Whenever you have an audience as large as Hilton’s, there’s obviously going to be a substantial swath of consumers who adore the person who built it. It would be wrong to say, “Everyone hates Perez Hilton,” because that’s just not true. But it’s pretty hard to find an intelligent person who loves him. (Such individuals exist, but not in great numbers.) It’s hard to find a thoughtful person who appreciates the way Hilton’s appeal is so hyper-directed at the lowest common denominator. Even his decision to name himself after noted celebutard Paris Hilton perpetuates a desire to produce self-consciously vapid work. So this, it would seem, is why smart people hate him: Because of his blog’s content. They find his ideas despicable (or so they would argue). Now, Perez would counter that accusation by charging his critics with jealousy. He (and his defenders) would claim that what people truly hate about Perez Hilton is not what he writes; it’s the size of his audience and the scale of his reach. That argument is not invalid. For those who live on the Internet, the attention economy matters way more than making money or earning peer respect; there is a slice of the Web that would do anything to harvest Hilton’s readership, even if it meant publishing photos of aborted celebrity fetuses while going bankrupt in the process. In other words, some people hate Perez for his ideas and some people hate Perez because they so desperately want to be like him. And as it turns out, both sides have a point. The reason Perez Hilton became a villain was the intersection of those two qualities: It wasn’t just the content, and it wasn’t just the success. It was the creeping fear that this type of content would become the only way any future person could be successful.
Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don’t really “need” anything new, so we only create what we want. This changes the nature of technological competition. Because the Internet is obsessed with its own version of non-monetary capitalism, it rewards the volume of response much more than the merits of whatever people are originally responding to. Moreover, there’s no downside to creating something that repulses all those who exist outside your audience (in fact, a reasonable degree of outsider hatred usually helps). Intuitively understanding these rules, Hilton only went after the kind of pre-adult who simultaneously loved and loathed celebrity culture to an unhealthy degree; he knew that specific demographic was both expanding and underserved. It was a brilliant business model. It was like he opened a buffet restaurant that served wet garbage in a community where the population of garbage gluttons was much higher (and far more loyal) than anyone had ever realized. And this made all the normal food eaters hate him. Do they hate his product? Sure (although there are many things on the Internet far worse). Do they hate his success? Sure (although he’s never been perceived as credible or particularly insightful, so the definition of his success is limited to pure populism). Do they simply think Hilton is a jerk? Yes (and perhaps he is — I have no idea). But none of those individual issues addresses the greater fear. The real reason Perez Hilton is vilified is the combination of a) what he does editorially, b) its level of public import, and c) the undeniable sense that all of this was somehow inevitable. Perez Hilton is a villain because he personifies the way desire-based technology drives mass culture toward primitive impulses. Any singular opinion of his work does not matter; the only thing that matters is the collective opinion, which can be dominated by a vocal, splintered minority who knows only that they want what they want. Everyone seems to understand this. And once everyone understands that this is how New Media works, it becomes normative. It becomes the main way we get information about everything (gossip or otherwise). There is no alternative option. By manipulating an audience that is complicit in the manipulation, Perez Hilton can force the rest of us to accept his version of the future.
Hilton is a technocrat, and technocrats inevitably share two unifying beliefs. The first is that they’re already winning; the second is that they’re going to push things forward, regardless of what that progress entails. Resistance to either principle is futile. Every day we grow closer to a full-on technocratic police state. “I don’t care if you like me,” Hilton has written. “I just care if you read my website.” This is not exactly an original perspective; many writers feel like that, especially when they’re young (Hilton was roughly twenty-four when he first experienced success). But the sentiment is disturbing when expressed by Perez. It seems like his entire objective. It’s like he vividly sees the relationship between those two adversarial ideas, and everything else is built upon that foundation. And this would be totally fine, assuming we felt as if it was our decision to agree or disagree. But we don’t. At this point, we can’t walk away from harmful technology. We’ve ceded control to the machines. The upside is that the machines still have masters. The downside is that we don’t usually like who those masters are.
When Kim Dotcom was arrested during a 2012 police raid of his home, I had the same series of reactions as everyone else: There’s a person literally named “Kim Dotcom”? And this person is a 350-pound, egocentric German multimillionaire who never went to college? And he got famous for being a computer hacker who refers to himself as Dr. Evil? And he lives in a mansion in New Zealand? And he participates in European road races and is the world’s best Modern Warfare 3 player? And he has a beautiful wife of unknown racial origin? And his twenty-four-acre, $30 million estate is populated with life-size statues of giraffes? And he likes to be photographed in his bathtub? Everything about his biography seemed like someone trying to make fun of a Roger Moore–era James Bond movie that was too dumb to exist. I could not believe that this was the person the FBI decided to go after in their ongoing dream of controlling the digital future. It seemed as if they were arbitrarily penalizing a cherubic foreigner for being wealthy and ostentatious, and New Zealand eventually deemed the raid illegal.
