About five years ago I received an invitation to the private BitTorrent music site called Oink. If you’re unfamiliar with BitTorrent, let me break it down for you. You download a client software to your computer, which is able to read and parse Torrents, and connect to BitTorrent trackers hosted on websites. No actual media is hosted on these websites, they only serve as a directory to Torrent files; Torrent files are small and serve only to connect users to each other and provide an organizational map for media data. When you upload a Torrent file to one of these sites, you are registering media hosted on your own computer with the website and opening that media up to other users to download. When a Torrent originates, hosted only by the original uploader, other users attach onto the file and are called Leeches. At first the downloading is slow, capable of only going as fast as the original uploaders upload speed. But when the Torrent is completed, once another user has fully downloaded the files, these completed downloads/users join the Swarm, the people sharing a Torrent and set of files. The more people in the Swarm, the faster a Leech’s potential download. Perhaps at first you may only download at 50KB per second but as more users complete the Torrent and share, joining the Swarm, you become only limited by your own download speed. You could be downloading at 1MB per second on a normal residential internet connection (thus getting a 60MB music album in one minute), or even faster if you’re on a university or business connection. It all depends on what people colloquially call your “pipe.”

Oink, in time, became the preeminent music download site among Torrenters; it ushered in this strange new era of sharing, with an effect greater than Napster because you could get absolutely anything, in complete albums, in any format you wanted. But, like Napster, it was shut down when it became too big. Without missing a beat, however, the Torrent community had new sites up within a week (which will remain unnamed in this article), staying true to what is known as the Hydra. A hydra has many heads, and when you chop one off more will grow in its place. The Torrent community cannot be stopped; you can’t shut down all the sites. Just as the recent judgment against the founders of the Pirate Bay reveals, you can persecute the people but you can’t stop the machine. These sites don’t just contain music. All digital media can be had if you get into the right site. Books are certainly included in this, both of the e-book and audiobook variety.

I thought this was an important topic to bring up because I myself hope to one day make a living from my art. But, despite what my friends may tell you, I am not a fool. With the way the current industries operate, music and book, and with the ease at which someone can “pirate” this media, the financial models these industries purport are simply not sustainable. Just as the iPod ushered piracy into the mainstream (can anyone claim they have paid for every single mp3 on their digital music player?), e-readers like the Kindle will do the very same thing to books. Why pay $25-30 for a book when you can have the text for free? In the New York Times’ Book Review podcast from 5/15/09, they discuss book piracy and how it effects authors and the industry and such. But these people talking about it, Motoko Rich and Sam Tanenhaus, come off as luddites (though they are just journalists, so we’ll cut them some slack). They speak of transcription as a form of book piracy, as in someone will sit and type a book out that they own so that they may distribute it on the internet. This idea is small potatoes; maybe a few will do this, but how many people do you think will actually spend their time transcribing a book?

More likely, e-reader proprietary formats will be cracked (do you think Amazon’s techs are smarter than millions of internet nerds?) and distributed through various Peer-to-Peer (P2P) sharing avenues on the internet, including BitTorrent. This is already the case. At my fingertips is almost any book I could want, in PDF for text or mp3 for audiobook. Now, if you’ve read some of my articles here before you’ll know that I don’t want to ever give up the paperback. I love the feel of a book in my hands. I love reading paper. And it is my opinion that, in this regard, music and book piracy differ. But I could, one day in the not too distant future, be in the minority. Many people love the Kindle. Just like the iPod, there’s a hefty upfront cost but if you know how to get your media for free, the $300 is worth it.

What does all this add up to? The industry can’t stop it. It is a fool’s errand to fight it. We are entering a new age and if the industry wants to stay lucrative, they need to adapt. Instead of suing people who share media, they need to hire a few and come up with a new distribution model. But I don’t see the big companies surviving, ultimately; their product will become too manufactured someday soon. They play it safe, create pop stars with little substance, and try to milk every dollar they can from a wilting turnip. Artists, both musicians and writers, need to realize this and figure out their own way. The days of the giant advance and massive royalties are over. What we’re learning is that it can’t just be about the money because the money no longer exists.

Once you release your art, your media, it is gone. Anyone can have it for free. I talked to my friend Scott Masson of the band Office about the subject. “I don’t want to spend my life and career fighting something that actually allows my own music to be heard,” he said. “Better that, than folks not hearing a piece of music at all.”

