INTRO:
ENTER THE LOLLIPOP
‘Meter Pop’ street installation by Mark Jenkins – Independence Ave, Washington D.C. 15th January 2006 © Mark Jenkins
Imagine you’re in your car, rolling down Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C. It’s a cold, crisp January morning. You flick on the radio and rotate through the FM crackle until a song you like hacks its way through the static. You twist the tuner until you’re locked in and the track floats from the speakers in clear stereo, filling the vehicle.
But not for long. Moments later, at the light, an SUV lurches to a stop beside you, blasting bass-heavy hip-hop beats. Your music instantly splinters as the low-end frequencies of the superior neighboring system rattle your windows. You glare at the guy reclining in the driver’s seat, but his cap is pulled too low over his face to catch his eye, and the sunlight is catching on the expensive-looking watch on his left arm, stretched across the steering wheel. As the bass reverberates through the traffic, he nods in time with a stuttering snare drum. Gravelly lyrics make their way out into the winter air. This guy, it strikes you, could be hip-hop’s modern-day poster child. He exudes swagger, confidence, and aspiration. The penchant for heavyweight cars and luxury jewelry is obvious, yet the sound track suggests a deep-seated connection to the street and the perceived realities of poverty. He looks like an extra from a P. Diddy video, but he could be a college student, crack dealer, or quantum physicist. There is no way of telling.
He could be from any number of social or ethnic backgrounds. This guy is one of a hundred million people in the United States alone under hip-hop’s influence, enchanted by one of the largest cultural movements on our planet today. To many, he represents the sum total of youth culture’s progress. But you’re too busy admiring his watch and glaring at his obnoxious speakers to check your mirrors. If you had, you might have noticed that the future of youth culture is actually pulling up behind you. What you did notice is your radio, which has just cut out. You lean forward and adjust the tuner. Nothing. In the SUV next to you, the radio has gone silent, too. You look across to see hip-hop’s poster child banging his dashboard; he looks as frustrated as you are. You check the sunroof — the skies are clear, no aliens jamming your signal. Nothing in your rearview mirror either, except some kid in a Prius with a blank expression.
Of course, you can’t see the iPod connected to a modified iTrip on his passenger seat. It’s even less likely that you’d guess he’s using these devices to broadcast silence across the entire FM band, transmitting tranquility pirate-style in the thirty-foot radius around his car.
The unassuming face in the Prius is the latest in a long line of youth culture revolutionaries, a band of radio pirates who have manipulated media for decades. They founded Hollywood, reinvented many forms of broadcasting, and helped win the Cold War. While changing the face of media around the world, the guy in the Prius, like his many predecessors, has gone almost completely unnoticed by mainstream society.
The light turns green and you pull away, still puzzled about what just happened. You head straight on. As the SUV and the Prius hang a right onto Ninth Street toward the Southwest Freeway, your radio suddenly comes back to life. A few minutes later, you’ve almost forgotten the incident as you park farther down the avenue. But as you fumble for change for the meter, you are about to have an even stranger encounter with youth culture.
Instead of the parking meter you use every day, a four-foot-high lemon-yellow lollipop is sticking out of the ground, basking unapologetically in the morning sunshine. Did you accidentally park on the set of Hansel & Gretel?
On closer inspection, it becomes clear you didn’t. The parking meter has been remixed into a piece of countercultural candy, its sugary facade made entirely of bright yellow Scotch tape. It is the calling card of another group of society’s unsung heroes — a group of pirates who manipulate public space rather than the public airwaves. The lollipop is one of the many hallmarks of an invisible army who started a revolution with pens and spray cans. They have affected advertising, fashion, film, and design, among other industries. They have established billion-dollar brands, focused the media spotlight on controversial political issues, and changed the way we think about the world around us.
On our airwaves, in our public spaces, and through the new layers of digital information that envelop us, pirates are changing the way we use information, and in fact, the very nature of our economic system. From radio pirates to graffiti artists to open-source culture to the remix, the ideas behind youth cultures have evolved into powerful forces that are changing the world.
