Aram Squalls

Like a free copy of GarageBand, in your browser: Myna

Free cloud software consortium Aviary just launched what looks like a pretty cool browser-based sequencing program (think GarageBand online), called Myna. Check it out:

Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace

I'm currently putting together the syllabus for my NYU Masters course this Fall, entitled "Topics in Digital Media: Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace." Usually when I teach a class like this, I tell a story on a timeline, painting cyberculture as an evolving entity. This time, however, I'm thinking about it in terms of subject areas, in which each week traces the past, present and future of a given meme or concept. My tentative list of 10 concepts/subject areas is as follows:

1: The Memex and the Mushroom Cloud
2: The Metaverse
3: Hackers and Gamers
4: OSS/FS/CC
5: dot-com Fantasies
6: Web 2.0
7: Remix/Configurable Culture
8: The Cloud
9: Surveillance, Sensors and Robots
10: Adventures in MeatSpace

I'd love any and all informed feedback on either (a) subjects I need to add, delete or merge, and (b) vital readings/viewings/playings for a given subject. Email or blog comments will do. Thanks!

4 Swedes sentenced to jail for pointing at stuff

This just in: four founders of Swedish BitTorrent tracker Pirate Bay have each been sentenced to a year in jail, and have been assessed an additional fine of $3.6 million.

The PirateBay never copied, hosted, or distributed any copyrighted material. All the site did was provide a search engine indexing and linking to text files known as "torrents" that provided instructions to users about how to share specific pieces of content (some copyrighted, others legally free to distribute). In other words, it didn't do anything different than Google, Yahoo, or a million other indexes of Internet content.

Not only does this ruling pose a tremendous potential chilling effect to free speech, it also marks a problematic incursion of U.S. industry and legal institutions into foreign markets and sovereignties.

And here's the icing on the cake: although people certainly used the Pirate Bay to download tons of unpermissioned copyrighted material, the jailing of its founders won't even mark a blip in the inevitable transformation of the media industry from a retail to a service model. In plainer English, the record labels and movie studios won't save a single, solitary dime as a result of this verdict.

Everyone with a brain in the media industry (a surprisingly large subset) knows that the traditional models of remuneration are over, and there's no turning back. Information goods are transforming into something more akin to a utility -- a fact the labels and studios are acknowledging by attempting to license at the ISP level, and supporting ever more on-demand services, from Netflix to Hulu to Spotify. Furthermore, recorded music is increasingly seen even within the industry as a marketing tool for the really profitable touring and merchandising industries. Warner Music Group has tacitly acknowledged this by announcing last year that all new artist contracts will be "360 deals," in which the label participates in the full gamut of a recording artist's revenues, far beyond simply keeping the wholesale on record retail.

So if the labels and studios are resigned to the structural changes of their industries, and the closure of a BitTorrent tracker will have zero effect on revenues, what's the reason for this trial, and for the amazingly punitive sentence? Pure and simple: the Pirate Bay founders are being hanged as an effigy for all of us. This is a pure act of spectacle, calculated to make us, the world citizens of digital culture, frightened and guilty for our sin of independence.

The only question is: will it work, or will the backlash catalyze an even greater revolt against the dominance of the gatekeepers?

The dark side of D.I.Y. (and sustainability)

As any reader of this blog, or anyone who is familiar with me and my work knows, I am a generally a big cheerleader for the whole D.I.Y. ethic. User-generated content, peer production, craftiness, what have you -- I'm all the way behind it. My wife and I subscribed to both Make and Craft magazines. D knits and crochets like a dynamo, and I am in the process of publishing a book on how mash-ups betoken a new social epoch. We dig hacks, mods, machinima, anything that smacks of good-old-fashioned people power.

However, an unnerving thought has been playing around the corners of my mind for a while: What if the whole D.I.Y. ethic isn't (just) a strategic boon to collective agency, but something more sinister: a wholesale shifting of productive labor onto the backs of consumers, and a sign of the end of the bourgeoisie as we know it?

We generally think of D.I.Y. as (light, encouraging voice) "C'mon, kid! You can do it! Do it yourself!" But what if it's actually something more like (gruff, discouraging voice) "Get out of here, pal, I'm too busy. Do it yourself!"

