Cowabunga, Dude.

It's a heady combination of a coming election with my own mercurial literary ambitions, getting me into that frame of mind in which I want to have arguments with big words and big ideas.

I get excited about elections. It's probably not a good habit, though - these things are expensive. It's also perplexing; I don't think I have ever in my life cast a vote for a winning candidate. Depending on your metrics, I have wasted every single vote I've ever cast. That's in three years of being legal voting age - just imagine the poor blokes for whom this has been a reality for thirty! Why all the excitement, why the nervous energy and the hope for changes that will never come? It would be too easy to become despondent, and perhaps I would have more reason than most. Well, if we're being technical, more reason to do so than a plurality of the Canadians who even bother to vote.

It's at a time like this when perspective can be, for lack of a better word, handy. Dandy, even. Why should this election's failure to produce radical, progressive change in this country bother me? Human history is a long chronicle of justice mostly prevailing over injustice. I realize that I run the risk of sounding positively panglossian when I write this, and I would like to qualify this statement. Progress has been erratic, fundamentally un-equal, and above all else it will never be complete. That does not mean that progress has not happened, nor does it excuse us from trying to extend the rights, freedoms, and quality of life that "we" (i.e., the kind of people who are affluent enough to spend their monday evenings blogging for no pay) possess to as many people as possible.

I should be careful to define my terms. "Progress" is a vague and loaded term, but I shall do my best to reach an agreeable definition. Progress may be scientific, technological, social, or spiritual. Progress can be said to have happened when we reach a new, or more complete understanding of an object, a process, or a concept than we previously had. Progress can also be innovations or insights gained from such understanding. I think that some people question this sort of definition, because some innovations are not "good" in their eyes. I don't think it should matter that a novel design of coal plant is an environmental nightmare; it merely offers us the ability to accomplish a task in a different way than we have before. When we come to understand that burning coal is not desirable - for any number of reasons - that, too, is a kind of progress. It is our responsibility to apply the new wisdom we have gained, and in this case, to stop building coal-fired power plants. At least, it is if we believe in the cause of environmentalism. I should add, finally, that progress can be said to have happened when humans meet the goals they have set for themselves.

I think that while it has taken "us" a very long time to come to a more complete understanding of what constitutes a human being and a citizen, that the definition has nevertheless been continuously expanding. From the exclusive club of propertied Athenian men, how our definitions have grown. Grown from white men to encompass men of every colour and creed. Grown from men exclusively to include women. Grown to encompass notions not only of belonging to a city-state, but to states and provinces, counties, countries, and even now the notion of global citizenship gains traction. We talk about citizenship and participation in online communities, which cross national boundaries (although linguistic ones may prove harder to breach...). Our notion of rights is expanding, too: we can conceive of rights to reproductive choice, to sexuality - healthy sexuality, to fresh drinking water, to education, to privacy...rights that have never existed comprehensively and for entire populations before in the whole history of our species.

The Harper Government has not been a stellar one. It can even be argued that they have tried to back-pedal on some of these crucial liberties. But always remember that it is we, we who side with the greater measure of liberty, inclusiveness, and tolerance who surf atop the inexorable wave of history. Let Harper build his sand-castle prisons; the tide is coming.

My Life Measured in Garbage Bags

Three years is enough time to accumulate quite a bit of unnecessary shit. I would be polite, but there is frankly no other way to describe the utterly superfluous junk that I find not-even-sentimental reasons to save from their truly deserved place in a trash heap. Poorly-written snippets of RPG systems I was making up, long abandoned. Sketches of cool futuristic guns that I draw whenever I get bored. Eight hundred course outlines and schedules. The panic-ridden house-cleaning that my compatriots and I have recently completed has opened my eyes to a certain disparity between the person who I am, and the one I would like to be.

To borrow a phrase from Daydream Believer, I don't want to settle. Or, more precisely I don't want to be the kind of person who settles. I'm young, I'm physically fit, I don't have a lot of obligations: no children, no permanent career position with good benefits and a nice pension plan. Why should I tie myself down as though I do? Why should I spent what will be - if not the best - the most able and mobile years of my life building a nest? I will have plenty of time to build a nest when it's time to, um, lay some...eggs...in...it? There are some pragmatic and political reasons, too; I don't want to be the kind of person who gives in too easily to the empty acquisition of mass consumerism. I mean, where's the fun in that? I'm not such an extremist to believe that nothing bought can have "real value" - precisely the opposite: I'd rather have less stuff, but individually I want the stuff I have to mean more. Less stuff is easier to move. It's not as messy, even when it's not exactly cleanly arranged either.

