Every once in a while I’ll notice a gaping hole in my knowledge. A few years ago I started wondering what exactly the economy was. What did it mean when people said the economy was growing? Who was Adam Smith, and what was so revolutionary (or Illuminatus sinister) about his book, "The Wealth of Nations"? In order to fill that hole, I bought some books, took a class, and wrote a paper debunking Keynesian economics that got me in so much trouble, I ended up dropping out of school. Again.
 
Aside from getting my questions answered and learning a little about the world, I learned a lot about life. Adam Smith, while a bit loquacious, was a frickin’ genius. His economic theory was so simple, yet so misunderstood, even 231 years later. In a nutshell, what Adam Smith said was this:
 
  1. 1. Wealth is not gold and silver. Wealth is living a comfortable life.
  2. 2. People should concentrate on doing what they are good at.
  3. 3. People should delegate what they are not good at to others.
 
We call this delegation of labor “trade.”
 
By doing what you do most efficiently, you have the most power to trade the produce of your labor with others who are, in turn, doing what they do most efficiently. Thus, the most overall good is produced with the least amount of effort, and we will all become rich, which is to say, we all live a comfortable life. The keyword here is all. In the old way of thinking, there was a limited amount of happiness in the world, so nobody could be happy, except at the expense of others. Adam Smith realized that, actually, we can all be happy.
 
I’m an engineer. Coming up with novel solutions to problems is what I do for a living. Ideas are cheap, though; you have to design and build a system to implement your idea. A system to make sure everyone in the world manages to produce and receive such that everyone achieves the greatest possible happiness seems extremely complicated.
 
Nay, said Adam Smith. It’s actually extremely simple. All you have to do is follow three simple rules.
 
  1. 1. Act selfishly to fulfill your own desires
  2. 2. ...within reason
  3. 3. ...and with an eye toward the greater good.
 
Selfishness is the basis of good design.
 
What’s magical about this system is that it’s realistic. A system based on people being unselfish is a system that is designed to fail. This not only applies to people; this applies to all systems. A selfish system is an automated system. A selfish system is an object-oriented system. It’s a system where individual actors pursue their own best interests and all that’s good comes as a side effect of those actions.
 
Consider the problem of hard drive fragmentation. Microsoft addresses this problem by providing a utility that people can remember to run from time to time that will take all of their files and move them around on disk to make the most efficient use of the filesystem given the available space. This is a system that’s designed to fail. Why would I run some pain-in-the-ass utility? How does that make my day better or more productive?
 
On the other hand, Apple’s filesystem automatically defragments itself as a side effect of normal filesystem operations. When I selfishly move, copy, and delete files, I’m defragmenting my drive as a side effect. This is a system that takes advantage of what I’m going to do anyway. Microsoft’s system is a stationary bike that relies on my being willing to exercise, while Apple’s system is a 12-speed street bike that takes advantage of the fact that I want to go to the store.
 
Apple is not blameless in this regard. Consider Disk Utility, which requires people to know about and remember to run some application to repair permissions on their drive so that everything works properly. This is a system that is designed to fail, and which does fail. Nearly every person who has lost their Delicious Library data has done so because of a permissions error. The root cause of this loss? Some engineer wrongheadedly  expecting a user to altruistically repair some esoteric aspect of their filesystem.
 
Selfishness is the way of nature.
 
One of my more controversial beliefs is that people shouldn’t bend over backwards for pregnant women or people with small children. I willfully ignore “expectant mother parking” and I have absolutely no tolerance for screaming children who run around restaurants ruining the atmosphere of my meal. Why do I feel this way? Well, first of all, having all kinds of stupid special parking spaces makes the act of parking needlessly complicated. There are handicapped spaces. We as a society have decided this is a good enough idea to codify that into law, and I will respect that. It’s hard enough in the high stress act of finding parking to deal with making sure a space isn’t blue. I don’t need the added stress of worrying about it being pink or having a picture of a stork, or some sign in the bushes that says it’s reserved for “honored patrons.”
 
Second, and more important, having children is a selfish act. Unlike Muscular Dystrophy or Polio, people have to try to have children. Even if you didn’t necessarily intend to do so, the ultimate decision to obey the biological imperative and advance your bloodline at the inevitable expense of others is wholly and entirely your own. I don’t make special allowances for people who have elected to spend their life eating so much fast food they can’t walk through a parking lot. I don’t give money to people who decided to pursue a life of chemically induced pleasure to the extent they’ve lost the ability to afford to put roof over their own heads. I don’t doubt that raising children, being morbidly obese, or drinking Steel Reserve at the Park and Ride are hard. I just don’t care. That’s your situation to deal with, and you need to deal with it on your own.
 
