PIPA

A bunch of websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit, BoingBoing, Craigslist, ICanHazCheezeburger (is that the right number of Zs?) and others have either shut down or done something else visible today to protest SOPA and PIPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act (as it is called in the U.S. House of Representatives) and the Protect I.P. Act (as a similar, complementary act is called in the U.S. Senate). Here’s the video that’s been going around—by the creator of the brilliant series Goodie Bag and Everything is a Remix that takes a stab at explaining it.

If passed by both bodies and signed into law by the President, these bills, along with similar government actions that are lining up in other countries, would, like Armageddon and Deep Impact, deliver profound, expensive, and oddly symmetrical shock waves to the Internet, both in the United States and around the world. That includes Overthinking It.

But, also like Armageddon and Deep Impact, people disagree on just how bad or crassly commercial they are. Votes are coming up, so now is the time to take action if you want to take action, whether you are of the Bruce Willis or Morgan Freeman schools of asteroid-stopping or asteroid-coping.

A lot of us here at Overthinking It have strong feelings about SOPA and PIPA. We try not to use the site to endorse specific political positions or candidates, so we did not shut down today. Still, without Wikipedia, we have no way of producing new content. So we decided to make this neutral official statement on behalf of the site and save our personal opinions for the comment thread.

SOPA

So let’s open the conversation to our writers and readers! What do you think about SOPA and PIPA? What do you think about copyrights? Who do you think should be responsible for identifying lapses or wrongs on the Internet, and what powers should they have to address them? What does our large international readership think of this American issue?

For example, why does the Rdio terms of service care if I make a derivative work of Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” which would not usually be covered by copyright? Do they think it would be commercially viable if I did? Should I make it anyway? Would “We Found Love In a Homeless Place” be inappropriate?

We’ve been thinking of adding forums around here for a while, and this seems like the perfect test case for whether our notoriously civil community can manage to discuss something controversial without being jerks, like the rest of the internet. So sound off in the comments!

FURTHER READING

The Stop Online Piracy Act — H.R.3261.IH — introduced in House

The Protect I.P. Act of 2011 — S.968 — introduced in the Senate

Write Your Representative, from the U.S. House of Representatives

How to Contact U.S. Senators, from the U.S. Senate

“We Found Love,” Rihanna

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Unless you’re Rebecca Black, the accidental YouTube sensation, and the number one entry in 2011′s Google Zeitgeist:

I’m sorry. Did you forget that Rebecca Black and “Friday” happened? Let me remind you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfVsfOSbJY0

In a way, I suppose that the dilemma of choosing between the front seat and the back seat is indicative of the great policy split of our era between advocates of government intervention in macroeconomics and advocates of a more laissez-faire approach. In a way.

Keynes vs. Hayek: which seat should I taaaake?

But in all seriousness, it’s clear that, once again, the Google Zeitgeist is anything but a zeitgeist. It doesn’t represent the true spirit of the times; it just represents what people search for on the internet (celebrities and technology news, plus a horrific disaster thrown in for good measure). But it does represent something significant, given the ubiquity of Google and its position as the first stop for many people on their way to other parts of the internet. So with that in mind, let’s use this as an opportunity to revisit the Rebecca Black “Friday” phenomenon, several months after its peak and likely at one of her last moments of relevance in pop culture.

For those of you who lost interest in Rebecca Black several months ago, here’s a quick update on her post- “Friday” adventures. She’s released two other songs, appeared in the Katy Perry music video “Last Friday Night,” and even scored an endorsement deal with Australian telecom company Telstra. That’s the good news. The bad news is that her subsequent singles have seen diminishing success, much less anything close to the notoriety achieved by “Friday,”  and worst of all, she was bullied out of her middle school.

She was the most searched for person on the entire Internet, she appeared in a Katy Perry music video, and yet, she experienced the ultimate alienation that any young person could face: exile from her school and her peer group. In the same year. She went from complete anonymity to near-total ubiquity to the ash heap of history (or at least to its outer edges). In the same year.

It would be too easy to ascribe this extreme volatility to the fast-paced, zero attention span information age. That certainly is at play here, but what’s far more interesting (not to mention relevant to the ostensible topic of this article, Google Zeitgeist), is the accidental, serendipitous nature of the whole affair. Presumably, nobody sat down with a master plan to create a song/music video so terrible and yet so appealing that it would catapult a nondescript middle-school girl into worldwide fame and the top of a list of most popular searches on Google for the year. Technology allowed this accident to happen, but it’s still an accident. An exception that proves the rule that, in spite of oddball viral fads that produce huge sensations from the grassroots, our world views are still dominated by hegemonic influencers and tastemakers, just as they were in the days before the Internet.

