The Napster Moment

Faced with slightly changing circumstances, a manager is able to make two choices– to modify how her system operates, or to retain the methodologies of the status quo. The brave or foolhardy manager will opt for change; to optimise the efficiency of their operation. Such a move is inherently risky; if the changes result in reduced efficiency, in failure, then she faces the blame as the manager who implemented the system. Those who want a quiet life will take the sensible option– retain the current model, and invest their energies in plastering over the cracks. With any luck, the system will outlive her tenure, and, if worst comes to worst, she can offer the defence that it was the system that was unsustainable– she just happened to be at the helm when it broke, but it’s the system she inherited and it could have happened to anyone.

This hypothesis on the inherent conservative bias in managerial practice can be applied as a general tendency. Complacency as to the efficacy of any given system tends to prevail amongst those who control the system, whether that system is the music industry, the newspaper industry or liberal capitalist democracy. People keep using the system, people keep abiding by the rules, laws and logic of the system– therefore, people must be invested in the system, must believe in the system, right?

Wrong. Whilst the ideological framework of, and popular consent for, any given system might appear to be largely intact, and ticking over nicely, that’s not in itself evidence that its clients are ideologically invested in that system. The managers continue maintaining the system, unaware of the growing contradictions within it that are threatening to realise themselves at any given point. That point occurs with the Napster Moment- the moment when technology allows the clients to circumvent the authority that manages the system. The moment refers not just to the peer-to-peer music sharing software that allowed users to obtain music free of charge (through piracy), but from the situation the music industry found itself in. For an industry that had, for so long, taken its user’s loyalty and expenditure for granted, suddenly the cat was out of the bag. This is the situation that describes The Napster Moment– a point of no-return, where, due to technological development, a defunct authority no longer has the legitimacy to enforce its hold over its users.

This is more than a technological crisis; it’s an ideological crisis. The ability to pirate music, whether through sharing CDs, taping off the radio or pirating in smaller “silo communities” (non-networked peer-to-peer associations, for example) already existed, but Napster offered a technological and ideological structure to turn peer-to-peer music trading into something which offered a genuine popular opposition to the music industry as distributors.

As a model for crisis, we can start to see it in its nascent form across cyberspace. For example Silk Road, an online anonymous marketplace which runs on Tor anonymity software, enables the trading of contraband, especially drugs and controlled substances, for bitcoins, an online crypto-currency, via mail. It’s highly possible that Silk Road, at least as a model, could spell the Napster Moment for the prohibition of drugs in western democracies. Its position here brings us back to our original point about consent: Napster and Silk Road didn’t arise from nowhere to create the ability for piracy and drug-dealing, but rather made it possible to organise those activities in such a way that their networked nature became an coherent challenge to the concept that the intellectual property regime, or the prohibitions on drugs, operate by common consent of citizens