GENOMICON

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.

Well it had to happen sooner or later didn’t it?

Someone has complained about my publishing Golden-Mean Calliper designs that were too close his… and fair enough, they are hell of a close even though there are numerous examples of prior-art all over the web… he seemed like a reasonable bloke, so why argue?

So. Although his original request was that I err… censor? my site to sustain the 20th century notion of intellectual property (denying information to the The Universal Mind), what I will do instead is repeat the de rigueur 21st century response, which is to produce a better design, and open-source it.

The original design had a couple of flaws – the tips of the callipers don’t meet in the middle, and the bits where the rivets/bolts go are hell of a flimsy.

So… I’ve put together a swoopier design with reinforced connector points, allowing for a more standard-gauge rivet/bolt, and designed so the points do in fact touch. I haven’t Ponokoed this yet – so don’t go mass producing this thinking that it’ll work straight off the bat – it will need a bit of tweaking I suspect.

This design is released under Creative Commons Share-Alike license… and is free to all, including the original complainant.

and looks a bit like this:

The .svg is available from Ponoko here

The previous emergent moralities have been

#1 : Thou shalt not impede the flow
#2 : Set thine information free

The third and last (I think) is:

#3 : To All Things: A Name. (And Address)

This one is more subtle.

A requirement for the Internet to function as a maximally huge AI experiment is that every single piece of information within it (and without it) needs to have a URI. A Unique/Universal/Uniform Resource Identifier.

A URI may be a
– URN : Unique/Universal/Uniform Resource Name
– URL : Unique/Universal/Uniform Resource Locator (or address)

eg: Romeo and Juliet:

– URN : ISBN 0486275574
– URL : http://www.example.com/example_directory/RomeoAndJuliet.html

A name and an address are the minimum requirements for information linkage.

Not supplying these to any piece of information is a crime against the internet. This is not (however) a strong morality, unless you are a blogger or developer… in which case then general reaction is generally a vague “Oh that sucks, I can’t link to it (or) I’ll have to copy it out by hand”. Information isn’t set free until it has a URN, and URL.

An example of this is the Whole Earth Catalog back-issue library that is now online…

and although it’s a nice gesture, it sucks because you can’t cite anything. They’ve wrapped it up in some (fucking) flash wrapper so that the smallest granularity of linkage you can get is to an entire issue. Utterly useless.

Maybe it’s a lot of work transcribing all this to proper HTML?

It is, but I think that The Whole Earth Catalog is so beloved by it’s readers, that a lot of people might just help out for free… I know I would – especially if they allowed “translated by” links. The Whole Earth Catalog is the spiritual parent of all blogs – it was itself a type of paper-based blog, and there will never be another paper-based Whole Earth Catalog, because millions of its spiritual progeny are all over the web. We are all Whole Earth Catalog editors/writers now.

Maybe they want to make money from selling back-issues?

They can and they will – but we (fans) are their marketing arm now. We’re their radio station – and we evangelise by sharing their content. They can still make money selling physical stuff or services, but the days of selling information in it’s pure form (over and over again, forever) are… well, the environmental conditions are very much against it. And I don’t buy for a second that the idea of generating infinite wealth from a finite piece of work was ever a sustainable or moral concept in the first place. It’s certainly not a moral right, as the copyright cartels would have us believe.

The world has changed. The attention economy has arrived, and new patterns are emerging: Reputational-Capital is not built by locking your information behind money, but by encouraging your fans to free it.

To participate.

This means they can quote it, link to it, share it, embed it in other contexts and make derivative works. This way they become a stake-holder in your information, and will evangelise on your behalf. This is cheaper and more powerful than television advertising… and they’re not getting it for “free”, they’re working (and some of us work damned hard) to increase it’s value as an attention-economy asset.

– Some people get this
– Some people half get it
– Some people are arse-over-tit backwards in getting it

Sure, the models for making money on the side are still emerging – but to try to legislate 20th Century Information-Transfer conditions into some sort of permanence is both trying to fight the tide, and is deeply, damaging culturally.

The age of participation is assiduously and belligerently rejecting the age of consumption. Adapt or die.

–

An interesting extension to this idea – is applying URIs to physical objects – part of Bruce Sterling’s Spime idea – and an essential part of automated manufacturing – where bills of materials can be sourced by what effectively amounts to hyperlinks. Web 3.0 will be involve (among other things) the application of URIs to physical objects.

Applying URIs to physical objects is also central to the UK governments wankingly clamorous desire to dog-tag all of its citizens (although technically, we aren’t citizens, we’re loyal subjects – we’re not owned by the government, we’re owned by The Queen). In some ways this isn’t such a stupid idea – but it needs to be completely transparent and-open sourced. We can’t trust the government to do this… because we can’t trust the government. Period. It has to be us that does it. The government needs to be taken apart and put back together anyway. It’s no longer fit for purpose.

