Bart Simpson and Darth Vader, Mouseketeers
As those of you who subscribe to my wildly popular weeklyish fantasy football newsletter--wherein, as here, I yell impotently about things beyond my control but also make fun of some of the only people on the planet who know or like me--already know, I’m no fan of Seattle Seahawks quarterback and Russell Wilson brand ambassador Russell Wilson. Is he a better-than-league-average NFL QB? Sure! But I don’t have to like him.
Russell Wilson is a True Believer in Human Branding. He speaks like Laura Linney’s character in The Truman Show, talking to the cameras and the people in the audience, and never, ever having an interesting or original thing to say. “Isn’t Gatorade the best? Just the best,” is an uncanny sports valley re-imagining of “I’ve tasted other cocoas--this is the best!”--and he said it out loud, seemingly of his own accord, like a semi-autonomous brand robot! Who the fuck does that?! If there’s a real person in there, it’s well-hidden beneath this creepy shell of a human, Tweeting about his penis's virtue and Instagramming about how much he loves his Concussion Prevention Bubble Water.
DangeRuss is but a symptom, of course. As I’ve blarghed elsewhere, in one of my favorite essays: The very concept of the sell-out is an anachronistic wheeze, betraying one’s inherent angry-old-man-yelling-at-cloud-ness. “We buy-in to our biggest institutions, corporations, and pop-culture more than ever because to allow in doubt about their basic goodness would be to call into question their value, and the damage we have caused in the nominal defense of these things is almost impossible to comprehend.” And now that we’re three lengthy, digressive, self-referential paragraphs in--what in the world does this have to do with the news of the week, specifically Ajit Pai, the end of Net Neutrality, and the Disney buy-out of massive chunks of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox media empire?
Ajit Pai, current head of the FCC, put out a video with Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller outfit that attempts to make light of the hysteria over net neutrality. It is, in the judgment of any reasonable human being, one of the worst videos in the history of the internet--not just for its dishonest, dismissive approach to the issue, but because it is just soul-deadening, cringe-inducing, look-away-now uncool. Ajit Pai has achieved perfect anti-cool. It’s just awful. You have to watch it.
Ajit Pai is the FCC’s Russell Wilson. Ajit Pai fucking buys-in hard. This video and that corny mug of his is all the proof I need. This butthead loves brands. There has never been a Coors Light commercial that Ajit Pai didn’t think was bad-ass. Ajit Pai once took a blind taste test at a grocery store and discovered, to his horror, that the store brand graham cracker really was indistinguishable and maybe actually a little tastier than the market leading brand--and at half the price!--and then, crying, Ajit Pai loyally and defiantly and patriotically bought three boxes of the leading brand on general principle. Ajit Pai follows the Resse’s Twitter account.
Ajit Pai is like a worst-case-scenario version of my brother Andrew, though that’s neither here nor there.
For all of his desperate lack of cool, though, he’s not entirely wrong, because his critics have put him in the enviable position of merely having to respond to hysterical nonsense. The assertions that the repeal of the 2015 rules was going to inevitably and perhaps immediately result in tiered pricing plans for specific websites, draconian throttling of download speeds to certain services, and the “end of the internet as we know it,” have made it all too easy for disingenuous assholes to dismiss all criticism as much wailing and gnashing of teeth over nothing.
"You expect me to *pay* for this shit? Pay for it with more than all of my personal identifying information, my location, social contacts, and the content of my mind as expressed by every action I take within easy reach of any internet-connected device? I don't even *like* this shit." (...) :: hands over credit card ::
Do we really need to go over why truthful hyperbole is quite bad--no matter how right or just one believes the cause? Lying is bad! Making public policy arguments with big sweeping false simplifications of complex issues and exaggerated potential worst-case consequences erodes trust in each other and in our institutions. But let’s put aside all the merely good reasons for using measured truths based in likely realities in support of your arguments and stick with the best reason: because it keeps the easy wins out of reach of disingenuous shit-eating assholes like Ajit Pai! Disingenuous shit-eating assholes always dismiss the opposition as unserious hypochondriacal loons--why let Pai be right about it?
It is true that internet service providers should not be permitted to throttle service or outright block access to particular websites or (legal) services. If a customer is paying an ISP for 5 mbps or 50 mbps or 1000 mbps service, that customer should be able to access all data consistently at something approaching those speeds, and the ISPs should be indifferent to what data their customers are choosing to access. These regulations are necessary because most Americans do not have a real choice in how to get broadband internet in their homes, as cable companies usually operate as local government-approved monopolies. These regulations are also necessary because most ISPs aren’t just in the internet access business, but in the content and distribution business, as well. Comcast isn’t just providing cable and internet into my home--they don’t just provide the gateway to the outside world. They also own and operate, in whole or in part, dozens of broadcast and cable television stations, television and movie production houses, and also the streaming service that offers access to all that content. (Seriously, go scroll through the list.) The other major broadband providers similarly have their fingers in many aspects of the content production and distribution process, with AT&T in the middle of an attempt to grow even bigger. The point is, more than ever in today’s ever-consolidating media market, it is in the business interest of your local monopoly cable and internet provider to give preferential treatment to the sister products under their corporate umbrella. We need enforceable regulations to prevent this sort of bad behavior--precisely the sort of rules Ajit Pai just repealed.