However, the arrest turned out to be far less arbitrary than I’d thought. Dotcom owned and operated the online service Megaupload. In an interview with Kiwi investigative reporter John Campbell, Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz in 1974) described Megaupload like this: “I basically created a server where I could upload a file and get a unique link, and then I would just e-mail that link to my friend so he would then get the file. And that’s how Megaupload was started. It was just a solution to a problem that still exists today.” In essence, Dotcom’s argument was that he simply made it easier for people to exchange and store digital files that were too large for Gmail or AOL — and when described in this simplified manner, it seems like his motives were utilitarian. But this claim is such a profound distortion of reality that it almost qualifies as a lie, even though (I suppose) it’s technically true. Megaupload was a place to steal music. There was no mystery about this; if you knew what Megaupload was, you knew it was a pirating service. There appeared to be dozens of other sites exactly like it. But what I did not realize was the scope of Dotcom’s empire: The week after he was arrested, downloading illegal music became almost impossible (not totally impossible, but at least ten times more difficult than it had been in 2011). His arrest instantly changed the entire culture of recreational music theft. For most normal adults, ripping music from the Internet went from “a little too easy” to “a little too hard.” Megaupload was more central to the process of stealing copyrighted material than every other file-sharing source combined. He really was the man. Kim Dotcom was not some goofy eccentric being persecuted for the sins of other people. He pretty much ran the Internet (or at least the part of the Internet that people with money actually care about). He denies this, as any wise man would. But even his denials suggest a secret dominance. Here’s one exchange from his conversation with Campbell, the first TV interview he gave following his arrest . . .
CAMPBELL: The FBI indictment against you alleges, and I quote, “Copyright infringement on a massive scale, with estimated harm to copyright holders well in excess of five hundred million U.S. dollars.”
DOTCOM: Well, tha
t’s complete nonsense. If you read the indictment and if you hear what the Prosecution has said in court, those $500 million of damage were just music files from a two-week time period. So they are actually talking about $13 billion U.S. damages within a year, just for music downloads. The entire U.S. music industry is less than $20 billion. So how can one website be responsible for this amount of damage? It’s completely mind-boggling and unrealistic.
It is mind-boggling. But it isn’t unrealistic. While I don’t doubt the FBI is using an unusually high estimate, it doesn’t seem implausible that $13 billion worth of music was flowing through Megaupload’s channels (assuming we pretend a CD is still worth its fourteen-dollar retail price). Ripping music is not like buying music. It’s not a meditative process. When you purchase music, you make a specific choice that (in your mind) justifies the exchange of currency. When you download music illegally, there’s nothing to exchange; if you can simply think of a record’s title and you can type it semi-correctly into a search engine, there’s no reason not to drop it into your iTunes. That’s pretty much the entire investment — the ability to type a band name into a search field. Megaupload made stealing simple (it was far better than the previous theft iteration, the Napster-like Limewire). The downloading process took (maybe) forty-five seconds per album, and — if you elected to never listen to those songs, even once — you lost nothing. People would download albums just because they were bored. Since the advent (and fall) of Napster in 1999, consumers’ relationship to music as a commodity completely collapsed. Supply became unlimited, so demand became irrelevant. A better argument from Dotcom would have been that the $13 billion he was accused of “reappropriating” was not actually $13 billion, but merely the projected value of what such exchanges would have been worth in 1998 (and only if the world had become some kind of strange musical utopia where consumers immediately purchased every single album they were remotely intrigued by).
Weirder still is that the charge of music theft isn’t even the main reason media conglomerates wanted Dotcom’s arrest. Their real concern was the increasing potential for the pirating of feature-length films, which is only feasible through this kind of server (relative to the size of mp3 music clips, film files are massive). The movie industry makes the music industry look like a food co-op (in 2011, global film revenue was $87 billion). Kim Dotcom clearly understood this, which prompted him to make the kind of move usually reserved for the Joker: Despite being under arrest, he wrote an open letter to the Hollywood Reporter, mocking the film industry’s inability to understand the future of its own vehicle. His twelve-paragraph letter opens like a Tweet: “Dear Hollywood: The Internet frightens you.” And he just keeps going . . .
(paragraph 2): “You get so comfortable with your ways of doing business that any change is perceived as a threat. The problem is, we as a society don’t have a choice: The law of human nature is to communicate more efficiently.”
(paragraph 4): “My whole life is like a movie. I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for the mind-altering glimpse at the future in Star Wars. I am at the forefront of creating the cool stuff that will allow creative works to thrive in an Internet age. I have the solutions to your problems. I am not your enemy.”
(paragraph 7): “The people of the Internet will unite. They will help me. And they are stronger than you. We will prevail in the war for Internet freedom and innovation that you have launched. We have logic, human nature and the invisible hand on our side.”