Masson has found success with Office, has bounced on and off of a major label, and has ultimately found it more fulfilling and lucrative to remain independent. His latest release, Mecca, is offered for free on Office’s website. “I worked my ass off on this album too, and spent a lot of money and time crafting it.  All I wanted was to share it because I believed in the contents.”

“The companies used to be in control of the artists, and now I sort of feel the public is in control,” said Masson. “The public will make the final decision on how an artist makes their living.”

I don’t think it’s become a question of morals, like some pundits argue. I don’t think labeling media sharing as “piracy” is very accurate. It is a new model. I’m not arguing that artists shouldn’t be compensated; they most certainly should be able to make a living from their work, so long as their work has greater cultural value. But, as Masson points out, the people will decide this. Morals are out of the picture. If you offer mp3s of your favorite new album to a friend, to a family member, to a stranger, will any of them decline this offering? “No,” your upstanding friend says. “I do not accept any music for which I did not pay.” Yeah, right. It will soon be the same way with books.

I don’t have the answers for the future of commercial media, I don’t pretend to know what the new model will be. But at least I’m thinking about the question. If major companies want to stay afloat they need to harness this new power of media distribution instead of trying to squash it with their heel. Artists will need to rely on the quality of their work, rather than a PR machine pushing it. This is bad news for the people who rely on the exploitation of artists to earn a living. But for artists, I think this is a wake-up call. With the fall of intellectual property rights, the ease at which anybody can download anything they want for free, the onus is on the artists to create something truly magical and culturally significant if they want to be relevant.

Related posts:

1. The Future of Books
2. To Publish in Print or Online
3. In Defense of the Kindle

The publishing elite generally regard print publishing as the only authoritative medium and web publishing as pure vanity. It’s true that anybody can publish on the internet because it costs nothing. Publishing in a journal, however, feels more meaningful because printing costs real money and therefore those who create the journal must be very critical of what they do and do not publish. It makes sense. But if an online journal were to gain a wide readership and provide only quality content, who’s to say it couldn’t be more authoritative than the classical journal? More readers troll the internet and read blogs than subscribe to journals. No, I don’t have facts or statistics to back this up. But honestly, could you argue differently? The internet is a beast and it’s not quieting down any time soon.

So I’ve decided to throw some of my own work up at the request of a friend. This is a piece that I usually read when I do readings; I recently read it at my friend Connor’s reading series Tuesday Funk. It is a short excerpt from my novel, A Fence We Can Climb, a story that I classify as midwestern gothic. My friend and editor, Tom, has told me I should remove this story from the novel but I’m so partial to it and always get such a warm reception with it, it’s very hard for me to kill this darling. I’m beginning to question whether or not this novel will ever see the light of day; it’s a very classical story, almost Biblical and definitely Shakespearean, but I wonder if it offers anything new. The more I construct my second novel, the more I see I’m inspired by Melville and Pynchon and since rereading some Donald Barthelme, I wonder if I should be thinking in a more post-modernist and humorist milieu. After all, I feel my humor is something that classifies me as a person and my writing really hasn’t reflected that.

Regardless, I hope you enjoy this piece. What I really like about this particular excerpt is its question/answer, back and forth storytelling cadence; it is very much indicative of a kid, any kid, telling a story. If you’d like to read more of my unpublished novel, you could always go to the New School MFA library and dig out my thesis (which is nowhere near as good as it has since become). Or you could just offer to publish it. I prefer the latter option.

Also, the crux of this story is true. Thanks to Michael McKeogh for the inspiration.

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Excerpt from A Fence We Can Climb, or The Dog Story.

After shoving the pump nozzle into the mouth of his tank, Gentry lifted the cradle and pushed a large yellow button on the machine. He squeezed the handle on the nozzle and using his forefinger locked it in place with the small length of steel just below the trigger. Hearing the fuel begin to course through the hose and into his pickup, he leaned back against the side of the truck bed and waited.

A young man stepped out of the station and called Gentry’s name. Looking up, Gentry waved and the man approached him.

“Hey there Gentry.”

“Heya Lou.” The two shook hands and smiled. Lou looked just a year or two younger than Gentry, still in school, and he barely had any hair on his face save for a thin strip on his upper lip.

“I’m glad you stopped in Gentry ‘cause I got a fucked up story to tell you.”

“Let’s hear it.” Gentry leaned harder against his truck and put his hands behind his head.

“So you been to my house and you know up behind it there’s that house on the hill, that big white bastard. This old jackoff Smokey lives there; well, he ain’t that much of a jackoff really except for in this story. He’s usually a pretty good guy.”

