GENOMICON

So earlier on the twitters, I said

and then

and

Only I won’t

Jeremy Taylor The Terrible works in this great big record shop in Cuba St, Wgtn. I’d lost touch with him for years, then wandered into this shop… and the top 100 albums were lined up in order, in a great big display around the walls… and I could tell by the order that I’d found him again. Went over to the counter and said “I don’t suppose Jeremy works here does he?”

I don’t want Jeremy’s shop to go out of business. I want there to be a Jeremy’s shop in every town. A Jeremy in every town. I’m not sure how his business is affected by the fact that people (who presumably have finite disposable income (which has been stagnant since the 80s)) are now spending:

- more on their monthly phone bill than they ever did on records or
- more on computer games than they ever did on records or
- more of big-ticket live gigs than they ever did on records or
- more on ISP connections than they ever did on records

or that people are now using shared files to find out about new music, rather than radio. But… but…

Half the people I know are musicians, or work in the music biz in some capacity. If I was going to go nuclear on the music industry, there would come a time when I would find myself downloading and burning one of Sprouts‘ records… and I couldn’t do it. It would feel like I was being cruel to a small furry animal. And Sprouts is just one. I couldn’t even do it to people I don’t know. I could never mass-pirate a Grant Lee Buffalo record. A dEUS record. I’ll evangelise (which means sharing) but I won’t… (how you say?) “hurt sales”.

Someone is going to put the entire history of recorded music onto a single disc, but it ain’t going to be me.

However.

The entertainment/copyright industries are visiting their own version of a nuclear option onto the Internet in the shape of 3rd-party liability… the current incarnation of which is the entirely repugnant, and secretly-negotiated-trade agreement ACTA. It obliges ISPs to spy on you. Next time you send an email, next time you visit a porn site, next time you do a search for some embarrassing ailment, next time you do a search for something that is quite innocent, but the combination of words is a bit weird….

… the entertainment industry has created a situation where you’re going to be spied on. All the time. By law. Everything you do must be monitored.

In addition to this, there’s the incredibly chilling/stagnating effect – the fact (for example) that you can’t make a movie without ‘errors and omissions insurance‘ – which similar to a lot of other regulation, pretends to be about “protections” but has the side effect that only big corporations can afford to innovate in the open market. IP law needs to be reformed… taken down a peg or 12, and IP lawyers need to be put in the stocks and pelted with shit-filled crisp-packets.

The Internet is more important than the entertainment industry – I mean fuck, the telephone system is more important than the entertainment industry… and the Internet is that multiplied by about 12 entirely new dimensions. The Internet is definitely more important.

The entertainment industry does not have a god-given right not to have to adapt.

So.

A nuke option is required… or more accurately, a response to the entertainment industry’s attack on us is required… or more accurately, we need to get rid of any corporation that is big enough to change government policy to the detriment of the society that hosts it. We need to get rid of the copyright cartels.

I think it needs to be a supply-side change. I think we need to render the copyright-cartels irrelevant not for the consumers, but for the producers. For the musicians, writers, film-makers – and I don’t think many of them will be too sorry about this, because “The Industry” with very few exceptions was always a bunch of total cunts to start with. Andy Ross is an example of someone who isn’t – if the music biz was entirely populated by people like Andy, the entire terrain would be different I think. I can think of a handful of others… they do exist, but right now the majors are a machine owned by financiers, and mega-corporations who fund all sorts of dubious shit.

Look it up sometime. The last time I looked, the same people who put out Jimi Hendrix’s records were also building a massively polluting and outdated incinerator in East Sussex UK. Vivendi are attempting to do to water, what the 20th century did to oil. These people are greedy rapacious scum.

And they’re attempting to force top-down control of the internet.

So. Supply-side change. What do we do?

Damned if I know. Set up systems where people can be paid directly by their fans rather than going through a risk-aggregater (who no longer risks)(and who pays them back a pittance, after they’ve recouped) That would do it.

The way through it is to cut out the supply-side middlemen.

But I still haven’t figured it out. The other day Adam was going on about this: http://stillcorners.bandcamp.com/

Great song. For sale for 1 quid.

Sorry, that’s pathetic. That’s sad on so many levels – not least of which, it’s a pathetically low amount – nominal… pitched at such because it’s what the market will stand… only the market isn’t bothering with it. It’s so low that all it represents is the symbolic reluctance to get out a credit-card. The Reflexive-Stinge-Hump.