–

The reason I think this is probably the last emergent morality is that they get more subtle by degrees… further down the track from this one is a whole raft of initiatives that well-meaning people have tried to establish as moral practices, but are turning out to be a colossal struggle… because (largely) the extra effort required in the implementation of these interfere with the “#1: Thou shalt not interfere with the flow“. So maybe things like micro-formats, and accessible-to-disabled-people HTML may be implemented at a “web-within-a-web” application level (eg: facebook), but at a Wild, Wild, Web level it’s never going to happen because speed of propagation always wins.

So there you go.

I’m interested in Emergent Morality… of this thing that we’re building – The Internet: A billion nodes each terminating with a soon-to-be-obsolete computer and a vast morass of complaining humanity, at least 50% of which has below average IQ.

LOL Retards.

But I won’t go into that today, I’ll put it off again…

So today this hit the wires/waves :

(from) (the music is too spooky. Mute it.)

What it is, is a little app for an open-sourced mobile-phone platform which is currently under the nurturance of Google, of whom you may have heard.

So another site offers a new scheme where people can offer to pay for apps to be developed (bounties) and developers can go ahead and “win” the bounties. Crowd-sourced innovation and funding then. Not that google doesn’t have the resources to do this itself, but the crowd-sourcing is the thing. This is where the genius lies on a number of different levels.

So the first… the very first app to win a bounty, is Torrent Droid, and the social news sites light up like Christmas on Fire, because what it is, is a barcode reader for DVDs that searches the bittorrents for the DVD content, and allows you to send it to your home PC, so rather than buying it from the shop, a pirate version is there waiting for you when you get home.

And the reaction from the Internet?

“I don’t bother going to DVD stores anyway? Why not just do a search on IMDB?”

It’s not going to change anything… but it’s a raised finger to the RIAA/MPAA. You people are so fucked. Nobody cares. You’re finished. You’re like a bully that starts out beating up little kids… and finds that when the little kids all get together and he starts losing and tries to be nice, no one wants to know.

Ok, I think I’ve figured out Kindles. Why people buy them I mean. It’s not because they’re a reading aid, it’s because they’re a shopping aid.

If I had one right now, I’d use it. There’s a book I’d like to buy… just to see if it’s any good etc. My library hasn’t got it, and if I had a Kindle I could get it right now, at less than the normal price, without any waiting around.

Apparently 10% of Amazon’s sales are now via Kindle.

I used to know someone who had this Web 1.0 startup that sold “answers to questions via SMS”. One quid a question – they had experts online, and an AI system for frequently asked questions… and people did actually use it. “are there any bars open in Wolverhampton after 11.pm”, “who scored the most goals in the game last night” etc… and when I asked about the price – and the fact that this was all free on the web, she said that information wasn’t the driver, situation was.

And so it is with Kindle I think. Mind you, I say this and I don’t actually have one, so what do I know.

Kindles. E-Ink. Kindle-2.

I’m not entirely convinced by Kindles at a conceptual level. It’s kindof like designing vacuum-cleaners so they look like brooms. It’s kindof like PDF turned into plastic. It seems to me like an exercise in building limitations into a piece of technology so it resembles an already existing object… which although very successful, was itself the product of technological limitations.

It’s an exercise in interface design, which is locked into a single “use”.

I think the way e-ink will probably go, if it goes at all, is as a cell-phone peripheral, and when I say cell-phone, I mean proper, open, programmable device, and not these propriety tethered-appliances we have today.

Mind you, the advert is mildly convincing

Although obviously when I saw the bit that said “new titles only 9.99, on Kindle, much less than the print version”, I immediately thought “oh, you are so fucked”. You know why they’re much less? Because the replication and distribution costs are zero. And you know what that means?

Well I was going to go on about neopaleofuturism, inspired by these “inventions” from Apple Labs (I think) of electric cars. iCars. iMo. eMo.

What is it with electric car designers that they always want to make them look like teapots? I don’t want to drive around in a teapot, I want to drive around in shark. I want an Angel Interceptor. I want vectors. Velocity. Velociraptors. With laserbeams and massive teeth that go “ARRRGHH” and eat fucking iMos for breakfast. That’s what I want.

So anyway, I was watching this video, and then thought “fuck me, what’s that”?

Top tune, so I googled the lyrics (you know, the ones the copyright cartels wanted to ban) and found the track… looked it up on youtube and found this:

Which I think is fucking excellent. Every so often something comes up and I think “everything has changed” and I have to sit back and assimilate the groundswell of transformed paradigms that come flooding in. The first time I felt this was when REM first turned up with So Central Rain. The Acid in the Park festival at Finsbury Park. The Orb. Kramer’s lot in New York. Teenager from Aus. Dunno. It doesn’t happen that often, and it’s highly subjective. It’s possibly a generational thing… something like: “the criteria by which everything prior to this was judged, no longer apply. We don’t even have to make sense. All we have to do is exist”

So MGMT – I think this lot are excellent – and the one in the video that looks a bit like a hobbit is even better looking than the chick from Hanson. They’re like gay hobbits on acid who don’t realise that The Mighty Boosh was supposed to be a comedy (and TBF, I can hardly blame them for that). Brilliant.

