Okay, But Who REALLY Owns the Internet?

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.

Pop Messiah and the Breakfast Cereal Killers

Jensen Karp (right), with his wife, actress Danielle Fishel

I’d never heard of Jensen Karp before this week, when he allegedly found shrimp tails, dental floss, and rat poop in a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch breakfast cereal. Karp’s Twitter posts about the debacle became an instant sensation, garnering thousands of retweets in mere hours. Despite his decades-long career as a child actor, comedian, and TV writer, it took breakfast cereal to turn Karp into an overnight sensation.

Then his ex-girlfriends began making their voices heard.

I understand the appeal behind Karp’s story. In a classic David and Goliath story, an individual hero stands fast against the industrial monster, General Mills. We humans seek heroes to confront our problems, because we recognize how pervasive our challenges are. But the rush to embrace Jensen Karp gave me instant willies, especially when he refused to participate in any effort to rectify the problem. That was my first problem.

Karp’s story appeared “ordinary” despite his large audience, drawn from his media presence. Decades deep in entertainment, he knows how to sell a story to the public, evidenced by his generous use of visuals. Karp offers a simple morality play of corporate negligence, or worse, while pitching himself as a hero against the mighty monster of General Mills. We buy it because we know corporations fundamentally aren't on our side.

David-and-Goliath mythology looms large in Western morality. We believe that the small, the ordinary, and the workaday, somehow deserve saving, a belief which transcends any religion. Yet we seek extraordinary individuals to perform that saving. Rather than collaborating with other individuals, a notoriously high-risk enterprise, we instead yearn for a superhuman hero who will do the defending for us.

Both political parties claim to speak for commoners and ordinary people, while shrugging at actual abuse. From Republicans turning water cannons on protestors, to Democrats abandoning campaign promises like disgraced lovers, conventional solutions just don’t work. We watch the powerful work in tandem with the rich to impede necessary changes, while the world literally burns and floods around us. And mere notional reforms only bandage a dying system.

Humanity has an innate desire to stand up against the powerful. But actually doing so carries great personal risk: the first person to threaten the powerful, usually gets struck down. Instead, we await an exceptional individual to do the threatening for us. After that person dies to save us, like Jesus or Fred Hampton, we’ll rally around that person’s martyrdom to provide moral unity and direction.

This messianic desire made sense in prior times. The idea of Christological salvation matters, because only with a rallying cry, could the weak and the defenseless band together against the powerful. The early church provided a place where the oppressed could air their grievances and be taken seriously. Sadly, of course, as the church became powerful in its own right, it switched sides and defended the rich and mighty.

If we’re honest, we don’t want to improve the world in the abstract, we want to live in the improved world. But challenging the powers which shackle us carries a price few people are willing to pay. We need someone willing to die for us. Our messianic hope tempts us to accept that Jensen Karp might threaten the corporations. But he can’t. He isn’t willing to die. His product is entirely himself.

Jensen Karp isn’t a messiah. His behavior, before and since, demonstrates that he’s in it for himself. He wants the rewards of notoriety. As reports of narcissistic behavior and sexual harassment emerge, it appears that Karp has always been his own product. He has always maintained a camera-friendly version of himself, perhaps because of his media upbringing. He has spent his life in the media eye, and knows how to keep it focused on himself.

Karp’s history of seeking attention comes at others’ expense. This isn’t the proletariat punching up. Karp used his media connections to manipulate a digital marketplace which loves a simple moralistic story. His attempts to hijack our moral umbrage redound entirely onto himself and his career. Karp has a product to sell, which is himself, and he’s sold it aggressively, because he knows the short horizon for media attention anymore.

I cannot fault anyone for embracing this story. It plays well: a massive multinational corporation did something negligent, and answered the everyman’s challenge with haughty disdain. It fits Western, Christian-adjacent morality neatly. Too neatly, as it turns out. Hopefully, Jensen Karp offers us a chance to learn how to spot, and avoid, future secular messiahs.