Do people pay that? I guess they might.

I’m feeling kindof torn on this one though. The last (and possibly only) digital track that I bought was this

And that was AFTER I’d pulled an MP3 from youtube (yea, you can do that).

It didn’t feel good doing it – paying for an MP3 I mean. There is something clangingly wrong about that deal. I like Trixie Whitley so much that I’d donate money to the cause… I’d pay money (proper money… you know, like $100) in advance for her next record – if she kickstartered it or something… but paying for an MP3 is like paying for an echo. It’s already out there… and I don’t want to ‘tip’ her a single quid. That’s taking the piss.

Maybe I’m hung up on cult of artifact… because I would pay for… a pebble off her local beach or something. Something of symbolic exchange – though if she sold a million records, she’d run out of beach… and it’s kindof ridiculous making someone go down the beach and post pebbles about the place anyway… but you get the idea. That scary Amanda Palmer

seems to do a roaring trade in indirect sales of stuff as well. Trent Reznor does as well I think. Monetising fame (that to a degree was paid for by their record companies before they split). Maybe that’s the way through – monetising fame. Not exactly meritocratic I know… but then it is more or less exactly what we have today anyway… only the terrain has shifted so what was once the product is now the advertising. And it’s really fucking good advertising, but you can’t really expect people to buy advertising. They want artifacts damnit. Like the ones Jeremy sells.

This has turned into a massive ramble… sorry.

Something else though… when I was a kid I was addicted to space-invaders. I must have spent thousands… 20c a go… would spend about $1 a time. I loved it. Every once in a while though I’d come across a broken machine that you could play for free… and it wasn’t 1/2 as enjoyable. I’d actually spend less time playing machines where nothing was at stake. I’ve noticed a similar thing with movies. If I’ve made some investment, I enjoy them a whole lot more. The value that I give to something is an inner-thing… and it gives back.

There must be a way through this… and I’m about to cast myself head-long into it because this year I’m shooting a movie based entirely on these principles.

So anyway… to boil it down to one memorable phrase: “I think we can destroy the legacy entertainment industry, by supporting artists directly”

Or… “The nuclear option is to water the grass-roots”

edit:
Unless of course they break the internet, in which case all bets are off.

This is fairly phenomenal

It’s this guy who appears to have single-handedly created about 1400 educational videos – university level. Check out the list on that page… that’s utterly incredible. He’s quite good at teaching as well by the look of it – they’re understandable. If I had ten divisions of such men our troubles here would be over very quickly.

I’ve been thinking about sky libraries quite a lot recently – because that (among other things) is what the web is. It’s a Giant Library In The Sky.

And you know what the thing about libraries is? They’re a basic human right. They’re a cornerstone of civilisation… all information available to all people all of the time, is a basic human right. If you are a publisher, you don’t get to choose what goes into a library. Please… fuck off. That is not your decision – the ethos/sanctity of libraries is more important than the business/$$$ of publishers. Sorry, you’ll just have to find some other way to make money – like the rest of us have had to.

Which leaves us with some fairly tangly questions to answer – to do with where privacy starts, and libararyhood… takes over. Every human on earth has a god-given right to be able to access all information as soon as it is published. Just like they would if it was a bricks-and-mortar library. Once information is in the wild, it no longer belongs to anyone… not logically or morally. The law is retarded, and retarding – and held in utter contempt by everyone under the age of 25, and a fair few over. You (Douglas Rushkoff) may think you have a right to “own” what you publish… rather than (as you say) just “giving” it to the hive-mind… nice try, but that is not the environment you live in. Those are not the environmental conditions – and you can’t fight it without pouring a ton of money and energy into the guard-economy. You can’t fight it without making the web equivalent of the fascism that we saw at the G20 in Toronto this last few weeks

Information is inherently unownable – if you don’t like it, don’t create it… there are a couple of billion people more than happy to take your place. We are witnessing the biggest explosion in expressive-capability in human history, and legacy industries are a hindrance, rather than the sine qua non of creativity. We are here.

So… I think the library frame is a more useful starting point for the morality of information… than that of “theft” – because that clearly doesn’t work.