The document concludes with Dotcom’s signature snark: “This open letter is free of copyright. Use it freely.” Technically, he’s trying to forward his opinion on how copyright law should be applied, based on the principle that the laws governing ownership over intellectual property are outdated and not designed for the machinations of the Internet age. But that’s not what interests me. What interests me is his personality and his leverage — and in the case of Dotcom, those qualities are connected.
If you’ve ever worked in an office filled with computers (which, at this point, is the only kind of office that exists), you’ve undoubtedly had some kind of complicated, one-sided relationship with whoever worked in the IT department. “IT” stands for “information technology.” [An easy illustration of the one-sidedness of this relationship can be quickly illustrated by asking random people what the “I” and “T” literally represent in that acronym. You may be surprised by the results.] Now, there are exceptions to every rule, and I don’t want to unfairly stereotype anyone. But people fucking hate IT guys. They want to knife them in the throat and pour acid in their ears. They want to see them arrested for the possession of kiddie porn.
There are two reasons why this is.
The first is that workers typically encounter IT people only when something is already wrong with their desktop (there just aren’t any situations where you want someone to be doing things to your computer that you can’t do yourself). But the second reason is the one that matters more. Regardless of their station within the office hierarchy, there’s never any debate over how much power the IT department has: It’s borderline infinite. They control all, and they have access to everything. They can’t fire you, but they could get you fired in twenty-four hours. You may have a despotic boss who insists he won’t take no for an answer, but he’ll take it from an IT guy. He’ll eat shit from an IT guy, day after day after day.
Specialists in information technology are the new lawyers. Long ago, lawyers realized that they could make themselves culturally essential if they made the vernacular of contracts too complex for anyone to understand except themselves. They made the language of contracts unreadable on purpose. [Easy example: I can write a book, and my editor can edit a book . . . but neither one of us can read and understand the contract that allows those things to happen.] IT workers became similarly unstoppable the moment they realized virtually every machine powering the modern world is too complicated for the average person to fix or calibrate. And they know this. This is what makes an IT guy different from you. He might make less money, he might have less social prestige, and people might look at him in the cafeteria like he’s a morlock — but he can act however he wants. He can be nice, but only if he feels like it. He can ignore the company dress code. He can lie for no reason whatsoever (because how would anyone understand what he’s lying about?). He can smoke weed at lunch, because he’ll still understand your iMac better than you. It doesn’t matter how he behaves: The IT department dominates technology, and technology dominates the rest of us. And this state of being creates a new kind of personality. It creates someone like Kim Dotcom, a man who’s essentially an IT guy for the entire planet.
“I’m an easy target,” Mr. Dotcom claims in his defense. “My flamboyance, my history as a hacker. I’m not American. I’m living somewhere in New Zealand, around the world. I have funny number plates on my cars. I’m an easy target.” (Kim Dotcom drives around in luxury vehicles with license plates that read GUILTY.) There is, certainly, something endearing about Kim Dotcom’s attitude. He acts like a man who finds his own obesity hilarious. His relationship to pop culture gives him a childlike appeal. (He once made himself the main character in a seminal flash-animation film that centered on the cartoonish murder of Bill Gates. He named his animated alter ego Richard Kimball, the wrongly accused hero from The Fugitive.) Sometimes it seems like he can’t possibly be serious. (After his arrest, he recorded an anti-copyright ABBA-like pop song titled “Mr. President” in which he directly compares himself to Martin Luther King.) In general, Americans enjoy the idea of computer hackers and prefer to imagine them as precocious elves. (Somehow, the touchstone for how hackers behave is still based on Matthew Broderick’s performance in the 1983 film WarGames.) Dotcom is arrogant, but not unlikable; at the highest possible level, being an IT guy is vaguely cool. Yet his underlying message is troubling. He starts by arguing, “Change is good,” which is only a semi-defensible position to begin with. But that evolves into “Change will happen whether y
ou like it or not.” He uses phrases like “The law of human nature is to communicate more efficiently,” which makes it seem like he’s proposing something natural and obvious. But all he’s really proposing is the business model for his own company (which might not be diabolical, but certainly isn’t altruistic). He’s trying to initiate an era when content is free and content providers make all the money, but he still wants to frame it like a more grassroots system (“The people of the Internet will unite”). Would his espoused structure actually be better? I don’t think it’s possible to know. But I do know that any argument attacking Dotcom will come from a position of sad technological inferiority. It will seem unsophisticated and antediluvian. It’s easier to just embrace Dotcom’s viewpoint, even if it’s self-serving and unfair; about a year after the initial raid, he launched another sharing service (this time simply called MEGA) that utilizes cloud technology. I suspect it will succeed. He is, in many ways, the most depressing kind of villain: the kind we must agree with in order to stay competitive. The only other option is being trampled.