Having read a truly dispiriting number of blogs and news articles and magazine pieces about the subject in the last two days, I am now, of course, an unimpeachable expert on the subject. My expert conclusion is that I have absolutely no idea who should make and enforce those rules. The FCC or the FTC or a new regulatory body codified into existence by a new set of Congressional laws about net neutrality? I don’t know--maybe! Given the realities of our increasingly globally interconnected world in which these multinational corporations operate and will continue to expand, is there a way to create an international regulatory body to ensure that all web traffic is treated blindly? A bit optimistic! What is certain is that we can’t just hope that the ISPs do the right thing out of some civic duty to the public good. I’m also certain that the libertarian argument that consumer and corporation are free to enter into any contract they choose to, and that government should stay out of it, is willfully blind to the reality of how these corporations came to and maintain their current position, and how dominant is their position relative to both consumer and any potential sincere competition. And I’m also certain that even if the 2015 net neutrality rules hadn’t just been repealed, those rules represented a very, very small part of ensuring a “free and open internet.”
This is not just the fault of the ISPs. When it comes to directing traffic across the internet, Facebook and Google are effectively a duopoly--the only two major games in town. How they deliver information to consumers is largely closely guarded proprietary information. Together, they referred nearly 70% of internet traffic to the (relatively) widely dispersed online publishing industry. Is the internet truly “free and open” if we’re depending on just two companies to determine what is and what is not worthy of our attention? Two companies whose entire business model is based on generating revenue through third-party advertisements, it must be noted. We used to (rightfully) dump on AOL for presenting their customers with a curated walled garden online experience and calling it The Internet--Facebook and Google have effectively set us loose in a far more expansive garden. We largely enjoy their curation, or at least feel compelled to constantly return to it, but our online experience is curated by secret algorithms and the business concerns of two of the most powerful corporations in history nonetheless. We buy-in, and pretty hard, for now. Free and open, you say?
Which brings us around to Disney’s purchase of most of Murdoch’s Fox empire, and, hopefully, eventually, somehow...Russell Wilson? I dunno.
Do we really want one company controlling so much of the popular culture? This Disney/Fox behemoth would be responsible for 40% of national box office revenues and 40% of US television business. Their stranglehold on sports broadcasting would be nearly total, with only a handful of minor Comcast-owned properties and a couple of Murdoch-maintained national Fox properties as competition. They gain a controlling interest in Hulu as part of this deal, and have announced plans to roll out at least one more streaming network in the next couple of years--a streaming service that could boast exclusive access to multiple universes of cultural content, including Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, Avengers, X-Men, and The Simpsons. As the already dubiously disparate elements of our culture fall into fewer and fewer hands, we risk a “free and open” world that relies on one company and a half-dozen tent-pole franchises to advance the cultural conversation.
But we buy-in. Much of the reaction to the Disney/Fox news seemed to be about how cool it’ll be to get X-Men fully integrated into the Marvel/Avengers cinematic universe, or if Disney might expedite an Alien/Planet of the Apes crossover. Though cable TV and then the internet appeared to fracture the monoculture produced by the first couple generations of television, the shattered remnants are being bought up and reabsorbed into an even more monolithic creature. A corporate creature in which we now invest a weird sort of social responsibility, as caretaker, producer, and distributor of our collective story.
Disney Disneying.
And we buy-in. A bunch of Russell Wilsons and Ajit Pais just super pumped about the latest piece of product from Disney, engineered to make as much money as possible while taking as few risks as possible while trying to gain an ever-increasing share of our attention. That it crowds out the risk-takers and that it abhors failure is a feature, not a bug. We don’t have two hours or even two minutes to risk such a thing as enduring a failure to entertain. Better to delve back into the comfortable imaginary worlds that enthralled us when we were kids. Like Facebook, Disney--and it’s not just Disney--is just repackaging and reselling us our own memories. Free and open? All right, man.
Ajit Pai trusts that Comcast and Verizon and the rest will do what’s best for their bottom line, and he believes that those interests align, more or less, with the interests of the public, and he believes the companies would fail if the interests did not align. Ajit Pai buys-in, not just to what Comcast and Disney and Reese’s are selling, but to the whole larger project--the evidence of corruption and incompetence notwithstanding. The rest of us seem to trust that Disney and the few other remaining media conglomerates will do what’s best for their bottom line, and that those interests align with our interests. We buy-in, too. But the fewer hands that control decisions on what gets made and what doesn’t, the subsequent production and distribution of that product, and the pipes that get it to us, the less responsive to minority needs and viewpoints they will be. They have no incentive to respond. They need only work something out with Comcast, or whichever other local monopoly controls your data feed.
Of course the internet had a collective hysterical freak-out about the end of net neutrality rules. And it was justified, to an extent! We should demand a truly free and open internet. I don’t know why we think that’s what we’re getting, or ever were, from the very concentrated power centers of our culture, though. We’ve tasted other cocoas, and this one’s the best! Or have we?
A free and open internet is all well and good, as an ideal. But our internet and media culture problems run far deeper than what one out of touch bureaucratic dweeb with a novelty coffee mug can screw up in one go. The repeal of the 2015 net neutrality rules is likely not a portent of imminent internet apocalypse, but should make us question just what it is we imagine we are defending. $14.99/month for Facebook, eh? Does that come with the Democracy-Upending Fake News package, or is that extra?
