The New “Why Don’t You…” Club
Way back in the eighties, there was a program called the “Why Don’t You…” Club, which generally encouraged people to get up off the couch and do something. This something was usually illustrated by some people demonstrating it on TV.
Today – actually, as I write this, today, not the more generalised contemporaneous version of ‘today’ – people across the UK are being told that they should write to their MP to stop the Digital Economy bill. This is a bill that has created a lot of impression with people who usually don’t care about any form of politics, because it intends to criminalise the act of illegal downloading. The bill also makes a lot of other things stupider and shittier too, but it’s the illegal downloading thing that seems to be motivating most people to write to their MPs.
In general, I think the bill is a bad idea, but I’m pretty discouraged that this is a topic that is getting people involved with politics. It’s being sold as a simplistic one-note idea, when in fact there are a myriad of factors that mean that we should reject this bill. For starters, you don’t get to choose when your preferred business model stops being relevant, but on the other side of the coin you can’t continually pander to those who only want free things all the time. It’s a big bill though, and there are a lot of problems with it – as this piece by Charles Stross shows, when he talks about the issues faced by creative people working across national boundaries.
But here’s the rub: the people who are most opposed to this are people under forty, who are most involved with online culture. At the same time, it’s become almost impossible to buy a house for anybody under forty across most of the UK (currently, first time buyers are creeping up to the age range of 35-37). Renting a home is a minefield of dodgy landlords, little or no protection from the law, and totally bastard letting agencies.
And everybody knows this.
It’s not something that boils down to a single issue though. If the same amount of effort was put into the housing market as the continued effort to save the current status quo of the internet, you bet we’d see some improvements. But until this becomes a hot topic, until it becomes something so urgent that it can be compressed into a single soundbite, we won’t be pressuring our MPs on the subject.
We shouldn’t need to have somebody saying to us “why don’t you… become politically involved in a subject that directly affects you, and everybody you know?”, should we?