A lot of people have heard of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, and they might even be aware that the invisible hand is the apparent force that automatically balances the market when people act in their own best interests. However, what most people fail to realize is that the whole “be selfish” message has two extremely large caveats. First, you have to be reasonable. There’s nothing wrong with having a beer or smoking some pot, nor is there anything wrong with making money. However, if you let the pursuit of endorphins or the balance of your bank account become the only thing you do, you are being unreasonable. Having a million dollars and having ten million dollars is the exact same thing. At a certain point, you have to step back and say, OK, I have enough. Time to do something else.
 
The other catch follows from the idea that I should be free to act in my own self-interest. If I do things that are unnecessarily detrimental to society, I am preventing other people from acting in their own self-interest. You have the right to do what’s best for you, but not if it infringes on my right to do what’s best for me. That doesn’t mean there can’t be competition. Competition for limited resources is inevitable. It’s the basis of nature, and the driving force behind another brilliant theory, natural selection. If there are two people and one job, let the one most qualified get the job. If there are two products that do the same thing, let the better one be the one you buy. Luckily, there’s a lot of people and a lot of needs, so chances are, even second place walks away with a nice prize.
 
What that means is you have to take care that your life doesn’t spill over into other people’s lives. You want to have kids, that’s fine. Keep that shit to yourself. When your children are running around screaming, they are affecting me. The same thing goes for dogs. You want to walk your dog, that’s fine, but I don’t like dogs, so keep it on a leash and keep it away from me. If it shits, pick it up. If it has to pee, let it pee on your own damned lawn. It doesn’t need to burn my trees with its stupid urine. If you can’t keep your dog on a leash and prevent it from peeing all over the place, you don’t get to have a dog.
 
Antisocial behavior is a crime against society.
 
The one thing that makes me red-faced, cross-eyed angry is when people do things that are antisocial. I don’t mean not wanting to go out or talk to people. I have the right to not talk on the phone because goddamn, Steven Frank, I can’t bring myself to do it either. No, by antisocial I’m talking about things that are actively incompatible with being around other people. I’m talking about cutting in line, stealing, and driving like a moron. I’m talking about breaking car windows, graffiti, and bumping other cars when you parallel park. I’m talking about littering, shitting all over a public restroom, and leaving dishes in the break room sink.
 
To me, these crimes of selfishness are the worst crimes in the world. If you and your friend get into a fight and you kill him, that’s unfortunate, but isn’t it worse to completely destroy the world’s ability to communicate because you insist on sending out millions of messages advertising penis pills, porn sites, and whatever the fuck else it is that’s clogging my inbox? Murder is a crime against another person and their friends and family. Spam is a crime against society itself. Society is more than just a person. Society is all people. Sometimes we, as society, have to move to rectify abuses that threaten our right to be selfish. Ultimately, the selfishness of the many must outweigh the selfishness of the few.
 
This is why, despite thinking Adam Smith is a genius, I think we need socialized medicine in this country. Corporations have lost their minds on the healthcare issue. The whole idea behind socialism is that some things are just too important to leave to individuals so we, as a society, have to make a decision. We all want to be healthy, and I don’t think anyone can honestly believe that one person is more entitled to being healthy than another. Breathe all the air you want, but if someone decides to pollute the air, we need to shut them down. The air belongs to all of us. The environment belongs to all of us. Healthcare belongs to all of us.
 
Every argument I have ever heard against socialized medicine has been idiotic. The biggest one I’ve heard is that we don’t want to lose the ability to choose our care, nor do we expect the government to provide us with the best level of care we could get. Guess what? You already don’t have a choice in the care you receive, and your quality of care has already been hampered. At least the government, big, blundering, stupid thing that it is, has to justify its actions in terms of benefit to you. What justification is there for my insurance company telling me I can’t go to a certain doctor, or that I can’t take a certain drug, or that I have to call them before I see my shrink because of whatever arbitrary set of rules will make them the most money?
 
Selfishness must regulate selfishness.
 