Sex and Politics Turn Everyone Into Liars

Anthony Comstock

Perhaps no American has had a larger effect on public consciousness than Anthony Comstock; yet outside Poli-Sci circles, few remember him. A relative hero of the Civil War and an active community volunteer, he used his insider political connections to lobby for what became known as the Comstock Laws. These laws banned distribution of pornography, sex toys, or contraceptives through the US Mail.

Comstock crossed my mind, following last week’s Atlanta massage parlor murders. The Atlanta shooter, like Comstock, believed his sexual behaviors lay beyond his control: as journalist Eric Schlosser writes, Comstock blamed his lifelong compulsive masturbating on some older boys surprising him with pornography in his childhood. Both men treated their sexual impulses as a monstrous invasion, caused by other people.

Thinking about it, I realized: they’re not entirely wrong.

Sex has a unique capacity for undermining people’s dominant sociopolitical theories. Conservatives, who believe we’re all self-controlled individuals, are unnerved by sexuality’s pre-conscious manifestations, reducing us to animal drives. Progressives, who believe social context explains, or anyway colors, most human behavior, feel ill-at-ease with sexuality’s intensely individual nature. Sex, alone, contravenes many people’s curated sense of their own identity.

Anthony Comstock used his insider status to manipulate legislation to reflect his values. The Comstock Laws, passed between 1873 and 1909, forbade distribution of “obscenity,” but didn’t define obscenity. Therefore Anthony Comstock, deputized by the Postmaster General, used his discretion to functionally outlaw anything which offended him personally. This wound up including feminist pamphlets, anatomy textbooks, and slightly racy love letters.

The Atlanta shooter lacked Comstock’s connections. Therefore he used a firearm to seek and destroy what offended him: non-White women working in physically intimate trades. (Reportedly, the massage parlors he targeted were only massage parlors.) His desire matched Comstock’s, though: stop anything which triggered his pre-conscious libido. He believed he couldn’t control himself, so he used force to control others instead.

Jacques Ellul

Christian Anarchist writer Jacques Ellul wrote, early in his career, that many people try to write their values into law, not to make society good, but to make themselves good. If law and society have values written into them, people don’t have to choose between right and wrong. Bad choices simply don’t exist, because they’re illegal. They don’t want to control everyone else’s morality; they want everyone else to control theirs.

How’s that working, Mr. Ness?

That pretty concisely explains both Anthony Comstock and the Atlanta shooter. They share a conservative ideology that all human behavior is individualistic, and bad behavior arises from bad character. Yet they acknowledge their libidos are pre-conscious, separate from their rational, moral beings. This creates an irreconcilable contradiction within themselves. Rather than address their inner spirituality, they preferred to destroy temptation at its perceived source.

Human sexuality is complex. It’s often conditioned by outside forces, as evidenced by today’s barrage of libidinous images in advertising, entertainment, and porn. But it’s experienced entirely internally. This contradiction makes it difficult to slot into any one-size-fits-all social or political theory. Witness the Leftist internet scolds last week, the kind who believe in institutional racism and injustice, rushing to blame the Atlanta shooter individually.

Essentially, ready-made answers collapse when sexuality enters the discussion. Giving into one’s libido produces the kind of dissolute, self-indulgent human wreck that both the Left and Right hastily reject. Resisting libido requires purging sexuality from either oneself or the world, forms of violence that equally offend secular powers. Spiritual practices which sometimes bring libido under control, are difficult, frumpy, and unremunerative for the capitalist class.

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t encourage acquiescing. Today’s society teems with sexual imagery and libidinous stimulation, even in cheeseburger ads, because they encourage a preconscious system that reduces human beings to mere automatons. People who sell sex, at least on an industrial capitalist scale, don’t have your best interests in mind; by encouraging you to think with your gonads, they reduce you to your lowest self, because it pays well.

Both Anthony Comstock and the Atlanta shooter recognized this. But rather than addressing how sexuality influenced them, and coming to grips with the spiritual struggle which our animal appetites create in everyone, they sought to create, by force, a utopian society where they’d never have to face themselves. They wanted to destroy their own libidos, but turned their inherent violence onto others, with disastrous effect.

Institutions, laws, and guns cannot protect our virtue. Only peace, patience, and self-control—what Christians call the Fruits of the Spirit—can do that. Achieving those is long, difficult, and, ahem, unsexy.