This desire for less "stuff" is also a broader part of a life philosophy that I've been entertaining for a while now. We can call it "Technomadic" culture, if it indeed deserves a name at all. The combination of highly-portable computing devices, ubiquitous wi-fi and wireless internet access, and "cloud computing"* means that I can be a knowledge worker from anywhere, at - roughly speaking - any time. Besides, cross-time-zone businesses are practically old-hat now. What relevance does the standard workday have when you need to be ready to help customers half a world away? It should be possible to, through a conscious minimizing of junk possessions, escape some of the "shackles" of a traditional white-collar job, especially in a knowledge industry. It should also be possible to make re-locating myself much, much easier if most of my stuff fits into a modestly-sized attaché case and a laptop bag. I could move to a new city by hopping on a train, or taking the next flight. There are still accommodations to be considered, but as long as one sticks to cities with month-to-month rentals available it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

That's an awfully...different speculative life than the one I lead now. It's possibly not too environmentally-friendly (depending on where and how I move), and it most certainly is rooted in a certain kind of middle-class privilege. I can only say that it's a notion in its infancy, likely untenable. I find myself nonetheless compelled by a certain minimalist component. If I have to choose, I would rather live with a few items of high quality, than with an ocean of disposable junk. I would rather live modestly in several interesting places, than live opulently in just one. That is, of course, still my aspirational self talking. My real self is still content to sit on his ass and play videogames. But a man can dream, so dream he shall.

In other news, there's an election now looming on the horizon, and I may give Stephen Harper credit, for once in my life; he did say that this was something Canadians didn't really want. Well, from my tiny cross-section of the Canadian population, it looks like he was probably right, albeit not for the reasons that he would hope. The people I know don't see any difference between the two parties who can be expected to form governments in this country. "Mildly objectionable" has been the only way to describe Canadian Prime Ministers since Brian Mulroney was "Very Much Objectionable" in the late 1980s (or, if you like it with a dose of perspective, since before I was born). Of course, "Not Something Canada Wants" is not the same as "Not Something Canada Needs". Can we, perhaps, salvage this poor election by proving that it needs to happen? Eh, maybe.

The Conservatives were set to fall on their budget, so regardless of whether or not they turned out to be in contempt of Parliament, there was an election coming. I found Harper's suggestion that the budget was "not a political game" to be disingenuous; a bad budget implemented quickly isn't actually good for Canada. Was the budget bad? I must confess that I have not read it, but all of the opposition parties - together representing a majority of those Canadians who bothered to vote in the last election - seemed to think that it was. Their obvious partiality aside, the Harper Government seemed unwilling to introduce compromise measures to woo even one party's support. I think that's characteristic of Harper's government style, so it's no surprise. It's problematic to me, because I can stand a Conservative minority that makes concessions, that ever acts in the spirit of co-operation for the benefit of the nation and its people. I don't really have time for Stephen Harper and his mildly objectionable political games.

But let's talk about this "contempt of Parliament" thing for a moment. For the first time ever in any Westminster parliament, our Conservative government has been found in contempt of said body. If it were some antiquated relic, something that was a commonplace occurrence - a slap on the wrist - I might not think it altogether important. However, the fact of the matter is that the government was asked in a legal and legitimate fashion for information which they did not provide. This was a party that had run on a platform of increased accountability, and it fell flat on its face. This is to speak nothing of their broken promises to reform the senate and the judiciary. If Stephen Harper had kept his word on any one of these issues, I would be singing a different tune. Stephen Harper may have been an antidote to years of Liberal corruption, he may have been what we needed at the time...but now he has proven himself no better than those he supplanted. We may not have anyone capable of articulating a coherent and inspiring agenda here in this country, but we can give this douche the Boot. "And why not?", say I.

"...give the Red States Blue Balls!" (21/??)