For the last sixty years, capitalism has run a pretty tight ship in the West. But in increasing numbers, pirates are hacking into the hull and holes are starting to appear. Privately owned property, ideas, and privileges are leaking out into the public domain beyond anyone’s control.
Pirates are rocking the boat. As a result people, corporations, and governments across the planet are facing a new dilemma — the Pirate’s Dilemma: How should we react to the changing conditions on our ship? Are pirates here to scupper us, or save us? Are they a threat to be battled, or innovators we should compete with and learn from? To compete or not to compete — that is the question — perhaps the most important economic and cultural question of the twenty-first century.
A man at the intersection between youth culture and innovation named John Perry Barlow, the cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, summarized the problem in 2003:
“Throughout the time I’ve been groping around cyberspace, an immense, unsolved conundrum has remained at the root of nearly every legal, ethical, governmental, and social vexation to be found in the Virtual World. I refer to the problem of digitized property. The enigma is this: If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it? How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And, if we can’t get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?
“Since we don’t have a solution to what is a profoundly new kind of challenge, and are apparently unable to delay the galloping digitization of everything not obstinately physical, we are sailing into the future on a sinking ship.”
This is the story of how pirates might save this sinking ship. Often pirates are the first to feel the winds of change blowing. The answer to the Pirate’s Dilemma lies in the stories of pirates sailing into waters uncharted by society and the markets, spaces where traditional rules don’t apply. The answers lie in the history of youth culture.
For more than sixty years, teenage rebels have been doing things differently and working out new ways to share information, intellectual property, and public space. Behind youth movements familiar to us are radical ideas about how we can compete, collaborate, and coexist in an environment where old assumptions about how we treat information do not hold.
The Pirate’s Dilemma will chart the rise of these radical ideas — ideas that started with individual mavericks conducting crazy social experiments which eventually enter everything, influencing business, politics, and many other areas.
For the first time, the dots between our collective future and youth culture’s checkered past will be connected, illustrating how a handful of seemingly random absurdities inspired some of our most important innovations. Right under our noses, the ripple effects of youth culture have been changing the way we live and work. But much of the time these effects have gone unnoticed.
Soon enough, though, everyone will notice. The Pirate’s Dilemma is not just facing those who deal in digital information — it’s escaping into the real world, too. As we shall see, new technologies could make it just as easy for us all to download physical products the way we download music, and we can already jam information being broadcast with a narrowcast signal of our own, signals that collectively have the power to overthrow presidents.
The Information Age has hit puberty and is experiencing growing pains. By remembering our own teenage years we can piece together the best way to ease this transition, searching out and understanding successful business models that entered society from the edges, many directly from youth cultures.
We rebel through youth movements because we recognize that things don’t always work the way they should. They are a way of communicating alternatives without inciting bloody revolutions, a way to reorganize systems from the inside, which isn’t easy to do. As rebel economist E. F. Schumacher observed of the damaging effects of the systems that govern us: “to deny them would be too obviously absurd, and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.” But as teenagers most of us aren’t reading Schumacher. Instead we protest with youth culture, social experiments — informal studies in the art of doing things differently that have given us good music, bad haircuts, and new ways to operate.
The little-known eureka moments in youth culture documented in this book are rare and priceless. The big bang happens when a strange new idea suddenly makes sense to a handful of people, who then transmit it to others. Experiencing one is like a revelation, a glimpse into the future.
When we see superstars and brands emerge from these scenes years later, it becomes clear to us all what these radical ideas that start small can mushroom into. The story of youth culture’s commercial success has been reenacted many times, performed by a variety of players against the backdrop of different genres across the globe. Rappers such as 50 Cent can make $50 million a year without even releasing a record; a graffiti artist such as Marc Ecko can develop his tag into a multinational brand worth more than $1 billion. “Today the most disruptive voices are no longer the artists’ voices being piped over the corporate airwaves,” Ecko told Royal magazine in 2006. “It’s the voice of the pirate, the pirate has become the producer. The indy-punk ‘f the man’ message is no longer a hook in a song. It’s scary. It’s hungry. It’s Godzilla. He’s knocking on the door uninvited, ready for dessert.”