DC Statehood is a Distraction from the Real Problem

Look, I get it: while Washington, DC, remains outside any legally defined “state,” its three-quarters of a million residents, over half of them Black, remain unrepresented in the Federal Government. That’s egregiously unjust. DC has more residents than Wyoming or Vermont, and only marginally fewer than Alaska or North Dakota, yet it required the Twenty-Third Amendment to even let them vote for President. That seriously sucks.

Worse, the specific arguments getting airtime now against DC statehood are frequently racist, and consistently political. Few national-grade pundits willingly admit they don’t want Black Washingtonians voting, but they’ll openly state that DC, which overwhelmingly votes Democratic, might create a permanent Blue majority in America’s Legislative Branch. They’d rather disenfranchise Black Washingtonians than devise a platform that Washingtonians would vote for.

Yet despite this, despite the naked partisan hackery and dog-whistle racism, I can’t support DC statehood. Both the Constitution, which provides for a Federal District outside any state’s jurisdiction, and the Residence Act of 1790, which drew the District of Columbia’s borders, assumed the goodness of putting the capital outside any individual state. This wasn’t frivolous; London’s status as Britain’s capital has always been sketchy, and functionally disenfranchised the provinces.

Putting the capital inside any state would create a feedback loop of imbalanced power. The first fear is that the federal government would favor the state that houses it. Less obviously, the state could exercise undue influence over the federal government by tactically withholding necessary services and infrastructure maintenance. To offset the political threats the state and capital hold over one another, they could easily establish an unhealthy reciprocal relationship.

“But Kevin,” statehood advocates have said, “statehood would only involve the city. The federal buildings and government offices would remain separate.” Okay, but legislators, judges, and their staffers don’t live in federal buildings. Unless we wanted federal employees to reside in government dormitories, they’d still have to commute to and from the city daily. They’d still be, functionally, resident in one state, defeating the purpose of an outside capital.

Don’t misunderstand me: the current situation is pretty awful. We’re withholding representation from over 700,000 US citizens in DC. Similarly, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and our Pacific Territories are rife with citizens denied the lawful vote on procedural grounds written by dead White guys in powdered wigs and knee breeches. The Founding Fathers weren’t omniscient; they failed to anticipate how the US has grown and evolved since 1789.

Moreover, the situation continues evolving. As recently as the 1990s, America’s legislators lived full-time in DC while Congress was in session. That means they rubbed elbows in their off hours; Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill and President Reagan famously met for non-political drinks on weekends. But since Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Republican Revolution,” legislators have flown home on weekends. DC has become someplace they visit, not someplace they live.

This raises a question: in today’s hypertechnological environment, does the federal government even need a capital anymore? Or just one? South Africa has separate capitals for its branches of government. What if the Presidency and executive bureaucracy remained in DC, but the Supreme Court met in, say, Salem, Oregon? And Congress could establish a rota of meeting locations, perhaps in state capitals. Physical proximity isn’t necessary for good government anymore.

Our current federal system is outdated. It was written to govern a cash-poor agrarian society where most technology involved mules pulling something: carts, mill wheels, water screws. Our state lines were drawn in the 18th and 19th centuries. Texas (statehood in 1845) and California (1850) are literally older than some European nations, including Germany and Italy (both unified in 1871). Los Angeles County has more residents than 41 entire states.

Yes, DC residents deserve representation. So do residents of Los Angeles, New York City, and Dallas. Several states, especially California and Texas, but also New York, Florida, and Ohio, could profitably use their constitutionally mandated authority to separate into several smaller states, which would be cheaper and easier to govern. In other words, DC statehood is a temporary Band-Aid on a federal system that needs fundamental, systemic overhaul.

I’ll never deny that the current system hurts DC residents. Like the other problems I’ve listed, it reflects a federal government born of compromise, based on outdated assumptions, and essentially unchanged in 232 years. I suspect Democrats hope, and Republicans fear, that DC statehood will provide key votes to expedite overdue repairs. I fear that, like another stimulus check, it’ll steer energy away from real reforms.