Look at the rest of the top ten list.

Six of the top ten are essentially the products of huge corporate publicity machines: a major label musician (Adele), mass market technology products (Battlefield 3, Google+, the iPhone, and the iPad), and the man who ran one of the best corporate publicity machines of all time. The other three are essentially current event items: Ryan Dunn, the Jackass star who was killed in a car accident, Casey Anthony, the subject of a sensational trial, and the aforementioned Japanese tsunami/nuclear disaster.

Rebecca Black may avoid the seemingly inevitable fate of obscurity and go on to a long and successful career as a musician. But assuming she doesn’t, she will remain an exception, an accident, rather than a truly zeitgeist-defining moment.

Which was a very long way of saying what we knew along: that the Google Zeitgeist isn’t a zeitgeist at all.

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Some folks in the tech press viewed yesterday’s iPhone 4S announcement as a disappointment. But if that’s true, then it’s an awesome testament to just how far Steve had raised the bar. Poor Tim Cook got up there and demonstrated Suri, a new voice recognizing “personal assistant.” You ask it to remind you to buy milk when you arrived at the grocery store, and it WILL. You ask it for good burger joints in the neighborhood, and it will FIND THEM. You can now have a conversation with your phone, which used to be something that only Tony Stark could do.

Tim Cook announced this, plus a processor seven times as fast as the iPhone 4 and a camera with twice as many pixels. And immediately, Apple’s stock tanked. This is what Steve Jobs accomplished; he blew our minds so many times that we came to EXPECT mind-blowingness. It was no longer enough to have a phone that could take dictation and shoot high definition video. People expected a phone that could bend the very fabric of space-time itself. A part of me wonders if Steve Jobs lived, would he have been able to keep meeting the insane expectations people had for him? How many rabbits can one man pull out of his iHat?

Let’s not forget that in addition to all the Apple stuff, Jobs was CEO of Pixar during the Toy Story days. Un-freaking-believable.

A line outside an Apple store. This happens ALL THE TIME.

Of course, Apple products are about way more than the technology, the same way a BMW is about more than its spec sheet. They are objects of desire. They are personal statements. Think about all those recent graduates who can barely afford ramen, but still wouldn’t be caught dead using a PC. Apple products have an aura that’s every bit as carefully engineered as their aircraft-grade aluminum casings. Steve could take credit for that. He had a vision of what he wanted Apple to be, and he injected that spirit into every aspect of the business. He oversaw the software. He oversaw the hardware. He even made sure the packaging was special. (Man, Apple made some gorgeous packaging over the years.) He would send everything back again and again until it was perfect. As Mr. Wrather pointed out to me this evening, “You had the sense as a consumer that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. Love him or hate him, Jobs had his hand on the wheel.”

And let’s not forget those audacious ads the company produced! I’m sure that most of Steve’s obituaries are going to quote the famous 1997 “Think Different” commercial: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels.” It debuted shortly after Jobs returned to the company he co-founded, after a 12 year hiatus. Jobs helped to write the text, and picked images of his personal heroes to accompany it. Bob Dylan. Jim Henson. Thomas Edison.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX9GTUMh490

Here’s the thing about that ad: it’s unbelievably douchy. This is a COMPUTER ad that doesn’t say a thing about the product and instead shows stock footage of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. Freaking GANDHI. Can you imagine any other company in the world using those two men’s images to sell a product and getting away with it?

But people LOVED that ad! Hell, I love that ad too! I just watched it twice and got a little misty-eyed! It should not work, but it does.

And that, my friends, is the Reality Distortion Field. The term was coined in 1981 (30 years ago!) to describe Jobs, and it’s dead on. Because let’s face it: the iPhone, at the end of the day, is just a phone. But you wouldn’t know that from the people who waited in line for days to get one. I sympathize with every other technology company out there. They can try (and even succeed) at making better technology than Apple, but they can’t design anything people will shower with as much love. Under Steve Jobs, Apple designed legitimately amazing things, but his greatest skill was making people feel those products were even MORE amazing. Even if you’re an Apple hater, you have to admire the man’s ability to sell a product, the way you admire Harold Hill even if he isn’t the bandleader he says he is.

The platonic ideal of the CEO.

But here’s what I’ll miss most about Steve Jobs. Quickly, how many CEOs do you actually admire and like? How many CEOs do you think are cool? ANY? In an age where CEOs are mostly in the news for their oversized golden parachutes, here was a guy who made millions of people want MBAs. He was smart, he was talented, and even in a culture that loves to sneer at its heroes, he was never the bad guy. (Yes, you can quibble all you want about Apple’s totalitarian lockdown of the App Store, but no matter how greedy and authoritarian Steve Jobs may have been, the public loved him.) There are lots of talented CEOs in the world, but Jobs was our greatest celebrity CEO. And with the American economy on shaky ground, we could certainly use more of him. We want kids to look up to entrepreneurs and business leaders, and without Steve, I’m not sure who’s left.

