GENOMICON

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.

–

(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.

I’m quite fond of saying “The defining conflict of the era, is Network vs Hierarchy” because it always seems to elicit sage nods of approval from my learned colleagues – really I don’t know it it’s true or not, but it seems like a cool thing to say, so I say it.

Conflicts are almost always hierarchy vs hierarchy… with the people at the bottom carrying the burden of suffering… so there’s also this permanent resentment about top-down control. Every once in a while a technology turns up that breaks top-down control… and after a period of attempted to be bannings (under the guise of heresy and witch-hunts), a big player takes advantage of this resentment to get people to mobilise around his flag… under the promise of freedom… and often, new hegemony is imposed.

Oliver Cromwell wound up having far more power than any king. Henry the Eighth… etc etc… The Catholics did not have the monopoly on cruelty and violence by any stretch. Guy Fawkes was the Stuart 9/11… but protestantism (believe it or not) is the spiritual ancestor of woman’s rights, egalitarianism, of the enlightenment, science… etc etc.

William Tyndale Bible

ok. Get to the point.

The lines are being drawn… between openness and control. Between open-platforms and control-systems.

Proprietary software is a control-system, Facebook is a control-system. iPhone is a control-system. Debt-based money is a control-system

Open-Source is open, Android is open, the Personal Computer is open. The Internet as a whole is open.

Google’s Wave is open; Opera’s Unite – while being a great (and crucial) idea, is closed.

iPhone is the AOL of cellphones. Android is an attempt at being the hand-held PC.

People bitch warily about Google… having too much power, saying that what Google is about isn’t “openness” so much as “openness to Google”. This is missing the point, and the historical context. What Google is, is a major player that’s come down on the side of the protestants – it is mobilising popular sentiment against top-down control. That is what “don’t be evil” means. The fact that Google is a hierarchy, with hierarchical goals and hierarchical needs, doesn’t mean it’s not doing good – because what it is doing is creating open-systems – the fact that it is setting these systems up so it can spy on them, doesn’t stop them being open… it just introduces a higher order of problem – but it doesn’t attempt to build evil (aka top-down control) into the DNA of what it creates.

DNA being the relevant word – because without control at a really low level, open software can just route around attempts to close it. To turn an open system to a closed system… to change the DNA, you need to control the root. Your PC may run Windows – which is a closed system, but you can (theoretically at least) route around any controls that Windows might try to impose – because Windows doesn’t own the root. You do.

Earlier in the decade was The Palladium Scare – which was Microsoft (who are the old-guard) attempting to build DRM directly into hardware to stop the PC being an open system – it was an attempt to take the root.

A bit later was the Sony root-kit fiasco – in which it attempted to infect its customers PCs with a virus that took the root.

The continual attacks by telcos against network neutrality are attempts to take the root – to stop the web as a whole being an inherently open system.

The global “3 strikes” fad laws that 1/2 the countries in the western world seem to be contemplating are an attempt at the “moral root” – which is to say, slight-of-hand… a distraction over the “details of the punishment” in an attempt to sneak through the idea that governments/corporations have a “moral right” to control at this level.

It’s all a battle for the root… so the Catholic Church can carry on raising armies, extracting tithes and selling indulgences.

- Daniel Schmitt, spokesperson for Wikileaks.org talking to the BBC (7 minutes in)

Part of the reason why I’ve been off… line, for the last month or so is that… erm… the nature of the war that we may or may not be in, is shifting focus. I feel like The Internet is being attacked… globally on so many fronts (in basically the same way) that we possibly do need to call it something like war now.

I mean in the bronze age, Iron age, industrial-era… wars were fought in bronze, iron, industrial ways – so I guess in the information era (or whatever it is we’re currently in) this pattern will continue – but things will be different because we’re also going through a Gutenberg Shift – and one of the things that happens in Gutenberg Shifts, is that it becomes a lot clearer to people that their biggest problems are top-down problems.

So we’ve got highly dubious 3-strikes laws being plotted/snuck through in New Zealand, the UK, Spain, France, Sweden?… there’s the ACTA negotiations which are secret because (according to one of the players) if people knew what they were, they’d walk away from the table. Relentless corporate attacks on net-neutrality… There are censorship moves afoot not just in China and Iran but also Australia… and all of the above is just the stuff I know about. There seems to be this broad-based top down attack going on. The end of 2009 feels like the end of Empire Strikes Back.

We seem to have skipped the part where we look at evidence as to whether sharing culture actually hurts the culture, and instead we (or our elected leaders at least) are just blandly accepting the idea that “a file shared, is a sale lost” and have moved on to discussing the punishment.

Well we’ve been here before, and I’m more than happy to fight for this. Seriously.

Anyway, vaguely apropos of that… here’s an interesting video of a beautiful bit of paleo-futurism – Salvador Allende’s hi-tech panopticon.

Free As In Beer: Cybernetic Science Fictions from Greg Borenstein on Vimeo.

(from)

Eventually everything gets digitised

I’ve been looking for this on youtube for years – and I guess part of the reason that it hasn’t turned up, is because there was no video… so who ever has posted this has made their own… which consists entirely of a static-camera shot of the act of digitization.

Which is almost I suppose (through the eyes of corporate lawyers (who like Phil Collins, and Huey Louis and the News)) taking the piss – actually filming the act of would be criminality. Whoever has done this though, isn’t taking the piss… they’re doing it because they fucking love it, and so do I.

So I’m doing my bit, and also (probably) breaking the law. Bad Brains were a fucking mental band – and the soundtrack of my life for a while… and this was my favourite song – that single note guitar bit in the second part of the verse is fucking excellent. Top band. They meant it.

