give a %&@#, right? It’s the same doing the mag. We don’t do the mag for like an audience, it’s not like ‘what demographic are we gonna go for?’ ‘Should we put extreme sports in there?’ Cos we don’t actually care. We put in whatever we think is interesting."

"The VICE empire now includes a successful record label, film company, TV channel, a London pub/gig venue, and several book and merchandise deals. Operating like a punk band has turned VICE into a multimillion-dollar brand. So it’s also become one of punk’s archenemies: a multinational corporation."

"Like all successful youth cultures, punk has been co-opted by the establishment."

"The Sex Pistols reunited for a tour in 1996 . “We have found a common cause, and it’s your money,” remarked Jonny Rotten."

"Antiestablishment slogans became the hallmark of big businesses interested in promoting themselves by supposedly empowering us with the D.I.Y. ethic. “Image Is Nothing,” says Sprite as it defiantly sells fizzy drinks. “Go Create,” Sony urges us. “Don’t Be Evil,” Google advises. “Have It Your Way,” cries Burger King. “Just Do It,” bellows Nike. Apple tells the hoards that gather every time it opens a new store to “Think Different,” holding D.I.Y. seminars for Mac users, teaching them how to get the most out of punk-branded music software such as GarageBand."

"What is interesting is what else is happening; punk capitalists are starting to use the free-market system to their advantage, and are turning the tables by selling real issues back to us through the things we consume." One more recent example of this is the (Product)Red brand that Bono promotes.

" VICE has in recent years traded basic punk shock tactics to cover genuinely shocking and important stories, stories that often don’t get relayed to VICE’s young hip audience. They published “The Special Issue” in 2002, edited by a team of people with various disabilities, featuring articles such as “The Totally Retarded Use of the Word Retard."

"When Shane Smith and VICE contributing editor Jamie-James Medina traveled to Darfur in 2006 to shoot an extreme travel guide to Sudan, the documentary they came back with was one of the first in the Western media to explicitly make the link between the actions of Western and Asian oil companies that operate in Sudan, and the genocide that has killed hundreds of thousands of people there and displaced millions more."

"In America there is no anti-status quo media,” says Smith. “It’s all the same four big companies, and they’re all afraid of losing Budweiser so it’s just like, there’s no voice. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is the most watched ‘news’ program by people under thirty-five and it’s a spoof comedy show. There is a

huge market out there of disenfranchised kids, and we do these political things which aren’t Republican or Democrat, but more like how a punk would look at things, which is more like ‘This is absurd. It’s not right, left, center, whatever, it’s just $@%^#."

Another punk capitalist is American Apparel. They give their workers a fair wage with benefits, keep the production in the US, use solar energy, and organic cotton.

On the coming of 3-D printers: " when this happens—there will no longer be any boundaries left between producer and consumer. The only thing left will be the creativity and ingenuity of the design itself. A world where anything and everything could be printed out at home is a world full of questions. What would happen to Nike when kids start printing out Air Jordans at the rate at which they illegally download music? Will your new ride be printed down at the showroom? Would Christmas morning be ruined if the printer jammed and nobody’s presents were printed? D.I.Y. is about becoming more independent. The more independent we become as a society, the more industries become decentralized. Indeed, we may reach a point where there is no “industry” left at all, in its place many vibrant local markets producing value, but not controlled exclusively by big players. This is already happening to the music industry, and it’s starting to happen with anything that can be transmitted electronically. But soon this may also happen in the world of physical goods. “We have reached a point in history where our most advanced technology is dirt cheap."

"Punk Capitalists are creating change using three separate ideas that came directly from the philosophy of punk rock:

1. Do It Yourself - D.I.Y. is changing our labor markets, and creativity is becoming our most valuable currency.

2. Resist Authority - Punk capitalists are resisting authority, too—by leveraging new D.I.Y. technologies and the power of individuals connecting and working together as equals. Technology + Democracy = Punk Capitalism.

3. Combine Altruism with Self-Interest - Punk injected altruism into entrepreneurship, a motivator of people long overlooked by neoclassical economics. Not only that, punk made the idea of putting purpose before profit seem cool to an entire generation. It manufactured new meaning in an area where it was really needed."

"As music historian Clinton Heylin suggests in Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry, “It could be argued that the influence and impact of the original punk bands lingered on only because their music was bootlegged."

Punk is about thinking for yourself and doing what you want. Not because you can, but because it makes sense to you.