A Prophet Is Heard In Chicago

Diane Latiker with Bethany Mauger, Kids Off the Block: the Inspiring True Story of One Woman's Quest to Protect Chicago's Most Vulnerable Youth

Diane Latiker, ex-construction worker, ex-hairdresser, didn’t go to college to study community organizing or teen outreach. She didn’t have burnished credentials or experience working with at-risk teens. She simply felt a calling, one day, to invite some teenagers into her house from the crime-stricken streets of Roseland, Chicago. When they started telling their life stories, she listened. That’s when she felt her life beginning to change.

Latiker’s memoir of her program for Chicago’s most precarious tenagers reads like a combination of inspirational devotion and political thriller. What started as an informal gathering of kids playing tag and doing their homework, soon became something more. Her house became a gathering place for kids who never knew safety or stability at home. Soon, the kids she gathered, some from violent backgrounds, started talking like they had a future.

In a neighborhood almost synonymous with gangs, Latiker, called “Miss Diane” by her kids, provided a guaranteed peaceful space to simply be young. More than schools, intervention, or closely designed curricula, peace proved to be what her kids needed. Freed from the fear of poverty and violence, Miss Diane’s kids started doing homework, writing songs, and playing three-on-three basketball. Some even started talking about college.

This transition faced impediments. Latiker’s husband and kids resisted first. Having dozens of neighborhood kids, some known gang members, passing through their house at all hours created tension with her family. They couldn’t see what she saw, that these kids were, underneath their learned street swagger, still kids. Her marriage, and her relationship with her kids and grandkids, went through an extreme rocky patch.

Then Latiker encountered problems when she went looking for financial help for her kids’ growing needs. Philanthropists and churches offered moral support, but when they discovered she didn’t require kids to renounce gang membership to receive her mentorship, they turned squeamish. Nobody would support her unless she cut gang-bangers loose. That is, they demanded she stop helping those kids who most needed help, before they’d support her.

Miss Diane remained faithful to her vision, though. And “faithful” is definitely the word: her narrative is explicitly Christian. She believes God called her to support these children, and God’s plan guides her successes. She doesn’t offer a portable checklist of tools community organizers can use to resist gang violence; Kids Off the Block is her unique Christian vocation, and when she heeds God’s call, things go well. Thick or thin, events happen on God’s schedule.

Diane Latiker

Though Latiker describes Kids Off the Block as a “program,” it initially lacked structure. She simply offered ten kids a surrogate home, free from judgement and shame. Kids started inviting their similarly at-risk friends, though. Soon, the Latiker household became the neighborhood’s home. Her husband, an auto mechanic and amateur builder, turned the spare bedroom into a recording studio. Together, they turned a vacant lot into a basketball court.

Guided by trust in Christian providence, Latiker’s movement gained momentum. Kids found the love their parents were unable to provide, and that gangs promised but never delivered. Kids began thinking long-term, saving money, getting jobs. And outsiders took notice. First local venues, like the Chicago Tribune, began showing Latiker’s movement respect. Soon, she found herself featured, in glowing terms, on CNN and BET, venues that mean something in Roseland.

Nevertheless, Latiker reminds us, not everything ended well. This isn’t a moral parable, it’s a memoir. She admits forcing herself to accept that she couldn’t save kids who didn’t want saving. And as the mostly Black kids passing through her door started behaving like a community, she describes drawing hostile attention from the neighboring Hispanic neighborhood. She struggles to accept her losses alongside her victories.

Throughout, Latiker reminds readers of her two Christian principles: listen to God’s calling, even when it sounds odd, and don’t judge others. Non-judgement, to Latiker, doesn’t mean not telling others they’re doing wrong. She describes frequently scolding her proteges, and occasionally calling the police when kids can’t leave gang affiliations at the door. Rather, non-judgement means meeting kids where they are, even when it makes our adult sensibilities uncomfortable.

Latiker’s memoir isn’t a progress from triumph to triumph. Though she sees improvement among her kids, and eyes lighting up and seeing the future for the first time, she can’t make others’ hurts and traumas go away. In an environment defined by generational poverty and street violence, Latiker simply followed Christ’s injunction to open her door to “the least of these.” I hope, someday, to live up to her example.