If you think the American health care system is the best in the world you’re either severely deluded, or you’ve neither been to, nor met a person from, another country. America does not have the best healthcare system in the world. Our healthcare systems ranks as decent, but compared to other nations, we rarely come in first place. The real difference is that people in other countries never forgo treatment because they don’t have health insurance. Nobody should ever have to take out a mortgage on their house because they got cancer.
 
Oh, and I know, if we had socialized medicine we wouldn’t be able to afford that new SUV because our taxes would be seventy-five percent. You know what? You can cut my income taxes to negative two percent. You can make like the state of Alaska and just cut me a check every year. If I’m walking down the street and get hit-and-run, or I have the misfortune of living long enough to catch some disease, I’m hosed. Even with health insurance, I will never be able to pay all those medical bills.
 
It’s not like privatized medicine is cheaper anyway. Just because it’s not in the FICA column doesn’t mean you’re not paying for it. Even if your employer pays your entire premium, do you think the cost of your benefits have no affect your salary? Do you really believe the cost of insuring the clerk ringing up your crap doesn’t affect the price of your crap? You’re paying for health care and you just don’t get to use it.
 
Speaking of SUVs, there’s a good example of selfishness run amok. There was a time when I considered buying an SUV. Then everyone else on earth bought one and they turned out to be a detriment to society. It’s not that they use a tremendous amount of resources to create. It’s not that they burn a lot of gas. It’s not that they damage other vehicles when they park. It’s not that they flip over and raise my insurance rates. It’s not that they are impossible to see around. It’s not that they get tax and regulatory breaks making them essentially subsidized by our tax dollars. It’s not that they make me more likely to die in a traffic accident caused by a person who can’t control the gigantic vehicle they are completely unqualified to drive. It’s not any one of those things—it’s all of those things. Taken together, driving an SUV brands you as a person who has hurt, and who is continuing to hurt, the public good. We, as the public, must punish you for that.
 
I would never advocate breaking the law, but if I ever did, I would suggest you carry a hammer and to break the headlights of every SUV parked around town.
 
Lights out, motherfuckers.
 
You might say, Mike, how can you rail against breaking car windows in one paragraph and justify breaking an SUVs headlights in another? When you break my car window to steal the change in my ashtray, you’ve cost me hundreds of dollars and violated my right to be left the alone. And for what? For pocket change. You know what’s worse than having your car window broken? Being beaten to within an inch of your life, then going bankrupt because you don’t have health insurance. That said, if I catch you breaking my car window, your actions are likely to have punitive repercussions beyond the cost of my car window. Why? Because you are an anti-social scum bag who is willing to break people’s car windows for pocket change. You are unfit to live in society and as such, are no longer welcome to continue doing so.
 
Now, if you break my car window because I parked like an asshole, cut you off without the common courtesy of a wave, or let my dog take a huge steaming dump on your lawn, that’s justified. It’s a bit passive-aggressive, but sometimes we have to be passive-aggressive to keep us from killing each other. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m going to be pretty pissed off about my window. I’m going to find some way to justify why I am right and you are wrong.
 
It turns out, I’m the star of the movie of my life. I am always going to give myself the benefit of the doubt. Karmically, though, you’re probably right. If I park like an asshole, I probably do deserve to have my window broken, though I might suggest that’s a bit extreme. A nasty note might be better. More than bad parking, bad driving, and bad animal hygiene, an SUV is an active crime against society. Frankly, having your headlights broken is a much smaller inconvenience than what you’re doing to all of us. You’re getting off easy.
 
Selfishness defines the value of everything.
 
Another thing to come out of all this invisible hand business is the idea of supply and demand. The idea is that the cost of something and the availability of something must balance out. If you’re selling something faster than you can make it, you have to raise the price. If you’re making something faster than you’re selling it, you have to lower the price. The reason this works is the law of marginal utility, which states that something is worth exactly what I am willing to pay for it. If I’m starving to death I’d probably pay you $100 for a hamburger. Once my belly is full, your hamburger is worth exactly bupkis.
 
Adam Smith didn’t understand this. He talked around it, but he never quite figured out price. He assumed it had to do with the amount of labor that goes into something, but we’ve since figured out that this is untrue. If I spend a year producing an ugly sweater with my poor knitting skills, and you make $72,000 a year, logic dictates you should pay me $72,000 for my sweater.
 
