Pearls Before Swine etc.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
But the huge contingent lamenting the loss of OiNK after the head dude was dragged from his flat Tuesday are crying for the loss of a particular culture. They grieve because they honestly feel the Man has won again; that the IFPI cracking down on OiNK is just another case of mainstream consumer culture trampling all over the rights of the little guys who simply want to listen to music on their own terms.
Yet what these people don’t understand, or at least won’t admit to understanding publicly, is that OiNK was a symbolic subcultural mirror of exactly everything they profess to hate about their vision of mainstream culture. You can’t deny that OiNK was itself a culture: it was private and elite, it had clearly elaborated and lengthy rules for membership that included an annoyingly audiophilic standard for musical “quality” and sanctions for not tithing as much as you took. It had forums where people discussed meta-level issues about its functionality. OiNK clearly had its own set of ideologies, and they were far from liberatory. While it’s only a symbolic gesture, I’m glad to see OiNK disappear for the same reasons I’m so glad to not be part of a music “scene” anymore; I don’t miss blue-blooded conservativism masquerading as originality and protest.
About the technology more generally: there’s nothing wrong with the basic functionality of BitTorrent, or with peer-to-peer more generally. They are, at their core, simple and effective ways of transferring information. Where I take the off-ramp, however, is ascribing these tools (or any technology, really) an inherently democratizing potential just because they offer a newish form of information access.
What’s more important to consider, though, is what gets lost: a whole generation, more or less, is growing up thinking they have a birthright to others’ artistic creations, and is justifying its freeloading by making the logically-flawed arguments that they have no other place to discover music, or they’re sticking it to the industry. These sorts of claims about OiNK represent the subset of its most fervent users–music fans who trick themselves into believing that an imaginatively-constructed, hidden-from-plain-view sharing and barter system could substitute for a sustainable approach to supporting music as art.
In his Slate piece countering Sasha Frere-Jones’ New Yorker article discussing race and indie rock, Carl Wilson shifted the frame of discussion to the more appropriate, broader and less-noticeable issue of class. Indie rock in the current decade has grown out of indie rock in the 90s, becoming more and more balkanized, with new genres emerging all the time. Fittingly, the most popular forms of “indie” music today—formerly accessible on OiNK by sorting in order of popularity—reflect its generic status as not one decided by instrumentation or miscegenation as much as social position. And, sad as it might be, that will probably (hopefully) be OiNK’s legacy 20 years from now: a cultural snapshot of music fandom and/of 00s indie rock as the express domain of the parochial and privileged.
ALSO: This post serves as probably the best counter-argument to what I’ve said above. For instance, did you know that busting file-sharers is comparable to lynching African-Americans in the early part of the 20th century? Neither did I! Here it is:
What scares me the most about all this is the loss of a revolutionary feeling. Why are all these people, most of them young people, on the side of the government? Do you know what the government does? Are you familiar with the 60s?
Before civil rights, were these the same people who were like, “Well it’s the law, so let’s go lynch some peeps.” (Note: yes, lynching was the law in the South. It was the law.)
Wow. This was actually just typed, publicly.
no comments! i will add one. i am not sure why i used oink. probably because someone was like, “you want an invite?” and i was like “sure.” i enjoyed the strict order and control. not for its ideological significance but because i enjoyed knowing that the yoseph torrent was in fact luke vibert and not you local radiohead circa spinning plates rip off whose lead singer parrots scott stapp over casio squelches.
is it right to steal music? i feel kinda bad for the fact that i am not sure if i care. i like to live under the thought umbrella that artists make their cheese on tours so i make it my business to go see them even if it is a little expensive. i am less concerned with distribution or who makes money off that.
i also justify myself in saying that i enjoy the ability to listen to a lot of different music without having to buy it because most things i will just listen to for a day or so. that to me is the advantage of listening to a lot of music. no real affective connection with the people. just the sounds. and that is fine by me. it reorganizes music in my head by genre and not so much by artist.
i dont know if any of this speaks to what you wrote but i am bored of this baseball game and am just talking talking.
oh hey, if someone steals a base tonight in the world series then taco bell will give everyone in america a free taco.
like i said, i have no necessary problem with the actual music that oink offered, but after thinking about it, with the most common modes of defense of it post-shutdown.
I never used oink, I have been fascinated by how genunely torn people are about it’s death though.
This was well written.
Ahahah, the people who link to that This Recording post and think they’re being so clever by pointing out that busting file sharing is in fact _not_ similar to mob lynching are some of the most humorless, dumbest people on the internet. Get a sense of humor, it’s called “tongue in cheek.” Tongue-in-cheek is a term that refers to a style of humor in which things are said only half seriously, or in a subtly mocking way.
Bravo! I think you covered most of the main points. You could have discussed the whole class aspect more – self-justifying, “revolutionary” OiNKers as the 00’s version of middle-class, self-satisfied hippies – but otherwise, well done.
re: Danish
Your comment makes no sense. If he is being “tongue in cheek” about lynching being comparable to busting OiNK, than he is undermining his own argument. And if he’s saying that they are in any way comparable, he’s being tasteless and tacky. Either way, it’s dumb.