And when you see what Salman Khan has done – what he’s gifted to the world… how much this information / teaching would mean to someone… who doesn’t have access to education. It goes beyond (the symptom of a chronically broken system that is) philanthropy and is looking a whole lot more… Gandhi-like is too strong… I mean all he has done has given everything he knows to the rest of humanity. He hasn’t broken the British Empire… but still… …If I had ten divisions of such men our troubles here would be over very quickly.

This one’s been ruminating for a while… It comes in the wake of a) the Digital Economy Bill passing in the UK (I’m British) and b) the Public Acta meeting in New Zealand (I’m a Kiwi)

So.

Part 1)

This is a stupid (no, really, it is stupid) piece of legislation, partly drafted by the BPI, and corralled by the unelected Peter Mandelson (who’s had to resign in disgrace, twice, but who is back)… which among other things, grants the said Lord Mandelson, the right to make up laws on the fly.

We protested – I personally wrote two letters to my MP, as did 20,000 other people…

… because it was really important…

… and only 40 of the useless cunts bothered to turn up. It was a whipped vote – which means it was driven from the top.

So the DEbill went through. There was nothing we could do about it. Our parliamentary system failed. Again.

–

All over the world (and by that, I mean the countries I know about… New Zealand, The UK, The US, Aus) confidence in democracy is being profoundly shaken. People fucking hate politicians. These are the people we elect – this shouldn’t happen.

Democracy’s role has become “Make up laws for lobbyists and pass them if no one protests”. In the UK, they’re passed regardless – MPs preferring the collateral damage of voter ire to offending the party hierarchy. A million people took to the streets in London in protest of the Iraq war. We were completely ignored. 20,000 people wrote to their MPs over the DEbill. We were completely ignored.

Confidence has been shaken in both the UK and NZ over systemic expenses scandals – where MPs pilfer the public purse – for holidays and duck-ponds etc… but the photo above is the thing that does it for me. Excuse me, but what the fuck are you people actually for?

Behind all this (and worse) though is this general sense of disenfranchisement – from teabaggers to greenies… we all feel disempowered – because really, there is no difference between the major parties.

And this is the Empire Strikes Back year for the internet – this is the year where governments in collusion with the old entertainment industry (owned now by major corporations or shell companies – the Gordon Geckos of this world) are attacking the internet (and therefore us) on every front. This is the year when we really need our elected leaders to act in our interests – instead of just fucking failing.

Here’s that picture again.

You see all those empty spaces? Those are our elected representatives. Failing.

Part 2)

So on the 8th I went to the #publicACTA meeting in Wellington. It’s purpose was to draft a set of recommendations to give to NZ ACTA negotiators. These needed to be phrased in legalese, and not be so far outside the scope of the negotiation that they be rejected out of hand.

About 100 people turned up – a selection of lawyers, geeks, tech entrepreneurs etc. People who actually understand the internet – who understand the ramifications of 2nd-party liability.

What happened was this:

1) Some people got up and made some speeches, outlining the issues.

2) we were randomly split up into (about 10) groups to brainstorm what we thought the points in the draft should be.

3) these were read out, and the most commonly raised issues were combined into a rough draft.

4) we split into groups again to re-word these issues to make them sound reasonable and legalesey

5) these were read out, and transcribed in real time (with guidance from the floor) and at about 7pm that evening the final draft was completed.

This is it.

–

Now it seemed to me that this was a pretty good way of creating legislation – or at least proposals for it. Maybe it was because everyone there was more or less in agreement before we started – there was one guy who tried to raise the Entertainment Industry POV, but this POV is based on a willful misunderstanding – and once this was cleared up there really wasn’t anywhere else for him to go argument-wise.

This process seemed a lot better than the current system – which has become worse than useless.

Government by Referendum is a bad idea – they have it in California and it is a farce. It is a carte-blanche handing of power to whoever owns the media companies, and whoever has the most money to buy their services. Government by Referendum is basically just handing the car keys to Rupert Murdoch…. the Public ACTA process was pretty good though – I think it should be a crucial part of ALL legislation… in fact I’m not sure that politicians should be deciding policy at all. They’re not good enough at it.

–

Clay Shirky pointed out that a society with a printing press is qualitatively different to one without. A society with an internet is qualitatively different to one without.

Which begs the question “how?”