Common sense says this is untrue. Even if we took out all the labor and I charged you $12 for the yarn, that doesn’t make the sweater worth $12, if you’re unwilling to pay it. You, and only you, decide how much you’re willing to pay. If I’m lucky, someone who is going to an ugly sweater party will offer me $20, and I’ll take it. If you decide that you want the sweater after all, that’s too bad. I’m not willing to spend another year making a sweater for eight bucks and the cost of yarn.
 
Yesterday Apple did three things that surprised me. First, as my wife pointed out, they eliminated white iPods for the first time in iPod history. Second, as Wil pointed out, they sowed the seeds for a Macworld or WWDC announcement that Safari is now the world’s leading browser, on account of the millions of iPods. OK, maybe not world’s leading just yet, but it’s coming.
 
Finally, they cut the price of the iPhone by $200. It was this last item I expected to make news. I could see the headlines in my mind: Apple finally gets it right. I mean, seriously, talk about an engineering solution. They’ve finally learned that when they come out with some new hotness, they have trouble meeting demand. They managed to pick a price point that was almost perfect. They sold iPhones at almost the same rate at which they could make them. Everyone who was willing to pay $599 for an iPhone got one.
 
Eventually, production ramped up, so they cut the price. That is exactly what should have happened, and that is exactly what they did. I was so happy that I just about hugged the person next to me. Then I saw the headlines. People are furious about this. Blogs I normally read and respect were encouraging people to raise hell to get their money back. Apple stores across the country were inundated with red-faced people on the phone and in person who demanded, yes, demanded, they receive their “$200 refund.”
 
Apple is right. You are an idiot.
 
If you bought an iPhone and you think Apple should give you $200, you are an idiot. In fact, you are so stupid I am hereby cordially inviting you to come to Seattle so I can punch you in the face. I don’t care if you were at the Apple Store signing your credit card receipt the moment the price dropped. You are not entitled to shit. You do not deserve shit. If you not only think Apple should give you shit, but you actually believe you are entitled to shit, let me expand my offer. Come to Seattle, and after I punch you in the face, I will pull down my pants and shit on you. You’re not entitled to that, but you do deserve it.
 
Let me explain to you how business works. Apple made you a proposition. They said, we’ll give you this amazing phone that you’ve been waiting for, maybe even begging us specifically for, for $599. You said, hmm, that seems reasonable. You paid the money, you got the phone. If Apple then turned to the person next to you and said, I’ll give you the phone for a bite of your sandwich, guess what, asshole? That is none of your goddamned business. I don’t care if you have a sandwich that you’re perfectly willing to share with Apple if only you had known it was hungry. I don’t care if your sandwich is better. I don’t care if it’s the best sandwich in the world and your mother made it right before she succumbed to cancer and you just had a baby and it’s really hard. All of that crap is completely irrelevant.
 
Now, Apple is not a company run by jerks. Rather, Apple is a company run by people are very generous. Indeed, they give you a certain period of time, which for the sake of argument I am going to call 14 days. I don’t care if it’s actually 14 days. It could be 14 years or 14 seconds. It doesn’t matter. The point is Apple says,  “Just because we are not jerks, if we lower the price of this or upgrade it in a certain period of time, we will give you the difference or let you get the new version.”
 
So, if you were signing your receipt and the price dropped, Apple would give you $200. That doesn’t mean you deserve it. That doesn’t mean you’re entitled to it, except insofar as it’s part of the deal. It certainly doesn’t suggest that, if you bought your iPhone 15 days ago you missed it by a day. You missed by two weeks and a day, and by “missed it,” I mean you didn’t miss anything because there never was a thing. You made the deal. If you went past the period even by a second, or if there was no period at all, that’s bad luck, but it’s just that.
 
Apple didn’t fuck you. The universe fucked you.
 
The problem is, people are always the star of the show. You are the hero of your movie, and everything else in the universe, with the possible exception of your friends and family, is simply an amorphous blob. The Apple Store is part of the universe. This is why people will buy something from one store and try to return it to their competitor. It’s not that they’re stupid, per se. It’s that all they know is the universe took their money and they want it back. Who or what part of the universe should be giving them their money back doesn’t really matter.
 
I got in line for my iPhone at midnight. I slept on the sidewalk in front of the store. I waited there all day long until the store opened at 6 p.m., then I went inside, got my phone, and left. The next day, I went back for a case and guess what, they still had iPhones. The guy standing next to me at the case rack said, “I bet the people who were waiting in line yesterday feel stupid.”
 