And these new Godzillas aren’t just graffiti artists or multimillion-dollar MCs. The face under Godzilla’s rubbery mask could be yours. I call this problem the “Pirate’s Dilemma” and not the “Pirate Dilemma,” because there is no difference between us and them. Illegal pirates, legitimate companies, and law-abiding citizens are now all in the same space, working out how to share and control information in new ways. The Pirate’s Dilemma is not just about how we compete against pirates, and how we treat them, it’s also about how we can become better by recognizing the pirate within ourselves.
How did we get here? What do the new conditions shaping our ship mean, and what do they tell us about where we are going next? To answer these questions, I’ve pulled together the work of leading academics, historians, innovators, and visionaries from a wide variety of disciplines, whose ideas and insights are illustrated with a cast of characters that includes such icons as Andy Warhol, the Ramones, Madonna, Pharrell, and 50 Cent. I’ve drawn on my own experiences growing up as a pirate DJ in London, at the flash point of emerging scenes, and my professional life immersed in the mainstream music, media, and advertising industries.
I’ve met with and interviewed legendary musicians, artists, entrepreneurs, and DJs who have changed things for the rest of us, often without us knowing. From hip-hop moguls such as Russell Simmons to media mavericks such as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, I’ll tell the story of a world ruled by the Pirate’s Dilemma with the assistance of some of our best-known change agents.
But I’ll also be introducing you to some extraordinary people who are telling their stories for the first time. You’ll meet the nun who helped invent dance music, and learn how the ideas she promoted in a children’s home in the 1940s are transforming the free market as we know it. You’ll meet the three high school kids who remixed Nazis into Smurfs in the 1980s, and changed the future of the video game industry as a result.
We’ll meet the professor who can tell us what will happen to Nike when it becomes possible for kids to download sneakers. We’ll see how the hippie movement was responsible for the birth of the personal computer. We’ll find out what graffiti artists, fashion designers, and French chefs can teach us about the future of copyright, and uncover how a male model, messing around with disco records in New York in the 1970s, changed the way Boeing designs airplanes. But before we do, we need to understand the thinking behind the business model that gave rise to the Pirate’s Dilemma. This is a new version of the old system I refer to as “Punk Capitalism.”
“This is Punk Capitalism,” Bono proudly announced to the world, as a torrent of camera flashes ricocheted off his trademark tinted glasses at an October 2006 press conference. The rock star philanthropist was in Los Angeles to launch the Product Red campaign, backed by a phalanx of CEOs from companies such as Nike, American Express, Gap, Apple, Armani, and Motorola, all of whom had signed on to create a range of products whose profits are used to help fight AIDS in Africa.
But ten years before Bono’s press conference, three Canadian punk rockers, who we’ll hear from shortly, had been using the term to sum up their philosophy long before Product Red — a philosophy they used to grow a fanzine into a multimillion-dollar media empire.
I use the term Punk Capitalism to describe the new set of market conditions governing society. It’s a society where piracy, as the cochair at Disney recently put it, is “just another business model.” A society where the remix is changing the way production and consumption are structured, rendering the nineteenth-century copyright laws we use obsolete. A world where advertising no longer works quite the way it did. It’s a place where open-source ways of working are generating a wealth of new public goods, niche markets, knowledge, and resources — free tools for the rest of us to build both commercial and noncommercial ventures. It’s a place where creativity is our most valuable resource. It’s a marketplace where things we used to pay for are free, and things that used to be free have to be paid for. It’s a world where altruism is as powerful as competition, inhabited by a new breed of social entrepreneurs, a creative resistance who make money by putting as much emphasis on truly making a difference as they do on turning a profit.
The philosophies that underpin Punk Capitalism took shape in the roots of punk rock. But as we shall now see, the story of Punk Capitalism actually begins in the roots of a hairstyle, created in the 1960s by a runaway teenager from Kentucky — a hairstyle that would change the world.
CHAPTER 1:
PUNK CAPITALISM
From D.I.Y. to Downloading Sneakers
Illustration by Art Jaz
“I’d noticed that hair mattered.”