This is a completely gratuitous picture of Bat from Bat for Lashes (who I love) and who I went on about over here when I was someone else, although my old personality seems to be leaking into my new one which is a bit of a worry

Whatever. I think MGMT “get it”. Kindof. As far as I can gather they’ve made some sort of application where their fans can mix their own videos and put them up on youtube. Because people were going to anyway… in fact in the “making of this video” video, that’s also on youtube, there’s a bit where they ask a couple of people who made a fan-vid of the last video to help with the next one. They recognise that one of their most valuable resources is the people who love them so much that they are willing to copy and re-interpret their work.

So there are hundreds of variations of this one track on youtube. As well as this, there are dozens of remixes and quite a few fan-vids made without using their application. They get it I think… they get that (in the words of Seth Godin), marketing isn’t about selling to people who don’t know you, it’s about giving the people who already like you the tools they need to sell you to their friends…. and this is what they’ve done. They’ve created a little memosphere for echo-chambering their stuff. It works.

MGMT would be fucking insane to try to stop people uploading variations of their tracks. This is how people show that they like you. This IS the highest form of flattery, and it in the internet age, it IS the main conduit for creating brand-awareness.

Sure you can’t make money out of something that’s infinitely copyable by anyone at zero cost… so a magic series of ones and zeros isn’t (and can’t be) (and shouldn’t be) a licence to sit back and make money forever… but that level of fame has got to be worth something. Fuck it – go back to selling vinyl to people who want to be cool. There must be something.

Mind you… they may get it, but their lawyers/record company, are still persisting in the dismally retarded practice of blocking embeddable videos (what happened to providing your uber-fans with the tools they need to sell you?)… so as a massive fuck-you to them, here are 3 versions of the same video uploaded to other sites.

Don’t you get it? When people embed a video on their site/blog, they’re doing you a favour. In the old days you paid (and probably still pay) radio stations to play your tracks. Illegally. Now when each of your fans has become a little radio station in their own right, you try to use the law (or get new ones written) to stop them.

The memosphere will route around you. For fuck’s sake, stop trying to fight the best thing that’s ever going to happen to you.

A while back I went into an entirely uncharacteristic rant about memetic poison… companies (always companies) trying to stop people propagating memes by tieing it all up with the ugly (wasteless, pointless) barbed-wire of corporate lawfare.

Anyway, the thing I was on about has turned up again… this time being the artist’s own site, and it’s utter genius so I’m going to pass it along etc.

from Kris Kuski who I’ve been aware of for a while now… his sculpture is incredible – it’s a physical collage of Bosch meeting Geiger (which I’m sure has been said a million times), on a very dark night indeed… but in a bad way.

bosch

geiger

So anyway… the reason I finally cracked and started going on about Kris Kuski’s stuff, is that he’s the only fine-artist I’ve ever come across who gets the web… or the digital medium in general. Every single other artist site makes the pictures too small… it’s like they’re timorously, clamourously trying to stop people from “stealing from them”, when in actual fact, all they’re doing is stopping people from evangalising about them.

For a while now I’ve been telling people that it’s because art-site web designers don’t look at enough pornography, so they don’t get that it’s supposed to be a completely immersive experience. Porn sites now sell photographs that are as large (if not larger) than real life. Porn sites get it, because porn has powerful forces of natural selection operating on it all the time.

It’s not enough just to show a little picture of what the real picture is like… people want to get inside the image. They want to climb into it, and be in that world, and look out from the art’s POV. It’s an NLP thing. It’s a Big-budget Video Game thing. It’s a Block-buster Movie thing. It’s a Porn thing.

On Kris’s site you can zoom in and pan around in his sculptures in full-screen mode. The next best thing he could do is make 3d versions (yea, the ones with those weird glasses). It is sculpture after all. Anyway, here’s some more… but go visit his site art-site web-devs. You’re doing it wrong, and he isn’t.

So anyway… back to Geiger…

… and as this blog is about memetics… forget about the Geiger-themed bars, and the fact that he made the Aliens out of Aliens

Here’s a geiger wedding cake…

and obviously until a meme’s been rendered in Lego, it hasn’t really become real…

from Narisa : Flickr

And then there are these little critters, who look like lego-people, but I’m not sure they are.

from mashkulture

Go forth and multiply my pretties… fly, fill the world, and be beholden to no one, thy 20 centuries of stony sleep, vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, the blood-dimmed tide, the reeling shadows, the desert birds… it is time. It is time.