How is it different?

Well… the last time around, the improvement in people’s ability to communicate with each other, resulted in them demanding democracy. It took a long time before democracy supplanted monarchy… but it happened. It also created a schism in the Church, and led to a whole raft of social reforms, ranging from Women’s Rights to the rise of science and rationalism. Rationalism and Humanism are really just extensions of Protestantism… or more accurately,Protestantism is a compromise… a key-frame along a route from (informational) tyranny to… something else. Rational Humanism I suppose.

The faster the memosphere, the more purely our organisations reflect our societal atomic structure.

So. The Protestant Revolution is still going on – the characteristics that define it are still echoing and perculating through our societies… and these characteristics are being accelerated by the internet. It’s the same revolution… The Catholic Church (for example) looks like it might need to schism again… along much the same lines, and for much the same reasons as last time.

The Church is thankfully no longer the (murdering, torturing) power that it was – these days power is a compromise between the state (that to a greater or lesser extent (even in tyrannies) exists as a result of public indulgence), and the corporations – who are the new globalised aristocracy – a baronial class, enslaved to a type of psychopathic mathematical formula, designed to transfer money upwards. They try to represent this formula as being a law of nature. It isn’t.

Parliamentary democracy evolved as a set of compromises between the interests of wealthy/powerful concerns and the commons. It needs to evolve again.

–

Some characteristics of a wired population are

1) Secrecy is a lot harder to maintain, and The Internet comes down with great force and furious anger upon anyone who tries to censor it.

Obviously govts all over the world are trying to censor it.

The main sword that the internet weilds is exposure. People laugh at slactivists – but it’s the slactivists that push one of the only levers we have to move those in power: exposure. We will force transparency upon you.

2) The amount of engagement we (the people) have in the decisions that affect us is no longer enough.

This is partly because our govts so reliably make bad decisions – that they force upon us even though we protest… but this sense of disenfranchisement cuts across the board. Right wing nutters and europhobes feel just as disenfranchised as the rest – in fact the army of cranks who would formerly write highly disturbing letters to the papers, number highly among the new rash of people offering themselves as alternative candidates.

This isn’t democratic though – the crank (and I use that word guardedly, but from a policy POV he is) who is running in my own constituency is not particularly interested in representing the views of his constituency – he just wants to promote is own anti-EU, climate-change-denying, war-supporting, “lefty”-fearing agenda. There was no public consultancy involved in arriving at this agenda…. if there was… if he organised a #publicACTA type set of meetings he’d get:

a) a manifesto diametrically opposed to his own

b) engaged and invested supporters

c) a better manifesto.

–

–

Here’s a short observation from Justin Carter at the ACTA thing. I’m including this because before he got up and spoke, I was ready to storm the Bastille. We don’t live in that age any more though. The way through this is not violence or confrontation, but killer frames – clarifying catalysts that dissolve and realign.

And a short observation from me:

No legislation should be considered before the metrics for gauging its success are agreed.

from

The interesting bit (I think) is that it uses an Android phone to interface with the web. I am Borg etc. We are Borg.

I think this is proof of concept for something that hasn’t been invented yet. Probably some sort of crowd-sourced sex thing I should think – or a wearable twitter feed.

Speaking of Android – there was a thing earlier where some of those Shanzai chaps in China had managed to make an android-powered iPad – which is mildly interesting because DRM is basically the thing that defines the iPad.

And lack of DRM is the thing that defines the Internet.

And worthy of a post in its own right, but not getting one… but apropos of the battle for the root etc, here’s a little vid about Wikileaks

Cuz if we are to become Borg, then it had better be on a non DRMed basis.

I like that blonde Aussie guy at the end – reminds me of Asmodious from Gabriel – Michael Piccirilli. I thought he was great.

I can’t really think straight at the mo. You may have noticed.

So letter-to-MP-writing time again.

They always say “be polite”, and sometimes I am, and sometimes I’m not… and sometimes I’m in between. Imagine I’m a nerd version of a cross between Shane McGowan and Hunter S Thompson – but without the talent, or fame.

You better believe I fucking mean it though.

According to recently leaked documents, New Zealand is a lone voice of sanity in the ACTA negotiations – and apropos of that (or not) there’s been a request for “Submissions on Enforcement in the Digital Environment” – which closes on the 31 March 2010.

