Gadgetory

most of you probably know Alex winter the actor winter has become a recognizable face for anyone who grew up in the 80s but he's also spent decades directing for TV film and a handful of music videos but winter isn't just interested in working in show business he's interested in how show business works and it all started in the very early days of the internet you directed a documentary on Napster all downloaded which congratulations by the way it's thirty one video on demand this year mm-hmm so just tell me how the hell you got involved in you know it's kind of a tech oriented person from like when you know the matte classics came out in 83 got online late 80s I was pretty entrenched in that world in the early not by the early 90s BBS world and all that kind of stuff the early days of for regular people not hackers they were online much earlier but and and then as the internet started to grow everyone was kind of waiting for something to come along that was just gonna blow the doors open we all knew where the world was going but hadn't gotten there and what was amazing about Napster when it happened in 9899 was that overnight and the dial-up your meaning the internet was was insanely slow there was a service that suddenly connected you know tens of millions of people together in the same community at once and there was nothing that had ever existed like that before by a mile so I was really taken with Napster it was clear that the world was now like the the dam had burst and the world was now going to change a revocable forever then all legal stuff happened and I became and sort of more interested in the human story what was happening with these two kids who had winningly and unwittingly unleashed this stuff Shawn Fanning and Shawn Parker 17 18 years old respectively I hunted them down and met them I sold the idea of making a movie to a major studio and I wrote it there like 2003 2004 I was gonna make a movie about the sort of the birth of the digital revolution it didn't get made there's a lot of movies don't we were under the development hell I walked away and then I came back to it no 9 because you know the world had changed so much in the intervening you know seven or eight years since I'd first been immersed in that story and but none of the core issues that NASA had raised had been solved in fact everything got worse like a worse like the whole and they gotten bigger we knew the issues we're gonna get bigger we knew that at the time I think a lot of us online knew that Napster wasn't about file-sharing and music it was about global community and transparency and you know these bigger issues but now by oh nine we were heading towards a world in which we were gonna have revolutions and countries around the internet like what happened in that you know with the Arab Spring WikiLeaks you know we had now the NSA Snowden scandal you have like this these big giant questions about global culture and I thought well the Napster story is a great way in to you know getting some context around it and maybe helping add to the conversation about this wacky ass world that we live in today right and there was actually another theatrical narrative starring someone in the role of Sean Parker oh yeah yeah so does that work I mean that didn't put me off doing a narrative at all you know the Facebook story what makes the Facebook story interesting is exactly the opposite of what makes an after story interesting the Facebook story is about a company that wasn't a revolutionary company it didn't enact global change or anything like it came along after all of that stuff it happened after MySpace and Friendster and Napster and the world had shifted what makes Facebook interesting is the little interpersonal politics between Zuckerberg and everybody and that's great it made a great movie whereas Napster is all about the extra personal it's all about global change and revolution and it's not that interesting on a personal no you did focus on some of the internal struggle in Napster in between the original team the founders and then what became this kind of like clunky business legal component that yeah took over I think that when people look at Napster and a lot of what happened in the digital revolution they get very black-and-white I think any big global change is scary even to the people who are on the side of the change it's scary it's sort of intimidating sort of like being thrown off a cliff and you kind of go oh there's nothing under my feet this is kind some people scream bloody murderers are going down and some people like wow this is rad but I'm still really freaked out when that happens you know we tend to respond culturally to those things and we try to paint them with as much of a clear-cut black and white brush as possible and the whole point that I wanted to make McMasters that there were no black and whites would have sir it was all Gray's you can't just side people still ask me was like you know I tell them making the national real like well what do you think I'm like what do I think about was like was it right or wrong I'm like that answer would take nine hours you know that mean it's like it's not there's no right or wrong it's like it was a massive piece of evolution that occurred in our culture that was going to occur that did occur and we have to live with it and we have to work with it so to meet a lot of the the internal politics that were interesting in Napster that I did show in the movie was this divide that erupted even within the company between the kids and the adults even within their own company and that's really emblematic I think of what's happened