Who bears responsibility when famous people slap their names on other people’s work? In a tweet time-stamped late last Friday, late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon invited singer and internet personality Addison Rae to perform what he called “8 TikTok Dances.” Social media erupted in outrage almost immediately, as the two-minute performance completely wrote out the choreographers, most of them Black, who actually invented the dances.
8 Tik Tok dances with @whoisaddison!! pic.twitter.com/slKkOOSECI
— jimmy fallon (@jimmyfallon) March 27, 2021
I understand the outrage prompted by this performance. Though not outright bigoted, it does bespeak the sublimated racism common in social media algorighms: Black content creators often see their material get more clicks when handled by White peers. But thinking about it, I realized, this isn’t unique. Many people still apparently believe Steve Jobs personally invented the iPhone, not the hundreds of anonymous engineers on his payroll.
Digital culture often makes everything unofficially public domain. It’s difficult to police ownership, because information flows freely with minimal oversight and few ways of preventing drift. I’ve found my poetry copied onto other people’s blogs and social media pages, not always with my name on it. And I use news photos to decorate blog posts, including this one. The casual anarchy of the internet rewards a limited amount of Wild-West behavior.
Thus digital ownership, to an extent, depends on the honor system. We trust people to care about others’ property, knowing not everyone will. (That’s why programmers invent workarounds like NFTs.) Some people behave recklessly with others’ property, even knowing that people require control of their content in order to control their finances. They need to own their product if they want to make a living.
In fairness, opposite the concentrated nature of ownership, we have the distributed nature of funding. Thanks to crowdfunding resources, one need only ask, to receive a side income; some people make a middle-class living through crowdfunding. This depends on several factors, certainly, as White people and cismen often find it easier to make a living online. But within that stipulation, content creators have a certain amount of creative autonomy.
Fallon’s behavior, though, shows how limited that model remains. His old media connections offer him power over others’ public exposure. Notice we’re fighting over a TV star’s irresponsibility, because TV still influences what people get to see. Influence peddlers like Fallon still constitute an information bottleneck: as reprehensible as it appears that he’s taken creators’ names off their products, I never would’ve encountered the products without them.
Old media empires like NBCUniversal, Warner, and especially Disney, retain remarkable authority. They outright own the dwindling number of products that comprise our shared cultural experience, and we permit them to gatekeep what merits our time. Powerful media executives, and their onscreen hand-puppets like Fallon, still filter what gets seen, and we give them profound sway over our tastes, and the tastemaking process.
This behavior didn’t originate with Fallon. Elon Musk has been repeatedly scolded for sharing others’ artwork without credit. But, again, most tech mavens don’t create the works to which they sign their names. Elon Musk, like Steve Jobs, did some technical design, decades ago, but both are (were) business executives claiming credit via the “Royal We” for work mostly done by others, who mostly don’t draw residual payments.
Powerful people screen what’s worth watching, listening to, or dancing with. But the powerless and diffuse actually create the products the powerful endorse. In a world suffused with content, we trust gatekeepers to screen our limited attention time. When Fallon says something is worth watching, we trust him, because we have to. And when he backs himself with a pretty woman, he merits that much more of our attention.
Poor Fallon possibly didn’t realize he was stealing. Perhaps he, or his writers’ room, assumed falsely that these dances originated organically, and spread via grassroots gossip. Several Twitter users successfully found the original choreographers, so ignorance isn’t a great excuse; he could’ve found the choreographers, he just didn’t. Either way, it proves he requires a greater dose of responsibility than he’s currently showing.
MIT professor Eric von Hippel demonstrates that strict copyright law narrows economic development, when applied to technology. End users should have freedom to adapt and improve their products. But he acknowledges this doesn’t apply to art. If artists can’t own their products, they can’t make a living, and therefore can’t dedicate premium mental energy to art. Sadly, White people have often used this limitation to short-sell Black artists.
Digital technology makes such uncredited “borrowings” more likely. Thankfully, tech makes catching them more likely, too.
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