Despite the fact I am a socialphobe who hates conflict, I turned to him and said, "You know what? I waited in line yesterday. I slept in front of the store. I don’t feel stupid. Why would I? I got my iPhone. That these people also got an iPhone doesn’t change that fact. What I could have done doesn’t change that fact. I waited and would wait again. You know what else? The iPhone is fucking awesome."
 
You’re probably wondering if I actually said that and, if so, what he said in response. Admittedly, those were not my exact words, but that’s the gist of it. His response was something along the lines of “Well, I’m just pissed that the iPhone caused Leopard to be delayed until October.”
 
I responded that I was a developer and that my life’s work, my project that I’ve been working on for years, can’t come out until Leopard does, and that the push to October has impacted me in a very real and direct way. And you know what? I don’t really care. First, I think the iPhone is worth the Leopard delay. In an ideal world, Apple would have been able to do both, I would have a 14-inch cock, and college girls would want to feed me banana cream pie with their tits. At the end of the day, even I—a man who is literally writing a book about Leopard—have enough of a life that the delay of an operating system just isn’t the worst thing in the world.
 
This is my word and my word is law.
 
I am Delicious Monster’s support staff. Lucas might send off the occasional license, but chances are if you have a problem with Delicious Library, I’m going to be the one who fixes it for you. Therefore, when I have a policy, the company has a policy. Wil can override my policy insofar as he can hire someone else to do the support, but ultimately, it’s my game, if only by default. My policy is this: you get one. That is to say, you get one chance to tell me my product sucks, to call me names, to accuse us of selling an Amazon front-end, to suggest I hate Australians, or to pretend that some petty problem renders my life’s work completely useless.
 
You get one because you’re frustrated and you assume that your mail is going into the ether and not to actual people. As much as I might bloviate, I am not an unreasonable or unforgiving person. If you punch me in the mouth and I think I deserve it or that it was an honest accident, I probably won’t even be mad. This is not an analogy. Just ask Lucas, who continues to live with all his faculties as a direct result of this reasonableness.
 
When I respond to an email with a solution or a question, or even an “easy there, buddy,” most people respond enthusiastically. Few people actually apologize, but that’s OK. Forgiveness means not holding a grudge. However, if your tone continues to be abusive, I will tell you in no uncertain terms to fuck yourself. If you think I’m exaggerating, you obviously don’t know me.
 
Your $40 does not buy you even the smallest right to abuse me. That you get to abuse me at all is simply generosity on my part. I’ll give you your money back, but I will not take your shit. Why this policy? Well, there are two reasons. First, because I’m a cranky old man who doesn’t like to abused by strangers. Mostly though, it’s because I don’t dance.
 
I don’t tolerate dancing and neither should you.
 
There’s a dance to customer service, a customer service waltz if you will. It’s based on the idea that if you are loud enough, angry enough, and abusive enough, you will get your way. Did we say 14 days? No problem. Did you obviously break this? We’ll go ahead and replace it anyway. All you have to do is yell at me and tell me you’re pissed off and threaten to sue me or call the Better Business Bureau, and definitely, definitely tell me that your problem is due to shoddy workmanship.
 
Ask me, no, demand I tell you my full name. Take it personally. Report me to my manager. No, better yet, tell me you are a personal friend of Steve Jobs and you will see to it that I am not only fired, but ruined. Make sure I know that you are so big and so powerful that you will make sure I never work again. You will see my family starve, my friends desert me, and my skin flayed and hung in tatters, because I *gasp* won’t repair your shattered iPhone screen under warranty.
 
Oh, and please, please make sure that if you do end up getting your way to gloat about it on your way out. Yes, definitely rub my face in it. I deserve that so very much for daring to have a job and having the audacity, the sheer temerity, to try to help you with the tools afforded me by my employer.
 
I am a logical person, and things that are illogical are anathema to me. I like rules and order and understanding. I look for how things work. That’s why I keep my word and pay my bills and stand in lines. That’s also why I get so pissed off when people cheat the system. The system is there to protect our individual right to selfishness. You know what prevents us from exercising our right to selfishness? Chaos. When you take it too far, you bring us that much closer to chaos. Ultimately, and quite literally, selfishness demands society kill you if that is what’s required to prevent that.
 