I learned that Steve Jobs was dead on my iPhone tonight. Then I came home to write about it on my MacBook. I’m never owned a computer that didn’t come from Apple, starting with my IIc, and I doubt I ever will. It makes me happy to use Apple products. They’re user-friendly, elegant, and cool. Like Charles Shultz, Steve Jobs lived for his work, and poured himself into every detail of his creations. He may be gone, but every time I hear that warm startup chime, his Reality Distortion Field will be in full effect.

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Does this come in MP3 or Ogg Vorbis?

Of course, it’s been behind the times for many years. This style of gramophone with the protruding horn went out of style around 1920, and more generally speaking, vinyl records lost their status as the main means of reproduction of recorded sound around 1988. I’m not referring to that. Instead, I’m referring to two things…

1. The award uses a representation of a physical medium that contains a sound recording. Physical media, especially when it comes to music, is essentially dead. Music is either streamed from the internet or downloaded into files that can be perfectly copied ad infinitum and know no physical boundaries.

2. There’s a big ‘ol speaker attached to the thing. Music is increasingly consumed through earphones attached to portable devices like smartphones and iPods. What was once a social, stationary activity is now intensely personal and constantly on the move.

Like I said, hopelessly behind the times. So what’s to be done about this? We could wait for the music industry to catch up to current trends

….OK stop laughing….

or we could take the initiative and suggest a new design for the Grammy award. Let’s give it a shot, shall we?

First, we need to understand what exactly the Grammy is awarding. Although it’s predominately a music award, keep in mind that its governing body is the “National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences”–no mention of “music” in the name–and that there are two “spoken word” award categories. So although it’s tempting to create an award that’s a physical representation of music, like an instrument or musical notes, that would actually be a little too specific. Interestingly, the award in its current form acknowledges this and reminds us that this is really all about the capture and reproduction of sound. It just so happens that a lot of that sound involves music. Even a microphone wouldn’t be appropriate, as it’s fairly common these days to produce music that involves no recording of actual instruments or voices.

So if we’re trying to create an award for the capture and reproduction of sound that may or may not involve music and increasingly doesn’t involve physical media or public broadcast of that sound, what does that leave us with?

There is actually one specific physical object that lies at the heart of all of this activity. It’s the “digital to analog converter,” a small device, usually a small computer chip, that converts the digital representation of sound into an analog signal whose vibrations travel through speakers/headphones and eventually into your ear. I can’t cite this, but I can say with a high degree of confidence that no music/recording operation of any significant scale can escape this component. There is no such thing as an all-analog production process; even the most lo-fi artists’ tracks get uploaded to iTunes eventually.

So ladies and gentlemen, meet the Grammy of the 21st century:

It would look great on Justin Bieber's mantel.

Readers: What do you think? Do you agree that the old gramophone award is hopelessly out of date? Do you have a better suggestion for a new award? Sound off in the comments!

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Note: this graph is changing as the year 2010 draws to a close. As of this writing, iPad has inched ahead of Chatroulette for the top spot.

It’s fascinating stuff, no doubt. But after perusing and pondering the results for a while (“Wow, look how searches on the Haiti Earthquake and the BP oil spill tailed off.” “Who the hell is Nicki Minaj, and am I officially not young or hip for not knowing?”), I noticed that Google was using some pretty grandiose language to describe its Zeitgeist study. Here are a couple examples:

“Based on the aggregation of billions of search queries people typed into Google this year, Zeitgeist captures the spirit of 2010.”

“We hope you enjoy this look back to what was on the minds of Americans throughout 2010.”

These statements got the Overthinking it juices flowing. What exactly is a “zeitgeist,” and is Google Zeitgeist really that? If not, then what is it?

Your first instinct may have been to Google “zeitgeist” to get a definition, so I’ll save you the trouble and put one here to help us frame our analysis:

“The defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.” – Oxford American Dictionary

This is where I take Google to task for playing a bit fast and loose with the use of the word “zeitgeist.” To me, Google’s Zeitgeist actually tells us very little about the actual “spirit or mood” of our times. Heck, it barely even shows us the “ideas and beliefs” of our times. It just shows us the stupid crap we’re looking for on the internet, and there’s a pretty large gulf between that stupid crap and anything approaching the spirit or mood of our times.