So this is what I said:

“Eastman Kodak claims that Apple Computers and Research in Motion are guilty of infringement of patents. Kodak has taken the step to request the U.S. International Trade Commission prevent both companies from importing their smart phones into the United States. Nokia filed a similar complaint in December 2009.” – from bettertrades.com

I can’t tell if this is satire or not… but that’s the nature of the beast. Intellectual Property enforcement has become so weird and extreme that… well, it is actually hard to tell if some things are satire or not.

It must be as clear as day by now that the entire system is unworkable, and either needs to be rolled back to the more sane system that existed about 250 years ago… or just scrapped completely. There seems to be (well actually, there IS) and entire parasitic economy based upon swooping on anything successful and suing for breach of IP. Avatar had loads of them.

There have been two particularly farcical incidents Down-Under recently, when use of a would-be national flag has been stopped because some deeply unenlightened person somewhere owns the IP on it. One was the Aboriginal flag vs Google – the other was in NZ, involving some kerfuffle with an MP and a clash of interests.

I really do hope that iPhone imports (I thought they were already American?) get blocked – in the vain hope that it might wake people to the idea that THE main thing “chilling” innovation is this ludicrous system of laws we have – to protect micro-monopolies on the utterly uncontainable.

The law is fucking wrong. It needs to be got rid of.

What’s the most fucked up thing that can happen?

What’s a common pattern of fuckupery that we’ve seen before, and appear to have a real talent for?

Ok. Here it is:

We (The People) create nightmares for ourselves when we form institutions to try to control the uncontrollable.

We’re really bad at this. It’s a really serious danger that we really, really, really need to learn not to do… ever again. We need to see it coming.

Period. That’s what happens. Every single time.

So when an institution is created to do the impossible, it will lie… it will

1) pretend it’s getting results
2) try to legitimise itself by creating terror of a “Great Evil”… threats so dire that no one can question them
3) try to expand
4) attempt to use the legal system as a form of terror – where penalties are extreme and disproportionate in the hope they will frighten people into subservience
5) become part of the political environment, that other non-related factions use as leverage

Once an institution of this sort is created, it becomes incredibly difficult to get rid of, because of 2) and 5) above. It becomes a massive parasite… a poison that runs through the veins of the body-politic, and takes hundreds of years to get rid of.

Lets take a look at a couple of examples.

1) The Inquisition

The picture above is Malleus Mallificarum – the Hex-Hammer. The handbook of the Inquisition.

This book is an icon to evil – in my opinion it out-evils paintings by Hitler, or… actual books about black-magic. I read it when I was about 18 and it made me feel car-sick. One turned up for sale on ebay recently (you know – the ebay that bans nazi memorabilia in various countries.) – I took a screengrab because… links to ebay disappear.

The “Great Evil” that the inquisitions were supposed to address was heresy, and to a lesser extent (when no heretics were available) witchcraft. Activities so nasty and repugnant, that it was very difficult to defend without tarring yourself with the same brush. There was almost always a more secular political component as well – the Cathar business was also something of a land-grab etc. With all institutions, there are local fiefdoms to protect and enlarge. See 5) above… fighting Heresy became a useful part of the political landscape.

As time went on… the printing press was invented, and the focus of the Inquisitions shifted to the banning of books… those bypassing the authority of The Church. I mentioned a video about the Venetian Inquisition a while back… telling you to skip the bits were they burned people or boiled them alive etc.

Copyright as we know it, was started in 1557 by Mary Queen of Scots who granted a monopoly on printing to The Stationers Guild – on the condition that they allowed no “seditious or heretical” works to be published.

Copyright started life as a means to censor. It didn’t work, so people were burned alive.

2) The War on Drugs

The War on Drugs is/was a disease that afflicted every nation on earth in the 19th/20th/21st Centuries. It has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, has created criminal-cartels so large they basically run entire countries, there are millions and millions of people currently in prison, millions of lives have been ruined…

… and it has failed to achieve a single stated goal. If there ever actually were stated goals.

I think this one will be destroyed in our lifetimes, and the only countries that still pursue it will be those that are basically… pre-enlightenment.

The War on Drugs will be looked back on as a type of collective insanity. An example of how badly we can get things wrong… just by letting a certain type of thinking take hold… just by letting a certain type of institution take hold.