“I know him.”

“Yeah so this old jackoff’s got this mutt of a dog, real inbred sonnuva bitch, all spotted and lean and kinda nasty. And he lets this thing loose on his property and sometimes it comes down to our property and gets in our garage and tears our trash up out of the bags. Real fucking messy man. And my Dad makes me clean it up so I already hate this dog, you know?”

“We got raccoons that do the same thing,” said Gentry.

“So the other day, a week ago maybe, this dog comes on down to our property and my little brother Michael is out playing in the yard and he sees this dog and wants to pet it, you know? He squares up to pet this dog and the dog squares up to inspect this little kid and Michael reaches his hand out to pet it and this old mutt bites at his fucking wrist. The dog almost bites my little brother’s hand off.”

“Well shit.”

“Tell me about it. So my Dad calls up Smokey and he calls up the cops while my Mom cleans Mikey up. She’s a nurse, you know? And Smokey tells these cops that come on by that Michael provoked it. He says this little five year old kid musta pissed his dumb old dog off because he ain’t never done anything like that before. He’s a good dog, Smokey says. And these fucking pigs buy every bit of it. I mean, course they do. Smokey’s all VFW and he gives money to the sheriff and he’s got one of those support your cops stickers on his bumper.”

“Yeah I know him.”

“Right. So my Dad’s pissed but he’s a reasonable man. After the cops leave he tells Smokey he wants him to put that dog down. Says he’s caused us too much trouble, he fucks with our garbage and now he’s fucking with our family. Know what Smokey says? He says Fuck You. He ain’t putting that dog down. Okay, my Dad says. Keep him on your property. Put up a fence and don’t ever let that bastard come near our property ever again. Smokey says nope. He ain’t doing it.” Lou looked over his shoulder at the station and then looked back to Gentry and scratched his upper lip. “He ain’t fucking doing it.”

“Your dad beat his ass right there?”

“Nope. My Dad’s crazier than that. The next day after work my Dad fries up a pound of bacon for dinner, makes it with lots of butter and oil, real greasy. While we’re eating this bacon and some eggs my Dad is over at the sink with all that left over grease and he’s got himself one of those sponges for washing your car. You know what I mean? Those sponges that’re as big as your foot. Bigger even. You know ‘em?”

“Yep.”

“So he soaks up as much grease as he can into that sponge. This thing is all dripping and brown and it smells great. Over at the sink he’s squeezing it hard and letting all that bacon water drip back into the skillet and then he starts wrapping rubber bands around it. He’s got about a hundred rubber bands in a pile on the counter and he’s just wrapping them around this squeezed sponge so that when he’s done with it the sponge is the size of a hotdog. Then he’s rolling it around in the grease again so that the sponge is soaking up even more of it and when he’s finally done with it he tosses the sponge on a paper plate and sticks it in the freezer.”

“The fuck man?”

“I know I know; just listen. So later that night my Dad sees Smokey let that old mutt out to take a shit or whatever and he goes into the freezer and takes the sponge out and unwraps the rubber bands off it and I’m telling you this thing looks just like a little hotdog. Little and brown and frozen and smelling like bacon. And we go outside and walk up the hill a little and soon as we’re close enough my Dad throws this thing over by where the dog is and we take off back down the hill. And once we’re home my Dad tells me, Lou, set your alarm for sunrise and I do it. Next morning real early we climb up that hill again and laid out there on the grass is that dog and its stomach is huge and right down the middle of its belly the skin is split and dark red and black and dried over and there’s already maggots and worms eating its guts and on the grass by its mouth is a bunch of dried puke with blood and hair in it and it’s obvious this thing was in pain when it died and I could hardly look at it. And you know what my Dad said to me?”

The nozzle clicked off and stopped pumping gas on its own but Gentry didn’t make a move for it. He listened to Lou with his head turned to the side.

“What’d he say?” said Gentry.

“He said Louis, this dog coulda killed your brother and we did the right thing by getting him first. It was painful, yeah, but how do you think your brother feels?”

“That story is pretty fucked up.”

“What’d I tell you?” He grinned. “Oh shit,” said Lou looking back to the station and noticing a customer waiting at the counter. “I gotta go man. Don’t worry about the gas Gentry. I’ll just tell my boss it was a drive-off and I didn’t catch the plates.” Lou reached out and shook Gentry’s hand and ran back to the station pulling his jeans up as he went.

Related posts:

1. Shake Rattle & Read and the Uptown Story