I was having a conversation with Daydream Believer, and she was telling me (after I complained of a sort of writer's block) that there was plenty to write about. And she mentioned the lack of support for safe abortions evident in Bill/Melinda Gates' charity efforts for Womens' health as one potential topic. I said that it was probably a political necessity when operating in the United States, and that a "different kind of soldier" was needed to fight for the acceptance of abortion in the US. And it strikes me now that this is perhaps not the best metaphor that I could have chosen for this, or any of a hundred thousand other ideological disputes. Analogy to warfare is not ineffective, not by a longshot; the wisdom of Sun-Tzu is valuable to many people whose job description is not "warrior prince" (gosh, would I ever love that on my résumé!), after all! But recourse to violence is often too real a response when no one is willing to give an inch. Should we dignify that by using the language of war? Should we cheapen the suffering of those who live in real wars by thinking and writing and speaking as though we are under siege, when in fact we live in peace? I am certainly leaning toward "no".

When the use of particular language is challenged on such grounds, the obvious counter-argument is that being proscriptive about language in this manner constrains the author. That to remove fiery language is to rob the verbal artist of the tools of his or her craft. And this is precisely the point. The intent of fiery rhetoric is to stir the blood, and not the brain. Thus, this is as much a gift to the health of a debate as it is a theft from the rabble-rousers who - it would seem - care little for solutions.

The metaphor of warfare and soldiering is especially damaging because inherent to these are formations, hierarchy, and battle lines. War is constructed such that there are generally two sides. The cohesiveness of a unit is tactical necessity, a union of purpose among allied forces a strategic imperative. But there are no such requirements in a debate, if one values truth over victory. There is a place for nuance and difference in debate; the only lines are the ones we choose to draw in the sand. An argument can look like a Venn diagram, where the sides may share common ground (like, say, Catholics and Protestants disagree about a lot of stuff, but they have God and Jesus sorta mostly in common?). The language of battle is clearly both innacurate and inappropriate.

It should go without saying that the logic, as well as the language, of war must also be expunged. An example from my conversation with Daydream Believer is that in attempting to figure out HOW to affect a policy change on abortion in the US, I quoted a line from a book I had leafed through many years ago. It said "Women: don't fuck Republicans". It was sound advice, but of course - as we both understood - there is not a homogenous battalion called "women" that can do (or, rather refuse to do) such a thing. And so while it can be expected that many different women may gather under the auspices of feminism when they can agree on certain minimum standards...it will work only as far as their disparate agendas permit. Unfortunately, when this happens it can give rise to the idea that there is only one feminism and, ergo, we can divide people along the lines of feminist/not feminist*. Another example would be the unnatural union of religious psychopathy and fiscal conservatism that produces the modern Republican party. It is a strategic alliance that produces victory, but also great internal tension because these are not always the most pleasant of bedfellows. And the focus on gaining power (victory) begins to outweigh the desire to use that power constructively. And if you think I'm down on American politics, the two main parties in Canada aren't even the result of fused ideologies, so much as they are strategic alliances of people with no positive beliefs beyond "I am entitled to Rule"!

*This realization has caused me to reverse my previous belief about something that EK has said, which is that one should necessarily self-identify as "feminist" if they believe in equality between Men and Women. Feminism is not only at this point a loaded term, but it can also describe easily dozens of distinct sub-ideologies. I do call myself a feminist, but I imagine there are those for whom I do not fit the definition. And, hence, I believe that no single ideological statement - no matter how noble - can really tell a person whether or not they should call themselves a feminist or not. It is far easier to state clearly what we believe than it is to spend our days clarifying labels.

LOUD!

They See Me Rollin'/ In Linen / Patrollin' / They Tryin' To Catch Me Ridin' Pretty

First up, I will draw attention to a new Process Blog post for Little Worlds, which is now back from hiatus. Check it out if you didn't before!