Meantime… see the 1-5 checklist above… every single item is checked.

–

Ok – here we are at the beginning of the 21st Century, and our internet is under attack.

All over the world, 3-strike laws are being flirted with, democratic governments are looking on with envy as countries like Iran and China censor at will… Entertainment Industry lobbyists (who IMHO should go to prison for attempting to subvert the democratic process) are tirelessly trying to bypass democracy by slipping draconian laws into trade-agreements… to prop up business models that were exploitations of a particular technological environment… that lasted less than a 50 years.

They’re all going to fail. You can’t control information flow… and if you try, you will form institutions that

1) pretend they’re getting results
2) try to legitimise themselves by creating terror of a “Great Evil”… threats so dire that no one can question them
3) try to expand
4) attempt to use the legal system as a form of terror – where penalties are extreme and disproportionate in the hope they will frighten people into subservience
5) become part of the political environment, that other non-related factions use as leverage

It’s happening. All of it.

The great danger of the copyright wars – is the establishment of a moral imperative – that file-sharing is inherently wrong, and punishable. It’s a hard-sell – so various people are trying to link it with pedophilia, Mexico and Venezuela have tried to link twitter to terrorism. On and on it goes. History possibly not repeating, but certainly rhyming.

There’s been an attempt to shift the “debate” (and I use that word with the snearingest of cynicism) in the direction of “what the punishments should be / who should do the policing etc”

No no no no no

Fuck that. What we need to look at is whether the “work once, get paid forever” model was ever a good idea in the first place. We need to roll-back copyright, not increase it.

We need to stop institutions who’s job it is to control the uncontrollable, from ever being formed… because they’re a total nightmare.

This is the real danger of ACTA… and the tide of insanity that it represents.

So…

End on an up (of sorts), here’s a thing by Lawrence Lessig… which appeared in a thing about “how to do public speaking” recently.

Watch this

This gets back to first principles of what we should be talking about – rather than this ACTA nonsense. Rather than listening to a single thing the copyright cartels have to say.

Back to Sony.

Remember the rootkit fiasco?

That was the one where Sony deliberately infected its customer’s machines with a rootkit virus – of the sort that hackers use to take total control of their victim’s machines – Sony did this to prevent people (you) from doing things that Sony didn’t like. They thought they had the right.

They should have gone to prison. If they were small-time hackers they would have… but apparently it’s ok to break the law if you’re a corporation and you’re only doing it for money.

Remember The Palladium Scare of the early 00s?

This one really, seriously put the shits up people who understand the web. It involved building a rootkit into the hardware of every computer – so then Microsoft (or other “trusted” parties) could spy on everything you did and prevent you from doing things it didn’t like – with the ability to completely disable your machine if they wanted… basically make you ask permission for everything you ran, and lock you into its proprietary formats. Forever.

You’d have to be a hacker to get round it, and you know… hackers go to prison.

In the same way that Microsoft could lock down Word documents to “trusted” applications, HP could just as easily force its printers to output low resolution documents if a genuine HP color cartridge was not used in the printer. This would certainly make some customers angry, but when you consider that HP makes its “printer” money on accessories, losing a customer who isn’t purchasing their brand of cartridges is not really losing that much.

Echoing Anderson’s sentiments, Bruce Schneier opined “this [Palladium] has nothing to do with security; it has everything to do with protectionism.” – from securityfocus.com 2002

So that was yesterday. Today is tomorrow already.

So welcome to the teenage years of the 21st Century. Much has changed, little has changed. “The Mobile Web” they say. “Smartphones: Platform of the future”… all that sort of thing, and tomorrow (or is today?) Apple are launching their new secret product that everybody already knows is a tablet PC. Whether it’s a tablet PC or a tablet iPhone remains to be seen… the only thing we know is It’s very new, It’s very tablet, And it’s Very Very Apple.

There will be a clamour of jackdaws. There will be videos of people on youtube unwrapping their first one. Personally I couldn’t give a toss, but that’s me. I’m casual. A bit over-casual actually. I’ve over-shot. It’s an issue – or would be if I gave a rats, which I don’t, so that’s ok then.

So anyway, back to Apple… or more specifically, back to the iPhone.