There are certainly many signs that D.I.Y. production is supplanting traditional economic structures across many industry sectors:

• Fifty years ago, you'd go to a department store and purchase a bookshelf. Today, you go to IKEA, bring home a box of compressed wood chips, and spend hours at home with an allen wrench.
• Marketers are increasingly relying upon consumers to share the cost of advocating products and identifying markets. MySpace and Facebook can certainly be seen as vehicles for this trend, although it also applies in the mass media, such as the recent peer-produced Superbowl Doritos commercial.
• Fifty years ago, both local and national news events were reported and published by a corps of professional journalists. Today, an increasing percentage of the news and (especially) opinion we read comes from the peer-produced blogosphere.

The list could go on ad nauseum; these are simply the first examples I could think of. There are many competing potential explanations for this trend:

• Peer-production is killing traditional industry, (e.g. the much-maligned influence of blogging on the newspaper business).
• Big businesses are crassly appropriating the peer-production ethic to lower their costs and boost their margins, in the guise of consumer-friendliness.
• Everybody benefits from increased efficiency, with lower overall production costs being passed down to the consumer.

Unfortunately, none of these explanations appears to be true:

• In the case of newspapers, for instance, I would argue that Craigslist is far more devastating an influence than the blogosphere. Local and classified advertising have always subsidized print news journalism, and the Web is simply a much better platform for localized marketing and commece. If anything, the blogosphere provides much-needed credibility and readership for the newspapers' online editions.
• Far from maximizing their margins, many industries are now in the red, and we are witnessing the fastest growth of unemployment in American history, and one of the fastest rates of atrophied production on record.
• Consumers have hardly reaped economic rewards from taking on the burden of production. I did a little checking with the bureau of labor and statistics, and it turns out that the cost of furniture has escalated 300% (accounting for inflation) since the mid-1950s:

So if none of the explanations I cited above explain the D.I.Y. trend, what does? Is it just simply an accident of aesthetic and cultural history, a trend as shallow and temporary as pogo sticking or C.B. radio? Maybe. But I don't think so. My suspicion is that we, as a society, are primarily using the D.I.Y. ethic as a screen to hide our increasing poverty from ourselves -- both at the individual and the industrial levels.

One statistic that's stuck with me since i came across it a few years ago is that a double-wage-earner family in the 2000s has a lower standard of living, and less buying power, than a single-income family in the 1970s. Obviously, the continuation of this trend would be devastating: maybe we should expect to see polygamy legalized in coming years to functionally allow families to include three or more full-time wage earners. More likely, we'll see people staying with their parents longer, and the birth rate shrink, especially among higher-SES populations.

To put my premise simply: I think that the D.I.Y. ethic provides industries with a convenient way to hide the declining health and wealth of their sectors by cutting costs (both labor and capital) without cutting prices. And it provides individuals with a socially positive context in which to cut consumption costs, by buying raw or semi-raw materials, rather than finished products. Of course, neither of these trends can continue much longer; to combine metaphors, if D.I.Y. is an economic band-aid and craftiness is a cultural fig-leaf, the open sore of our festering economy and naked poverty of our middle classes cannot be hid much longer.

One final thought, generated by a masters student of mine as I was discussing the above in class last week: The whole green/sustainability movement may have powerful economic and altruistic roots, and may be socially beneficial in problematizing and solving the rampant excess of consumer culture, but it can also be understood as a fig leaf of sorts. When I was growing up, old people who saved string, tin foil, and paper bags seemed like damaged goods, crazy holdovers from the anomalous scarcity of the great depression. Today, it's becoming increasing hip and cool to do exactly these things -- in other words, we've developed a cultural mechanism couching the degradations of poverty in both the attractiveness of hipster culture and the admirability of altruism. Today's string-savers aren't a bunch of crazy old kooks; they're cutting-edge, avant-garde paragons of youth culture, and staunch defenders of our planet's future.

Please, somebody tell me I'm wrong...