So.

Everything gets digitized in the end, except that which nobody cares about.

Anything that doesn’t get digitized dies. It become analogue link-rot. It’s the 10c bin, which no one even looks at. It smells of old cardboard and will eventually be chucked out.

So… what is being filmed here, isn’t the moment that a song entering the realm of zero-reproduction/zero-distribution costs… and (theoretically, according to the lawyers) having it’s commercial value also pushed to zero – it’s the moment that it is brought to life… rescued from the moth-eaten libraries of New Alexandria.

Anything that anyone cares about enough to copy, becomes immortal. Kindof. If it’s not being copied, it’s dead.

I feel sorry for people who come from the past sometimes.

Not often, but sometimes. They’re are so fucked. So valiant and well-meaning (hemmed in by their invisible, imaginary walls) , but so fucked.

But then I remember the damage that they do; the damage they would do if they could only get away with it… and I well, no, I don’t feel sorry for them at all.

So this turned up:

Yoostar

A fabulous new PRODUCT for CONSUMERS where you can superimpose yourself over your favourite actors in your favourite movies and be a star on Youtube!!!

Only you can’t – they choose the bits of movies you can act on for you – you’re given a limited set of scenes to start with, and then you pay for other ones, through the nose, from another limited selection. Then you upload them to their site, and they choose whether to display them or not.

You can’t upload them to Youtube because you’re not allowed. No kiddy-winkies (because that’s what you are), you’re not allowed… it clearly says so in the terms and conditions.

Only it doesn’t clearly say so, because the whole thing is written in densely-worded, ant-font legalese (the hall-mark of the corporate-anal-retentive) and the whole thing reads like a fantasy dreamed up by the sorts of people who are so out of their minds with their lust for control, that they’re only happy when they’re wandering round with loads of rubber-bands secretly tied round their cocks.

Great idea. Hopelessly, haplessly emasculated execution.

Someone else is going to do this – and it will probably be quite popular. The key is a bit of software that can selectively green-screen selected (moving) elements in an original movie… and then blend in other parts.

It’s a great idea – but it can’t be controlled by the englobulators. The real stars that arise from this will be the people who break the rules… the satirists and subverters.

And we can all tell without even checking our watches, that it’s going to create an entire genre of highly unsettling pornography where people lip-synch to other people’s orgasms… or worse still, genuinely come over other people’s fakes. People are weird. There’s no telling what they’ll do.

And that’s the point.

lol

This is cool

I’m not sure if it is what I think it is, because I’m an ignoramus* but what it looks like to me – what it looks like it could be (almost) is a way for people to make their own music videos.

It provides a palette, a brush and a simple mechanical hand-holder (you fly sideways across the page) basically turning you into a human scribble-bot, loosely choreographed in time to some music. When the song is finished, you can send it to your friends.

It’s similar in some ways to what MGMT did a while back – but they alas are controlled by a major record company, who’s head is firmly stuck up the arse of the 20th century – so they block video embedding and ban youtube (et al) copies. The idiocy of these people is utterly dumbfounding – these are the same people who pay millions in payola “Independent Promotors” to get something on the radio, then persecute/prosecute people who are actually trying to help them, for free, in a medium far more powerful.

Check it out. I’ve gone out of my way to break the law to help you people. I think this song is excellent and I’m advertising on your behalf, for free, at cost to myself.

Your record company doesn’t deserve to be in business. Sack them.

So anyway – back to the slinky inky thing – I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that this is the future of music promotion – giving people the software tools to make cool videos of their own… but it’s a fairly good tactic I think. I mean people are going to do it anyway – I found this the other day:

Which is a video that someone’s made of Catpower’s cover of a Velvet Underground song.

It utterly gob-smacks me that there are about 300 variations of this on youtube – and this is a pretty obscure song.

And it’s illegal (although Matador Records don’t contribute to the RIAA and I know because I ask them, because I boycott all companies associated with the RIAA) – it’s illegal, and people are doing it in droves anyway, in this huge act of civil disobedience which would be Ghandi-like if it actually mattered that much, and if the people involved were even thinking about the political aspects rather than simply expressing themselves.

Simple amateur creativity is the biggest act of civil disobedience going on in the world today?

It’s a nice thought.

Still. The Velvet Underground.

It’s been said that they never sold any records, but everyone who heard them picked up a guitar. It does my head in that they’re from the 60s, and not even the late 60s – and in a funny kind of way they represent a prototype (of some sort) of what’s happening now – what Clay Shirkey describes as an open invitation to participate, as in “I could do that too”. They taught the world to sing, by the age of 21. They broke every mould and taught people how to write songs from the pieces – listen to the song-structure in that first catpower video. It’s a tacit freeing of all successive artistic progeny from the constraints of conformity. You don’t need verses, you don’t need choruses, it doesn’t have to rhyme, it doesn’t have to be radio-friendly… and most importantly…

… it doesn’t even have to be terribly good.

And that in a nutshell is the genius of it.

I’m almost tempted to make a website of home-made videos of songs that are covers of Velvet Underground songs – 2 generations of replication etc – by both artist and medium.

But I won’t. I’ll just break the law by embedding this:

It’s not even a video… but getting back to the initial point about writing systems that allow people to create and propagate their own videos – like the inky thing at the beginning could almost be… really, the whole internet is one giant system for doing just that.

ps: Initial inspiration courtesy of atomicshed :twitter.

pps: it’s also projectable onto walls:

pps *

Someone who can speak many languages : Multilingual
Someone who can speak two languages : Bilingual
Someone who can only speak one language : English.

C’est moi.