Over the weekend I had an encounter with what I guess must be called "pretty cyclists" or "pretty riders". It wasn't really by chance, but because I don't look before I leap I had decided to attend an event described as a "pretty ride"; I naturally assumed that living in a city that isn't hard on the eyes (and I believe fancies itself to be picturesque), this was a geological/architectural sort of pretty we were talking about here. "I am down with biking past pretty places", said I. Only later when I went to see where I ought to park myself come fourteen-hundred-and-thirty Saturday did I notice a link to an article describing the act of "riding pretty". Riding pretty, besides being something you'd expect to hear in a Chamillionaire parody, is a movement whose goal is to disarm road rage and intolerance toward cyclists with an aesthetic shift from what you expect (spandex, muscle shirts and cargoes if we're talking mountain or BMX bikes) to something a little more whimsical, perhaps. Helmets which have velcro-on hat coverings. Lipstick. The pretty rider falls somewhere in the area of 'hipster' or 'retro-chic' on the fashion spectrum. Suits seem to be accepted also (one man and one woman came so attired). It was raining Saturday afternoon, and so I went somewhat less-than-prettily, following my usual logic of "if you would mind getting chain grease on it, don't wear it on a bike!".


These pretty riders turn out to be a nice bunch, so it didn't even turn out to be a thing that I looked as though I had not received a memo. Perhaps they were too polite to make a point of it? If it happens again on a nicer day I shall dutifully suit up, perhaps? In any case, it didn't end up being a very long bike ride on account of the rain and the cold, but that made tea at the end rather gratifying.


The Pretty Ride was a part of cycling week here in Halifax, which is a rather encouraging phenomenon. Halifax has rather fewer bike paths than Ottawa does, and almost nothing like the sections of trans-Canada trail and similar pathways that wind along the rivers and the Canal. Oddly enough it makes cycling a little more visible when you have to take the roads everywhere, but the flip-side is that even comparatively deferential Nova Scotia drivers can scare some would-be cyclists off the road as-is. About a week before the pretty ride was an event called "critical mass" in which cyclists saturated about a lane's worth of roads and even tackled one of the big suspension bridges over to Dartmouth, so I hear it. ELI was rather disdainful of their tactics ("You shouldn't be allowed on the road if you can't keep up with traffic!"), but I rather enjoyed the idea of such a high-visibility tactic. It's really too easy to miss cyclists when they're confined to the narrow margin between car door and kerb.


It seems not unreasonable that major streets should have dedicated bike lanes. The nice, bold white lines make everybody's lives easier. The margin for cyclists is well-defined, it's clearly delineated...it removes a lot of ambiguity from the relationship between car and bicycle drivers, I think. Halifax has a few good bike lanes, but not enough. But beyond that, we should be looking at how to reverse the car-centric approach to urban transport. Peninsular (Metro) Halifax isn't that big - maybe 25km from end-to-end, if that. That's a long bike ride if you need to go from one tip to the other, and most people probably don't.


Bikes are - at least according to Mind Trap - the most efficient vehicle ever designed by humankind. They have a much better vehicle-weight-to-payload weight ratio...actually, it's so good that it's the other way around! It's a rare person who weighs less than their bike! I'll sound like a broken record saying this, but you want an easy way to kill two birds with one stone? Bikes are a pretty good tandem solution to over-dependence on oil and potentially the obesity epidemic - certainly if you encourage cycling from childhood.


I've never really been heavily invested in velopolitics (a term I have just now coined) but this bike week, and a couple of recent discoveries have made me consider it more strongly (that, and it will make a lovely break from copyright law!). Bikes are forbidden in Halifax's public gardens. I'm cool if I have to walk my bike in quiet, slow-paced pedestrian crowds...but even WALKING MY BIKE is apparently disallowed. I will go to great pains to keep it out of peoples' way; I just want to cut through somewhere pretty and not have to backtrack in order to get to my ride! Furthermore bikes are also prohibited on the weekends in Point Pleasant Park. THIS IS MADNESS. What good is Saturday and Sunday biking if the nicest places in the city to look at are off-limits to me? I drive slow on the paths, I look out for people. I stop when dogs take an interest and let them sniff so I don't run into them. THE DOG OWNERS APOLOGISE, EVEN (they needn't!). I don't ask to be able to be a speed demon in a shared pedestrian/cyclist park, but I would like to be able to see the sights in my own chosen way!


That is all for now, methinks.


-LOUD!

Some Unrelated Notions

Short Story: io9 has one of those comedic movie reviews that takes a bad example of genre X (in this case, super-materialistic rom-com Sex and the City 2) and casts it as a quirky, innovative take on Genre Y (in this case, Dark-City* esque solipsistic SF)

*What, you haven't seen? Go get it. But before you leave to do that, I have one fact that will save you a lot of breath: it was made before The Matrix.