As this is a SFW blog, I was somewhat limited in my choices for Chatroulette screenshots

Chatroulette is not an idea or belief, nor is the iPad. Justin Bieber, for all of his popularity and 6 million followers on Twitter, is a pop singer. Now, are all of these parts of larger societal trends? Sure, one could easily argue that yes, all of them are. Social media, obsession with gadgets, Bieber Fever, etc. And do these larger societal trends help make up the “spirit or mood” of our times–that lofty “Zeitgeist”? Sure they do. But Google doesn’t claim that its search trends are ingredients of social trends that are part of the zeitgiest (with a little z). Google claims that its Zeitgeist (with a big Z) “captures the spirit of 2010.” Google thinks that is search trends ARE the zeitgeist (with a little z). And in doing so, it’s taking an extremely miopic view on the American psyche. According to the world of Google, we are what we search for.

There are so many things that are feeding into the true zeitgeist of the moment that just aren’t represented at all. On the Zeitgeist US page, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, two generation-defining conflicts with incalculable national security implications, are nowhere to be found. “Unemployment” makes the list of top 10 fastest rising news searches, but that’s the sole mention of the economy and the growing sense of malaise around America’s dimming prospects for prosperity.

Now, I’m not complaining that Americans don’t care about these issues (they clearly do, at least about the economy). I’m not even complaining that Americans aren’t using Google (and the internet) enough to learn more about these things. No, I’m really complaining that Google doesn’t have either the self-awareness or humility to consider that the true zeitgeist–the spirit of the times–might not be easily captured by billions of entries into its search box and that its complex algorithms and near-stranglehold on the internet aren’t powerful enough to deduce or display what any moderately well informed citizen could tell you about the state of his/her country.

There is, of course, an alternate reading of Google Zeitgeist, which is that celebrity gossip and gadget-obsessed consumerism actually do represent the spirit of our times far better than my disjointed ramblings about American economic and security anxieties. I refuse to believe that, if for no other reason than that I see signs of that anxiety every day, in real life, in real people, and I know that anxiety runs deep, even if it’s not getting typed into a search box as often as Justin Bieber.

So Google, I have some advice for you: take out your dictionary. Review the definition of zeitgeist. Look into your soul. Look into the American soul. And next year, just call the damn thing “Top Google Search Trends of 2011,” or “Google Bieber Fever Index 2011.” I for one will appreciate your honesty.

Justin Bieber is always trending in my heart.

[Yikes, I didn't mean for this to get so preachy at the end, but hey, sometimes it just happens! So what do you think--is the search engine tail wagging the dog? Am I just, like, totally overthinking the definition of "zeitgeist"? What's your favorite German word that you throw into your everyday speech to make yourself sound smarter? Sound off in the comments!]

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Yeah, I thought so. Although SPVTW functions as a fantastical application of video game rules and aesthetics into “real life,” I can’t help but to read it as a prescient look into the future of our increasingly videogame-ified culture. And a future where a “pee bar” hovers over someone taking a piss isn’t actually that far-fetched; in fact, most of the basic ingredients for it exist here and now.

1. Applications of video game rules to real life SPVTW’s video game aesthetic goes beyond just the surface look and feel of the movie; it’s also a commentary on how a generation brought up on video games seemingly prefers the tangible rewards system of video games to the ambiguities and dissatisfactions of adult life. This is most clearly evinced in scenes where Scott literally “gets a life” by grabbing a video game iconic representation of a “life” and where he “levels up” after accomplishing a noteworthy task:

Video game developers have been aware of this for a long time, even if they weren’t aware of the now well documented studies of the physiological effects of games on the reward and motivation parts of the human brain. Recently, however, social media programmers sought to liberate these concepts from the confines of video games and their enclosed, virtual worlds and apply them to everyday life. In Foursquare, you get points for checking into restaurants, bars, etc., and you compete against your friends for earning “badges”/achievements and getting the high score of the week.

In Epic Win, you earn points from checking chores and unpleaseant tasks from your to-do list.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmKwF_Si734

Earning points and unlocking levels isn’t just for Mario to do in the Mushroom Kingdom. You, Joe Shmoe, can do that in “real life” and get a slice of that same dopamine-laden satisfaction for going out to a new bar, or just taking out the garbage.  Which is great, but there’s an important limitation to this game-ification of life: although all of this comes from actions performed in the “real world,” these graphical representations of achievement are limited to the abstract screenspace of a website or a smartphone app.

But that barrier is quickly disappearing, thanks to…

2. Augmented Reality

Imagine if you held your smartphone camera up to a city block and you saw all of your Foursquare or Epic Win points and achievements layered on top of the camera image. Augmented reality apps already allow smartphone users to see restaurant reviews and subway directions in this way, and it’s no big leap to imagine any other location-specific data, such as Foursquare check-ins, done in the same way.

