Nothing is ever forgotten, nothing is ever new

Back in the olden days, the Bible was a mystery. Not a mystery in the "this passage is a tad unclear, and could use some sound expounding" sense, but rather in the "dude, it's written in bloody Latin, I can't read this" sense. As in literal Latin, the language of the Romans, a language that had long since gone its merry way to become French, Italian and all those romantic sounding languages.

In short, you were either a priest (and had gotten a solid education in Latin), or you weren't, and the Bible was an incomprehensible mystery. Unreadable, in all senses of the word.

This put enormous amounts of power in the hands of the (soon to be*) Catholic Church. Only its representatives could speak with any authority about the Word of God. And God, as you might remember, is a big deal - the creator of the world, the punisher of sinful, the justifier of monarchies, the foundation of all that is Good and Just and True.

You can do a lot of things with God on your side.

If you've stayed in a hotel recently, you might have noticed that there was a Bible there. And that it wasn't in Latin. And that there are, in fact, quite a number of bibles in quite a number of languages that's not Latin. Clearly, something has happened between now and then.

What happened between now and then?

Gutenberg happened. He didn't quite invent the printing press, but he made it commercially viable enough for the contemporary market. As in, you could build one, if you were mildly rich and put your will to it. And thus people did build them. And they used them to print books. Loads of them. Floods of them.

One of these books was the Bible. Not the old Latin version, but numerous localized versions, that ordinary people could read and understand. No longer did the (soon to be*) Catholic church have a monopoly on the Word of God - just about everyone who was somebody knew a guy with a strange contraption in his basement that churned out bibles at an ungodly pace.

And boy did they read. And boy were they righteously pissed off when they discovered that the (soon to be*) Catholic Church had, to put it mildly, embellished a little on the Words of God during the last thousand years or so.

Calamity ensued.

What changed with the improvement of the printing press wasn't just the means of production of written works. To be sure, that was part of it, but it was not the most important part of it. The most important part of it was that people got access to the Words of God, and with their own eyes could see what was what. And, in due course, become justifiably outraged by what they saw.

This is not without parallels in our contemporary society. There's this thing called the internet, that came into being a while back. We could say it's the same story all over again, only in a different setting, and with a less theological version of the Word of God. Though, to be honest, the intricacies of legislature could very well be written in church Latin, for all its readability to the common folk.

Until now.

There is a point to this ramble. More than one point. One of these is that my description about how Lutheranism came about is wrong, and that you can point out any number of errors if you know the details. Another point is that this doesn't matter, since the gist of it is right, and that it's right enough that one can make comparisons between then and now. Comparisons such as: hey, haven't we seen all this before somewhere?

(I am, in fact, so wrong that I've been corrected in this here blog post. Go read it. You'll learn actual things that are actually true.)

When people talk about the value of history, they don't talk about dates, facts and other things best left to Wikipedia. They talk about that "hey, I know this, this reminds me of..." feeling. It can be the vaguest, most general, least factually correct remembrance ever - it doesn't matter. As long as the general gist of it is correct, you can go from there, and find out the details and specifics and all that as you go along. And, more importantly, get a context from which to view whatever is going on at the moment.

Back in the days, the (soon to be*) Catholic Church had a monopoly on the Word of God. Then that changed.

Back in the days, you had to be an initiate of the highest order to gain access to the legal reasoning of the state. Or, indeed, to even know where and how to read them in order to make any sense out of it. Now, this has changed - as ACTA and TTP shows.

Let's hope we're not in for another session of ensuing calamity. -

*: a funny thing about the Catholic Church is that it only became Catholic after the Reformation. Before, it was simply the Church, the one and only. You only need to name things when there's a need to keep things apart, which you don't when there's only the one.**
**: the Orthodox Church doesn't count. It's far enough away for everyone to know that it's obvious to everyone that you can't really confuse apples and oranges.

The ungreyed artists

I love the question of how the artists will/should get paid. It gives me ample opportunities to talk about myself, about what I do and about how I make my way through the world.

You see, the one reason I could pay my rent this month is because I didn't charge anyone for being an artist, a writer or a content maker. The one reason I could pay my rent this month is because I trust my audience enough to give them what I do - in all forms - for free, and then let them decide what they want to do with it.

If they like it and want to smile - they do. If they like enough to share it - they do. If they like it enough to remix it - they do.