People often bitch about Microsoft nicking Apple’s ideas but this one goes the other way. Apple has created Palladium in the iPhone. You have to ask permission to run anything… which coming from a cellphone-angle is predictable enough, but if this is going to be a future platform of the web, then it’s a fairly serious problem.

Some people think that the App-Store is A Good Thing… developers can make a shitload of money they say. What it does however is lock in place the “Work once, get paid forever” model – which… well… it feels to me like it defies some sort of law of thermodynamics. You work once, then you extract value from your customers forever. I mean I’m all in favour of a diverse ecosystem of business models, but to enforce one particular model… THIS particular model, is profoundly counter-productive.

THIS particular model, is profoundly counter-productive…

… because it involves micro-monopolies. Each new innovation needs to be legally ringfenced to stop anyone else using it… which (as is plain to see) seriously chokes innovation. This is why in the end Open Source… anything, is going to piss all over proprietary anything. Which maybe (just maybe) is why Apple have enforced the “work once, get paid forever” model.

As an aside, if “work once, get paid forever” is set in stone as some moral imperative, then you’ve got the makings of one of the blindest evils that we humans manage to inflict on ourselves, and that’s Institutions who’s responsibility is to enforce the unenforceable. More on this later.

So I had a look at current state of play of Palladium… apparently MS changed the name (doubtless to distract the growing sea of ire that they were provoking)… to “Trusted Computing Platform” – which actually means “Untrusted Computer Customers” (that’s you)… and the Trusted Computing Group was formed, that seems to include everyone in the whole fucking world… except Apple.

Ironic as hell that they’ve managed to pull it off, on their own, with nary a complaint. Apart from people who’ve fallen foul of it already – had their apps rejected. You know… people like Google.

So is the tablet going to have an App Store? Who knows.

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(This post is one of four interlocking posts, the other three of which I haven’t started.)

When I was a kid, Lego was all… little blocks. They were all oblong, and they were made out of wattle and daub. We used to have to make our own thatch out of straw etc and the lego people all looked a bit like Baldrick.

I looked a bit like Baldrick. I still do look a bit like Baldrick – and I miss the days when Lego was only blocks, because you could make absolutely anything out of it… because your imagination could smooth the curves, and television wasn’t invented yet so everything you did make, did actually come directly from your own imagination, with a little help from ergot, amanita and the hectic bit at the back of the bible.

So it worries me when I see modern Lego – which seems to be set up with lots of “shaped” bricks that basically allow you to only make one thing. I saw a great example of this recently… some massive space-ship that made me think… “Well, Yea, that’s pretty impressive, but… you could only make that space-ship… all the parts are too application-specific to make a house or a dragon or whatever”.

(from)

It’s absolutely huge.

And upon closer inspection, I was totally wrong – it isn’t one of those “set piece” ones like this,

It’s original… kindof… I mean it does come from photos from a film, bit it isn’t… um… a pre-designed thing a bit like a 3d jigsaw puzzle.

So then I thought… yea, ok… so it’s not exactly “made-to-measure”… but the design comes from a movie… so it’s not purely imaginative… it is still sort of “copied”… like people have internalised a load of lego-boxes etc…

… but then I lost the site for a couple of days, and when I was googling just now, found that there are literally thousands of Lego spaceships out there – whole galaxies of them.

And my own personal favourite, the prints of which are available on deviantart

Entire galaxies of them. Amazing – some are original, others are note-perfect copies… with every shade of originality in between… although there is this tendency to borrow heavily from movies – which borrow (I suppose) in turn from Sci-Fi authors and artists.

This is kindof an illustration (I think) of the way that human culture is a process of copying and morphing, copying and morphing. I think it’s impossible, and entirely undesirable to try to isolate the “copying” part of culture as something that “you’re not allowed to do”.

Attribution where attribution is due… that’s kindof a moral duty – but the idea that you can control the progeny of your creations is insane. Have you seen how much of it’s out there? It’s not so much a case of “there’s quite a lot of copying in the culture” as “the culture is almost entirely a construction of different shades of copying”… or ‘influence’, as it’s more euphemistically known.

That’s what it’s made out of. Copying is the lego of human culture. It’s how we get the bits to fit together. It provides the raw-materials for experimentation. To try to cut future generations out of the loop (because for a brief period in the 20th century, conditions existed where you could) is a bit dismal really.