This is about shades of grey (usually charcoal) more than painting things black, but…
- As an early candidate for this year's Turkey Awards, the conspicuous consumption of cryptocurrency tycoons driving the art market in 2021 might even require a recount for last year. Award-selection fraud — it's everywhere! But there's a more disturbing undercurrent in the very inquiry: Cui bono? It sure as hell isn't the artists, whether those working today or those of the past, the ones who couldn't make a living from their art… which has disturbing implications for "who are the artists?" in the first place.
- No more so than the closed culture of publishing. This is one of the unanticipated side effects of "the canon": What it excludes, and fails to preserve, at least as much as anything else. Consider, for the moment, something very British indeed: The Child ballads, and the combination of "editorial role" and methods in both selecting art to preserve and deselecting art we'll never know of. The "preserver"'s first name should be a big hint: "Lord."
- But from the annals of surrealism, consider manuscript theft. One of the undercurrents in this story — one entirely neglected — is what was being "stolen"; if you look at either the story or the other public statements about it (both during the "investigative phase" and otherwise), you'll notice that the sources were as white as the paper the books would eventually have been printed on. There were a few — very few — exceptions; but it feeds directly back into the preceding sausage.
- But that sure as hell beats giving music producers a copyright interest. Part of this problem arises from "who the hell is the 'producer,' anyway?" — and this is not a transparent or easy question amenable to a rule, and perhaps not even to a standard. Too often, the "producer" of recorded music is a patron with little or no actual involvement in the creative process… or at least no more than a girl on a beach, or worse yet a mere patron (however magnificent).
If all we meant by "producer" was "recording engineer," there would be something closer to a legitimate claim of copyright; in recorded music, there's at least some decisionmaking, some creative judgment, involved in the actual process of recording. Some; probably not enough; no more than editors who aren't really coauthors (and there are both more and fewer of them than is well known).
- Conversely, there's misapplied creativity that surprises precisely no one familiar with the local cop culture (arrest records near Pioneer Square in the 70s are… interesting, and well-known even then), with psyops, or with the history of misapplied counterinsurgency and suppression of dissent. Think there's a copyright interest anywhere in there? There's certainly something approaching "creativity"…
And on this note, a big fat raspberry to Profs Packer and Van Bavel, whose analysis of tribalism turns entirely on the definition — both in general and in specific instances — of "tribe." If there's one aspect of tribalism that worldwide guarantees conflicts, it is the largely self-selected tribe consisting of "law-enforcement personnel" — and their patrons, both "legitimate" and otherwise. The function is a necessary one; the selection mechanisms/precepts and "us against them" mentality, not so much.
- It's only a very, very short step from "the tribe of law enforcement" to vestiges and inherited benefits of slavery. That step may nonetheless involve a stumble over learning about it, even before actually coming to terms with it. Which, necessarily, involves contemplating the possibility that one's ancestors were selfish, ignorant bastards, not above committing (or at least acquiescing in) atrocities so long as there was a hope that it might improve their immediate prospects — something that we don't do a very good job of either accepting or thinking about in the first place.
- Far from least, I'm going to break one of my internal rules and link to something at a publication I find ordinarily hypocritical and unreliable… because this time it's the clearest set of directions to keep your phone use from being further monetized by a monopolist. Not to mention others to whom you have not given permission; just who are those "third parties"? Think any of them might own real property in Miami (see above, and remember that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean They're not out to get you)?
One should wonder if the FCC might be interested in this sort of thing. But only if one was more than a bit Pollyannish and unfamiliar with the concept of captured agencies (PDF).