And if they like it enough to thank me (in words, money or things) - they do.

This is not a strange thing. It's how humans have always worked. And most of what I do revolves about reminding people that this is, indeed, the way humans work when they are given an opportunity to do so. All you need to do is give them that opportunity.

And thus, my rent is paid. Because I didn't force people to ask permission to take part, and because I didn't ask for permission to do mine.

I live, as it were, in and of a grey area of copyright.

As much as I love the question of artists making a living, I am less fond of the answers. These seem to revolve around making people pay, and not only in the literal sense. The sense of pure retribution that some of my fellow creators seem to feel frightens me. They talk about damages, reparations, lost incomes - even of sending people to jail.

Punishing people for liking what I do does not seem to be a proper way to behave. On a pure personal level.

On a corporate level, it makes more sense - copyright infringements tend to cost not insubstantial amounts of money, especially if it's on a large scale. Millions and billions of dollars are spent each year on copyright protection alone, and thus it makes corporate sense to put in place strong, retributive systems of copyright laws.

I, however, am not a corporation, and neither do I make any millions or billions of dollars. I only make two things: art, and do.

The question of artists making a living is plagued by answers who mistake me for those corporations, and who subsume my personal/artistic sensibilities for the corporate sense of profit making. I have no interest in taking my fans, friends and fellow artists to court for liking my work - I doubt I could afford it, even if I wanted to. But it is in my name even harsher measures on copyright infringers, consumers and my fellow remixers are proposed.

In my name.

As a struggling artist - indeed, as the very poster child for a poor creative person trying to make do - I have no interest in being included in the fight on my fellow art lovers. And I have even less of an interest in being used as an argument by corporations who don't give a manicured rat's ass about me when their profits are on the line.

If you want to support the corporations - then do. If you want to support the artists - then do. But, please, don't say we need harsher copyright measures in my name.

That's not my answer to this favorite question of mine.

Two-way streets

One of the things on my mind lately is the militarization of the social. How we are constantly in a state of alertness, mobilization - ready to act at a moment's notice. Indeed, ready to take and receive notice in the first place.

This is, in part, due to the ever increasing connectedness of everyone to everyone else. Back in the days, you had to send a guy running to get the word out, so naturally it took some time for word to get out. Now, it takes some literacy and a charged battery. It lowers the barriers, so to speak.

But more precisely, it is those barriers that are not lowered that makes this militarization of the social both necessary and unavoidable.

A local example of this is the recent trend of mass transit commuters to tweet about where ticket inspections are occurring. Whenever they see those men in uniform - a tweet is sent, and everyone hoping not to be found in transit can instantly react to this sudden intel.

The interesting thing is that it's not just fare dodgers that participate in this. You'd imagine that it was a self serving thing, freerider to freerider, but many respectable commuters share what they see. Not because they necessarily agree with the ethos of fare dodging, but because they know that those caught are more likely than not to be roughed up if the uniforms have a bad day.

And in solidarity with this, they share what they know. Not due to the lowered barriers of communication, but because of those barriers that have yet to be lowered.

Solidarity, remixed to the streets.

A more global example is, of course, the Occupy movement, and every subsequent protest movement afterwards. What the Occupy movement did/does is that it removes barriers of communication - it doesn't matter if you're black, white, rich, poor, strange, pathologically normal or just around. You're angry and want change, and that's good enough - let's talk.

But the solidarity created is one under siege - literally, in some places. The constant threat of police action, and the even more literal/constant barriers the police presence gives rise to, makes a readiness to confront confrontation necessary. Where are they, what are they doing - what are we to do next?

The flipside to building community, libraries and a general sense of social acceptability - is this very preparedness to get moving. In defense of what should be by virtue of people talking to each other.

Conversations, remixed to the streets.

And as the internet makes it easier for the strange to find each other, for the lonely to become less lonely and for people to get together in general, an opposite reaction happens. The guardians of remaining barriers become increasingly worried, and tries to strengthen the what they fear might be lost otherwise. Monopolies of information are draconically enforced, the war on terror makes everyone a suspect, and even the defenders of traditional values turn violent when it turns out that people who are not afraid of each other don't see things their way.

As the barriers fall, the walls start to become fortified. And we, the people, are the Hannibals outside the gates. Whether we want to or not, we are mobilized into a confrontation with the militarization of the social.

War. Remixed to the streets.

Whose streets? Our streets.