He’s sitting across from me in the back of a café. You wouldn’t think that hair mattered to look at him. His dark brown hair falls around his thick-rimmed glasses down to his jaw, casually framing his face. He has that relaxed, just-got-out-of-bed look. Not the on-purpose kind media types have, but as though he actually might have. It doesn’t look as though he’s given hair much thought at all, but the man I am talking with had one of the most important haircuts of the twentieth century.
This is Richard Meyers: writer, poet, artist, and former front man of bands the Neon Boys, Television, and the Voidoids. He is better known as Richard Hell, and the angular hairstyle and cut-up clothing he pioneered in the early 1970s would come to define a movement better known as punk.
Not far from where we’re sitting on New York’s Lower East Side was the club CBGB, where Hell’s early performances inspired punk’s first generation. A runaway from Kentucky, he arrived in the city an aspiring writer, affected by beat poets and writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but quickly realized he could make a more powerful statement with music. “Part of what I liked about music was all these other means for communication,” Hell told me. “In rock ‘n’ roll it’s always been important how you looked. How you looked said something. And it was usually something about rejecting convention and the nine-to-five, and any kind of control, but you could get really elaborate with how you used the way you looked to communicate stuff. You’re always being interviewed, your album covers, your live shows, it was so broad, the areas for getting your message across. I wanted to use all of them.”
And use them he did. Inspired in part by the rebellious French poets Rimbaud and Artaud, who had sported spiky hair in the early nineteenth century, Hell chopped his mane into a short, aggressive style as a way of rejecting the hippie movement and the big-hair glamour of stadium rock. He looked at the Beatles’ bowl haircuts and asked himself, what are they really saying? “Well,” he explains, “they really say five-year-old kid. So I thought, ‘What was my generation’s haircut like when we were five years old?’ Where I grew up, the most popular haircut was called the ‘Butch.’ Short all the way around, and you’d maybe wax up the front of it. But of course being kids, we wouldn’t get to the barber that often, and we wouldn’t keep it neat, it would just be kind of raggedy…. I wanted it to be do-it-yourself. I wanted it to not be something you’d go to the barber for.”
Richard fused the Beatles, the “Butch,” and two radical nineteenth-century French bohemians into his new do-it-yourself hairstyle, and hell literally broke loose. In 1974 Television took to the stage at CBGB on Sunday nights. Hell wore clothes slashed as aggressively as his hair, held together with safety pins and emblazoned with slogans such as PLEASE KILL ME. “It was a rejection of having who you are imposed on you by corporations who were gonna profit from making you feel insecure about how you look,” he says. “I’ve just always been really skeptical and suspicious and resentful of people who try to sell you stuff by intimidating you.”
Hell’s statements were a full-frontal assault on the senses, burning his ideas into the minds of his audience, who at the time happened to be some of the most influential people in New York City, and in pop culture period. After Television’s success, CBGB (which stood for “Country Blue-Grass Blues”) switched to a punk rock–only format every night, becoming a creative hotbed for artists and bands such as the Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, and Debbie Harry, all of whom cut their teeth on its stage. Malcolm McLaren, then manager of another influential group, the New York Dolls, was so stimulated by Hell’s look he took it back to London and used it to create a new band: the Sex Pistols.
Punk exploded.
Thirty years after it first shook the world, punk is in a museum. A few miles uptown from where Hell and I are sitting, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is holding a punk exhibition sponsored by multinational luxury goods brand Burberry. Tourists are studying early British punk clothes—made by now world-famous fashion designers such as Vivienne Westwood—and listening to a podcast commentary by the world-famous Sex Pistol Jonny Rotten.
Punk is dead.
But Hell survived. Instead of becoming a parody of his former self, he moved on. He remains on the Lower East Side, under the mainstream’s radar, but credible in many other circles, now the successful poet and published writer he always aspired to be. This new attitude, career, and his current, less threatening hairstyle are all part of a strategy. “The interesting thing is to not remain the same,” he muses. “To me that’s what’s boring; I don’t really care to see fifty-year-old people going around in punk leather jackets. The point is to stay unclassifiable. Then they don’t own you.”
