Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent: The Blogosphere and its asymmetric discontents
If so many people are doing this, the logic goes, and it is so effective that the only possible response is so strident, and yet they can only punish so few people, the balance of benefit against risk is skewed way over to the little guys. In other words, in an asymmetric conflict, once the monolithic side starts to fight you, it has lost. The only way for the monolith to win the game is not to play at all.
There are two obvious ways to apply this idea: one is to map the RIAA’s strategy of spending their energy prosecuting their customers onto it. It works there. The larger entity fails to see an opportunity and manages transform itself from a benign money machine to the most vilified industry in the West.
But what of the larger, more serious issues? What about Western culture, or more precisely the US, as the monolith under attack from small numbers of terrorists (of whatever stripe: I’m not willing to defame the hundreds of millions of non-violent Muslims by labelling the WTC attacks as being an Islam-endorsed action)? How does the monolith respond and “win”?
I think in both cases, the monolith’s strategy is to treat with the opposition as individuals: what does an individual member of the music-buying public want? I think it’s been established that they want to listen to music they have bought, wherever they are, regardless of format, and they want to be able to buy more in smaller units. They want to hear tracks or songs and program their own entertainment. And it appears obvious they’ll do it, whether the RIAA’s members ever figure out to make money from it or not.
On a much more serious topic, it would make sense to find out what Al Qaeda’s soldiers want, behind the “death to America” chants. A few radical clerics and oppressive governments have combined to focus the energy and discontent of multiple generations on the West, to keep themselves in power. How to go over the heads of those who benefit from the continued hostilities to those who pay for them with their lives should be considered, rather than knocking over suspect foreign governments and occupying them. I have to think we’re doing things the most expensive way, on many levels.