You are a liar and a cheat, and that’s not OK.
 
I believe people need to be rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad behavior. Keep your word, and everyone benefits. Break your word and you’re threatening the whole word-keeping system. If Apple sold you an iPhone and you got home and opened the box and it was a pear, you would be pretty upset. The deal was, I give you $599 and you give me an iPhone. This is a pear. That was not the deal. You would suggest Apple needs to be punished, and I would agree.
 
If, on the other hand, you open the box and it’s a phone, but you turn around and demand $200 back, you are the one breaking the deal. If, in the commission of this breach of contract, you call the Apple store and yell, insult, and threaten the employees, you are behaving very badly. If Apple gives you $200, they have rewarded your breaking the deal and furthermore rewarded your abusing their employees.
 
This is not a victimless crime. You are yelling at, insulting, and threatening a real person. I don’t care if it’s a dance. You are hurting someone because you are a deal-breaking cock. That person is now having a terrible day, thanks to you, your dishonesty, and your greed. And what hath thou wrought?
 
Now the person who tried to help you is going to give bad customer service to someone who deserves good customer service. They are going to be angry in traffic and make other people angry. They are going to be cross with their spouses and intolerant of their children.
 
Is your $200 worth that? The answer is fuck you. It would be “no,” except that’s so fucking obvious the fact you’d even have to ask means you’re too stupid to understand what “no” means. So, fuck you.
 
Christopher Columbus: bigger dick than you.
 
This is apropos of nothing, but sitting here in the coffee shop I sometimes hear things that are really stupid. This latest nugget is not the stupidest thing I have ever heard here, but it’s definitely in second place. I don’t even know the context, but since the upshot is who deserve a merely theoretical ass-whooping, I don’t think it matters. Anyway, this is, in its entirety, the stupid thing I just heard: “Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.”
 
Really? What does that even mean? The only significant even of 1492 was when some dead Italian traitor sailing under a Spanish flag got lost and hit a piece of land leading to one of the greatest acts of genocide the world has ever known. I’m not the kind of person to get worked up over the past. As far as I’m concerned, what your father did to my father is between two old men and they ain’t us.
 
Don’t shit my mouth and call it Godiva. That kind of meaningless jingoistic bullshit is why there’s terrorism in the first place. Shithead.
 
Anyway...
 
Let me refresh your memory of what, exactly, the deal is.
 
Let me state this very clearly: We at Delicious Monster are making you the following proposition. We agree to provide you with a piece of software. We will also provide you with support for that software, within our abilities. We do not promise the software is free of bugs, nor do we promise it is suitable for your purpose.
 
Indeed, I promise you that the program does have bugs and will not meet your exact needs, just like every other program ever written, including software you write yourself to meet your exact needs without bugs.
 
However, because we are in no way dishonest, we will provide you with a free demo so that you can determine for yourself if the program is good enough to warrant your giving us $40. This deal does not include any additional rights, products, or services, even those implied by us.
 
The list of things the deal does not include begins with the right to abuse me in your support email, even once.
 
I do not make this statement as a representative of Delicious Monster. Indeed, I do not represent Delicious Monster in any way whatsoever, except insofar as I am employed by them. Rather, I speak only as a sane individual who did not make his first retail transaction yesterday.
 
That is because this deal, or some variant thereof, is the basic proposition made by any business. With the possible exception of businesses specifically aimed at accepting your abuse as a service, abuse is never part of the deal. If you are abusing the employee of a company, you are not a customer. You are an asshole, and I for one am intolerant of assholes.
 
Speaking of assholes, let me tell you a story about iTunes.
 
At a certain point in my life, I decided to stop buying CDs and DVDs, except for the rarest of occasions. I stopped buying them for the same reason I stopped buying cassettes, VHS tapes, vinyl records, and games for my NES. Simply put, they are obsolete. There are better, more convenient formats out there that have obsoleted the old ones. I, as a consumer, have voted with my feet and my wallet and moved whole hog to the iTunes Music Store.
 
What iTunes did is simple and beautiful and natural. They met their competition head on, offered a better value, and won. Who was their competition? Why, piracy of course. By the time iTunes came out, the CD was already obsolete and the DVD was on its way out. The ease of obtaining and consuming purely digital music was simply a better deal.
 