So now we’re able to merge Foursquare-esque game data with the space around us, but this is still limited to the view available on hand with a smartphone. Well, not for long…

3. Contact Lenses with Embedded LEDs

This is the last crucial barrier standing between our hum-drum normal lives and a SPVTW all-game-all-the-time existence. With LED contact lenses in your eyes, augmented reality is no longer confined to a smart phone; it’s on all the time. Of course, this concept of an always-on HUD view has been with us for a while:

But most imaginations of these types of displays have been about fairly straightforward information display. The key leap to make here is to bring game-like data into the persistent view of the world to create the constant presence of incentive and reward, just like it is in a video game:

What does this all mean? Where is this going?

Let me go back to a point I made earlier: “SPVTW’s video game aesthetic goes beyond just the surface look and feel of the movie; it’s also a commentary on how a generation brought up on video games seemingly prefers the tangible rewards system of video games to the ambiguities and dissatisfactions of adult life.”

I think this will only become truer over time. Video games may take some of the blame for this, but most of this comes from the developed worlds’ shifts to service-based economies from manufacturing-based economies. When we don’t make stuff on a day to day basis, and we don’t sell our produce or shoes on the market ourselves, we become divorced both from the fruits of our labor as well as the immediate, direction connection between labor and its reward. Cranking out Excel spreadsheets in an office, collecting a steady paycheck, and living a modern, hum-drum existence can often be very boring and lacking in reward, so it’s no surprise that software developers are bringing video games and their concepts of rewards to everyday life. Foursquare may not be huge now, but it’s getting bigger every day because people are responding to this need for reward and achievement.

If given the option to augment their everyday lives and views on the world with game-like points and achievements, I think a lot of people would choose to do so. And this may not necessarily be a bad thing. Sure, many would argue that failure to find motivation, reward, and achievement in plain, unaugmented reality is in fact a failure at life, not life failing them. And that would be fair. But if the powerful reward systems of video games could be leverage to steer personal behavior in positive ways, that could make real differences in peoples’ lives that simply could not be achieved in other ways. Weight loss. Better grades. Brushing your teeth before you go to bed. Improved job performance. Would that be so bad?

Granted, I know that such a widespread video-game-ification of real life would not be so straightforwardly positive. There’s the issue of adoption–unless the nanny state forcibly implants these LED displays in our eyes–and of course perverse incentives and gaming the system that undermine even the most well thought out scoring rubriks.

Any system of bringing video-games rules to real life, no matter how deeply embedded and well thought-out they may be, inevitably must exist apart from the messy reality it tries to bring order to. To this point, it’s important to remember that Scott Pilgrim and his video game perspective stand against, or rather, versus, The World. Sure, Scott’s video game rules help him achieve self-actualization and get the girl, but they also hindered him along the way and kept him from developing into a functioning adult.

I can’t come down firmly on the pro or con side of this hyper video game-ified augmented reality life, but I still do believe that this sort of thing is coming soon, and that we should be prepared for it when it comes. So don’t blame me when everyone around you is leveling up and leaving you behind.

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Since 2008, more than eight million people have watched online videos from the Hitler Finds Out About… meme, in which the subtitles from a clip from the 2005 German film Die Untergang (known in the English speaking world as Downfall) are replaced in order to make it appear that Hitler is very angry about Michael Jackson, video games, Hillary Clinton, Kobe or the fact that everyone forgot his birthday.

The meme was huge, one of the biggest of its time, with hundreds of variations and millions of views. Last week, Constantin Films, the company that owns the film started pulling the videos off of YouTube claiming that they violated the company’s copyright.  Many of them are still up, but the most popular ones (including the one where Hitler gets kicked off of Xbox Live – >6 million views) were the first to go.

The deletion of this entire meme may seem inconsequential, but for a culture built on mashups, this copyright fight is a serious step in the wrong direction. It’s also one of the worst business decisions since, well, that guy at Goldman who didn’t realize that email can be subpoenaed as evidence.

If you haven’t seen one of these, watch Hitler discuss the meme himself or Google “Hitler parody” and choose your topic.

Hitler was upset when McCain nominated Palin.

When it came out, Downfall generated a lot of controversy for humanizing Hitler. Critics worried that by showing him as a man under extraordinary pressure who also had a kind word for his secretaries, the horrors he perpetrated would seem less evil. In an age when we know the intimate personal details of our leaders, I argue that we could all use a little reminder that just because a politician has traits with which we can sympathize doesn’t mean that he or she isn’t capable of atrocity.

