On Saturday, March 28, 2009, the Ann Arbor Film Festival hosted the second public screening of RiP: A Remix Manifesto, a new documentary by Canadian filmmaker Brett Gaylor. Normally I’d put the video trailer at the end, but for those of you who haven’t seen it (or who aren’t familiar with these issues), I’d like you to have a quick crash course in the modern gray area between remix culture and copyright law.

As you can see, the film starts with the controversy surrounding the mash-up artist Girl Talk — real name Greg Gillis — who has been growing in popularity (or notoriety) since the release of his 2006 album Night Ripper. His albums feature hundreds of samples of copyrighted music that Gillis never got permission to use.

Audio: “No Pause” by Girl Talk, from the 2008 album Feed the Animals.

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What’s not seen in the trailer is the four-point manifesto which provides a basic outline for the film. Gaylor calls this “A Remixer’s Manifesto”:

1) Culture always builds on the past.
2) The past always tries to control the future.
3) Our future is becoming less free.
4) To build free societies you must limit the control of the past.

The moment I saw this manifesto, I knew it must have been directly inspired by 1984. (Sorry to sound like a skipping record, but clearly Orwell is an important figure in all these issues.) The quote in Orwell’s book: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” It’s such a simple statement, yet it encapsulates so much about the world. You may need to see the film to completely understand what I mean. Another resource I’d suggest is a website I made in grad school called Connected to Creativity. It’s still hosted on my personal website, and it contains a lot of valuable information about how the Internet is fostering incredible creativity, while the current application of copyright law is dangerously stifling it.

To illustrate the problem, I’ll use an example that relates to the duration of copyright protection. When copyright was first made a law in 1790, it lasted 14 years from the date of creation. This was changed many times over the next 200 years, and the most recent alteration came in 1998. Now copyrighted works are protected for the author’s lifetime plus 70 years. But the term “author” is a slippery one here, because copyright law has been transformed to benefit corporations much more than any individual creators. Copyright law was instated to protect the economic rights of the creator and the fair use rights of the public (fair use says it’s okay to use copyrighted works for certain purposes). But now the vast majority of copyrighted content in the world is controlled by a handful of media conglomerates: Disney, News Corporation, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS.

Many topics in the film were inspired and informed by the Creative Commons movement and Lawrence Lessig’s 2004 book Free Culture (which I covered here in July ‘08). In both that book and this documentary, Walt Disney is discussed at length. Disney himself was a sort of remixer, because many of the first animated films produced by his company were based on stories in the public domain. In other words, they were adapting stories that weren’t protected by copyright anymore or never had been protected. Think Snow White, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Fantasia, and on, and on, and on. But when Walt died, the Walt Disney Corporation took a turn for the worse, and they’ve now become a force of evil in this war.

Creative Commons, on the other hand, are the foremost source of good, and over the past two years I’ve supported them however possible. One way I do that is by licensing all content on Supraterranean.com with a Creative Commons license. Like the founders say in one of the informational videos on their site, they’re laying the framework for an entirely new world culture based on sharing, collaboration, and progress.

As I left Michigan Theater when the film ended, I said to my special lady friend that it was the first time I felt proud to live in Ann Arbor (hey…give me a break…I’m a Spartan to the core). I felt surrounded by people who understood the importance of remixing, free culture, and net neutrality. It became clear that these ideas are at the core of all my work, even if I’m still figuring out how to express my thoughts and feelings. I felt a surge of emotion while watching footage of children in Brazil’s poorest neighborhoods remixing music and art, or dancing together instead of getting mixed up in gang violence. I couldn’t help but imagine what the world could be like if we continue down this brave path.

It seems like a new philosophy is shaping itself, a living philosophy that cannot be invented by any one person. Gone are the days of the dogma; we have no use for that anymore. Now there is only life — how to understand it, build upon it, make it better. Copyright law has prevented humans from being what they should: emergent and symbiotic. Our culture has become stale and rotten, but technology is setting us loose. We’re figuring out new creative ways to expend our life energy, and realizing that this is a far better option than the destruction that human history has seen thus far.

I see a future coming that will belong to no individual; instead, it will belong to all individuals. As time goes on in this new digital culture, we will all own an equal share in the past. And like Orwell wrote, “who controls the past controls the future.” Now we just need to take over the present. Lessig is working on that, too, through efforts to reform Congress and the American lawmaking process. Furthermore, most literary and philosophical genius I’ve encountered (especially surrounding Existentialism) has suggested turning attention to self-discovery, the creative struggle, and free expression. As emphasized in A Remix Manifesto, the creative process has now become more important than the finished product.