With few legal ways to do this, people turned to stealing it. It’s a lot like the old joke about items in the store with no price tag. Must be free! This is one thing I loved about The Sims. Criminal was one of the career choices. Isn’t that true? Isn’t deciding to commit crime ultimately an economic decision? Isn’t everything?
 
A few years ago I wondered what the economy was. What I learned is that the economy is life. When they say the economy is growing, they mean that life is getting better. Maybe it’s not getting better for you, or maybe it’s getting better in the wrong places, but ultimately, the currency of the economy is happiness, and a bigger economy means there’s more happiness.
 
When I want music or a movie or a TV show, I want happiness. If I decide an album is worth money, it means, at least in theory, that I’m willing to do something I don’t like in exchange for the money necessary to buy it. That money represents the sweat of my brow and the pain in my muscles and the wear on my bones. If I think the sum total of misery necessary for me to earn that money is more than offset by the joy of experiencing that album, I make the purchase.
 
This decision is entirely what we mean by the word Capitalism.
 
On the other hand, if I don’t think it’s worth the money, I might decide to steal it. That means I’ve decided that the time and trouble and risk of being sued or imprisoned is worth the value returned to me by the album and, it bears note, both are worth less than the cost of the album.
 
The smartest thing ever said on the subject of the economics of piracy came from Steve Jobs when he first introduced the iTunes Music Store all those years ago. I silently asked him why would I pay you 99 cents for something I can get for "free"? He answered me: because stealing music is more of a pain in the ass than earning 99 cents by honest means. And you know what, he was right.
 
I’m not saying I’ve ever installed, used, nor even heard of Napster, Morpheus, Kazaa, Limewire, Acquisiton, or Gnutella. I’m just saying I’ve never stolen a piece of music I could buy on iTunes. Like Steve said, economically, iTunes is just a better deal.
 
The other day, something horrible happened.
 
I was listening to a KanYe West song (purchased on iTunes) and I wanted to hear the original version of the song he sampled for it. I could figure out the name and artist of the song, but for some reason, it’s not on iTunes.
 
Since the other day was Sunday, I imagine an episode of The Simpsons was on. I love The Simpsons. I used to sit through the Tracey Ullman Show just to watch the interstitial animations, which featured a family my sister and I called “The Bugs.” I loved them so much that I would actually watch the Gary Shandling Show, which came on afterward, just in case the bugs somehow made an appearance. Yes, I was a dumb kid.
 
In 1990, I entered high school and the bugs got their own show, “The Simpsons.” It was so popular my class voted Bart Simpson to be the class mascot. This vote was overruled by the administration, not simply because Bart Simpson was actually considered threatening (haha!) but because, as they explained, this would be our mascot for the next four years. How embarrassing it will be in 1994 when nobody will even remember who Bart Simpson is!
 
In the course of its 20-year run, including 18 seasons as a prime-time sitcom, The Simpsons is not only the longest-running sitcom in American television history, it’s also one of the most influential cultural icons of my generation. You know what I’ve long since forgotten? Any of the names or faces of the administrators who made that idiotic decision. They didn’t get it, just like whoever it is at Fox who decided to keep The Simpsons off iTunes doesn’t get it.
 
The other day something horrible happened. I wanted to listen to a song, but it wasn’t on iTunes. I wanted to watch a television show, but it wasn’t on iTunes. You know what I did? I bet the executives at NBC know what I did. Oh yes, right now, were they reading this, they’d be gritting their teeth at the thought of me stealing music and TV shows from the internet. Aren’t iPod owners thieves? Isn’t the fact I have three iPods evidence that I’m among the greatest criminal minds of my generation?
 
You know what, though? I didn’t bother stealing either one of them. I would have bought them both on iTunes, but going through the trouble of stealing them was just not worth it. After a few frustrated minutes, I stopped caring, and went to go do something else.
 
This year, as in years past, I purchased and watched Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, the Office, as well as several other shows, some of which might have been provided by NBC. Next year, if they’re not on iTunes, I might steal them, but let’s be honest.
 
I have loved The Simpsons above all other shows for two-thirds of my life, but I couldn’t even be bothered to steal it. What are the chances I’d bother stealing The Office?
 
That, my friends, is what should be scaring NBC shitless, not my three iPods, my Apple TV, or the existence of BitTorrent. You know what’s worse than being pirated? Being forgotten.
A few years ago I wondered what the economy was. What I learned is that the economy is life.
Thursday, September 6, 2007
On Selfishness