When these parodies started generating huge interest, another wave of criticism worried that making Hitler a comedic figure similarly threatened to mitigate the world’s repugnance towards the Nazis. While I understand their argument, I can’t help but think about Attila the Hun.

Attila lived during the 5th century CE, during which time he led the Huns from the Baltic Sea to France, burning, raping and pillaging the whole time. He was so feared by the Romans that he earned the nickname “The Scourge of God” and was the boogeyman that Roman children feared for centuries after his death.  1500 years ago in Europe, Attila was the worst person in the world.

Today, we remember so little about him that US Presidential candidates will wholeheartedly endorse books that purport to impart the great secrets of Attila’s leadership.  That’s how it goes.  History shows us that moral outrage, however warranted, has an expiration date.  A few hundred years from now, most people will remember that Hitler was a bad guy, but as has happened to Attila, Genghis Khan or Nero, the details will start to get fuzzy and Hitler will lose his menace. These videos were part of that inevitable trend.

Apparently, Attila would have come in a distant third to Clinton and H.W. Bush.

Unlike its production company, Downfall director Oliver Hirschbiegel likes the parodies.  In a recent interview, he makes a different point about their effect on how Hitler is remembered:

“The point of the film was to kick these terrible people off the throne that made them demons, making them real and their actions into reality,” he says. “I think it’s only fair if now it’s taken as part of our history, and used for whatever purposes people like.”

But we digress. We’re not here to talk about the film, we’re here to talk about why pulling the Downfall parodies off of YouTube was a very bad idea.

In 2007, very few people in America knew about Downfall. It had been nominated for a Best Foreign Language Oscar, but that section is when most of America goes out for more chips. In theatrical release, the film earned only $5 million in the US (out of ~$90 million worldwide).

But then came the meme. In 2008, millions of people were suddenly made aware of the film. If a marketing firm had started it, it might have been the single most successful viral marketing campaign of all time.

According to www.the-numbers.com, retailers like Wal-Mart don’t publicly report DVD sales, so it’s tough to figure out what any given film makes after it goes to video. The only rubric I’ve been able to find is Amazon.com’s sales ranking system.

The other Foreign Language Oscar contenders in 2005 were As It Is In Heaven (The 4,666th most popular film on Amazon’s movies and TV category), The Chorus (#1,886), Yesterday (#19,092), and the winner, The Sea Inside (#25,568, even though it starred the now famous Javier Bardem). 2010’s winner, El Secreto de sus Ojos, is ranked #934.

Despite the hard work of five or six people, the "Javier Bardem hears about..." meme failed to take off.

Downfall, an also ran from five years ago, is ranked #475.   Considering that Amazon has hundreds of thousands of DVDs for sale: 475 is pretty damn good for a German film that almost nobody saw in theaters.

Destroying a meme that has kept your five-year-old foreign language film raking in serious cash long past its predicted expiration date? Good work, Constantin Films.

This was a bad move for Constantin Films, but a worse move for our culture.  While not an expert on copyright law, I believe in Fair Use and free speech. That’s why I’m a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and why I’ll let them give you all the details. For those who don’t want to click through, suffice it to say that these videos don’t actually violate Constantin’s copyright and, as parodies, should be protected by the legal doctrine of fair use.  If you look at the four factors that determine fair use, the fact that the company’s making a fortune off of this meme should singlehandedly make the legality of these parodies obvious.

Fair use is important because our culture is a mashup, a conglomeration of ideas and themes that have come before, remixed by each generation to fit the world in which it lives. The ideas of the past are the fuel of the future and if copyright protection forces us to stop borrowing ideas from one another, our culture will soon run out of gas.

Or, as Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing put it: “Three or four billion years ago, by some process that we don’t understand, molecules began to copy themselves. We are the distant descendants of those early copyists – copying is in our genes. We have a word for things that don’t copy: ‘dead’.”

You want proof?

George Lucas grew up on Buck Rogers and loved Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. Now we have the original trilogy.

Twilight is a 21st Century romance novel retelling of Dracula, a 19th Century Romantic novel. Stoker’s Count was himself a hybrid of a sadistic Eastern European warlord and a bunch of old ghost stories.

J.K. Rowling = J.R.R. Tolkien + Judy Bloom

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter? Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? This is what we do. This is where our culture comes from. There are no original ideas and that’s ok – our minds are designed to learn from and build on the foundation of the past. It’s a phenomenon that’s accelerated incredibly in the last few decades, but it goes back pretty far.

Virgil took themes, characters and structure from the Iliad and the Odyssey, stirred in the legend of Romulus and Remus, sprinkled on Julius Ceasar’s claim to have descended from Venus and served up the Aeneid, which has been on every required reading list for the last two milennia.