Remember this saying? “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Well, Gaylor has taken that advice literally. As announced at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, he has already twice invited other filmmakers to remix this documentary, and some of that material has been worked into the final version of A Remix Manifesto. We were reportedly the first audience to see this third cut. Gaylor also started a website called Open Source Cinema, where anyone can further remix the film. He’s hoping to build it into a platform where filmmakers can remix and collaborate using their own material. Even if you’re not ready to start remixing, you can currently view all chapters of the documentary on the site.

For more information on Creative Commons, here is an intro video from their site.

It’s probably no mystery by this point that I think documentaries are really valuable. In fact, I think their value will steadily rise over the next decade or so, now that the Internet has opened up film distribution in amazing new ways. One such example is the duo of Zeitgeist (2007) and its sequel, Zeitgeist: Addendum (2008). These “cult favorites” are only distributed via the filmmaker’s own web site, where viewers can stream the films or download as a torrent. Aside from the incredible distribution capabilities, I think documentaries will become more important because they provide context, perspective, and explanation for what’s happening in the world. They are usually more credible than television shows, but they employ the engaging audio/visual style that many people prefer over reading long documentary-style articles or stories. In other words, it’s a lot of information obtained with little time or effort.

A week or two ago, I heard that the rock band …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead actually named their newest album after a documentary. The film is Adam Curtis‘ The Century of the Self, a four-part BBC miniseries from 2002. The series is one of three that are forging a strong reputation for Curtis; the other two are The Power of Nightmares (2004) and The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007). Century and Power are both available for free download at Archive.org (here and here, respectively). The Trap, however, is not, so I had to procure a copy through…other means — but still via the Internet. And The Trap was the one I found first, so it’s the first one I watched.

All three documentaries have an IMDb rating over 9.0, so I expected them to be spectacular. The Trap was enlightening, and so densely packed with information that I found myself taking notes during the three hour-long portions (it was originally aired over a stretch of three weeks). Curtis’ filmmaking style is definitely different than most American documentaries I’ve seen. He didn’t try to convince the viewer that his argument was indisputable. His edge was having a historical perspective that most people just don’t have. The Trap covers 1950 to today, starting with the first part, entitled “Fuck Your Buddy.” This tells how John Nash’s economic ideas based on Game Theory went on to create a narrow view of human beings as entirely rational creatures. (Even that one sentence is dense!) In this scenario, Game Theory was used to suggest that the logical choice in human interaction will always be to act out of total self-interest (what is called a “betray” move in the game), as opposed to acting in cooperation with others. This mentality was heavily influenced by the oppressive atmosphere of the Cold War, but also by Nash’s battle with paranoid schizophrenia. But instead of helping society run more efficiently and promoting human freedom, this led governments and institutions to try and fit people into that narrow mold of suspicious, paranoid, psychologically damaged individuals that Nash and his RAND Corporation had described.

That’s all in part 1. Part 2 starts with Clinton’s economic advisers, who said he should let the market read and respond to the needs of the public, because it was more efficient than having government do it through the democratic process. This is naturally tied to the way that companies seem to own and operate everything these days. It also seems closely tied to the banking bust of fall 2008. Part 2 elaborates on the psychiatric discussion from part 1, namely that human emotion became medicalized, and the public was made to think that there was some kind of perfect human that no one was capable of being or becoming. Furthermore, Nash’s Game Theory ideas kept echoing through society, leading to decreased social mobility, the development of an entirely new kind of social stratification, and corruption in business and politics (especially in America).

Are you still with me? There’s another part left! Part 3 starts with Isaiah Berlin, who published a paper in the 1950s about two kinds of liberty: positive liberty and negative liberty. Positive liberty is the kind that happened in the American Revolution; it’s frightening, dangerous, volatile, and uncontrollable. This idea of liberty has been suppressed, but people are still inspired by the idea that we can improve the world and its inhabitants. Specifically, people want to be given the opportunity to reach their full potential. However, Western governments have favored negative liberty, which may seem like freedom on the surface, but it’s actually a very narrow kind of freedom, with ridiculous costs that are incurred around the globe. America has been pushing negative liberty for a few decades now, since Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger began supporting violent dictators who agreed to help suppress anyone who caused trouble (i.e. – communists, revolutionaries, etc). And obviously this has continued with every president since.

In summary, The Trap was probably the best description of the Post-War Western world I’ve ever seen. It also made me think more than ever before that there is just no correct way to run countries or the world. Of course that’s not true, but it’s strange to see, as Curtis points out, that ideologies no longer rule the world. In fact we are living in a world that is ruled by the opposite of ideologies. We are ruled by pointless decrees set forth by politicians, who are now controlled by corporations. We are seeing what Isaiah Berlin warned against: if negative liberty is viewed as an unalterable goal, it leads to the corruption of freedom, not the protection of it. With each stage in this progression, things became more concrete and hard to change. Efforts at improvement usually backfired, or they were used by the institutions to manipulate and control the public.