Firefox plugin replaces banner ads with art

This nifty little plugin replaces all the banners on a web page with "curated art images." Every 2 weeks, its cache of images is updated, to a new bunch of works by a new bunch of artists selected by a new curator. I'm definitely installing it now.

(Spotted on Grand Text Auto)

New Biggish Idea: Pandora for Politics

I spent Saturday at Columbia University, attending a mini-conference devoted to the subject of the disintegrating news industry and the future of the American public sphere. Despite never once getting called upon in 6 hours of hand-raising, and having to listen to some less-than-informed comparisons between the news industry and the music industry, it was a pretty interesting event, and I met some very smart and cool people.

One of the interesting ideas that came out of the conference was generated by me and Jack Balkin, in response to a talk by Bruno Latour about the negative effect of "attention deficit" on civic participation. In its essence, the idea is this:

THE PROBLEM:

• It's difficult for even a civically-engaged person to develop confident opinions about a broad range of political issues, mostly due to our limited attention and resources.
• This difficulty is exacerbated by (a) the dwindling resources of the professional journalism industry, and (b) the increasing [perceived] partisanship of the mainstream media, which reduce both salient information and the vital bond of trust between information-seekers and providers
• The result is increasing homogenization/polarizing of platforms, and civic disengagement

A SOLUTION:

• A recommendation engine for political facts/opinions/news that captures and reflects the underlying value systems that drive civic engagement by individuals, and delivers customized political information to those who seek it

The reason I cited Pandora specifically at the conference (when I finally stopped waiting to get called on and just started talking) is that I believe its tag-based database infrastructure, which charts the relationships between the intrinsic qualities of songs, rather than between their audiences, provides a promising alternative to more traditional collaborative-filtering recommendation techniques. Whether applied to music or politics, collaborative filtering tends to have an "echo chamber" effect, reinforcing the "tyranny of the majority" and supporting traditional generic categorizations. In politics, its effect would be to provide obvious recommendations that already match the reductionist platforms of the two major parties for most users. A Pandora-style architecture, on the other hand, would have the plasticity and nuance to deliver counter-intuitive news and information. Just as the music site now offers recommendations that fall outside of people's established generic preferences, a political version might offer Republican points-of-view to Democrats (or vice-versa) much more frequently, and accurately to the needs of individual users.

The problem with adopting the Pandora model whole-cloth would be its reliance on experts; its database is populated by a team of highly-specialized music analysts, who apply their expertise to the coding process. Clearly, to put a political recommendation engine in the hands of such "experts" would be problematic for several reasons -- the most important of which would be that they would provide the same reductionist coding as a collaborative-filtering engine, being steeped in the dominant Manichaean political framework. Much more useful (not to mention more robust, less expensive, more timely, etc) would be to crowdsource the database generation using a process similar to Wikipedia's.

So, in short, the political engine would use:

• Wikipedia-style data generation and management
• Pandora-style database architecture and processing
• Newsreader-style, queryable front-end..? (not so sure about this part yet)

The other benefit of this system would be that the degree of complexity introduced by processual firewall between data generation and database analysis would limit the potential for hacking, google-bombing, SEO, or whatever you want to call "tipping the electronic scales." In other words, if well-designed, it would be very difficult for a third party to pre-determine the opinion and data retrieved by any given individual -- just as Pandora is more or less immune to record label promotional efforts (they could, of course, accept payola and hack their own database, but founder Tim Westergren is vociferously against such meddling, even if it would save his business from going under).

Clearly, there's even more to it than this (the idea kind of sprung wholly-grown like Athena), but these are the rudiments. I've discussed it with a few smart people in the past 2 days, and everyone thinks I should try and build it... Comments? Suggestions?

Conversation with TV Exec about Convergence and DIY

A friend of mine who is a strategy exec at a major TV network sometimes IMs me to talk shop. With his permission, I'm posting an interesting conversation we had today, about how Hollywood should deal with the "DIY" video movement. I've changed his handle for privacy purposes.

I will also be cross-posting in my new role as a guest blogger over at Starpolish.com.