Shakespeare stole from every source he could find and he’s been on those same lists for 400 years.

The US Constitution is a fine cocktail of Roman Republican structures and Enlightenment ideals garnished with a slice of the Magna Carta.

Anyone know what "Thou shalt not" would have been in the original Hebrew?

The King James Bible, the one most American churches use today, may be the greatest mashup of them all. The Torah, or Old Testament, was the collected writings of centuries of Jewish scholars and priests who combined stories from Babylon (the Flood) with local history and legends, Greek philosophy, health tips (bacon has always been bad for you) and their own moral prescriptions. A couple of centuries later, after the Torah went into the public domain, Christians added four stories about Jesus, the contents of Paul’s outbox and the disturbing predictions of St. John.  Then, in 1601, King James has the whole thing subtitled in Shakespearean English. It’s now one of the most important books in Western Civilization.

Future generations will not, we must hope, base their faith, their government or their education on a four-minute video of Hitler yelling about his Xbox. Nonetheless, these videos were a unique moment of collaboration and community in which hundreds of creators and millions of fans took part. They were a fad, but one that told us a lot about who we were at that particular moment. The people behind the removal of these videos and the larger fight for stricter copyright laws fail to recognize the way that our culture has always worked.

They’re putting profit ahead of good entertainment and if they win, future generations won’t have much to Overthink.

PS: here’s the latest mashup to grab my attention.  It turns out that Super Mario Brothers is even more fun if you’re playing as MegaMan, Link or Blue Pants.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjushh-uE88

The reaction from the idiot savants on the internet was almost universally negative. Then came the October 16th debut of the “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show.” According to media reports, it wasn’t until the airing of this episode that someone at Microsoft realized that their new flagship product was going to share air time with fart jokes and racial stereotypes and subsequently pulled the plug on the special episode. “Not a fit with the Windows brand” was the official line from corporate.

There’s so much fail going on here, but neither should have been particularly surprising. Both “Family Guy” and Microsoft’s respective fails were in fact years in the making.

FAIL #1: “Family Guy” officially cedes any claim to edginess or subversiveness

Did *anybody* think this was funny?

Not that it had a whole lot to begin with, but much of the appeal of “Family Guy” rested with its subversive reputation: “Family Guy” was supposed to be the show that blew past conventional norms and pushed edgy content where no others would dare. This may have been true years ago, during the show’s original three seasons, but this is no longer the case. We’ve grown accustomed to the crass humor, non sequitur cut-aways, and gratuitous racial innuendo that used to shock and surprise us. “Family Guy” may deserve some credit for this change in taste, but nevertheless, it  fails to do anything other than dole out the same crap it’s been serving for years on end in the same predictable manner.

“Family Guy” was no longer original, edgy, or subversive by the time the Windows 7 fiasco broke, so it should have come as no surprise that the show sold itself out to the epitome of corporate dominance and the polar opposite of subsersiveness, Microsoft.

FAIL #2: Microsoft shows yet again that it doesn’t have a clue.

But Microsoft’s status as a corporate behemoth isn’t the focus of this fail. Instead, it’s the company’s repeated misreadings and miscalculations of the popular culture.

Exhibit A: the world’s first “cyber sitcom,” an excruciating attempt at associating Windows 95 with the coolest of cool at the time, “Friends”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GWQgb015Lc

Exhibit B:Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld at the shoe store, only the first of a series of utterly incomprehensible ads:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKM8kCPBn5E

And lastly, Exhibit C: The Windows 7 Launch Party promo campaign, and its accompanying painful “how to” video that went on a one way trip to YouTube infamy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ

Ouch. It’s no wonder that Microsoft always seems to come with a healthy dose of uncool in the pop culture zeitgeist.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF FAIL: Adding Insult to Injury

As if these missteps weren’t embarrassing enough on their own, both “Family Guy” and Microsoft have bitter rivals that they are loathe to lose face to.

I'm not saying that South Park is without fault, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have sold an entire episode to promoting Windows 7.

I am of course referring to “South Park” and Apple. Many regard “South Park” as far superior to “Family Guy,” both in terms of comedic and satirical value. That may be up for debate, but I doubt few would argue that “South Park” and its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, would have made a similar deal with a corporate behemoth sponsor.

Likewise, few could imagine Apple launching an abortive tie-in campaign with an awkward TV show combination. A special Snow Leopard edition of “Dancing with the Stars” that gets pulled at the last minute for “not being a fit with the Apple brand”? I think not. Apple has far better understanding and control of their brand. They create their own sense of “cool” without having to rely on awkward tie-ins with “Friends,” “Seinfeld,” or “Family Guy.”

