Barbershop Punk by Georgia Archer & Kristin Armfield

You can’t know something unless you test it. Barbershop Punk shows that critical thinking is not only for academics but also for ordinary people, by portraying a change in the attitude towards companies and their practices in the US. Robb Topolski was one of those sceptical nerdy technicians, who accidently found out that his internet provider Comcast had blocked his peer-to-peer data exchange. As a fan and singer of barbershop music, Topolski wanted to legally share his music with like-minded people. The blocking was quite quickly interpreted as an infringement of the first amendment: the freedom of speech. The film tells the story of an ordinary American white man who unintentionally became a hero and representative of net neutrality activism. His story is recounted within the larger framework of a legal process in which Comcast is accused of violating the first amendment.

Interestingly enough, the filmmakers are confronted with the very same difficulties heard by the court. The invisible internet, which is presented as the leading media of today, is on the other hand represented through images of wires, transmitter masts, the blinking lights of routers, sped-up footage of car traffic at night and CGI animations. The elusive presence of modern media is thus transformed into a feeling of speed and material-based technology. The pictures themselves demonstrate the inability to visualize and even control the internet. If the film makes quite clear that web access is an existential right for everybody, the question is if the directors’ style serves those interests. There is a paradox involved: the interests of the ordinary man as well as the interests of companies share the very same American ideal: self-made success. Based on the confrontation of those two spheres of rights, the film shows the difficulties in how to deal aesthetically with such a paradoxical tension. The main focus however is not on the paradox but on an interest in taking up a left-wing position. Consequently the documentary serves the interests of an American public that wants to find new avenues to challenge the status quo of industrial and governmental relations and wants to take responsibility for itself. That‘s not punk, that‘s soft punk.

By Johannes Bennke