TV_exec
question
do you envision a world where

Aram Sinnreich
shoot

TV_exec
DIY
acutally is competitive with
studio material?
talking long-form
(30 min greater ent content)
ugc
whatever u wanan all that cagtegory

Aram Sinnreich
depends on what you mean by DIY/UGC
peer production yes

TV_exec
long form
commanding cpms

Aram Sinnreich
peer production, yes

TV_exec
similar to current hollywood long form
pper production?

Aram Sinnreich
meaning, open source

TV_exec
oh ok i c

Aram Sinnreich
movie equivalent of linux
but not single-handed

TV_exec
right so
that gets distributed on line

Aram Sinnreich
it's hard enough for a single person to make a compelling 5-min clip

TV_exec
or do they strike deals with other media distrbution?

Aram Sinnreich
not very many auteurs can swing 1+ hours without collaboration

TV_exec
sure, or have hte money
to make it competitive with hollywood
talking ent only

Aram Sinnreich
right, though that's becoming less of an issue, esp w/ animation and documentary

TV_exec
i think that's unclear

Aram Sinnreich
so is your question about distro

TV_exec
but yeah i mean it's heading that way

Aram Sinnreich
or about content

TV_exec
it's about both
meaning

Aram Sinnreich
or about revenues?

TV_exec
it's kind of a broad question about
the "disurptive force"
of non studio / hollywood content
and its place in the future

Aram Sinnreich
1) will long-term content be made by non-hollywood entities? yes

TV_exec
i agree with that

Aram Sinnreich
2) will it have competitive distribution? yes, to an extent, but studio money will still go a long way

TV_exec
we internally always refer to it as "long form" for distnigushing sake
ok
yeah it's like

Aram Sinnreich
3) will it have revenues?
yes, but probably through secondary uses and services, e.g. linux

TV_exec
right
i mean it's baiscally asking the question

Aram Sinnreich
i think the entertainment world needs to understand what's happening in the software world

TV_exec
how so specifically?

Aram Sinnreich
because code has been manipulable, configurable, peer-produced much longer than, say, video

TV_exec
ok

Aram Sinnreich
those creative communities and industries have already figured out a lot of the possibilities
e.g GPL
which was recently adapted to creative commons for entertainment/media
or collaborative production, which is what's starting to happen on youtuve
for instance, all the beyonce versions
even the concept of "versioning" got its start in software, unless you count the jamaican kind

TV_exec
i mean it makes sense with regard to

Aram Sinnreich
and as far as biz models

TV_exec
creating mroe value overall
i think
but it's about who moentizes it
i was wondering this (came up in a meeting)

Aram Sinnreich
software has shown that corporations can make money from peer production and distribtion

TV_exec
yeh but that is not apples to apples

Aram Sinnreich
google's whole business is built on more-or-less open source software
not exactly, no
but culture is becoming more and more like software

TV_exec
i agree
but i think u know for example
the average person

Aram Sinnreich
in that it's produced by taking snippets, and rearranging them to suit different tasks at different times

TV_exec
watches 6 television stations
right?

Aram Sinnreich
yes

TV_exec
if hlllywood serves as a tastemaker
and offers up X product
and controls all that product
and the peopel are ok with that

Aram Sinnreich
well it depends what you mean by "controls"

TV_exec
the need for robust gpl type licensing structure
is not really there
or am i off?

Aram Sinnreich
there are powers that average people have now that they didn't ahve a decade ago

TV_exec
why does content need to change if in genreal the people will have the services they neeed?

Aram Sinnreich
and they are increasingly clashing with media legal depts over those powers

TV_exec
yes but what is that % oppulation

Aram Sinnreich
such as universal suing that family for youtubing its toddler with "lets go crazy" by prince in the background

TV_exec
mos tpeople are passive consumers

Aram Sinnreich
actually, you're wrong
most people are now active consumers
i fielded a national survey in 2006 that showed this

TV_exec
don't u think u have to acgtually wait for the old generation to die off
before saying that?