Long Story: I wanted to dismiss this as a potential topic because in general I think the above meme (can we call it that? I think the ironic movie review has got to count!) is kinda dumb, probably because it fails occam's razor; are we to presume that mainstream writers are busy hiding complex themes of existence, identity, time, and control in (apparently) vapid fluff for calceivorous fortysomethings - especially when it is much simpler to believe that mainstream writers really do just write dreck? But I lingered just too long upon the topic, which is when a little voice in my head decided that it actually wanted to see that movie.

...no, the other movie, the one that doesn't exist about four women trapped in consumer heaven-or-is-it-hell for eternity, blessed/cursed to spend eternity buying more and more expensive shoes and handbags and dresses that somehow consistently fail to scratch the itch to consume more still, and where neither volume nor quantity of Manhattan hookups can fill the gaping void in their empty souls. And yet at the same time I think that somehow such a film would be an inevitably preachy condemnation of capitalist living; and why make that film when our propaganda (SatC2) does the same job so well already (apparently)? The natural objection is that satire can be done effectively, and that this "inescapable" cheesiness simply isn't, which is pretty valid. Next, then, we must ask how to avoid making an unenjoyable movie. I'd suggest that instead of focusing on the satire itself, or the nature of whatever dark forces are manipulating the characters, let's focus on the characters and their stories. People will have to fill in some of the gaps: Why are these people here? Is this nightmare world a function of their collective insanity, or the work of aliens/mind flayers/posthuman AI? You know, a movie that thrills by posing questions to which definite answers are not always given. But now the circle of paradox is almost complete, because I think the movie I just described would not look altogther that different from Sex and the City 2 (ok, so I haven't seen SatC2, but let's assume that one movie about the commercial and sexual exploits of four aging Manhattanite girlfriends looks like another?). Would audiences know the difference? Could you market a movie as SF that was really more inplicitly than explicitly so?

In more recent news, we have dolphins using touchscreen devices to communicate with humans. This is pretty damned cute, but also a sweet advance for anyone who likes dolphins and/or is a fan of David Brin's Uplift series (fuck you, Etarran**; I love those books!). I'd love to speculate about a glorious future for animal-human communication, but at first we get to learn about the nature of dolphin intelligence and language, maybe. Dolphins got flippers instead of 10 digits, so if they have a concept of or can be taught numeracy, what kind of base system will make the most sense to them, if any? How long an individual memory do they have? Do they have any kind of oral history, and if so how far back does it go? I'm not sure the last one will turn out to be true, but damn it would be bitchin' cool. If communication does turn out to be fruitful, of course, we have a further issue on our hands; we're going to have to re-evaluate our treatment of dolphins and other animals. In his uplift books, David Brin always (to my knowledge) ends with an ecological message about the value of preserving dolphins and apes so that one day we may know their minds as the characters in his books do (or something like it, I suppose). I think it would be a great step forward for environmentalism and animal rights if it turns out that we can communicate with dolphins on a complex and abstract level.

**Thinks David Brin is a hack.

Probably in large part due to Brin's work, I have a rather deep-seated fixation with the notion of uplifting other primates and dolphins to sentience, or failing that even establishing some kind of inter-species language. It's almost the same thing I feel about mechanical AI; I want to talk to one so that I can try to understand how another kind of being thinks about the world. Etarran has said before that anything we can understand is functionally human; it will think rather like us, and we should afford it the same rights as we would a human (I agree with the latter unequivocally). Even if this is so, I think there's still hope that communicating with a different kind of life-form could still be eye-opening; dolphins are astronomically unlikely to share any kind of cultural commmon ground with humans, besides what comes with being mammalian. If we talk to dolphins (and we don't just hear about how good the fish was, and other mundane details) and their thought processes aren't altogether that different, maybe dolphin similes turn out to be really neat, or something? Maybe they tell jokes we've never heard before! Again, it probably won't work like that but imagine someone just totally estranged from every bit of human culture that exists, and now imagine talking to them about what they think happens when you die, for example. I'll bet their answer would be surprising (assuming you speak a common language with some fluency, or established one with great difficulty). We're likely years away from any of my pipe dreams, but that we are even a step closer is pretty nifty. Also, if dolphins are taking to the iPad that means that even if they aren't all that smart, then neither are we.

