The Mario Sweater Vest — Happy Seamstress. Used with permission.

Nerdgasm, n., an involuntary reflex of disproportionate scale to something most people don’t get or understand.

In the early eighties I was a squeaky pre-teen living just outside the suburban band that surrounds Boston. It was a town of five thousand, a lot of land, one stoplight and no public transportation.

Bikes got us to friends’ houses. We tromped a lot in the woods. In the winter there was snow and a fairly big hill behind our house.

And that was pretty much life.

Until 1983 or so. That was the year those with Ataris started getting this game called Donkey Kong. Gone went the bikes and the hikes through the woods. Life became much more complex. There was a princess to be saved, a gorilla — who I somehow identified with — to be battled and, of course, our digital, 8-bit self: Jumpman.

Yes, if we remember back almost thirty years, Mario didn’t become Mario until joined by his brother Luigi in Mario Bros. And when that came out, along with Donkey Kong Junior and later Super Mario Bros, the bikes basically rusted as those of us on the outskirts of Boston suburbia holed up with our game consoles for afternoons on end.

Which led me to this nerdgasm the other night. The Mario Sweater Vest is a throwback of the best sort. It’s also an example of analog remixing I’m seeing more and more of.

The mashup and the remix is digital culture’s basic platform. We hear it most easily in our electronic music: Moby, for example, made his name by remixing the old — the analog — into the new.

This isn’t to say remixing didn’t exist before. Walt Disney famously remixed Buster Keaton into a mouse that eventually became Mickey. It’s just that digital culture is remix culture on steroids.

But the sweater vest takes us the other way by transforming the primitive early graphics of a global gaming phenomenon back into a most analog of mediums: the knitted sweater.

The digital to analog remix happens elsewhere. Take, for instance, this video of the Bad Plus’ remix of Aphex Twin.

Like the sweater, it’s pulling digital bits back to a tangible analog.

All this I think is a good thing. Digital culture is young yet, I know, kind of like us squeaky kids of so long ago.

But as both subject and object of a new generation of remix artists it’s maturing and coming into its own. Dare I say it might be about to get old.

Related posts:

1. Move Over Mario, Hello Shakespeare
2. Waiting For John Edwards… With Mario Cuomo
3. Marlena Shaw: California Soul (Diplo Remix)

By file sharing I mean the good, the bad and the ugly in the debate. This includes those in the record industry whose blood reaches a fevered boil at the mere mention of the phrase to their ideological opposites who insist that all content everywhere must, should, will and at all times be free.

As a US citizen, I generally follow only what’s happening here in terms of copyright, file sharing and what in the past I’ve called mental squatting. That, for worse and worse, is how we do things here in America. (Although, in moderate defense, I have been following New Zealand’s recent copyright battles.)

But with a desire to be a bit more worldly in my understanding, I started reading a report commissioned by the Dutch government on the social and economic effects of file sharing on the music, film and gaming industries.

Color me amazed.

US debates circle endlessly around producers and consumers with each reduced to a function of the dollar amount added or subtracted to the entire industry. That is, the argument is generally won or lost on proof that behavior (i.e., file sharing or its prevention) benefits a producing agency such as a record label.

For example, if you can’t demonstrate that file sharing benefits or injures the recording industry, you’ve lost the argument. The goalposts in our US debate are strictly aligned to what positively or negatively affects an industry.

The Dutch go about this differently. They bring in another potential beneficiary. Cleverly enough, they’re called citizens. And what amazes me in this report is the very simple move of bringing in the collective commons as an equally worthy participant in any analyses of whether file sharing harms or benefits society.

The research shows that the economic implications of file sharing for welfare in the Netherlands are strongly positive in the short and long terms. File sharing provides consumers with access to a broad range of cultural products, which typically raises welfare. Conversely, the practice is believed to result in a decline in sales of CDs, DVDs and games.

That the report talks about overall societal welfare is eye opening to begin with. That it recommends that the benefit of such welfare is equal to that of the producing agents is something unheard of in our Stateside debates.

Determining the impact of unlicensed downloading on the purchase of paid content is a tricky exercise. In the music industry, one track downloaded does not imply one less track sold. Many music sharers would not buy as many CDs at today’s prices if downloading were no longer possible, either because they cannot afford it or because they have other budgetary priorities: they lack purchasing power. At the same time, we see that many people download tracks to get to know new music (sampling) and eventually buy the CD if they like it. To the extent that file sharing does result in a decline in sales (substitution), it usually entails a transfer of welfare from producers to consumers. With estimated welfare gains accruing to consumers totalling around €200 million a year in the Netherlands, music producers and publishers suffer turnover losses of at most €100 million a year.

You see what they did there? The emphasis is mine but there’s a “transfer of welfare from producers to consumers.” This is not a dollar amount, although the report’s authors quantify it. Instead, it’s a social good. It’s a cultural product that citizens otherwise would not have access to but can benefit from and are available through file sharing.

The Dutch view this as valuable. Instead of a US debate where dollars lost is a net loss in the zero sum game of US citizens defined as consumers, the authors of the Dutch report suggest that the transfer of — and access to — cultural assets is a societal good.

This is not to say that the report dwells solely on this idea or issue. Instead, it looks at new business models for the music, film and gaming industries where citizens are equal partners in the equation rather than blameworthy pirates to be sued by a nation’s recording industry.

What strikes me though is the Dutch reintroduction of the consumer-as-citizen, and the elevation of that citizenship to equal status with our corporations. It’s an argument lost in US debates on the issue. And one that should be found as we consider content in an age of digital reproduction.

The report can be found here.