Aram Sinnreich
been looking for funding to re-field recently
creative commons is also about to publish a similar survey

TV_exec
hm

Aram Sinnreich
true, this stuff does correlate linearly with age
but
even old folks are doing this stuff to an extent

TV_exec
well yeah we are talking abotu the future also so poitn taken haha
u know that like some crazy high %

Aram Sinnreich
my grandma has a flickr and my dad's on fb

TV_exec
of ppl claim texting as the most valuable
feature on their phone?
i think that's an itneresting paradigm shift refelective
of kidn of what ur talking about

Aram Sinnreich
yeah, that's why the telcos can charge ridiculous prices for it

TV_exec
haha word
it really comes down to licensing strucutre, right?
i mean the distribution is what it is in large part

Aram Sinnreich
yes, if you mean revenues

TV_exec
but who owns the content and what u can do on it and how you capture
ancillary revenues

Aram Sinnreich
licensing is going to be bigger and bigger
not so ancillary any more

TV_exec
is all incumbent on who owns the license

Aram Sinnreich
because copyright is increasingly reverting to its original form

TV_exec
well it's itneresting -- i'm not seeing anything to suggest a radical departure from current copyright

Aram Sinnreich
e.g. regulating inter-business relations

Linus's Law, remixed

A masters student of mine, writing an (otherwise excellent, if grammatically challenged) paper on open-source mobile platform software, came up with an unintentionally wonderful re-casting of Eric Raymond's famous developer dictum: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

In her words:

“Give enough eyeballs, all bugs are shadow"

Help me, lazyweb! Questions about Openmoko, the open-source mobile phone

So now that my dream of MVNO-fueled independence from the telco cartel has vanished like a dragon scale in daylight, I'm ready to ditch Virgin Helio and the godawful Ocean (no disrespect to my friend who designed its interface, it's just superbuggy and the hardware is made of tinkertoys).

One option would be to suck it up and buy an iPhone 3G, but I have many objections I don't need to get into here -- suffice to say I'd rather not do business with AT&T or live in Apple's perfect little jail.

Another option I'm considering is Openmoko, the open-source, Linux-based touchscreen, GPS-enabled mobile communications device. At $399, it's a pricey gamble, but it would be worth it if it lives up to its promise. However, I've got a few questions before I can take the plunge, and I'm having difficulty finding

 

answers on the the Openmoko wiki. Maybe some of the smart people who read this blog on occasion can weigh in with their help.

First of all, I know the phone comes in a US-flavored GSM tri-band version, which is fine. T-Mobile supports the right GSM format, but they don't have any voice/data plans other than Blackberry. Would I need to pay a carrier for a voice/data plan in order to take advantage of Openmoko's data services? Or is simple GSM connectivity enough? If the former, what carrier/plan makes the most sense? I'm really kind of confused.

Second, this is a Linux-based phone, and I don't know Linux. That's right, I'm a fake nerd. Anyway, would I have to install the mobile software, and manage my device, from a Linux box, or can I use my MacBook Pro? (Yes, i know I slagged Apple above, but the MBP is a little more open than the iPhone -- for instance, I can actually install support for the tens of thousands of WMA files I have on my home media server). Even more importantly, would I have to know Linux to use the phone? Does the free software available for it come in easy-to-use installer pac

 

kages, or would I have to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of Linux command-line interfaces before I could move that Pac-Man clone to my phone?

I appreciate any and all responses, ASAP!

UPDATE: I could also just wait a month or two or three (with a broken Ocean) for the Android-powered HTC Dream (see video below). Decisions, decisions.

OMGWTF? Google Chrome's EULA grants Google the perpetual right to your work

Ok, here's something not mentioned in the awesome Google Chrome comic book:

IF YOU USE THE BROWSER, GOOGLE OWNS YOUR WORK.

Specifically, according to the browser's current Terms of Service:

You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

In other words, anything you blog, submit, or even write in a web-based email account using the Chrome browser instantly becomes freely available to Google to use for the rest of time. The EULA goes on to say that this will only be used to "display, distribute and promote" the browser, but, er, let's say you upload a song you just wrote to your own web site. Technically, Google can now use the song in a TV commercial without writing you a check.

I'm sure there'll be a blogosphere shitstorm about this (kind of surprised it's not on boingboing yet), and Google will have to rewrite and retrench. But, still, you expect more from a company whose motto is "Don't be evil."

More informed discussion here.

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, Google has retrenched. Collective intelligence and advocacy in action.