There was an interesting exchange between Stephen Miller and Mollie Hemingway yesterday regarding the stolen nude photos of celebrities unleashed upon the Internet on Sunday. Here's Miller:
You're no more a bad person for looking at leaked nudes then the people are at taking nude pictures. Relax and have a fap people.
— S.M (@redsteeze) September 1, 2014
And here was Mollie's response:
.@redsteeze What's your measure for this statement? On what basis is someone not bad for this? Is *anything* in the world bad? — Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 1, 2014
After some back and forth, Miller seemed to settle on this response as his guiding principle on the matter:
.@MZHemingway People are going to look at the leaked nudes. That doesn't make them bad people. Simple as that.
— S.M (@redsteeze) September 1, 2014
He expanded on his thoughts* a bit today, noting that the people who stole the photos of Kate Upton, Jennifer Lawrence, and the rest are in fact bad individuals but the people who benefit from the hack (that is, those who look at the pictures procured by the hacker) are, in fact, totally blameless because "free" and "easy," or something:
Here’s the thing, and the moral betters in the media at large are really going to hate this; People are going to look at the leaked pictures. There’s no grandiose explanation of a larger culture of sexism or war on women and "rape culture" at work here. People are going to look at the pictures because it’s a familiar face, they’re free and it’s one or two clicks. ... Viewing leaked pictures on the internet does not make someone a person devoid of ethics. [Emphasis mine]
This is the culmination of the Napster and Pirate Bay ethos, the sad lie that undergirds the battle cry "information wants to be free!" This is the world that piracy and those who drafted the intellectual framework to excuse said piracy have created. Illegality and immorality mean nothing when it comes to data files, be they mp3s or jpegs, therefore there is no reason to shame those who engage in what we would traditionally consider illegal or immoral behavior. "This illegally uploaded album is free and available online, therefore I am free to take it and I scoff at your moral judgments. This illegally uploaded movie is free and available online, therefore I am free to take it and I scoff at your moral judgments. This illegally uploaded cache of nude celebrities is free and available online, therefore I am free to take them and I scoff at your moral judgments."
It's Sean Parker's world, man. We're just living in its ruins.
*For the record: I follow Miller on Twitter and enjoy his feed. You should follow him too! And I agree with the thrust of his post, namely that it's incredibly ironic that the same media that cheered the hacking of George W. Bush's email account and the illicit taping of Donald Sterling is now trying to scold us about the evils of breaching someone's privacy. Similarly, I find it absurd that the people who were cheering on Snowden's theft of huge caches of our national security secrets are now really sad that hackers are up to no good. I simply reject his supposition that it is not immoral to act as the Internet equivalent of a Peeping Tom.