When the hairstyle lost its meaning, Hell lost the hairstyle. But his statement and the do-it-yourself ideal he promoted affected the world. Today it is the driving force behind a new generation of D.I.Y. entrepreneurs who are raising hell once again. Disruptive new D.I.Y. technologies are causing unprecedented creative destruction. The history of punk offers us valuable insights into how this new world works. Punk was an angry outburst, a reaction to mass culture, but it offered new ideas about how mass culture could be replaced with a more personalized, less centralized worldview.
Punk has survived in many incarnations musically—it became new wave, influenced hip-hop, and conceived grunge and the notion of indie bands. But more important, its independent spirit also spurred a do-it-yourself revolution. D.I.Y. encourages us to reject authority and hierarchy, advocating that we can and should produce as much as we consume. Since punk, this idea has been quietly changing the very fabric of our economic system, replacing outdated ideas with the twenty-first-century upgrades of Punk Capitalism.
Suddenly like at a punk gig, today everybody is getting smashed together in a much more turbulent, concentrated environment that is constantly changing. There are fewer conventional “jobs,” and increasingly complex relationships between those consuming and those producing. And changes in manufacturing mean soon all of us could have the means to create literally anything ourselves, from the comfort of our own homes.
As we shall now see, the possibilities of D.I.Y. are reaching new heights. Like a roomful of teenagers with green hair throwing bottles at one another, this new world can look frightening. But once you get it, it’s obvious it’s a better place to be. The end of top-down mass culture is creating opportunities and freedoms for us all.
Hell used the past to create a hairstyle that shaped the perspective of a generation. Generations since have grown up using ingenuity and creativity to do the things punk always promoted: tearing down hegemonies and hierarchies, starting over, and improving the way we operate as a society.
Hell is right. Hair mattered.
Long live punk.
“Where everything went wrong in the world. Previously.”
When punk was born, polite society didn’t think it was right about anything. Initially, punks were seen as threats, menaces, scum. “What is punk music? It’s disgusting, degrading, ghastly, sleazy, prurient, voyeuristic, and nauseating. Most of these groups would be vastly improved by sudden death,” remarked a member of the Greater London Council in 1976. But when Joe Strummer, lead singer of the legendary punk band the Clash passed away in 2002, the BBC described punks as “pioneers who kicked down musical and social barriers, making anything seem possible.”
So what changed? Why does history remember them fondly? Because the punks had a point. Established ideas and outdated dogma create limitations. Limitations suck. As the Sex Pistols lead singer, Jonny Rotten, said in the documentary The Filth and the Fury, “All our first rehearsals were a nightmare. It would be constantly ‘You know you gotta learn to sing’ and it’s a Why? Says who? Why are you accepting all these, like, boundaries? That’s where everything went wrong in the world. Previously.”
Youth cultures often embody some previously invisible, unacknowledged feeling in society and give it an identity. They are reactions or responses to other factors, and once a critical mass of people endorse such movements, they take on lives of their own. “I think it was in fact, inevitable in history,” says Hell. “Western culture got homogenized and corporatized to an extent where it was inevitable that would come into existence a stratum under the radar, where people who saw the stupidity and boredom of the mass culture started doing things themselves and for each other, and opposing the standards and values of the false, mass way of doing things…. I don’t think it was someone’s brilliant idea, it just followed from the way things had become.”
The urge to rebel and express oneself is clearly many moons older than punk, but its angry, loud, minimal sound concentrated this feeling and sent shock waves through society, demonstrating to a generation disenchanted with rock ‘n’ roll that once again, anything was possible. “We thought pop stars came from outer space and we couldn’t do it,” says Paul Cook in Punk by Colegrave and Sullivan. This is no surprise; at the time most aging rockers were hanging out in Monaco with supermodels (in fact, many still are) and had no idea about the predicament of Britain’s underclass. But Cook soon found out he was wrong. He was the drummer for the Sex Pistols.
Copyright © 2008 by Matt Mason.
To read the rest, please visit one of the fine book sellers below:
Buy a copy of The Pirate’s Dilemma from Amazon
Buy a copy from Barnes & Noble