in the in the digital revolution is you do have a divide of sort of world perception you know between people who embrace and understand and grew up online and people who didn't write all of their recording executives that you interviewed said I think a couple of them said they felt like they were ambushed you know the record industry and and the the the industries that fought and in general are surprised you know you're dealing with people you know the rock-and-roll business is not the most stodgy end of the business world so you're dealing with people who are pretty radical themselves I think everybody was kind of like what we expected something to happen we didn't expect you know the seventeen year old kid and this 18 year old partner you know with no education and no contact to any industry and no sophistication to come out of left field and just completely revolutionized the world overnight which is what was so what was so shocking about Napster and weirdly somehow fifteen years later I mean you have a lot of companies trying to push the edge of Spotify which Sean Parker's involved in now still embroiled in in royalty arguments and legal compliments and all that stuff hasn't really been solved did you get a sense from you know Shawn Fanning and Parker and the others who are involved you know what their how they feel about where things have gone yeah I mean I think the funny thing is is how similar everybody thinks I think that you know the Fanning and Parker the record label has the tech people a lot of the legal people I talk to all kind of feel like it's all gone to a bad place you know I sort of looked at the downloaded story as a tragedy I feel like everybody lost so it was ironic that Parker basically had go in and do for Spotify what he wasn't ever ever able to do with Napster which was actually make licensing deals with the record industry for their content on you know an online service and that was ten years later it was wild to see you know the same arguments going back and forth you know in terms of our our artists making money from this are they being hurt by this and that there's a big divide within the the music community about that that still persists today you know sides releasing competing studies every few months talking about that yeah you're seeing studies every few months that completely contradict each other constantly I mean and they're so seems to be so little data of any measurable quantifiable kind that just guarantee it's just says to any of us this is actually what's happening on either side I think that the wrong way to come at this whole thing is to say well these things are bad for artists or they're bad for the public so we should scrap them because they're not going away you know it's like it's like howling at the moon it makes no sense the the changes are here a lot of people are resisting them and want to go back to the old way we're not we're its we are in it we're way in it at this point you know we've jumped into the swimming pool we can't pretend we haven't jumped off the high dive that being said I you know feel like we should be supportive from an innovation standpoint on companies like Spotify whether we wholeheartedly agree with their monetization system or not at least are trying to drive us somewhere because the alternative is is total piracy which obviously isn't gonna work well how did you come across Nasser I know you said you were on the online recognizing the BBS and how did I find it yeah how did you find it and what did you download well everything to answer the second question first I was working in London at the time and I would go into my production office there were like 25 computers in there I'd run all of them all weekend I would Jack everybody's computer in a Napster and run it all weekend I never you know used downloaded any infringing copyright type material though it was only fair use that's just a legal disclaimer I think I found it because like the people that I was communicating with a line were like you should go over to Napster and we should meet over there and I was like well what the hell is Napster and then you like jacked into this thing and suddenly it's really hard to explain even in the movie to explain like what the experience was like I mean because there's nothing like it today you know took you 20 minutes to get online he kept getting bumped off and they they told me to go over an F there whatever Napster there are all these chat rooms all these all this committee millions of people and then I was like in their heart I was like literally in their hard drive so you were like it was really like something out of a William Gibson novel you literally kind of moved traversing around through people's hard drives all over the world in real time it was like going scuba diving like you'd be like oh okay and now I'm over in this second I'm in the music and art section of the hard drive now they've given me access to this and I'm over in this section of the hard drive and like this is I'm in Russia and like some guys doing it and they're like feeling around and I'm watching them root around in my hard drive it was like now I'm doing that's like a thousand people at the same time it was a trip you know so I think it came to me through the social community first and then I was like wow okay so I can pull all this down and over to my drive alright right thanks a lot yeah thanks so much Alex yeah thank you and good luck with the debt future release and thanks and your next documentary thank you yeah I hope people download it stream it whatever whatever floats your boat torrent it yeah hey whatever works