Doesn't shoe shop with Seinfeld.

Now, I want to be clear on what it is exactly that I’m criticizing and what I’m doing when I compare and contrast these two pairs. I’m not necessarily saying that “Family Guy” should be the same satirical and subversive force that “South Park” is. And I’m not necessarily saying that Windows 7 is worse than Snow Leopard due to Microsoft’s lack of marketing and pop culture savvy.

What I am trying to criticize, however, is the clusterf@#$ of bad decisions on both sides that led to this unholy matrimony of Fail. I’m criticizing Fox and McFarlane’s shameless grab at whatever marketing dollars came their way, and I’m criticizing Microsoft’s baffling ignorance and miscalculation on this and its previous strategies. There are smart people at Fox and Microsoft. They should know better.

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Shawwwty!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIvodV2cvK0

Lyrics after the jump. Shawwwty!

I’ve done some Overthinking of Auto-Tune before

when comparing its inventor to Les Paul

And though Dr. Hildebrand and T-Pain might not be remembered as musical innovators like Les Paul,

There is no doubt that Auto-Tune is hugely influential today.

And so it’s big news when an iPhone app

comes out that promises to make you T-Pain

by integrating the auto-tune effect with some backing tracks

it allows even amateur musicians to sing like T-Pain.

But it’s very important to note that this app requires

a basic ability to sing a melody.

With the notable exception of Auto-tune the news,

Auto-tune can’t make something out of nothing.

Haters of Auto-tune may claim that this sort of app

only proves their point that Auto-tune is killing music

But I beg to differ. It can only do good

if it gets people to sing more than they normally would.

By removing barriers to making music,

Things like I Am T-Pain and Guitar Hero make music more accessible,

And that is something your violin teacher was unable to do.

So to all the haters and all the players,

I suggest you put aside your cynicism and give this a shot.

You’ll be making music, and that’s a good thing.

This has been Mark Lee for Overthinking It.

Shawwwty!

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A 12-year-old boy sits behind a desk.

BOY: Hi there. I’m Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. I wanted to tell you about some of the exciting new features we’ll be rolling out in the coming months. You guys have enjoyed the “Poke” since the beginning. In 2007, we added the Super Poke. But for those times you really want to get somebody’s attention, we’re introducing the Ultra Poke.

INT. DORM ROOM – DAY

There is a knock on the door. A COLLEGE GIRL answers it. A MAN with a clipboard stands in the hallway.

MAN: Are you Abby Smith?

COLLEGE GIRL: Yes.

He quickly pokes her hard in the chest.

COLLEGE GIRL: Ow!

MAN: Consider yourself poked!

INT. FACEBOOK OFFICE

MARK: You guys can’t seem to get enough updates on each other. So we’re adding thoughts to your News Feed.

INT. LECTURE HALL – DAY

COLLEGE GIRL #2 is looking at Facebook during class. A new message suddenly appears on her page: “Brad is fantasizing about you.”

She looks across the lecture hall, alarmed. A college guy, BRAD, is staring into space with a vacant expression. A message flashes on Brad’s computer screen: “Sarah totally knows you’re fantasizing about her.”

INT. FACEBOOK OFFICE

MARK: You thought Scrabulous was fun? Wait ‘til you play our new game, Hungry Hungry Hippulous.

FACEBOOK PAGE

A message box says, “Click OK to eat marble!”

MARK VOICEOVER: And for even more excitement, try ULTRA Hungry Hungry Hippolous!

INT. DORM ROOM – DAY

Same dorm room as before. The College Girl opens the door and sees a man in a hippo costume. He grabs her and tries to eat her.

COLLEGE GIRL: Aiiiieee!

INT. FACEBOOK OFFICE

MARK: And finally, we’re following up Facebook Chat with Facebook Hyperchat. This will give users the groundbreaking ability to interact with their friends in person.

INT. DINING HALL – DAY

COLLEGE GUY #1 is eating a burger by himself. COLLEGE GUY #2 walks up, taps him on the shoulder, and hands him a sheet of paper. It says “JOSH would like to initiate a Facebook Hyperchat with you.” There are boxes labeled “ACCEPT” and “DENY.”

College Guy #1 takes out a marker and checks “ACCEPT.” College Guy #2 sits down.

COLLEGE GUY #2: Hey man, how’s it going?

COLLEGE GUY #1: Not bad. Big test tomorrow.

INT. FACEBOOK OFFICE

MARK: We hope you enjoy these exciting Facebook innovations. And even if you don’t, what are you gonna do? Set up a Friendster profile?

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