If it “doesn’t make sense” I suggest picking a career outside of academia because my comment wasn’t that difficult to follow. Being “half serious” for the sake of a joke doesn’t undermine anything. As for taste and tact, you’re hardly an arbiter.
Danish: if that post at This Recording was meant seriously, it’s an embarrassing act of ignorance. If, on the other hand, a comparison of the lynching of African-Americans to the busting of music downloaders was meant as a joke, it’s a profoundly horrible one, in terms of execution and content. There is such a thing as satire, and then there is self-aggrandizing, opportunistic bullshit defined as satire after no one gets the joke. It’s very clear where on this continuum that particular post fits. Shame on them, and shame on you for carrying water for them.
Nice post!
Dr. Lahey, as someone who works for a distributor I can tell you this, most small bands make almost no money touring the States especially those from the EU or UK, most of them lose money. Really, just going to some gig and plopping down a $10 entrance charge, or even $20 with the conversion rate as it is today, is barely a drop in the artists bucket. Does anyone not realize the expenses of hotels, flights, splitting door costs with opening acts, eating, etc? I am not trying to be a bastard here either, just pointing out things that I feel very few think about. .
I also feel that with these file sharing systems a lot of people have seriously forgotten what it is like to be passionate about the arts, music, etc. It is so easy access these days, you don’t have to work for it at all and thusly their allegiance and understanding of it is puddle deep 80% of the time. I don’t wish for elitist access either, but if I was an artist I would really want to know that my fans actually gave a shit about what they were buying of mine rather than just adding a shelf to their storage unit. I may work for a distributor, but I still buy music like a fiend and have never used a file sharing system, seriously. OK, once hoping to find MP3 of the Vanity 6 record from a disc as opposed to the vinyl that I have for my Ipod, but that is it. I honestly miss all the record shops that I used to be able to frequent looking for special 12s, limited editions, etc., actually finding them meant so much to me when I did. When I came across the white label of Aphex Twin mixing Curve’s ‘Falling Free’ shortly after it had snuck out I was thrilled, and it made it that much more special to me. Special almost feels as if it doesn’t exist anymore sadly for music. The brilliance of buying a 4AD record with its’ lush packaging, or a Factory record or some such. It’s really sad.
My two cents…
And yes, Danish, I have to agree here that the “tongue in cheek” of the This Recording post is a faltered exercise in this case.
This isn’t an intelligent, logically argued essay, its you making a bunch of associations to construe Oink in a certain light. That’s all this is.
Oh, and if you think technology doesn’t have the power to democratize, then you’re seriously misinformed… Ever consider the printing press? Nothing has changed society more than technology.
@anonymous:
you’re falling into the same determinist trap that so many others do. technology doesn’t have any inherent capacity to change a society in and of itself. people use technologies to affect change in society; these practices don’t just emerge from thin air. technologies like bittorrent (or the printing press) come about, and are used in particular ways, due to a vast array of socio-cultural processes. they have no pre-determined uses or ideologies, only those that are mapped onto them.
actually, no, i would’ve fallen into that trap if i hadn’t avoided determinism completely be referring to technology’s POWER to democratize. And that’s really what its all about. Technology empowers humans, and culture highlights and encourages certain aspects of human nature. the attitude we have towards new technology and the way we use it will change the future course of society. i am of the opinion that we should look forward and embrace the new possibilities that technology offers us rather than looking backwards and trying to protect a system that was appropriate when these new technologies didn’t exist. i think my statement still stands, in slightly altered form to avoid confusion: nothing has forced or allowed society to change more than technology. and considering the fact that we are living in an age of unprecedented, previously unimaginable technological progress, it should come as no surprise that culture and society will need to change, too. those who embrace the internet and the power that it gives you will be the ones to decide the direction of history. i hate to adopt this bombastic “revolutionary” tone that is so easily satirized, but i really believe this is the current state of things.
test
I think one can easily make the argument that the Internet, while long trumpeted as the universal force for democratizing speech and ideas, has had the exact opposite effect as well. That being – hardened niches of intolerance, injustice, lies, and perpetuated falsehoods. In other words, if you are a bigot, its never been a better time for enforcing your backwards beliefs with other like minded bigots – no matter where one resides.
I imagine we are in the digital equivalent of the early days of newspapers. When each city had dozens of papers, newsletters, pamphlets, etc. I’ll leave that to a historian.
^ what he said.
I am in a precarious position when it comes to the OiNK debate. I remember the last albums I was truly invested in were Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse and Elliott Smith albums that I downloaded from iTunes almost 5 years ago. I used to have this pact with myself that if I wanted to listen to an artist, I’d have to listen to their whole discography, from the first song on their first album to the last song on their last. This meant a lot of 4-7 hour sessions of those groups.
