 He argues that copyright debates stem from this fear, pointing to a fight over fair use regarding the reproduction of a print article, which is adorably appropriate to his time. Today one can download a movie in less than a year, and the movie and music industries undoubtedly fear the destruction of their profits more than the new possibilities for freedom of expression. Theall’s commentary on censorship is nonetheless more than just an interesting historical artifact, though it certainly is that:
Sorry, I need few sentences to fixate on ‘the Net’. (The ‘Net’ and ‘Web’ both have connotations of trapping and restricting; the ‘internet’ puts the potential for connection first and then mentions there will be something to catch us. Also, the trend toward decapitalization reflects the I/internet’s unofficial nature; it is not a brand name, but a fact of nature like the air and the trees. Even if people buy and sell it, the concept of it remains unownable. That will be it for close reading and this paper, thanks.) Hey, we won. Theall is not a prophet after all. He’s right about one thing; freedom was always going to come at a cost to corporations. The lack of censorship means widespread reproduction of copyright works without payment; it means production of new works without going through corporations; it means old people are scared of the internet; it means corporations desperately grasp at popular trends instead of regulating those trends. Small bits of the internet are regulated, but that’s the minority. The central characteristic of carnival, the one that has not been replicated until the internet, is that the figures of authority are terrified and everyone else is not.
	Authority’s best defense against the carnivalesque is inertia. The unimportance of laughter has been so enshrined in our culture that carnivalesque works have no chance for canonization. People do not expect and do not really understand ambivalent humor. The internet’s confusing and unpredictable nature is just fine on the internet, but not everyone is prepared for the internet to leave the internet. Sam Lipsyte’s novels, as works characterized by ambivalent laughter, are not the subjects of academic papers. People will not pointedly read his novels in public; nor will they recommend his novels to others without having read them. (That is the true mark of success.) People will read his novels and enjoy them and mostly, keep it to themselves. Inertia is usually quite a powerful thing; it generally prevails. Generally, however, it does not face the internet. The internet needs no defense for its power as a force of change, but just in case, a few paragraphs back are some excerpts from an article about future possible censorship of the internet. And today, just 14 years later, the idea of an internet without pornography is unthinkable.
	I did not intend this to be an optimistic paper, despite Sam Lipsyte’s novels being everything I love and finally learning how to pronounce Mikhail Bakhtin because I’ve never had more fun with a literary theorist.10 The Enlightenment, after all, ruined everything. For every Lipsyte there are a million people on the internet who keep trying to make rules happen. They’ve never known anything but binaries and structure “in real life,” so it’s not entirely their fault, just mostly. Then again, carnival was mostly useless fuckers I’m sure, but I’ve let Bakhtin’s idealistic framing win out because magic doesn’t require perfection. (The first mostly joking paper I ever wrote for school was about the ridiculousness of excluding contractions from life/academic papers. This is the last, so, full circle.) The thesis was never exactly stated (because I’m lazy) because argument is a process, not a statement. A thesis could never be everything I intend to say - it structures, regulates, threatens absolutism and ruins the ambivalence of suggestion and/or demagoguery. I’d say fuck capitalism, but capitalism gave us the internet because it contains the seeds of its own destruction. To anthropomorphize a bit, capitalism is constantly unsatisfied because it creates and creates and expands the production possibility curve and nothing is ever enough and everyone hates it, except self-centered idiots who say they love it but really only love themselves. Carnival is amused by this, but that’s typical. Capitalism and Enlightenment thought are different things and in a different paper I’d explore those differences; in this one, let’s just say they’re twinsies. Like everything on earth, their lifespans have limits, and the carnivalesque reminds us that their lives contain constant reminders of their deaths. Meanwhile, the internet is here to save us - perhaps someday it will be our new god and require new (but so very old) spaces of freedom to save us again.
