°The War on (File)Sharing
Dion Dennis, from “Domestic Wars Redux: Obama, Digital Prohibition and the New ‘Reefer Madness’” (CTheory):
[…] if past is prologue, the U.S. will not be without a new form of Prohibition for long, with a new set of targets constructed by a dominant demographic slipping from power; a new domestic “War” against a rival demographic, under the discursive cover of a newly fashioned political correctness. (It’s just what Americans “do.”) For example, after the passage of the Twenty First Amendment in 1933, it was not long before Prohibitionist impulses settled on a new target population, and a new set of cultural practices. In the 1930s, these impulses were instantiated in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics anti-Marijuana campaign, a campaign that demonized Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, and generated the perceptions that paved the way for the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. In the second decade of the Twenty First century, the demonization geist will fall hard on those who remix and mash up digitized cultural icons and images. This uptick in a global “War on Pirates” is the contested site of an emergent generational “war,” the latest site in which post-Baby Boomer generations, already saddled with elephantine debt, crumbling infrastructure, and intensive responsibilization techniques that shift governmental functions onto their privatized collective backs (think “service learning” and “civic engagement” initiatives) [5] now face Boomer-based criminalization of their cultural practices of quotation and communication; [6] all in the service of indefinitely maintaining Boomer-era models of cultural production, circulation and profit, in a post-Boomer world. [7] It’s the latest and onerous manifestation of “low intensity conflict,” of a cultural guerrilla war that pits a subset of well-heeled and well-positioned Boomers against their children and grandchildren. The ramped up stakes are evident in recent high-level appointments in the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice, and in the deeds of U.S. Vice President Biden and his Congressional allies. The conceptual coherence and persistence of these efforts point to a demographically-defined, and increasingly probable period of Digital Prohibition. The politics of Prohibition are alive and well; the population and objects have changed, but the general game resembles that of 1930s America. A brief look backwards, as prologue, is instructive.
Roosevelt’s America as Prologue […]
The rest. Much as I’m applauding the careful analysis of emerging lines of prohibition and New Dealism, I’m wary of granting an inter-generational paradigm, but there is surely a way to think questions of genealogy and intimacy without granting the figural (in this case, Baby Boomers) while still making age a question in all this, including the construction of figures. Here, I’m not only thinking of the way in which filesharing is associated with a younger generation (however untrue this might be), but also the ways in which the figure of the pedophile (and perhaps less explicity because less figurally dramatic, underage sex) - as an unstated prop of marital contract - is in no way incidental to the war on filesharing and remixing. Think the LiveJournal Strikethrough.
Tangentially, and thinking out loud, I’m also recalling the most interesting thing to be gleaned from the Great Swine Flu Pandemic of 2009 - namely: that to the surprise of healthworkers in the US, the flu did not circulate between children and parents, nor did it (as the outer edge of this demographising might have it) afflict the very young and the very old, but was transmitted for the most part between teenagers. The reporter had to prompt the person who was being interviewed to specify that “unhygienic habits” meant teens didn’t tend to sneeze into tissues.
Snotnosed is, perhaps, less dramatic than rampant teen sex - but it remains a question of the sharing of bodily fluids in any event.
Interesting blog and post, but it’s missing an important part of the equation: Generation Jones, born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and Generation X. Google Generation Jones, and you’ll see it’s gotten a ton of media attention, and many top commentators from many top publications and networks (Washington Post, Time magazine, NBC, Newsweek, ABC, etc.) now specifically use this term.
It is important to distinguish between the post-WWII demographic boom in births vs. the cultural generations born during that era. Generations are a function of the common formative experiences of its members, not the fertility rates of its parents. Many experts now believe it breaks down this way:
DEMOGRAPHIC boom in babies: 1946-1964
Baby Boom GENERATION: 1942-1953
Generation Jones: 1954-1965
Generation X: 1966-1978
Here is a recent op-ed about GenJones as the new generation of leadership in USA TODAY:
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20090127/column27_st.art.htm
hbdt2087 [May 14, 2009 @ 2:19 am]