Over time, though, I wanted to dive deeper and deeper into the vaults and got caught up in about $2,000 worth of debt to my parents thanks to overzealous spending. OiNK allowed me to fuel this habit in a monetarily safe way; my addiction no longer had any negative side effects.
However, I do always cede the point that I no longer care like I used to. I keep my iTunes Library (1,294 artists and 39,330 tracks strong, not to mention the 57 albums or EPs I have yet to add in, or the 40 I didn’t have a chance to download) on shuffle, always in the pursuit of hearing something new rather than something I know or love. Most things I hear I have no attachment to, although I will recognize them anytime I hear them afterward. I also have never done the entire discography method in nearly 3 years, not counting the day before In Rainbows came out.
I am glad for OiNK because it allowed me to get all the things I wanted without any penalties, and the things I wanted were always very neatly organized and distributed (it seems odd to me this feature would be discarded as elitism…would you want unmastered promo copies masquerading as the real thing in a record store? or fake artists in real packaging?), but I do admit it probably killed my ability to truly be a music fan, rather than a music librarian.
I wonder when everyone will catch up to me on this topic, so I can rejoin the conversation.
What’s more important to consider, though, is what gets lost: a whole generation, more or less, is growing up thinking they have a birthright to others’ artistic creations, and is justifying its freeloading by making the logically-flawed arguments that they have no other place to discover music, or they’re sticking it to the industry. These sorts of claims about OiNK represent the subset of its most fervent users–music fans who trick themselves into believing that an imaginatively-constructed, hidden-from-plain-view sharing and barter system could substitute for a sustainable approach to supporting music as art.
real good stuff.
I can understand a lot of the distaste for OiNK in its aftermath, but all your arguments are flawed in a discussion of the OiNK community as a whole. You hinge not on the qualities of its user, but of a generation that is not in the least bit specific to OiNK alone.
You could replace OiNK with almost any other name and this article would still hold up.
I’ve never used OiNK, so I can’t comment on the utopian community aspects. However, just because a group of like minded people are friendly and uphold high standards, perhaps even better than legitimate, i.e. legal alternatives, is not a valid justification for pirating music.
I’m tired of hearing this defense.
I cannot argue that OiNK wasn’t full of comment threads which if taken as representative could cast the entire community as technocratic fucktards. But the elitism there was not as rampant as this article suggests. What you’re taking as exclusivity (e.g., the invite system) I would describe as some level of regulation on this god-forsaken network of electrified fibers and airspace which is the interweb. I never got a virus from any torrent on OiNK, which is more than I can say for pretty much every other torrent site I’ve used save indietorrents, which is basically OiNK’s little sister. Additionally, I would hesitate to call the rules of sharing on OiNK “lengthy.” The concept was simply “share or leave.” If you did not upload, you were not contributing, and had to go away. None of these guidelines are complicated with a basic working knowledge of p2p torrents. As far as the minimum bitrate goes, this was installed to keep webrips of streaming music out of the community as they are easily accessible to anyone and therefore not worth sharing; understandably, the moderators did not want to waste server space. So there’s the two big complicated OiNK rules. We share and we want CDs.
What I’m mourning from the loss of OiNK is not the elite indie community where I could have flexed my musical e-peen when the mood struck me. I am also not defending that community; it was the creation of a segment of OiNK members and served no useful purpose aside from letting a few audiophiles vent their spleens about pitchfork. What I will miss is the regulation and the functionality which was unprecedented in any torrent site I’ve encountered. OiNK did not start internet sharing, and its demise will not stop internet sharing. It simply provided one of the best means of internet sharing I’ve ever seen. The so-called “parochial” or “privileged” aspects (adjectives, by the way, which don’t really address the fact that I and many others steal music because we’re broke) stemmed from a highly vocal minority which misrepresented OiNK and OiNK users, not unlike this essay.
Also, don’t get me wrong Mr. Harvey. I enjoyed this post immensely, though I disagreed with some of it.
brandon: you’re right, i could have phrased it a bit more specifically, saying “one of the loudest sections of those lamenting the loss of OiNK,” or something like that. i do note that i accidentally incorporated a lot more people into my discussion than i meant to.
also: please never call me Mr. Harvey again.
I’m always kind of surprised that people love a particular band or musician yet they steal music from that person.
“I love you so much I have to steal from you!”
This sounds like the tortured cries of a wife beater: “I do it because I love you!!”
You can get tons of free samples online in order to determine if you like the CD enough before you buy it. When I was a kid, we didn’t have that luxury. (Now get off of my lawn!) I mean in the past– before the internet– I often simply bought an album and assumed the risk that I might not like it. That even happens today. I just view it as part of the risk of buying music.
Many of these musicians want to make a living at what they do, especially the smaller indie rockers. Stealing from them just makes no sense. Zero sense.
This sounds like the tortured cries of a wife beater: “I do it because I love you!!”
The irony here is as alarming as a mob lynching.
http://www.oil21.org/