So even though this is a lot to take in in three hour-long sittings, I do feel like I have a better understanding of why our world is so messed up. The only comforting idea in all this may be that negative liberty is dying on its own. The American-sanctioned Western world of negative liberty is falling apart without any revolutionaries fighting against it. I do think the Internet will hasten the process, and help us bridge toward a sustainable version of positive liberty, where more people are able to live up to their potential and contribute more to society. But it’s going to take a long, long time.

Here is the introduction to The Trap for your viewing enjoyment:

It’s both exhilarating and humiliating to see a photo of George W. Bush cowering as a shoe flies towards his head. For those of you who haven’t experienced it, you must have missed yesterday’s story about Bush’s final visit to Iraq. I managed to read about the incident on The New York Times’ website, and I was reminded of a quote from the 2005 film The Weather Man. The character Robert Spritzel (played by Michael Caine) says that in “this shit life…we must chuck some things.” It’s too fitting a caption for such an image.

Seeing the picture is exhilarating because, stated simply, I support the shoe-tossing Iraqi journalist. I’d like to chuck a rubber object at Bush’s head too. So you can imagine then why I find this AP story headline a bit humorous: “Bush’s Iraq-Afghan farewell tour marred by dissent.” The headline makes him sound like a rock ‘n roll star playing concerts around the world, only to receive some unexpected (and undeserved) criticism. It occurred to me that we haven’t heard many stories about Bush receiving dissent first-hand. I think that says something about the extent to which “Dubyah” has been hiding from the public lately. The Administration doesn’t give the public a chance to air their grievances, especially not if it could create such a racy photo opportunity.

The AP headline also implies that Bush deserved a warm welcome in Iraq, which I find ridiculous. The idea that the American government might be supported or praised in Iraq in late 2008 seems absurd to me because I’ve seen the 2007 documentary No End In Sight, directed by Charles Ferguson. The film is a prime example of why I’ve been turning to documentaries for in-depth information with perspective and credibility — the kind that mainstream media just cannot provide. The documentary is rich in its sources; those include veteran soldiers, military officers, American government officials, journalists, etc.

The source that sticks out most clearly in my memory is Ambassador Barbara Bodine, whom the film introduces as the person “in charge of Baghdad for the U.S. occupation.” Naturally, she speaks from a very unique position, and she effectively illustrates exactly what has gone wrong there over the past seven years. The most important point is that she was not given the appropriate resources or power to act. She felt more like a puppet, while Dick Cheney and his cohorts controlled the situation from Washington.

What’s worse, the film’s sources collectively suggest that Cheney and friends purposefully made the situation worse in Iraq so they would have an excuse to continue the occupation indefinitely. In other words, the Administration wanted a fortress in the Middle East, and this was the easiest way to obtain one. I’d be more skeptical of the film if more of the sources were from outside the American government. But across governmental branches and departments, everyone gives the sense that the White House ran the show consistently, and also that they ran it terribly. At the same time, every source that criticized of the Bush Administration also seemed to feel helpless towards the situation. Bodine’s story is particularly painful. To know that an American Ambassador could have maintained order after the removal of Saddam Hussein, but who was prevented by the likes of Cheney—that’s such a source of anger and remorse.

Now you might see why I also found the shoe photo humiliating. We’re still an object of worldwide hatred. We’re viewed as the world’s dopey bully who steals lunch money and gives wedgies. The Bush Administration will bear most of the humiliation as Obama transitions into office, but common citizens around the world won’t be too rapid to change their opinions of us. The fact that the Iraqi journalist threw a shoe and not a rock or a grenade (if we assume he could have gotten such an object into the press conference) also deserves attention. In a way, the shoe was more powerful than an actual weapon. The journalist essentially said that Bush was worth less than the dust below his shoes. And that’s an especially strong sentiment, if I remember that aspect of Iraqi culture correctly.

While most of us will never get a chance to inflict our own humiliation on George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and others who have furthered the deterioration of America’s reputation, we can take this chance to educate ourselves on exactly what happened from 2000 to 2008. Watching No End In Sight is a good start. We should all be reflecting on what went wrong, at home and abroad, and thinking of how to prevent such atrocities from ever occurring again—not only in a broad political sense, but also on an individual basis. To reverse the wrongs that have occurred, it’s going to take a collaborative effort involving all concerned Americans. We’ve all been chucking things for a while. Hopefully in the future we won’t have to quite as often.

No End In Sight Official Trailer: