Copyright is confusing. So confusing, in fact, that the only way to explain it is to turn to the bottle.
Or, rather, the humble bottle opener.
If at this point you're slightly confused as to what kind of bottle opener I'm referring to, seeing as there's quite a variety of mechanisms that can be used in the process of bottle opening, therefore deserving the name "bottle opener" - you're on point. There's more than one way to open a bottle, and there's more than one way to construct a bottle opener. The general principle being that if it opens bottles, it's a bottle opener.
Enter copyright.
The prevailing paradigm when it comes to enforcing copyright is to ensure that everyone uses a particular kind of bottle opener. No matter that there are many kinds of openers, many ways of opening a bottle and many bottle standards across the world - one solution fits all. And you have to use this particular opener in order to open the bottles you want to open.
The prevailing paradigm is circumvented every day. As you might imagine.
The key to making this enforcement strategy work is to design bottles in such a way that they can only be opened by a particular opener. Which is as hard to do in regards to bottles as it is to anything else, be it physical or digital objects. But, hard or not, the design efforts continue. Those who have the know-how to find other means of opening the bottles do so; those who do not, are left with the hope that the bottle/opener works well together.
And have to trust the ever so helpful customer services when they don't.
One example of this is libraries and ebooks. Especially university libraries. If you're a student, you most likely have access to a large number of ebooks through your library card. However, to actually use this access, you have to jump through some hoops. One of them being to log in with whatever student login is required. Another being that you are limited to using whatever format they are providing. Regardless if those formats actually work on the devices you use. Or the software you use.
Things only working in Internet Explorer, not working on mobile devices, only working for a limited time - there's a lot of demands and limitations to take into account. And it is up to you to adapt yourself to these demands and limitations, rather than the other way around.
Copyright demands that you use the prescribed opener. Which, in the library case, means that things are not as accessible and readable as the library ethos would want them to be. But they have to use these systems, because otherwise they wouldn't have access to these ebooks at all.
Copyright demands. Copyright limits.
It could be as simple as the book being there, available to everyone who'd want to read it, the world being a richer place for people having read it. It could be. But it isn't.
That's the most confusing part.
Showing posts with label pirates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pirates. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Boombox politics
Politics is a game of possibilities. It's more about what someone might say or is likely to have said, than what they're actually saying. Even more so, it's about what people can say without losing face.
As the ancient saying goes: it is very possible to paint oneself into a corner.
This might all sound fancy and highbrow, but it works like this: a politician can't say that it would be a good idea to slaughter every existing baby seals and burn their baby fat in enormous bonfires. Somewhere between these bonfires and the statement that kittens are cute, there's a boundary between proper and improper. It's all about keeping oneself on the right side of this boundary.
Another limit to what one can say is what has been said before. If your position for a hundred years has been that lowered taxes are the best thing since politics was invented, it's a hard sell to suddenly propose higher taxes. There are expectations to fulfill. Being true to your (public) self is one of them.
Between what is proper to say and what is expected to be said, there's what's possible to say. You gotta be true to your public self, and you gotta avoid slaughtering baby seals.
This range of possibilities is rather limited. It is, to a certain extent, possible to predict what's going to be said, and it takes considerable time to widen the scope of possibilities. Which is good for voters (since they know, to a certain extent, what they can expect), and for the working environment of those doing the communicating (being creative at all times takes its toll, and that cheat sheet works wonders). Continuity is predictability.
But.
This range of possibilities also contains things that one would rather prefer not to say. They conform to what has been said before, they are not about baby seals, but they are uncomfortable. Since they are things one very well might say, and are thus very hard to backpedal. (There's that famous corner again.)
The Yes Men are experts at exploiting these possibilities. They act as if they speak for organizations with reputations of being less than saintly in their actions, and say things that these organizations would never say on their own. But very well could say, and thus cannot easily backpedal from.
Such as when they pretended to be Dow Chemical (of Bhopal chemical spill fame), and proclaimed that the company would provide substantial aid to the hundreds of thousands of people afflicted by the accident. Which was cause for rejoice when the word got out, and cause for anger when the real Dow backpedaled by saying that they were, in fact, not going to provide any aid at all.
Politics is more about what's possible to say, than about what's actually said.
Which takes us to the real subject of this post. The latest, mostest and everest bid from the (Swedish) Moderate party. They pulled no punches and spared no efforts when it came to this one. They went all in, with a big
BOOM
It's a stroke of genius. They have expanded their range of possibilities enormously. There's almost nothing they can't say after this. All they ever have to do is say
BOOM
followed by whatever. Whatever the subject, wherever they are, whenever something needs to be said.
But they can't say everything. They will, for example, have a hard time time insisting that they are more fit to rule than the opposition, and that they are the Serious Alternative. Because boom. [The picture says: BOOM! Our opponents will actively seek to sabotage our defensive capabilities if they win. We rule.] And it's hard to backpedal from this, just like it was hard for Dow to backpedal with a rhetorical "eh, guys, we were just kidding."
But. Being a pirate, I cannot but offer to help them along. Thus, you are very likely watching this very large, very inspired picture, which was made possible only because of their boomboxing politics:
Originally published August 14, 2014
As the ancient saying goes: it is very possible to paint oneself into a corner.
This might all sound fancy and highbrow, but it works like this: a politician can't say that it would be a good idea to slaughter every existing baby seals and burn their baby fat in enormous bonfires. Somewhere between these bonfires and the statement that kittens are cute, there's a boundary between proper and improper. It's all about keeping oneself on the right side of this boundary.
Another limit to what one can say is what has been said before. If your position for a hundred years has been that lowered taxes are the best thing since politics was invented, it's a hard sell to suddenly propose higher taxes. There are expectations to fulfill. Being true to your (public) self is one of them.
Between what is proper to say and what is expected to be said, there's what's possible to say. You gotta be true to your public self, and you gotta avoid slaughtering baby seals.
This range of possibilities is rather limited. It is, to a certain extent, possible to predict what's going to be said, and it takes considerable time to widen the scope of possibilities. Which is good for voters (since they know, to a certain extent, what they can expect), and for the working environment of those doing the communicating (being creative at all times takes its toll, and that cheat sheet works wonders). Continuity is predictability.
But.
This range of possibilities also contains things that one would rather prefer not to say. They conform to what has been said before, they are not about baby seals, but they are uncomfortable. Since they are things one very well might say, and are thus very hard to backpedal. (There's that famous corner again.)
The Yes Men are experts at exploiting these possibilities. They act as if they speak for organizations with reputations of being less than saintly in their actions, and say things that these organizations would never say on their own. But very well could say, and thus cannot easily backpedal from.
Such as when they pretended to be Dow Chemical (of Bhopal chemical spill fame), and proclaimed that the company would provide substantial aid to the hundreds of thousands of people afflicted by the accident. Which was cause for rejoice when the word got out, and cause for anger when the real Dow backpedaled by saying that they were, in fact, not going to provide any aid at all.
Politics is more about what's possible to say, than about what's actually said.Which takes us to the real subject of this post. The latest, mostest and everest bid from the (Swedish) Moderate party. They pulled no punches and spared no efforts when it came to this one. They went all in, with a big
BOOM
It's a stroke of genius. They have expanded their range of possibilities enormously. There's almost nothing they can't say after this. All they ever have to do is say
BOOM
followed by whatever. Whatever the subject, wherever they are, whenever something needs to be said.
But they can't say everything. They will, for example, have a hard time time insisting that they are more fit to rule than the opposition, and that they are the Serious Alternative. Because boom. [The picture says: BOOM! Our opponents will actively seek to sabotage our defensive capabilities if they win. We rule.] And it's hard to backpedal from this, just like it was hard for Dow to backpedal with a rhetorical "eh, guys, we were just kidding."
But. Being a pirate, I cannot but offer to help them along. Thus, you are very likely watching this very large, very inspired picture, which was made possible only because of their boomboxing politics:
Originally published August 14, 2014
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
Freeriding the dark train of anxiety
When I was younger, I used to travel. A lot. Not to anywhere exotic or far away, but to places nearby. Stockholm, Gothenburg, most of the larger cities in the south of Sweden. On occasion to Oslo and Finland, just because they were there.
Thing is, I didn't go to all these places to do anything specific. I went there for the most everyday things. To visit friends, to pick up books at libraries, to breathe the air of someplace that is not home. On occasion, even to help out with everyday chores - because why not?
You might be wondering - just how much is a lot? Once a month? Twice?
That might be considered a lot. I went twice or thrice a week. Because why not? What are friends for, after all? And why buy a particular book when it's easier and faster to pick it up at some local library?
You might also be wondering - just how much did all this galavanting and skedaddling cost?
Nothing. Or, given the scope of things, the next best thing.
At this point, you just might be wondering what sort of privileged past I'm hailing from. What is up with all this going hither and dither for next to nothing? Who paid for all of that?
Here's the deal: no one did. I went anyway. Because why not?
There are many names for this practice. Free-riding, fare dodging, fraud. Depending on circumstances, you'd want to use different terms for it. But the general gist of it is this: getting from here to there on public transit without going through the hassle and hustle of having the proper ticket to ride.
Not the one singular time. Not two times. Three times. A week.
I still remember the first time doing it. I was to meet a friend in a city not far from where I lived, and got to the train station without quite enough time to buy a ticket. The choice was this: either get on the train without buying one, or buy one and miss the train during the time it'd take to complete the purchase. So I thought: hey, better to get there than to not get there. They'll probably let me buy one on board anyway.
I got on board. Sans proper travel documents.
As circumstances would have it, this particular train was slightly overcrowded. Not quite over capacity, but still more people than there really ought to be. Which turned out to be a blessing in disguise. On the one hand, I had to stand, as there were no seats available. On the other hand, we were quite a few bystanders. I found a standable spot and claimed it as mine, as a body occupying space does.
I heard the conductor approach in the distance. Quietly, I braced myself for the question that is also a demand: tickets please.
Only, the question never came. The conductor did, but only to then pass my by, not bothering to validate my anxiety. Or tickethaving. People around me got asked, showed their various travel documents, bought tickets, all the things that go into the consumer finance of modern train travel. Me? I just stood there, trying to keep my emotions in check (and, I hoped, invisible), until the moment had passed.
Somehow, I apparently looked travel weary enough to not warrant further inspection.
The next station came and went, and the next. The overcrowding situation didn't improve, as those who got off seemed to be replaced by newcomers who were faster on their feet than me. Aside from being mildly inconvenienced by standing around, I didn't mind, though. The experience was new enough to block any such sensations, and I was haunted by an anxiety that came to me in the form of thoughts like "what if I get caught?".
I didn't get caught, but I thought about it the whole way.
It was pretty much the same story on the return trip. Slight overcrowding, standing, looking as if I was bored with standing, not being asked, anxiety running through me the whole way. But, and this is key, at a slightly less rampant pace as the first time. The first time is always the hardest; the second time you have the luxury of looking back at the first time.
The third time is the charm. Not to mention the thirteenth.
As my galavanting became more and more of an everyday occurrence, I aged. I enrolled at the local university, gained new friends, did all the things that goes with being a young Scandinavian without any particular plan or direction. And as a part of this - to this day I'm not sure if my friends or the university played the bigger role - I started to read certain authors. One, in particular, is more critical than the others:
Foucault
If you've read Foucault, you'll most likely have picked up on the word 'anxiety' above. It is one of the key things he writes about in his works. And, more specifically, the sources of it. One of these sources is the fear of not passing inspection, of whatever kind you might imagine. Ticket inspection is one particular kind of this. Passing tests (such as those encountered in schools) is another. Looking good yet another. Job interviews. Across many particular examples, the general principle boils down to this:
The fear of being looked upon by someone else, and to be found wanting.
It will come as no surprise that being on a train, ticketless, is very translatable to this line of thinking. There are those who are to be inspected (passengers) and those who are to do the inspecting (the conductors). The rules of the inspecting are easy to understand - you either have a ticket, or you don't. Getting a ticket is a predictable action - you can generally figure out how to buy them if you need to.
In short, the rules are simple, and you know what to do to follow them. To pass inspection.
Even when you do follow all the rules, though, there is still room for anxiety. Something could go wrong - you could accidentally buy the wrong ticket, there might be some sort of misunderstanding, a situation might arise where the rules and you don't agree with each other. And when that happens, it is usually on your head.
The fear is built in to the system. Even if the rules are easy to understand, there is always that underlying element of fear. What if I don't pass this time? What if something goes wrong?
As I gestured at earlier, this isn't just something that happens on trains. It happens everywhere, at all times. Whenever we feel that there's some standard that we have to live up to, and that there might be some risk of us not doing it - there be anxiety. There be the fear that we will be exposed as the frauds that we are, not good enough to pass muster. Not good enough to be a true member of the social order.
Be it in small or large circumstances.
Knowing this - doing it in practice - is one of the things that has shaped me the most as a human being. There will, in any given situation, be anxiety, but there will always be the option to not give a fuck about it. Following the rules is no guarantee for safety, breaking them is not an automatic failure. Life happens in this state of uncertainty, and knowing this helps.
It will not, by any means, abolish anxiety. But it will make it that much more livable.
The most important part of this generalized understanding of anxiety is that it is not a thing that happens to you and you alone. Everyone has to pass inspection, and everyone has to face the risk of failing. Everyone. You're not alone.
This is a foundation of solidarity.
As the years went by, I expanded my criminal activities to other transport systems. Not because I needed it, but because it could be done. The general principle was the same: all I needed to do was to fit in just enough to avoid suspicion, and thus inspection. Keep up appearances and carry on as if you belong, and in most cases you'll get along. Looking the part is at times better than being the real deal.
Thing is, though. It is taxing. Emotionally. Humans are not built to not belong, and merely keeping up appearances leaves you tired to your invisible bones. You don't ever relax, and the anxiety never really goes away. Especially if you actively seek these situations out.
I did a lot of that.
Eventually two things happened. The one thing is that I lost the urge to skedaddle and galavant. Been there, done that and so forth. The other thing is that I got the local Pirate Party to pay me to go places, which overall reduced my need to do my thing. If only to replace one form of inspection with another, writ larger.
Surveillance society is a thing, you know.
The reason for me writing this is not to glorify my younger days. The reason is to bring these experiences to you in a form that doesn't require you to muddle through Foucault or get yourself on a train without a ticket. (Both risky propositions, to be sure.) To give you something to point to, in order to be able to say: fuck, it's just not me. Everyone's doing it, trying to measure up for (real or imaginary) inspections, going through the required motions. No matter how ridiculous or ridiculously hard these motions might be.
Anxiety follows from this. It's not a thing that happen to you, specifically; it's what happens to humans, in general, put in the situation you're in.
Don't beat yourself up over it.
(If you've read this far, you'll probably be pleased to know that there is a part 2. Do freeride over to it.)
Thing is, I didn't go to all these places to do anything specific. I went there for the most everyday things. To visit friends, to pick up books at libraries, to breathe the air of someplace that is not home. On occasion, even to help out with everyday chores - because why not?
You might be wondering - just how much is a lot? Once a month? Twice?That might be considered a lot. I went twice or thrice a week. Because why not? What are friends for, after all? And why buy a particular book when it's easier and faster to pick it up at some local library?
You might also be wondering - just how much did all this galavanting and skedaddling cost?
Nothing. Or, given the scope of things, the next best thing.
At this point, you just might be wondering what sort of privileged past I'm hailing from. What is up with all this going hither and dither for next to nothing? Who paid for all of that?
Here's the deal: no one did. I went anyway. Because why not?
There are many names for this practice. Free-riding, fare dodging, fraud. Depending on circumstances, you'd want to use different terms for it. But the general gist of it is this: getting from here to there on public transit without going through the hassle and hustle of having the proper ticket to ride.
Not the one singular time. Not two times. Three times. A week.
I still remember the first time doing it. I was to meet a friend in a city not far from where I lived, and got to the train station without quite enough time to buy a ticket. The choice was this: either get on the train without buying one, or buy one and miss the train during the time it'd take to complete the purchase. So I thought: hey, better to get there than to not get there. They'll probably let me buy one on board anyway.
I got on board. Sans proper travel documents.
As circumstances would have it, this particular train was slightly overcrowded. Not quite over capacity, but still more people than there really ought to be. Which turned out to be a blessing in disguise. On the one hand, I had to stand, as there were no seats available. On the other hand, we were quite a few bystanders. I found a standable spot and claimed it as mine, as a body occupying space does.
I heard the conductor approach in the distance. Quietly, I braced myself for the question that is also a demand: tickets please.
Only, the question never came. The conductor did, but only to then pass my by, not bothering to validate my anxiety. Or tickethaving. People around me got asked, showed their various travel documents, bought tickets, all the things that go into the consumer finance of modern train travel. Me? I just stood there, trying to keep my emotions in check (and, I hoped, invisible), until the moment had passed.
Somehow, I apparently looked travel weary enough to not warrant further inspection.
The next station came and went, and the next. The overcrowding situation didn't improve, as those who got off seemed to be replaced by newcomers who were faster on their feet than me. Aside from being mildly inconvenienced by standing around, I didn't mind, though. The experience was new enough to block any such sensations, and I was haunted by an anxiety that came to me in the form of thoughts like "what if I get caught?".
I didn't get caught, but I thought about it the whole way.
It was pretty much the same story on the return trip. Slight overcrowding, standing, looking as if I was bored with standing, not being asked, anxiety running through me the whole way. But, and this is key, at a slightly less rampant pace as the first time. The first time is always the hardest; the second time you have the luxury of looking back at the first time.
The third time is the charm. Not to mention the thirteenth.
As my galavanting became more and more of an everyday occurrence, I aged. I enrolled at the local university, gained new friends, did all the things that goes with being a young Scandinavian without any particular plan or direction. And as a part of this - to this day I'm not sure if my friends or the university played the bigger role - I started to read certain authors. One, in particular, is more critical than the others:
Foucault
If you've read Foucault, you'll most likely have picked up on the word 'anxiety' above. It is one of the key things he writes about in his works. And, more specifically, the sources of it. One of these sources is the fear of not passing inspection, of whatever kind you might imagine. Ticket inspection is one particular kind of this. Passing tests (such as those encountered in schools) is another. Looking good yet another. Job interviews. Across many particular examples, the general principle boils down to this:
The fear of being looked upon by someone else, and to be found wanting.
It will come as no surprise that being on a train, ticketless, is very translatable to this line of thinking. There are those who are to be inspected (passengers) and those who are to do the inspecting (the conductors). The rules of the inspecting are easy to understand - you either have a ticket, or you don't. Getting a ticket is a predictable action - you can generally figure out how to buy them if you need to.
In short, the rules are simple, and you know what to do to follow them. To pass inspection.
Even when you do follow all the rules, though, there is still room for anxiety. Something could go wrong - you could accidentally buy the wrong ticket, there might be some sort of misunderstanding, a situation might arise where the rules and you don't agree with each other. And when that happens, it is usually on your head.
The fear is built in to the system. Even if the rules are easy to understand, there is always that underlying element of fear. What if I don't pass this time? What if something goes wrong?
As I gestured at earlier, this isn't just something that happens on trains. It happens everywhere, at all times. Whenever we feel that there's some standard that we have to live up to, and that there might be some risk of us not doing it - there be anxiety. There be the fear that we will be exposed as the frauds that we are, not good enough to pass muster. Not good enough to be a true member of the social order.
Be it in small or large circumstances.
Knowing this - doing it in practice - is one of the things that has shaped me the most as a human being. There will, in any given situation, be anxiety, but there will always be the option to not give a fuck about it. Following the rules is no guarantee for safety, breaking them is not an automatic failure. Life happens in this state of uncertainty, and knowing this helps.
It will not, by any means, abolish anxiety. But it will make it that much more livable.
The most important part of this generalized understanding of anxiety is that it is not a thing that happens to you and you alone. Everyone has to pass inspection, and everyone has to face the risk of failing. Everyone. You're not alone.
This is a foundation of solidarity.
As the years went by, I expanded my criminal activities to other transport systems. Not because I needed it, but because it could be done. The general principle was the same: all I needed to do was to fit in just enough to avoid suspicion, and thus inspection. Keep up appearances and carry on as if you belong, and in most cases you'll get along. Looking the part is at times better than being the real deal.
Thing is, though. It is taxing. Emotionally. Humans are not built to not belong, and merely keeping up appearances leaves you tired to your invisible bones. You don't ever relax, and the anxiety never really goes away. Especially if you actively seek these situations out.
I did a lot of that.
Eventually two things happened. The one thing is that I lost the urge to skedaddle and galavant. Been there, done that and so forth. The other thing is that I got the local Pirate Party to pay me to go places, which overall reduced my need to do my thing. If only to replace one form of inspection with another, writ larger.
Surveillance society is a thing, you know.
The reason for me writing this is not to glorify my younger days. The reason is to bring these experiences to you in a form that doesn't require you to muddle through Foucault or get yourself on a train without a ticket. (Both risky propositions, to be sure.) To give you something to point to, in order to be able to say: fuck, it's just not me. Everyone's doing it, trying to measure up for (real or imaginary) inspections, going through the required motions. No matter how ridiculous or ridiculously hard these motions might be.
Anxiety follows from this. It's not a thing that happen to you, specifically; it's what happens to humans, in general, put in the situation you're in.
Don't beat yourself up over it.
(If you've read this far, you'll probably be pleased to know that there is a part 2. Do freeride over to it.)
Monday, May 19, 2014
Endless wonder, endless mysteries
In just a few hours, Warehouse 13 comes to an end, as the last episode is aired. It is the end of an era, and -
Wait, what?
I've already seen the last episode? Before the end? What is this magic?
It is a question I often ask myself. Not because the last episode is available out there if you know how to procure it (no help from me), but because it doesn't happen all that often. Somehow, the last episodes of things - indeed, all episodes of things- are strictly kept under wraps until they are aired. And then they leap out, available to everyone who knows how to procure them (still no help from me).
Why is this? What's the secret of this strict discipline?
In theory, episodes of television series could and/or should appear long before they officially air. This is because they are recorded long before they officially air (Lost does not count). Since copying files is as easy as opening a newspaper, it stands to reason that someone should happen to get a hold of a file that will soon become an early release.
It's basic computer security. And human nature. If and when secrets are kept, someone will eventually unkeep it, and then it is loose upon the world. For all to see, as it were.
"All" being people like me. Who know how to procure such things.
And yet, it rarely happens. It happened this once, but I can scarcely remember it happening at any other times.
What's the secret? How do they do it? What sorcery is this?
Do you know?
Btw: the last episode is a good last one. Do enjoy it. It is one of the defining moments of the series. All of it.
Wait, what?
I've already seen the last episode? Before the end? What is this magic?
It is a question I often ask myself. Not because the last episode is available out there if you know how to procure it (no help from me), but because it doesn't happen all that often. Somehow, the last episodes of things - indeed, all episodes of things- are strictly kept under wraps until they are aired. And then they leap out, available to everyone who knows how to procure them (still no help from me).
Why is this? What's the secret of this strict discipline?
In theory, episodes of television series could and/or should appear long before they officially air. This is because they are recorded long before they officially air (Lost does not count). Since copying files is as easy as opening a newspaper, it stands to reason that someone should happen to get a hold of a file that will soon become an early release.
It's basic computer security. And human nature. If and when secrets are kept, someone will eventually unkeep it, and then it is loose upon the world. For all to see, as it were.
"All" being people like me. Who know how to procure such things.
And yet, it rarely happens. It happened this once, but I can scarcely remember it happening at any other times.
What's the secret? How do they do it? What sorcery is this?
Do you know?
Btw: the last episode is a good last one. Do enjoy it. It is one of the defining moments of the series. All of it.
Thursday, April 3, 2014
The right that is, or the right to be different
Strange things happens when you think two things at the same time. The thought things are put into perspective, and strangenesses that pass by unnoticed otherwise become overapparent in comparison.
The question is: what happens if we think about the actually existing democracy and the actually existing mass surveillance at the same time?
In order to think these two things at the same time, we have to first think them one at a time. Thus, what follows is me thinking first the one and then the other, followed by a particle accelerator style thought smash. In order to make things easier, I've assigned numbers to these things - first the one, and so on.
Let's smash.
1. The strangest thing about the actually existing mass surveillance is that it is seldomly used in order to catch criminals. Oh, it is rhetorically justified by words such as security and safety, but when the policy document meets the pavement, very few actual criminals have to care about it. It's not that they are not subject to the surveillance - on the contrary, everyone is - but those that man the digital periscopes are not looking at them. Other priorities, other goals, other sponsors.
Isn't it strange that we are not flooded with reports about terrorists and organized criminals being caught by the evidence gathered by the surveillance efforts? The proponents of these systems, who in times past have been keen to stress that this is what these systems were to be used for, should be all over the fact that the systems are used as intended. In one swift move, they would be able to dismiss critics with a simple statement of fact: the systems are used as intended, criminal gets their just trials, and the world is a safer place for it. In terms of PR, it would be a slam dunk - nothing wins hearts and minds faster than concrete evidence that criminals have had a hard time during your time in office.
There is no reason to believe that those in office at this time suddenly have lost their public relations acumen. They still know what they are doing, they still know what they voted on when they voted for these surveillance systems, and they still want to be re-elected. Why are they not all over this, exploiting it to the public relations maximum?
Because the systems are not used against criminals, terrorists and their ilk. They are used against Angela Merkel.
Or, to put it in more general terms, they are used against people who are not criminals or terrorists. By any stretches of imagination. One might argue that the heads of other states are criminal and terroristic by default, but it is not PR-smart to do so. Not least if you expect to maintain and develop diplomatic relations with these heads of states.
If criminals or terrorists are not the main targets of the actually existing mass surveillance - then who is?
It would be interesting to find out, to say the least. If only in order to find out what all these billions and billions of taxpayer money is spent on. Or to make absolutely sure that these systems cannot be used against anyone with mere justification of their names being mentioned on a coffee break.
Or that these systems won't become active whenever you become politically uncomfortable. By any definition of "uncomfortable".
2. The strangest thing about the actually existing democracy is that isn't always as representative as its definition suggests it to be. In theory, there are people in place at the various levels of the state apparatus to represent our wants and needs - whoever we happen to be. By virtue of us having voted these people into their offices.
The bearing thought is that the system thusly will legitimize itself. Everyone has the right to vote, and when everyone's opinion is taken in the aggregate, the result is bigger than the sum of its participants - the one vote rarely make a difference, but all votes becomes the voice of the people.
It goes without saying that this depends on as many citizens as possible voting. It becomes somewhat non-representative if large parts of the population don't vote. Which, to put in in perspective, happened back in the days when only rich people could vote. Or, for that matter, when women couldn't vote. Or be voted on.
You may or may not agree on the importance of proletarian feminist struggle. That's not important - what's important is that those who do are and can be represented.
In theory, this setup is self-legitimizing. Those who best represent the will of the voters is voted on, and the voters are represented by voting on those who best represent them. Those who govern today don't do it because they happened to govern yesterday - they have made themselves relevant to the citizens they govern, and these citizens have become relevant by virtue of this.
As you might notice, this goes two ways. The responsible politicians has a duty to represent to the utmost of their abilities, and the responsible citizen has a responsibility to vote when election day arrives. Much can be said about politicians that do not deliver - much more has been said to those citizens who do not vote.
If you want an example of this, this interview with Russel Brand is an overly obvious one. Paxmans objection is, almost to a word, "but you don't vote!". It's hard not to think that just about any line of reasoning could be swept away with these words - no matter how relevant it might be.
Legitimacy goes two ways. The system is self-legitimizing - and therefore, those who do not participate in the system are illegitimate. They do not voice their votes, and thus their voices don't count.
There are any number of reasons to not vote. Brutal political apathy is one of them. A feeling that nothing changes by voting is another. Not to mention the lived experience of the powers that be not giving a democratic shit about one's opinions, problems, issues, conditions of life or even one's literal death.
The recent years have been characterized by a general downscaling of priorities. The word "austerity" is on everyone's minds and policy documents. Everything is to be done cheaper, more efficiently, faster. If it needs money, it also needs a justification, and if that justification isn't fast or efficient enough, it's reclassified as an unnecessary expense. The combination of increased profits and lowered taxes means a decrease in the questions considered legitimate - the public sphere retreats. Withdraws. Downscales, austeres. Safety costs money - you should have begun building your personal brand fifteen years ago!
Is it any wonder people feel justified in feeling illegitimate - voting or no voting?
It is very much a political question to ask where illegitimacy lies. Is it in the individual in regards to the system - that is, is the individual a lazy scrounger incapable of getting a decent job? Or is it in the system in regards to the individual - is there a democratic problem inherent in a political system that, in no uncertain terms, communicates that it doesn't give a rat's ass about whether you live or die?
There is legitimacy, and there is legitimacy.
3. The strangest thing about thinking about both the actually existing mass surveillance and the actually existing democracy is that it's not done more often. Not least because it leads us to the question of why. Why is Angela Merkel being watched? Why are you and me being watched? Why is a nominally democratic state making every effort to put the well-documented achievements of the DDR to shame?
There might be good, legitimate reasons for this.
If we see legitimacy as something created by going through the democratic motions, then the mass surveillance is voted on by informed citizens, who made the judgment call that mass surveillance is what represents them. We have mass surveillance since we voted on the parties that implemented it, and we voted on them because we knew that they would. Democracy in action.
If we turn it on its head, we get a different picture. There is an ever increasing number of people who are no longer legitimate - be they unemployed, immigrants, of strange sexual bent, poor, uncomfortable, not normal. They disturb the prevailing order, they are foreign elements, they are stains on the social contract. They are unpredictable. And thus, a watchful eye must be kept on them at all times - order must be maintained against the constant influx of disorder. Otherwise, chaos.
The strangest thing about this picture is that criminals (or even terrorists) are not the biggest threats. They do indeed break the laws and cause disorder, but it is a predictable and manageable disorder. It can be cushioned, prevented, insured. Be shoved from the (ever-retreating) public to the ever more lonely private. Crime becomes an everyday occurrence, and it is your own fault if you do not lock your bike, door or vagina.
There are many ways of becoming an illegitimate person.
Instead of keeping an eye on criminals, the ever increasing mass surveillance is used to keep tabs on ordinary people. Unemployed people are forced to file reports on their jobseeking; those on social security are forced to subject their entire economic lives to scrutiny; and immigrants (or those who look like they might be immigrants) are forced to justify their existence to the police at random intervals. Ever more frequent and intrusive mechanisms are employed to keep the illegitimates in place.
And those who object to this are likely to meet these two responses, in tandem: "but you voted for it!" and "but vote for something else, then!".
It probably won't surprise you where these responses get their justification from.
The combination of the actually existing mass surveillance and the actually existing democracy is not a happy thought. Who is surveilled? Whose democracy? Who needs the ever expanding, ever more fine-grain systems of control that's gradually put in place? Is it a legitimate defense of the current order, or is it an ever more desperate defense of a system where more and more people are excluded and need to be defended against?
It is not a question you will get an answer to in this text. But it is a question well worth your continued pondering. One thought at a time. Then two. Then -
Originally published November 1, 2013
The question is: what happens if we think about the actually existing democracy and the actually existing mass surveillance at the same time?
In order to think these two things at the same time, we have to first think them one at a time. Thus, what follows is me thinking first the one and then the other, followed by a particle accelerator style thought smash. In order to make things easier, I've assigned numbers to these things - first the one, and so on.
Let's smash.
1. The strangest thing about the actually existing mass surveillance is that it is seldomly used in order to catch criminals. Oh, it is rhetorically justified by words such as security and safety, but when the policy document meets the pavement, very few actual criminals have to care about it. It's not that they are not subject to the surveillance - on the contrary, everyone is - but those that man the digital periscopes are not looking at them. Other priorities, other goals, other sponsors.Isn't it strange that we are not flooded with reports about terrorists and organized criminals being caught by the evidence gathered by the surveillance efforts? The proponents of these systems, who in times past have been keen to stress that this is what these systems were to be used for, should be all over the fact that the systems are used as intended. In one swift move, they would be able to dismiss critics with a simple statement of fact: the systems are used as intended, criminal gets their just trials, and the world is a safer place for it. In terms of PR, it would be a slam dunk - nothing wins hearts and minds faster than concrete evidence that criminals have had a hard time during your time in office.
There is no reason to believe that those in office at this time suddenly have lost their public relations acumen. They still know what they are doing, they still know what they voted on when they voted for these surveillance systems, and they still want to be re-elected. Why are they not all over this, exploiting it to the public relations maximum?
Because the systems are not used against criminals, terrorists and their ilk. They are used against Angela Merkel.
Or, to put it in more general terms, they are used against people who are not criminals or terrorists. By any stretches of imagination. One might argue that the heads of other states are criminal and terroristic by default, but it is not PR-smart to do so. Not least if you expect to maintain and develop diplomatic relations with these heads of states.
If criminals or terrorists are not the main targets of the actually existing mass surveillance - then who is?
It would be interesting to find out, to say the least. If only in order to find out what all these billions and billions of taxpayer money is spent on. Or to make absolutely sure that these systems cannot be used against anyone with mere justification of their names being mentioned on a coffee break.
Or that these systems won't become active whenever you become politically uncomfortable. By any definition of "uncomfortable".
2. The strangest thing about the actually existing democracy is that isn't always as representative as its definition suggests it to be. In theory, there are people in place at the various levels of the state apparatus to represent our wants and needs - whoever we happen to be. By virtue of us having voted these people into their offices.The bearing thought is that the system thusly will legitimize itself. Everyone has the right to vote, and when everyone's opinion is taken in the aggregate, the result is bigger than the sum of its participants - the one vote rarely make a difference, but all votes becomes the voice of the people.
It goes without saying that this depends on as many citizens as possible voting. It becomes somewhat non-representative if large parts of the population don't vote. Which, to put in in perspective, happened back in the days when only rich people could vote. Or, for that matter, when women couldn't vote. Or be voted on.
You may or may not agree on the importance of proletarian feminist struggle. That's not important - what's important is that those who do are and can be represented.
In theory, this setup is self-legitimizing. Those who best represent the will of the voters is voted on, and the voters are represented by voting on those who best represent them. Those who govern today don't do it because they happened to govern yesterday - they have made themselves relevant to the citizens they govern, and these citizens have become relevant by virtue of this.
As you might notice, this goes two ways. The responsible politicians has a duty to represent to the utmost of their abilities, and the responsible citizen has a responsibility to vote when election day arrives. Much can be said about politicians that do not deliver - much more has been said to those citizens who do not vote.
If you want an example of this, this interview with Russel Brand is an overly obvious one. Paxmans objection is, almost to a word, "but you don't vote!". It's hard not to think that just about any line of reasoning could be swept away with these words - no matter how relevant it might be.
Legitimacy goes two ways. The system is self-legitimizing - and therefore, those who do not participate in the system are illegitimate. They do not voice their votes, and thus their voices don't count.
There are any number of reasons to not vote. Brutal political apathy is one of them. A feeling that nothing changes by voting is another. Not to mention the lived experience of the powers that be not giving a democratic shit about one's opinions, problems, issues, conditions of life or even one's literal death.
The recent years have been characterized by a general downscaling of priorities. The word "austerity" is on everyone's minds and policy documents. Everything is to be done cheaper, more efficiently, faster. If it needs money, it also needs a justification, and if that justification isn't fast or efficient enough, it's reclassified as an unnecessary expense. The combination of increased profits and lowered taxes means a decrease in the questions considered legitimate - the public sphere retreats. Withdraws. Downscales, austeres. Safety costs money - you should have begun building your personal brand fifteen years ago!
Is it any wonder people feel justified in feeling illegitimate - voting or no voting?
It is very much a political question to ask where illegitimacy lies. Is it in the individual in regards to the system - that is, is the individual a lazy scrounger incapable of getting a decent job? Or is it in the system in regards to the individual - is there a democratic problem inherent in a political system that, in no uncertain terms, communicates that it doesn't give a rat's ass about whether you live or die?
There is legitimacy, and there is legitimacy.
3. The strangest thing about thinking about both the actually existing mass surveillance and the actually existing democracy is that it's not done more often. Not least because it leads us to the question of why. Why is Angela Merkel being watched? Why are you and me being watched? Why is a nominally democratic state making every effort to put the well-documented achievements of the DDR to shame?There might be good, legitimate reasons for this.
If we see legitimacy as something created by going through the democratic motions, then the mass surveillance is voted on by informed citizens, who made the judgment call that mass surveillance is what represents them. We have mass surveillance since we voted on the parties that implemented it, and we voted on them because we knew that they would. Democracy in action.
If we turn it on its head, we get a different picture. There is an ever increasing number of people who are no longer legitimate - be they unemployed, immigrants, of strange sexual bent, poor, uncomfortable, not normal. They disturb the prevailing order, they are foreign elements, they are stains on the social contract. They are unpredictable. And thus, a watchful eye must be kept on them at all times - order must be maintained against the constant influx of disorder. Otherwise, chaos.
The strangest thing about this picture is that criminals (or even terrorists) are not the biggest threats. They do indeed break the laws and cause disorder, but it is a predictable and manageable disorder. It can be cushioned, prevented, insured. Be shoved from the (ever-retreating) public to the ever more lonely private. Crime becomes an everyday occurrence, and it is your own fault if you do not lock your bike, door or vagina.
There are many ways of becoming an illegitimate person.
Instead of keeping an eye on criminals, the ever increasing mass surveillance is used to keep tabs on ordinary people. Unemployed people are forced to file reports on their jobseeking; those on social security are forced to subject their entire economic lives to scrutiny; and immigrants (or those who look like they might be immigrants) are forced to justify their existence to the police at random intervals. Ever more frequent and intrusive mechanisms are employed to keep the illegitimates in place.
And those who object to this are likely to meet these two responses, in tandem: "but you voted for it!" and "but vote for something else, then!".
It probably won't surprise you where these responses get their justification from.
The combination of the actually existing mass surveillance and the actually existing democracy is not a happy thought. Who is surveilled? Whose democracy? Who needs the ever expanding, ever more fine-grain systems of control that's gradually put in place? Is it a legitimate defense of the current order, or is it an ever more desperate defense of a system where more and more people are excluded and need to be defended against?
It is not a question you will get an answer to in this text. But it is a question well worth your continued pondering. One thought at a time. Then two. Then -
Originally published November 1, 2013
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
The copyright that wronged your soul
Sometimes, discussing copyright is an outright surreal experience. It would seem that the difference between copyright issues and copyright law is one of the least understandable differences since the invention of sliced bread.
Which is not only a mixed metaphor, but also the reason why so many get stuck in their underfinanced trenches. Often without knowing that they are either in a trench or underfinanced.
It tends to go something like this: someone writes a long, comprehensive argument about the need for reform in copyright law, wherein they point to such things as the consequences of the ever more draconian punishments for everyday copyright infringements. Consequences such as a diminishing lack of respect for the institutions of the law; a youth generation that grows up taking for granted that they will be viewed as criminals (because they are); a private sector that actively avoids investing in anything digital due to fear of crossing the line between innovation and criminality; a stifled creativity among artists who put ever more effort into making sure they are not sued for making something that reminds of anything copyrighted; archivists who refrain from preserving unreplaceable works of art due to fear of copyright claims eating their ever diminishing budgets - and so on and so forth.
Whereby someone responds with the question: but how shall the artists get paid?
I'm sure you immediately notice two things here. Both the surrealism and the trench. Not least in the assumed premise that it somehow would stop being a problem that everyone younger than me have committed crimes on a daily basis (and assumed the mentality that follows from an unreflexive life of crime) - if artists got paid.
Yeah, right
A tragic aspect of this is that all these tougher measure against copyright crimes doesn't lead to these artists in question getting paid. Putting young people in prison won't make them put more of their non-existent budgets into buying more culture. Neither will the threat of putting them in prison or of giving them enormous fines increase their willingness to consume. And if we ask the artists themselves if their intent is that their productions are to be enjoyed under the thread of legal violence, they will think the question absurd. Because it is.
The problems for artists is not that people pirate things. Their problem is that they sign lousy contracts, and that those organizations that could collectively bargain for better working conditions are busy lobbying for harsher measures on piracy.
This does not have to be. There's no need for this nonsense. It can change. But only if those who pay lip service to working for the artists get their act together and put their money where their mouths are. If they get to work on ending the cynical exploitation of the artists by the corporations that have the loudest mouths regarding the importance of harsher measures against piracy.
Therein lies the difference between copyright issues and copyright law. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Originally posted August 11, 2013
Which is not only a mixed metaphor, but also the reason why so many get stuck in their underfinanced trenches. Often without knowing that they are either in a trench or underfinanced.
It tends to go something like this: someone writes a long, comprehensive argument about the need for reform in copyright law, wherein they point to such things as the consequences of the ever more draconian punishments for everyday copyright infringements. Consequences such as a diminishing lack of respect for the institutions of the law; a youth generation that grows up taking for granted that they will be viewed as criminals (because they are); a private sector that actively avoids investing in anything digital due to fear of crossing the line between innovation and criminality; a stifled creativity among artists who put ever more effort into making sure they are not sued for making something that reminds of anything copyrighted; archivists who refrain from preserving unreplaceable works of art due to fear of copyright claims eating their ever diminishing budgets - and so on and so forth.
Whereby someone responds with the question: but how shall the artists get paid?
I'm sure you immediately notice two things here. Both the surrealism and the trench. Not least in the assumed premise that it somehow would stop being a problem that everyone younger than me have committed crimes on a daily basis (and assumed the mentality that follows from an unreflexive life of crime) - if artists got paid.
Yeah, right
A tragic aspect of this is that all these tougher measure against copyright crimes doesn't lead to these artists in question getting paid. Putting young people in prison won't make them put more of their non-existent budgets into buying more culture. Neither will the threat of putting them in prison or of giving them enormous fines increase their willingness to consume. And if we ask the artists themselves if their intent is that their productions are to be enjoyed under the thread of legal violence, they will think the question absurd. Because it is.
The problems for artists is not that people pirate things. Their problem is that they sign lousy contracts, and that those organizations that could collectively bargain for better working conditions are busy lobbying for harsher measures on piracy.
This does not have to be. There's no need for this nonsense. It can change. But only if those who pay lip service to working for the artists get their act together and put their money where their mouths are. If they get to work on ending the cynical exploitation of the artists by the corporations that have the loudest mouths regarding the importance of harsher measures against piracy.
Therein lies the difference between copyright issues and copyright law. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Originally posted August 11, 2013
Saturday, August 24, 2013
I caused the economic crisis
I have a total of twelve euros to my name.
That's twelve. As in 12.
That's more awesome than it sounds.
Somehow, by not spending these twelve euros, I've managed to wreak severe economic havoc across a wide spectrum of economic sectors. Developers, distributors, studios, associations, - the whole gamut of copyright industries and related businesses. They have all been wrought upon, and the havoc has been severe.
That's quite the bang for the bucks. All twelve of them.
The logic I'm applying here is the old doctrine that one illegal download is one lost sale. And that my criminal self has inflicted great damage upon a great many commercial actors by not spending my money on those things so downloaded.
All twelve of them.
One might object that twelve euros is not much, and that spending it on anything at all in the first world wouldn't change anything in the grander scheme of things. That it is impossible to lose a sale to someone who never could afford it in the first place. That poor people make poor consumers. That it might be proper to rethink the old doctrine.
One might.
But I quite like the thought of causing great imaginary economic havoc with my imaginary money. It is, after all, the most bang I'll ever get for my bucks. The highest return on investment I'll ever see. In any category.
That's twelve. As in 12.
That's more awesome than it sounds.
Somehow, by not spending these twelve euros, I've managed to wreak severe economic havoc across a wide spectrum of economic sectors. Developers, distributors, studios, associations, - the whole gamut of copyright industries and related businesses. They have all been wrought upon, and the havoc has been severe.
That's quite the bang for the bucks. All twelve of them.
The logic I'm applying here is the old doctrine that one illegal download is one lost sale. And that my criminal self has inflicted great damage upon a great many commercial actors by not spending my money on those things so downloaded.
All twelve of them.
One might object that twelve euros is not much, and that spending it on anything at all in the first world wouldn't change anything in the grander scheme of things. That it is impossible to lose a sale to someone who never could afford it in the first place. That poor people make poor consumers. That it might be proper to rethink the old doctrine.
One might.
But I quite like the thought of causing great imaginary economic havoc with my imaginary money. It is, after all, the most bang I'll ever get for my bucks. The highest return on investment I'll ever see. In any category.
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Your social computing is no good here
Another day, another police raid. I have lost count of them - by this point, my reaction upon hearing about them is a shrug and a tired acknowledgement that it happened. It's no longer a thing out of the ordinary, but more and more a part of the digital status quo.
This time it has happened to undertexter.se [subtitles.se], a page where those who so wishes could find subtitles to movies. Swedish subtitles, translated by the fans, for the fans. Not the movies as such, mind you, but the files that contains the translated subtitles to these movies. That is to say, text files containing the translated transcripts of the dialogue within these movies.
We have therefore taken another step up the ladder of abstraction when it comes to internet related crimes. We know from the Pirate Bay-trial that it is de jure illegal to provide a bulletin board (physical or digital) that contains information as to where the files are. That is to say, to in any way, shape or form assist the accessories of the crime in question - be it in the form of a link, a word or a pointed finger. This has now been extended to things that might in any way, shape or form be related to the assisting of these accessories. Such as fansubbing.
This is not a step in the right direction. For three reasons.
First off, the general vagueness of this legal situation is very detrimental to the social stability. If handling things that are peripherally related to piracy is criminalized to the point where police in the mood for a raid can show up at any time, then there's a very present incentive for ordinary people to start thinking like criminals. Because they are, in the eyes of the law. And, moreover, there's an incentive to start to raidproof one's home, workplace or digital hideouts - the police might after all show up at any moment, and if they find something suspicious, they both can and will use it against you.
Under such conditions, applied paranoia pays off.
Secondly, this stifles innovation. Things that might be seen as creative and innovative leap when it comes to collaborative computing, might also be seen as organized crime. Or as facilitating said organized crime. Which, quite straightforwardly, makes it rational to be hesitant when it comes to innovate in these areas - especially when these innovations includes the sharing of information. Those policemen are not kidding around once they get into their raiding gear.
To slightly paraphrase a famous phrase: any sufficiently advanced application of collaborative computing is indistinguishable from piracy.
Thirdly, this is a direct and unmistakable message to the digital business community. Or, rather, it's two messages, one domestic and one international. The domestic message is this: don't mess with computers. The international message is this: don't come here if you are a company that messes with computers. Since every action that in any way, shape or form relates to collaborative computing can be interpreted as abetting organized criminality, and since actions undertaken on a commercial scale are always punished harder than those undertaken on a hobby basis - just don't do it. Stay out. It's not worth the hassle and the legal fees. Keep your business elsewhere.
It goes without saying that this is quite the opposite of conducive to a prospering digital business community.
There are two ways to react to this. The one way is to shrug and keep on keeping on, as if this is the way things are supposed to be. The other way is to get mad. To get out of your chairs, open your windows to the internet and yell: this legislation kills innovation, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!
It's your choice. Don't let the threat of the next police raid leave you too unaffected.
Originally published July 10 2013
This time it has happened to undertexter.se [subtitles.se], a page where those who so wishes could find subtitles to movies. Swedish subtitles, translated by the fans, for the fans. Not the movies as such, mind you, but the files that contains the translated subtitles to these movies. That is to say, text files containing the translated transcripts of the dialogue within these movies.We have therefore taken another step up the ladder of abstraction when it comes to internet related crimes. We know from the Pirate Bay-trial that it is de jure illegal to provide a bulletin board (physical or digital) that contains information as to where the files are. That is to say, to in any way, shape or form assist the accessories of the crime in question - be it in the form of a link, a word or a pointed finger. This has now been extended to things that might in any way, shape or form be related to the assisting of these accessories. Such as fansubbing.
This is not a step in the right direction. For three reasons.
First off, the general vagueness of this legal situation is very detrimental to the social stability. If handling things that are peripherally related to piracy is criminalized to the point where police in the mood for a raid can show up at any time, then there's a very present incentive for ordinary people to start thinking like criminals. Because they are, in the eyes of the law. And, moreover, there's an incentive to start to raidproof one's home, workplace or digital hideouts - the police might after all show up at any moment, and if they find something suspicious, they both can and will use it against you.
Under such conditions, applied paranoia pays off.
Secondly, this stifles innovation. Things that might be seen as creative and innovative leap when it comes to collaborative computing, might also be seen as organized crime. Or as facilitating said organized crime. Which, quite straightforwardly, makes it rational to be hesitant when it comes to innovate in these areas - especially when these innovations includes the sharing of information. Those policemen are not kidding around once they get into their raiding gear.
To slightly paraphrase a famous phrase: any sufficiently advanced application of collaborative computing is indistinguishable from piracy.
Thirdly, this is a direct and unmistakable message to the digital business community. Or, rather, it's two messages, one domestic and one international. The domestic message is this: don't mess with computers. The international message is this: don't come here if you are a company that messes with computers. Since every action that in any way, shape or form relates to collaborative computing can be interpreted as abetting organized criminality, and since actions undertaken on a commercial scale are always punished harder than those undertaken on a hobby basis - just don't do it. Stay out. It's not worth the hassle and the legal fees. Keep your business elsewhere.
It goes without saying that this is quite the opposite of conducive to a prospering digital business community.
There are two ways to react to this. The one way is to shrug and keep on keeping on, as if this is the way things are supposed to be. The other way is to get mad. To get out of your chairs, open your windows to the internet and yell: this legislation kills innovation, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!
It's your choice. Don't let the threat of the next police raid leave you too unaffected.
Originally published July 10 2013
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
I am a criminal
I sometimes shock my fellow human being by telling them that I am a criminal.
One might suspect this is done in order to stir up a conversation among and with my fellow human beings. It is. But more than that, it is done in order to inform them that I am indeed a criminal.
You may or may not find the reason I'm a criminal laughable. The reason is that I'm a file sharer. Which might not seem like such big deal - there are worse things to be guilty of, after all, and in the grander scheme of things it's not that big of a deal. When they wrote the seven deadly sins, copying computer files was not among them. You may or may not approve of it, but when compared to murder, rape or large scale financial fraud, there's not too much doubt about which one is the worst. Which one will send you to hell, and which one will at the most give you time in purgatory.
There is a qualitative difference between the one in the other. When push comes to shove, misdemeanor and hard core criminality are two different things, and should be treated differently.
The crux here is that in the eyes of the law, this difference does not exist. According to the law, I am as likely to go to jail for the one as the other, and if I ever become the target of a legal process, I am as guilty as charged. And I both can and will go to prison for it, as sure as if I did something of the worse order.
The reason I tell people I'm a criminal is that in the eyes of the law, I am a criminal. Not of the hardcore life of organized crime kind - but the kind that goes to jail anyway.
The disconnect between being a criminal and being a criminal is the prime reason I tell my fellow beings about my criminal being. Because it is not just me - it's just about everyone that is younger than me who's used a computer. There's a whole generation of criminals out there, living their life in the shadow of their possible prison sentences. Living their life in preparation for a police investigation - or a police raid - that may or may not ever come.
Living lives of crime. Becoming used to thinking like criminals. Without ever committing something most people would consider criminal. In the common sense use of the word.
This does not have to be.
One might suspect this is done in order to stir up a conversation among and with my fellow human beings. It is. But more than that, it is done in order to inform them that I am indeed a criminal.
You may or may not find the reason I'm a criminal laughable. The reason is that I'm a file sharer. Which might not seem like such big deal - there are worse things to be guilty of, after all, and in the grander scheme of things it's not that big of a deal. When they wrote the seven deadly sins, copying computer files was not among them. You may or may not approve of it, but when compared to murder, rape or large scale financial fraud, there's not too much doubt about which one is the worst. Which one will send you to hell, and which one will at the most give you time in purgatory.There is a qualitative difference between the one in the other. When push comes to shove, misdemeanor and hard core criminality are two different things, and should be treated differently.
The crux here is that in the eyes of the law, this difference does not exist. According to the law, I am as likely to go to jail for the one as the other, and if I ever become the target of a legal process, I am as guilty as charged. And I both can and will go to prison for it, as sure as if I did something of the worse order.
The reason I tell people I'm a criminal is that in the eyes of the law, I am a criminal. Not of the hardcore life of organized crime kind - but the kind that goes to jail anyway.
The disconnect between being a criminal and being a criminal is the prime reason I tell my fellow beings about my criminal being. Because it is not just me - it's just about everyone that is younger than me who's used a computer. There's a whole generation of criminals out there, living their life in the shadow of their possible prison sentences. Living their life in preparation for a police investigation - or a police raid - that may or may not ever come.
Living lives of crime. Becoming used to thinking like criminals. Without ever committing something most people would consider criminal. In the common sense use of the word.
This does not have to be.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
A brutally political vision of a better tomorrow
There are two kinds of politics. The first is the I have a dream kind - the formulating and propagating of ideas about how the world should and ought to be. Dreams, visions, utopias, better tomorrows - all the good stuff.
And then there's the policy document kind.
Something that most people are either blissfully unaware or all too aware of is the difference between these two kinds. Those who are so lucky as to be unaware can spend oh so many joyous hours in the company of better tomorrows - those tomorrows that follow after the Revolution, the Rapture, the Realization of the Free Market or any other Singularity you might imagine.
Those of the unlucky persuasion are stuck with either the writing, reading or unhealthily close interpretations of policy documents. Which can be just as interesting, boring and hellishly narrowly focused as it sounds - depending on the particular circumstances of who, what, why, and how much money it would cost.
These two kinds are related. But not as a direct line from the one to the other, but rather as a long circuitous series of indirect routes and Chinese whispers. Which, as you may or may not know, means that the intentions that enter into the one end does not necessarily translate into the intended consequences at the other end.
To formulate it in a soundbite: all political visions must survive being translated into policy documents.
Not just a policy document, but many of them. Not just once in order to enunciate and expound the vision for a better tomorrow, but at least once for every institution that is expected to make this better tomorrow happen. At least once in order to make it clear that this particular institution is indeed involved in this betterment, and then an innumerable number of times in order to make it clear exactly how this betterment is supposed to be done.
The easiest way to visualize this is to think from the top down. First word must pass from the top of the hierarchy to the level below it, and then from that level to the level below it - and so forth until we reach the proverbial man on the street, the ordinary people.
Which means that a whole lot of translating, misunderstanding and office politics will have meddled in the political vision by the time it reaches those who are supposed to make it happen. And, unsurpisingly, means that it is harder than it looks to change the ways institutions work, even when the vision of the better world is perfectly clear at the top level. (Be that at the level of central government or the level of theory.)
This difference between the two different kinds of politics tends to be what makes people bitter, cynical and apathetic. On the one hand, the better tomorrow is a better place. On the other hand, the inertia and general indirectness of actually existing political institutions is enough to make even the most bravehearted of idealists lose heart. Nothing ever changes!
The thing is - they do. They are nudged, budged and ever so imperceptibly moved in this direction and that. It's not a big blob of inert political matter that envelopes the lands in a permanent status quo, but rather a vast collection of interconnected and mutually affecting social contexts. Changes in one place has consequences in another, which has consequences in yet another, and so on - and the key to making change happen is to nudge, budge and wiggle at as many of these places as possible at the same time.
Legislation is one of these places. But when it comes to making social change happen, it is not by any means the only place that matters. It is an important place, to be sure, but not the only place. But if you treat it as the only place that matters, you miss out on all that nudging and budging, and all the associated opportunities to affect change.
All political visions must survive the translation into policy documents. And you can help that translation - at all levels. Wherever and whoever you are.
That's a vision for a better tomorrow if there ever was one.
And then there's the policy document kind.Something that most people are either blissfully unaware or all too aware of is the difference between these two kinds. Those who are so lucky as to be unaware can spend oh so many joyous hours in the company of better tomorrows - those tomorrows that follow after the Revolution, the Rapture, the Realization of the Free Market or any other Singularity you might imagine.
Those of the unlucky persuasion are stuck with either the writing, reading or unhealthily close interpretations of policy documents. Which can be just as interesting, boring and hellishly narrowly focused as it sounds - depending on the particular circumstances of who, what, why, and how much money it would cost.
These two kinds are related. But not as a direct line from the one to the other, but rather as a long circuitous series of indirect routes and Chinese whispers. Which, as you may or may not know, means that the intentions that enter into the one end does not necessarily translate into the intended consequences at the other end.
To formulate it in a soundbite: all political visions must survive being translated into policy documents.
Not just a policy document, but many of them. Not just once in order to enunciate and expound the vision for a better tomorrow, but at least once for every institution that is expected to make this better tomorrow happen. At least once in order to make it clear that this particular institution is indeed involved in this betterment, and then an innumerable number of times in order to make it clear exactly how this betterment is supposed to be done.
The easiest way to visualize this is to think from the top down. First word must pass from the top of the hierarchy to the level below it, and then from that level to the level below it - and so forth until we reach the proverbial man on the street, the ordinary people.
Which means that a whole lot of translating, misunderstanding and office politics will have meddled in the political vision by the time it reaches those who are supposed to make it happen. And, unsurpisingly, means that it is harder than it looks to change the ways institutions work, even when the vision of the better world is perfectly clear at the top level. (Be that at the level of central government or the level of theory.)
This difference between the two different kinds of politics tends to be what makes people bitter, cynical and apathetic. On the one hand, the better tomorrow is a better place. On the other hand, the inertia and general indirectness of actually existing political institutions is enough to make even the most bravehearted of idealists lose heart. Nothing ever changes!
The thing is - they do. They are nudged, budged and ever so imperceptibly moved in this direction and that. It's not a big blob of inert political matter that envelopes the lands in a permanent status quo, but rather a vast collection of interconnected and mutually affecting social contexts. Changes in one place has consequences in another, which has consequences in yet another, and so on - and the key to making change happen is to nudge, budge and wiggle at as many of these places as possible at the same time.
Legislation is one of these places. But when it comes to making social change happen, it is not by any means the only place that matters. It is an important place, to be sure, but not the only place. But if you treat it as the only place that matters, you miss out on all that nudging and budging, and all the associated opportunities to affect change.
All political visions must survive the translation into policy documents. And you can help that translation - at all levels. Wherever and whoever you are.
That's a vision for a better tomorrow if there ever was one.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Hacking all the things
For some reason, the notion that hacking is something done on and with computers has taken a very firm hold on the popular imagination. The reasons for this are many and interesting, and I might very well return to them in the future. Right now, though, I just want to turn your attention to the fact that you can hack pretty much everything that has sufficient complexity to be hackable.
Tautologies. Love 'em.
One example of this, which is on my mind due to it being in the local media at this moment, is the tax code. In particular the tax code regarding the construction and renovation of houses. As you might imagine, these can be rather expensive propositions, and as a means to get people to (re)build things anyway, a deduction was introduced. The short, easy to grasp version is that you can deduce costs relating to labor, and only labor.
This can be hacked, if you put your mind to it.
The way to go about this is to say - okay, labor is deductable, material items are not. How do I make sure that I can get the most out of these particular circumstances?
By transferring costs from material items to labor. Or, in more concrete terms: by selling the material items on the cheap, and then charging loads and loads of money for the work of turning these items into buildings. In a manner such as this:
Big hulking machine: $5
Installing the big hulking machine: $7000/hour
By manipulating the numbers in this way, you can maximize the deduction while at the same time still charging the same price for it. (Or less, should you want to compete with someone else.) Which translates into profits, all legal and proper.
This, dear readers, is an act of hacking. And it is not quite as related to computers as one might imagine hacking to be. Rather, it takes advantage of the complexity of a system. Not a computer system, but a system in general.
All systems are hackable. All systems have parts that can be bent in certain ways to produce an outcome that is something other than the intended one. All you have to do is to put your mind to it and say - okay, this is such, that is thus. How can the working of the one affect the working of the other?
As the players of computer games are so wont of saying:
Good luck, have fun!
Tautologies. Love 'em.
One example of this, which is on my mind due to it being in the local media at this moment, is the tax code. In particular the tax code regarding the construction and renovation of houses. As you might imagine, these can be rather expensive propositions, and as a means to get people to (re)build things anyway, a deduction was introduced. The short, easy to grasp version is that you can deduce costs relating to labor, and only labor.
This can be hacked, if you put your mind to it.
The way to go about this is to say - okay, labor is deductable, material items are not. How do I make sure that I can get the most out of these particular circumstances?
By transferring costs from material items to labor. Or, in more concrete terms: by selling the material items on the cheap, and then charging loads and loads of money for the work of turning these items into buildings. In a manner such as this:
Big hulking machine: $5
Installing the big hulking machine: $7000/hour
By manipulating the numbers in this way, you can maximize the deduction while at the same time still charging the same price for it. (Or less, should you want to compete with someone else.) Which translates into profits, all legal and proper.
This, dear readers, is an act of hacking. And it is not quite as related to computers as one might imagine hacking to be. Rather, it takes advantage of the complexity of a system. Not a computer system, but a system in general.
All systems are hackable. All systems have parts that can be bent in certain ways to produce an outcome that is something other than the intended one. All you have to do is to put your mind to it and say - okay, this is such, that is thus. How can the working of the one affect the working of the other?
As the players of computer games are so wont of saying:
Good luck, have fun!
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Accessorize those criminals!
Strange things are afoot.
I awoke today to the news that my local Pirate Party has been subjected to legal threats. The conditions are simple: stop providing bandwidth to the Pirate Bay, or face the legal consequences.
Which provides any number of legal conundrums. For one thing: since when is it illegal to provide bandwidth? For another: who makes the call as to which things are illegal to provide bandwidth to? For yet another: if providing bandwidth is a crime, then what other things are criminal as well?
Is it time to, perhaps, investigate the postal service for their distribution of illegal goods? Or the municipal services who provides maintenance for the road systems?
The legal basis for their threat is the crime of being an accessory to an accessory to an accessory to the one actually committing the crime. Which is vague indeed. And opens up for many an interesting lives of crime.
You know, the easy thing to do might just be to reform the actually existing copyright framework. Make communication a little less criminal and a little more communicative.
Communication is hard as it is. No need to make it harder than it should be.
I awoke today to the news that my local Pirate Party has been subjected to legal threats. The conditions are simple: stop providing bandwidth to the Pirate Bay, or face the legal consequences.
Which provides any number of legal conundrums. For one thing: since when is it illegal to provide bandwidth? For another: who makes the call as to which things are illegal to provide bandwidth to? For yet another: if providing bandwidth is a crime, then what other things are criminal as well?
Is it time to, perhaps, investigate the postal service for their distribution of illegal goods? Or the municipal services who provides maintenance for the road systems?
The legal basis for their threat is the crime of being an accessory to an accessory to an accessory to the one actually committing the crime. Which is vague indeed. And opens up for many an interesting lives of crime.
You know, the easy thing to do might just be to reform the actually existing copyright framework. Make communication a little less criminal and a little more communicative.
Communication is hard as it is. No need to make it harder than it should be.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
6 of 95: The radical, the political and the internet's refusal to be either
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
[Part 5]
This is true to the point of banality. And I rather suspect you've heard this point been made many a time in the last decade or two.
Has the internet been around for two decades already? Gosh. The kids today must be all confused! Not with the internet, mind (to them, it's always been around), but with the genre of internet newliness.
By this, I mean the constant fascination with all the new things one can do with the internet. It's as if some part of our culture got stuck in 1993 and the glorious amazement with this new thing that just arrived.
Now, I'm all for 1990s cyberoptimism, but it comes a point in every culture's life where things stop being new and start to have brutal political, social, cultural and economic consequences. And where the language to describe these no longer new things change in accordance to this.
So, without further ado, I'm going to manifest a statement:
The internet is as revolutionary a force for social change as the process of industrialization. And it is no longer new - it has, in fact, had over two decades of brutal, ruthless, ceaseless, overwhelming and subversive effect on the world we live in. It has ravaged, transformed, made inprofitable and in any other imaginable way made the practices that depended on a few, well ordered and well controlled monopoly medias that much harder to maintain. It has empowered people and disempowered elites, and will continue to do so until we no longer recognize the monopoly of communication we call the past.
This statement can be read in either one of two ways. It can either be read as a radical political statement amounting to a declaration of war on the old order, or as a matter of fact statement without any political underpinnings whatsoever.
The difference between these two readings is not subtle, not trivial and not hard to detect in effect.
We can restate this difference as such: either you see the internet as a threat, or as a set of useful tools for getting communication done. And it tends to be that this 'either' is very depending on your relation to the old monopolies. If you're a part of them, it's very much a threat; if you're suddenly liberated from them, it's not.
We can restate this difference again: either you think it's a good thing that humans from all over the world suddenly have access to a very large percentage of the accumulated cultural heritage of the world, or you don't.
The truly radical thing about this is that it is the "don't" position that's the radical position. The sane, rational and analytical part of the world just concludes that, yep, the internet is here, and it has been around for two decades, and the only thing that will make it not be around anymore is a major infrastructural catastrophy or an all out nuclear war. The "well, let's see what we can do with this thing now that the kids have all grown up with it" position is not radical, not political and most of all not new - it's the default mode of anyone born after the age of informational empire.
When you have to commit large acts of sabotage or bring out the nukes - that's when the word 'radical' is appropriate.
For all the rest - file sharing, community building, blogging, cryptohacking, remixing, chatting, making friends, crossing borders, expanding the cultural and social horizons of billions, enabling the emergence of new cultural forms that both includes and transcends those of the past - well. We're living in a world where that is an everyday occurrence, and in truth most of you wouldn't recognize a world where this wasn't so.
The internet is a radical transformer. But it is not radical - it is, de facto. And what we do with it is up to us. So let's make it into something epic, shall we?
I'll see you again tomorrow for part seven.
[Part 5]
This is true to the point of banality. And I rather suspect you've heard this point been made many a time in the last decade or two.
Has the internet been around for two decades already? Gosh. The kids today must be all confused! Not with the internet, mind (to them, it's always been around), but with the genre of internet newliness.
By this, I mean the constant fascination with all the new things one can do with the internet. It's as if some part of our culture got stuck in 1993 and the glorious amazement with this new thing that just arrived.
Now, I'm all for 1990s cyberoptimism, but it comes a point in every culture's life where things stop being new and start to have brutal political, social, cultural and economic consequences. And where the language to describe these no longer new things change in accordance to this.
So, without further ado, I'm going to manifest a statement:
The internet is as revolutionary a force for social change as the process of industrialization. And it is no longer new - it has, in fact, had over two decades of brutal, ruthless, ceaseless, overwhelming and subversive effect on the world we live in. It has ravaged, transformed, made inprofitable and in any other imaginable way made the practices that depended on a few, well ordered and well controlled monopoly medias that much harder to maintain. It has empowered people and disempowered elites, and will continue to do so until we no longer recognize the monopoly of communication we call the past.
This statement can be read in either one of two ways. It can either be read as a radical political statement amounting to a declaration of war on the old order, or as a matter of fact statement without any political underpinnings whatsoever.
The difference between these two readings is not subtle, not trivial and not hard to detect in effect.
We can restate this difference as such: either you see the internet as a threat, or as a set of useful tools for getting communication done. And it tends to be that this 'either' is very depending on your relation to the old monopolies. If you're a part of them, it's very much a threat; if you're suddenly liberated from them, it's not.
We can restate this difference again: either you think it's a good thing that humans from all over the world suddenly have access to a very large percentage of the accumulated cultural heritage of the world, or you don't.
The truly radical thing about this is that it is the "don't" position that's the radical position. The sane, rational and analytical part of the world just concludes that, yep, the internet is here, and it has been around for two decades, and the only thing that will make it not be around anymore is a major infrastructural catastrophy or an all out nuclear war. The "well, let's see what we can do with this thing now that the kids have all grown up with it" position is not radical, not political and most of all not new - it's the default mode of anyone born after the age of informational empire.
When you have to commit large acts of sabotage or bring out the nukes - that's when the word 'radical' is appropriate.
For all the rest - file sharing, community building, blogging, cryptohacking, remixing, chatting, making friends, crossing borders, expanding the cultural and social horizons of billions, enabling the emergence of new cultural forms that both includes and transcends those of the past - well. We're living in a world where that is an everyday occurrence, and in truth most of you wouldn't recognize a world where this wasn't so.
The internet is a radical transformer. But it is not radical - it is, de facto. And what we do with it is up to us. So let's make it into something epic, shall we?
I'll see you again tomorrow for part seven.
Saturday, December 29, 2012
The tragedy of the common internet
Often when discussing file sharing, the notion of the tragedy of the commons is invoked. Often as an argument against it - the one person having access to most of human culture is no big deal, but as more and more entities gain this access, stranger and stranger things start to happen. In the end, tragedy occurs.
For those of you who for whatever reason might want a reminder of what the tragedy of the commons is all about, here's the gist of it: imagine a public space, open for everyone. Any one person using it won't make that much difference, so the implicit imperative for any one parcitular person is to use it to the max. Which, eventually, leads to a critical mass of people using it to the max. Which, in turn, ends in tragedy, as the usefulness of this public space is diminished or even destroyed, due to everyone overusing this public space.
The implied relevance to the issue of file sharing being that even though the one person engaging in it can be written off as collateral damage, the effect of the multitude of people doing it is a radical shift in consumer behavior that will destroy the common good. Which, according to this logic, means that any and all cultural activities that also happens to be a commercial enterprise will in effect shrivel and die because no one is willing to pay for anything anymore.
Why pay for anything when everything is free, right?
Wrong. Evidently wrong, too. My proof for this claim is as follows: the internet exists.
This is the entirety of my claim. The alpha, omega and all in between. Nothing added, nothing subtracted - this is it, in sum total.
So, what does it mean that the internet exists? And, moreover, that it has existed for so long that those born on this side of the millennium bug don't know what a world without it looks like?
It means that the fact that people are still willing to pay for culture is a brutal argument against the validity of the invocation of the tragedy of the commons. Because - and be sure to notice my stressing of this point - even though most of what's produced in terms of commercial culture is available for free these days, people still pay for it. And, moreover: if you ask them about it, they will most likely tell you that this is the right and proper thing to do.
Soo.
Can we get past this moot point now, and get back to the business at hand? There's a whole lot of business going on on this internet thingy, after all, and I dare say that most of it has something to do with culture -
For those of you who for whatever reason might want a reminder of what the tragedy of the commons is all about, here's the gist of it: imagine a public space, open for everyone. Any one person using it won't make that much difference, so the implicit imperative for any one parcitular person is to use it to the max. Which, eventually, leads to a critical mass of people using it to the max. Which, in turn, ends in tragedy, as the usefulness of this public space is diminished or even destroyed, due to everyone overusing this public space.
The implied relevance to the issue of file sharing being that even though the one person engaging in it can be written off as collateral damage, the effect of the multitude of people doing it is a radical shift in consumer behavior that will destroy the common good. Which, according to this logic, means that any and all cultural activities that also happens to be a commercial enterprise will in effect shrivel and die because no one is willing to pay for anything anymore.
Why pay for anything when everything is free, right?
Wrong. Evidently wrong, too. My proof for this claim is as follows: the internet exists.
This is the entirety of my claim. The alpha, omega and all in between. Nothing added, nothing subtracted - this is it, in sum total.
So, what does it mean that the internet exists? And, moreover, that it has existed for so long that those born on this side of the millennium bug don't know what a world without it looks like?
It means that the fact that people are still willing to pay for culture is a brutal argument against the validity of the invocation of the tragedy of the commons. Because - and be sure to notice my stressing of this point - even though most of what's produced in terms of commercial culture is available for free these days, people still pay for it. And, moreover: if you ask them about it, they will most likely tell you that this is the right and proper thing to do.
Soo.
Can we get past this moot point now, and get back to the business at hand? There's a whole lot of business going on on this internet thingy, after all, and I dare say that most of it has something to do with culture -
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Tell me why (this is the party of confusion)
I'm hearing rumors about Mr Assange. Rumors suggesting that the formation of a Wikileaks Party is on the horizon. And the one question I keep asking myself is -
Why?
First off, it's very much a duplication of efforts. I may be somewhat partial here, but the Pirate Party exists, and it exists in some fifty-odd countries. And if you want to make a dent in the political realities of these countries, you could do worse than suggesting to these parties that they should go ahead and do what they are already doing anyway.
To say that there would be somewhat of an overlap between the actually existing pirate parties and the eventual Wikileaks party, would be to break new grounds when it comes to understatements. To say the least.
Secondly - why would you want to destroy the impartiality of Wikileaks? If a party comes into being, all future leaks will be seen in the light of the question "how does this benefit the party?". The notion of just putting the truth out there is brutally undermined when you become someone who stands to benefit in a very direct way from releasing some pieces of information and withholding other pieces. Being impartial is a hard thing to do when one is blatantly partial.
I do not understand this line of reasoning. At all.
Do you know something I don't? Do tell!
Why?
First off, it's very much a duplication of efforts. I may be somewhat partial here, but the Pirate Party exists, and it exists in some fifty-odd countries. And if you want to make a dent in the political realities of these countries, you could do worse than suggesting to these parties that they should go ahead and do what they are already doing anyway.
To say that there would be somewhat of an overlap between the actually existing pirate parties and the eventual Wikileaks party, would be to break new grounds when it comes to understatements. To say the least.
Secondly - why would you want to destroy the impartiality of Wikileaks? If a party comes into being, all future leaks will be seen in the light of the question "how does this benefit the party?". The notion of just putting the truth out there is brutally undermined when you become someone who stands to benefit in a very direct way from releasing some pieces of information and withholding other pieces. Being impartial is a hard thing to do when one is blatantly partial.
I do not understand this line of reasoning. At all.
Do you know something I don't? Do tell!
Sunday, December 9, 2012
The political divide: socially mediated opinionmaking and you
It would seem there is something of a catch 22 when it comes to politics. Or, rather, the relationship between citizens and their politicians.
On the one hand, we have citizens who actively want their politicians to make and take stances against the current order of things. There is no shortage of the sentiment that the political process is too slow, and that it would do well to speed things up in terms of getting things done. The citizens are waiting for the people to do things, to make a difference – to be the difference, as it were.
On the other hand, we have politicians who feel that they cannot act because they perceive a lack of public interest in a certain issue. While they might be ever so ready to bring out the political big guns when the time is right, they won't do it as long as the public is less than storming the proverbial barricades.
Which is the whole crux of the catch. The one hand waits for the other, and vice versa.
Clearly, this is a less than optimal situation.
The reasons for things being this way are many. One of the biggest one being that citizens and politicians live in different lifeworlds. Citizens see the issues in the abstract concreteness of ordinary life, where a problem is a problem. Politicians see the issues in the concrete abstractness of the political world, where problems are divided between separate political entities and where you have to navigate the intricate webs of institutional inertia in order to get things done.
To take this to the streets: if there is a pot hole somewhere, the ordinary person will think to himself that it needs to be fixed. The pathway from problem to solution is as straight as the street itself. The politician, on the other hand, will think about which department or institution that has authority over street fixing, what their budget is, what their current order of business is and who one should talk to in order to get them to get to work. And, moreover, how one should talk to that person.
Not quite the straight and narrow.
The thing here is that the politician way of thinking isn't wrong. The world we live in is governed by an intricate network of institutions, and being able to navigate these is a necessity for getting things done. Short of a major governmental overhaul, we are stuck with the institutional setup we have, and knowing who, where and why is a large step in the process of making change.
Needless to say, the sentiment of the people and the political situation within and among these networks of governmental bodies - don't always align. There may be a gaping hole in the street, but if the deciding body is in uproar over something completely different, the chances for fixing that hole are slim. And, conversely, that very same body might be on the cusp on launching the biggest street fixing campaign ever, eagerly awaiting a popular support that is nowhere to be seen - support it would need in order to amend the budget.
I believe you're seeing where I'm going with this. The divide between the public will and the necessities of actually existing institutions.
There are of course moments where these two align perfectly. I would be committing a great sin if I didn't mention ACTA in this context. It is the one, best example of when the two worlds unite in singular action -when public opinion and institutional logic speak the same language.
For every such victory, there are thousands of losses happening in the dark. Not because they don't matter, but because it's hard to make complicated bureaucratic matters of brutal subtlety matter to those who do not know the first thing about the institutional makeup of their government.
Sometimes, the two worlds meet. More often than not, they don't. Remember Occupy.
If you happen do be thinking "but how does blogging relate to this", now is the time where you will get your answer. I propose, suggest and support the notion of the blogging politician. Not only because it brings them closer to their electorates, but also because it brings the intricate world of political necessity down to an understandable level. The networks of governmental organizations is not impossible to understand, it's just darned hard to get a grip on it when coming from the outside. (Especially for those who spend their lives doing the necessary hard work of the working people - not everyone reads up on constitutional theory after working eight hours in the factory.)
If the politician plays their blog right, they can invite the people to take appropriate action when the time is right - i.e. organizing demonstrations coinciding with important votes, building opinion before important sessions, those kinds of things.
Coordinating what happens inside with what happens outside, as it were.
What do you think about this? Is it something I should be pushing on the politicians I know - and, more importantly, something you would be willing to recommend to yours?
Do tell!
On the one hand, we have citizens who actively want their politicians to make and take stances against the current order of things. There is no shortage of the sentiment that the political process is too slow, and that it would do well to speed things up in terms of getting things done. The citizens are waiting for the people to do things, to make a difference – to be the difference, as it were.
On the other hand, we have politicians who feel that they cannot act because they perceive a lack of public interest in a certain issue. While they might be ever so ready to bring out the political big guns when the time is right, they won't do it as long as the public is less than storming the proverbial barricades.Which is the whole crux of the catch. The one hand waits for the other, and vice versa.
Clearly, this is a less than optimal situation.
The reasons for things being this way are many. One of the biggest one being that citizens and politicians live in different lifeworlds. Citizens see the issues in the abstract concreteness of ordinary life, where a problem is a problem. Politicians see the issues in the concrete abstractness of the political world, where problems are divided between separate political entities and where you have to navigate the intricate webs of institutional inertia in order to get things done.
To take this to the streets: if there is a pot hole somewhere, the ordinary person will think to himself that it needs to be fixed. The pathway from problem to solution is as straight as the street itself. The politician, on the other hand, will think about which department or institution that has authority over street fixing, what their budget is, what their current order of business is and who one should talk to in order to get them to get to work. And, moreover, how one should talk to that person.
Not quite the straight and narrow.
The thing here is that the politician way of thinking isn't wrong. The world we live in is governed by an intricate network of institutions, and being able to navigate these is a necessity for getting things done. Short of a major governmental overhaul, we are stuck with the institutional setup we have, and knowing who, where and why is a large step in the process of making change.
Needless to say, the sentiment of the people and the political situation within and among these networks of governmental bodies - don't always align. There may be a gaping hole in the street, but if the deciding body is in uproar over something completely different, the chances for fixing that hole are slim. And, conversely, that very same body might be on the cusp on launching the biggest street fixing campaign ever, eagerly awaiting a popular support that is nowhere to be seen - support it would need in order to amend the budget.
I believe you're seeing where I'm going with this. The divide between the public will and the necessities of actually existing institutions.
There are of course moments where these two align perfectly. I would be committing a great sin if I didn't mention ACTA in this context. It is the one, best example of when the two worlds unite in singular action -when public opinion and institutional logic speak the same language.
For every such victory, there are thousands of losses happening in the dark. Not because they don't matter, but because it's hard to make complicated bureaucratic matters of brutal subtlety matter to those who do not know the first thing about the institutional makeup of their government.
Sometimes, the two worlds meet. More often than not, they don't. Remember Occupy.If you happen do be thinking "but how does blogging relate to this", now is the time where you will get your answer. I propose, suggest and support the notion of the blogging politician. Not only because it brings them closer to their electorates, but also because it brings the intricate world of political necessity down to an understandable level. The networks of governmental organizations is not impossible to understand, it's just darned hard to get a grip on it when coming from the outside. (Especially for those who spend their lives doing the necessary hard work of the working people - not everyone reads up on constitutional theory after working eight hours in the factory.)
If the politician plays their blog right, they can invite the people to take appropriate action when the time is right - i.e. organizing demonstrations coinciding with important votes, building opinion before important sessions, those kinds of things.
Coordinating what happens inside with what happens outside, as it were.
What do you think about this? Is it something I should be pushing on the politicians I know - and, more importantly, something you would be willing to recommend to yours?
Do tell!
The right to link
Is it a crime to link to something?Some would say the answer is yes.
"Some", in this case, being the judicial system, which apparently is about to try a certain Barrett Brown for the crime of linking to certain information. If you want details on what, you can crime your way over it from here.
"Some" is also, believe it or not, the Swedish copyright law. It is in fact a crime to link to things, under certain conditions. Not because of malign intent, mind you, but because of something that is about to become very common in the years to come: changed circumstances.
You see, the relevant laws regarding this were written back in the early 1900s. As you may well know, things were different back then. The laws say that 1) copyright is automatically given to someone once they have created something, that 2) they have the right to choose when and how they make their creation public and that 3) to make something public without the creator's permission is not allowed.
Under the conditions of early 20th century, this was as good a copyright law as one could make. No fuss with paperwork, no fuss with different types of works, and in general less fuss than one would expect from copyright regulation. If you created something, you got the copyright to that thing, and that was that. Simple, plain and easy to understand.
Back in those days, the means of production were not quite what we know today. Whatever any one person could do was of limited scope, and couldn't in any relevant way threaten those who mass produced copyrighted works. If you typed out a whole book on your typewriter, you had to put in a lot of effort just to produce that one copy. If you copied a painting, you essentially had to paint it by hand, which again took a long time for that one copy. And so on and so forth - things took quite a while to do back then, and if one person did it it didn't really have an impact on the market as such.
Or, put another way: it's hard to set up a factory cranking out pirate goods by accident. You really needed to know what you were doing and do it on a large scale in order to be relevant for copyright law back then.
These laws are, by and large, still in force. And they produce strange results when they are applied to the current state of things. Linking to something, for instance, has been compared to making something available to the public, which (as we saw in 3 above) is a crime. There actually was a big case a while back where someone was charged for linking to an unencrypted access point for a digital television stream. The stream itself was unencrypted and open for anyone who knew it, and the one thing this guy did was to link to it - therefore making it (more) available to the public.
An extension of this line of reasoning is that it may, in fact, be illegal to tell someone the names of things. If you know the name of something, you can search for it in a search box, and the person who told you the name made the search results available to you. Absurd, yes, but laws don't have to make sense - they just have to cohere.
Again - this state of things is not due to malign intent. It's just the result of good lawmaking not quite remaining good in a society where people have weapons of mass productions in their homes.
You and I take our right to link for a given. But there are forces in the world out there trying to make it something less than given. Good legislation turned bad is one thing, and the interests behind the case of poor Barrett is another.
Let's keep this right a given. Let's keep fighting those things that tries to take this right away from us. With legislative reform where possible (the Swedish Pirate Party is hard at work on that), and through ever more awesome feats of cryptography where it isn't (Telecomix and others are hard at work on that).
Don't let the dead hand of history take away the most potent weapon you have: the right to talk to your fellow human beings. If we lose that, we lose everything.
Friday, November 30, 2012
The criminal mingling of DeLanda and Deleuze
I am now going to commit a crime. I am, moreover, going to commit it at you.
Congratulations. You are now on the recieving end of an act of filesharing. Enjoy!
Congratulations. You are now on the recieving end of an act of filesharing. Enjoy!
Thursday, November 29, 2012
News and old profits
The purpose of newspapers is to sell customers to the advertisers. The ad buyers buy ad space, and as a part of this purchase they expect the newspapers to do their outmost to make sure that as many people see these ads. This by making themselves readworthy, and by process of mass distribution transforming the ads into profits. You, the readers, are the product, sold to the advertisers. For profit.
This is what newspapers is about. This is the one thing they do as a channel of communication.
I suspect someone might want to make some objections to this. Objections such as that the newspapers constitute a watchdog function on the public sphere, that they inform the public about important current events in in business and politics, that local newspapers serve to keep geographical regions coherent by discussing local affairs, that they provide citizens with an arena for debate and dialogue -
One could raise quite a few objections to the reduction of newspapers to a purely economic function. One could even make a case that the purely economic functions are of secondary importance to the vital social, societal and political functions that newspapers provide.
I concede this point.
With that said, isn't it time that we start talking about file sharing in the same way, without constantly getting stuck in this economic reduction to absurdity?
Originally published June 7, 2012
This is what newspapers is about. This is the one thing they do as a channel of communication.I suspect someone might want to make some objections to this. Objections such as that the newspapers constitute a watchdog function on the public sphere, that they inform the public about important current events in in business and politics, that local newspapers serve to keep geographical regions coherent by discussing local affairs, that they provide citizens with an arena for debate and dialogue -
One could raise quite a few objections to the reduction of newspapers to a purely economic function. One could even make a case that the purely economic functions are of secondary importance to the vital social, societal and political functions that newspapers provide.
I concede this point.
With that said, isn't it time that we start talking about file sharing in the same way, without constantly getting stuck in this economic reduction to absurdity?
Originally published June 7, 2012
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
The bleeding hearts and the artists
Sometimes, the question of how artists are going to get paid in a world where file sharing exists is thrown at me. Most often with an undertone of accusation - being a proponent of a reformed copyright makes one a target for such questions. The assumption being that reformed copyright will utterly crush any and all markets for artistically inclined people.
There are several answers to this question. One of these has been addressed before. Here, I want to give you one of the more brutal responses. In order to put the question into proper context.
Because it is a valid question - if and only if it is placed in proper context.
Consider Greece. Things are looking rather grim at the moment. Estimates put youth unemployment at somewhere around fifty percent - give or take. This is both a cause and a symptom of the severe social and economic instabilities that have become endemic to the country. The one feeds into the other, and together these instabilities cause what economists call "a mess".
How are these kids going to get paid?
Don't play stupid with me now. If file sharing alone can utterly destroy entire economic sectors, then it stands to reason that the economy at a larger scale is at a similar risk of being just as utterly destroyed by similar factors writ large. If the faster flow of information has effects on a small scale, it would be absurd for it not to have it on a large scale. Effects are either real or irrelevant - you can't both copyright the cake and eat it.
Make no mistake. These kids live in exactly the same economy that the aforementioned artists are supposed to make a living in. Pretending that the one and the other have nothing to do with each other is either ignorant, cynical or both. In a situation where it is an undeniable empirical fact that the economy simply does not need the labor input of half it's youth - what room is there for artists? What use is it to ask about the artists when the more relevant question is how anyone at all is going to get paid?
Now, Greece is not an exception. It is, rather, the shape of things to come, a vanguard of the economic and social changes that has struck and will continue to strike the Western world. In force.
Faster flow of information, faster flow of money, faster flow of people - less local stability, less economically sound reasons to play the long term game, less political incentive to supply the social infrastructure needed to withstand the harder times that are upon us. The neoliberals tells us that we have to compete with the Chinese and the third world in the ever present competitive race to the bottom that is the quest for economic growth. And thus, ever faster, ever less -
Are you still worried about how the artists are going to get paid? Are you paying attention yet?
Have I managed to place the question firmly in the proper context?
If a small scale copyright reform is the biggest of your worries, then please show yourself out of the political sphere. You are not relevant, not helping and not a part of any solution whatsoever.
Get a grip. Get real. Or get (like so many of the young Greeks) lost.
There are several answers to this question. One of these has been addressed before. Here, I want to give you one of the more brutal responses. In order to put the question into proper context.Because it is a valid question - if and only if it is placed in proper context.
Consider Greece. Things are looking rather grim at the moment. Estimates put youth unemployment at somewhere around fifty percent - give or take. This is both a cause and a symptom of the severe social and economic instabilities that have become endemic to the country. The one feeds into the other, and together these instabilities cause what economists call "a mess".
How are these kids going to get paid?
Don't play stupid with me now. If file sharing alone can utterly destroy entire economic sectors, then it stands to reason that the economy at a larger scale is at a similar risk of being just as utterly destroyed by similar factors writ large. If the faster flow of information has effects on a small scale, it would be absurd for it not to have it on a large scale. Effects are either real or irrelevant - you can't both copyright the cake and eat it.
Make no mistake. These kids live in exactly the same economy that the aforementioned artists are supposed to make a living in. Pretending that the one and the other have nothing to do with each other is either ignorant, cynical or both. In a situation where it is an undeniable empirical fact that the economy simply does not need the labor input of half it's youth - what room is there for artists? What use is it to ask about the artists when the more relevant question is how anyone at all is going to get paid?
Now, Greece is not an exception. It is, rather, the shape of things to come, a vanguard of the economic and social changes that has struck and will continue to strike the Western world. In force.
Faster flow of information, faster flow of money, faster flow of people - less local stability, less economically sound reasons to play the long term game, less political incentive to supply the social infrastructure needed to withstand the harder times that are upon us. The neoliberals tells us that we have to compete with the Chinese and the third world in the ever present competitive race to the bottom that is the quest for economic growth. And thus, ever faster, ever less -
Are you still worried about how the artists are going to get paid? Are you paying attention yet?
Have I managed to place the question firmly in the proper context?
If a small scale copyright reform is the biggest of your worries, then please show yourself out of the political sphere. You are not relevant, not helping and not a part of any solution whatsoever.
Get a grip. Get real. Or get (like so many of the young Greeks) lost.
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