APOCALYPSE SOON

Dick Pountain/17 October 2000 14:17/Idealog 75

The graffiti on the hoarding at the corner of Gower Street today was new and rather arresting: it simply said '1939 has returned'. Nine times out of ten when I see an apocalyptic graffito nowadays it turns out to be just fly-posting for some band - maybe a rock group called 1939 finally came back to London from a long-enforced exile in Pontypridd - but if that is not the case, then I interpret this message as meaning that we are all on the verge of war and global chaos. The graffitist is not alone because I have started receiving spam from a variety of sources including the delightfully named toolate@armageddon.co.uk (love that parochial top-level domain) informing me that, yes indeed, the world will be ending soon. Oddly enough I didn't get any of these last year so it would appear that these millenarian alarmists are also 2001-endians, which would make a sort of nerdy sense.

I remain unconvinced that civilization is ready to collapse quite yet, but I'd have to admit that autumn 2000 has been a hell of a season so far: the Israelis and Palestinians laying into each other, suicide squads in rubber dinghies blowing 600 squ. foot holes in American warships, floods in the UK, an oil crisis, a market rout of hi-tech stocks, and confirmation in the business pages that we are now well into economic deflation with all sorts of prices in free fall. However among all this sturm and drang, one item stands out for me, and that is the appearance of Napster on the cover of Time magazine. A few years ago a product this geeky would have been lucky to make the Science and Technology pages at the back, but in these hyper-aware times it's front cover news because it represents yet another possible business model for the Internet, to replace last month's (WAP) and the month's before that (B2B). What it retains in common with all its predecessors is that of course no one can make any money out of it.

The essence of the Time story was that Napster's (and Gnutella's and Freenet's) peer-to-peer file sharing ability threatens an end to the enforceability of copyright over intellectual property of all kinds, not just music: soon books, magazines, even films will be passed around free over peer-to-peer networks that are quite separate from the World Wide Web. I've devoted quite a few column inches over the years to discussing both the merits of intellectual property and the deficiencies of the Web as it is currently constituted, and I don't propose to go over those arguments again. I'll admit though that while I ultimately stand by my belief that creators must be rewarded somehow if we are to continue to get good art, my heart fails to bleed for the record industry which is currently fighting for its life against 25 million Napster users. The record business is extraordinarily rapacious by any standards, even making Hollywood look almost ethical (at least film companies risk big money to make a movie). I was reminded of this last weekend when my friend Al invited me to take some of his vinyl records which he has finally decided to relinquish, having had a CD-only hi-fi setup for years already. The cynical way that the record business killed vinyl and imposed the CD format was scandalous enough (compounded by the fact that a CD I can burn for under a quid still costs £16.99 in the shops) but now we hear that the industry is trying to pull exactly the same trick again over DVD. I doubt it will wash a second time, though I'll be happy to accept discarded CDs too should I prove wrong.

We are entering a period of deflation in part because consumers are in revolt against high prices (and probably, once Gee Dubbya Bush is elected, against taxes too) and that lends to the peer-to-peer file sharing model of free information a certain inevitability. That such a revolt may kill the goose that lays the eggs is a very real possibility, but people don't seem to be in a mood to hear it and the economic consequences may be very grave indeed. At precisely the same time, many of the world's telecomms companies have been deposed, with a bewildering suddenness, from their cosy positions as near-monopoly profitmongers into a world of crippling competition and debt, thanks to ridiculously overpaying for their third-generation mobile airwave licences. Demand for broadband services would on the face of it appear to be strong as people want to download MP3 tunes in less than half-an-hour and will soon want to swap movies too, but if they are not prepared to pay anything for content they won't want to pay very much for the carrier either, effectively shafting the telcos' business model too.

I won't pretend that I know what is going to happen next. The downside could be a world in which very little new creation takes place and all the back catalogue material just gets churned around from person to person over an increasingly congested network until everyone in the affluent West has a copy of everything (not so much an information superhighway, more an information scrapyard). The upside could be a world which gives every child free access to all of its accumulated art, science and literature. We're poised on a knife edge between these two scenarios and there's many a slip twixt cup and apocalypse.