I Believe I Shan’t Pay For Content Anymore

Recently I watched Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary about the life of Harlan Ellison. Ellison, now 74, is one of the most accomplished living science fiction writers in the English language, and probably in any language.

I once got to see a tape of Ellison being interviewed by my former writing teacher, James Gunn, in the sixties or early seventies. Ellison was resplendant in his indoor sunglasses, musing about why “every chick in L.A. is into astrology right now.” College kids of both genders sit all around him, hanging on his every word, nodding without irony at everything he says. I watched that clip and thought, Wow, that guy was the epitome of cool. Was there ever another person who so clearly understood the nature of his own time, in relation to what came before, and what was coming after?

In Dreams With Sharp Teeth, there is a clip of a more recent Ellison standing before an auditorium of college kids and shouting “If you want your music, pay for it!” And I thought, in spite of myself: The old man just doesn’t get it.

My family was the first on the block to have an Apple II+, and I grew up pirating software left and right. All the kids I knew did it. There was no sense of shame, nor was there any sense that we were doing anything wrong by any standard. Software had come into the world, and it was, by definition, as free as the air around us.

We had no money of our own, so the issue of buying vs. pirating didn’t come into play. Sure, you could always try to talk your parents into buying you a piece of software, but that wasn’t the same because

a) maybe they wouldn’t want you to have it, or

b) they couldn’t afford it either, or

c) they couldn’t get it fast enough.

No matter what the reason, the point is that we, as kids, had not yet been forced to go out into the world and exchange our labor for money, and our money for goods and services. If we wanted something, there were simply degrees of difficulty in receiving it. The scale of desirable things went something like this:

• Impossible and far away: unicorns, light cycles, Princess Leia
• Seemingly impossible and far away: driver’s license, physical strength, control over one’s own time
• Possible but difficult: honor roll, first prize at the science fair, going steady
• Possible but requiring marginal effort: desert after broccoli, the big gift from santa, candy from the bank teller
• Available on demand with no expectation of difficulty or effort: breathing, eggs for breakfast, an unlimited supply of computer software Read the rest of this entry »