The Setup

I've recently discovered a little site called "The Setup", and I'm absolutely loving it! There's something very compelling about its particular mix of gadget fetish and celebrity worship - it's even addictive enough to dull the pain of learning that some of these coders, bloggers and celebrities live as you have only dared to dream (triple monitors, 8-core workstations). On some level, it's pretty unsurprising that much of this web elite rocks a macbook and then some ancillary desktop. What I do find interesting is that a large number of these people have multiple cell phones. And not like "oh I have this old one that I unlocked when my contract ran out"; I'm talking like "I have three iPhones"* or "an N95 8Gb with a regular N95 as backup"**. Not for the first time I feel like I'm so woefully behind the curve on portable electronics (although a rockboxed Sansa e260, while light on storage, is still a good toy. I'll bet none of you with your fancy iPods are listening to 1000kbps+ FLACs on the go, hmmm?***).

* Actual loadout of interface designer Amy Hoy

**Actual loadout of sex blogger Violet Blue

***I'm sure a "real" audiophile would tell me that I'd need to solder on a new crystalliser or signal processor and buy a better set of headphones and some kind of in-line amplifier. Sure, fine. FLACs still do sound somewhat richer than mp3, although with my present setup I'm not sure they're quite worth the extra space...

Lessons Unlearned

In the aftermath of Boobquake (the boobwake, if you will) I saw a few (generally female) bloggers despairing at what they perceived as a "highjacking" of boobquake by what a film geek might call the male gaze - a sort of objectifying ray emitted by the eyes of men. In all seriousness, it was a good concern; the focus of boobquake was primarily humour and skepticism...T'n A being a pleasant - if non-critical - side benefit. Men who went into Boobquake day looking for nothing more than a show of tits were clearly misapprehending the point. Worse still, I think, is that they were in a way undermining a part of Boobquake's thesis. You'll recall that in Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi's clerical error (oh, snap?) he professed that it is female immodesty that causes male infidelity (and presumably that of women as well)...and that somehow this affects plate tectonics. And how did some of us supposedly enlightened western men react? Well, kind of offensively, actually. I don't have statistics, to be sure, but I think what's important here is to recognize that freedom of clothing choice isn't the endpoint of equality. The objectification of women is still something to be reckoned with in our society, and the blithe equation of Boobquake with "yeah, shake 'em baby"...it does worse than NOT help the cause. It transforms an event dedicated to satirizing ridiculous pronouncements and the mistreatment of women into little more than us ramming our culture down another culture's throat. How DO you like them American hooters, mr. Muslim?



You see, it just trades the spark of genius for the spectre of racism and bigotry.



I'll come back to this, but first I need to work something out that's been bothering me for a while:

" How is this "feminist" response anything but an attempt to squash female expressions of our sexuality, for fear of whipping men into an uncontrollable frenzy?



How is it anything other than blaming women for the fact that many men behave badly?"

I've been going over this sort of reasoning in my head for a while. On the one hand, I think there's a point missing: Heterosexual dudes are genetically programmed to be aroused by the female form, or at least I'm pretty sure we are. I mean, it's not a very good meme for a species that reproduces sexually to be ambivalent about the process. Ah - I can hear the yells forming in your throats and I am not done yet thank you very much! Genetic predisposition isn't really an excuse, but neither is it nothing at all. Dress and manner are means of communication, often nonverbal, but communication they are. Friends of mine will recall the ladies' T-shirt I proposed with only "The medium is the message" emblazoned upon the bosom. It was my own little way of satirizing T-shirts that said things like "my eyes are up here" in bright, eye catching text across the wearers' breasts. Both of these T-shirts are saying the same thing, when you get down to it. When you wear a particular style and cut of clothing you are sending people messages. I admit full well that I try to wear snug T-shirts these days because I've got a little muscle in my upper body and it's nice to have it show. But I am under no illusion that I have a right to complain if someone makes a remark about it on the street, in class, wherever. I'm trying to show off, the least you can do is notice!

No style of clothing is to be taken as a declaration of consent, duh. I still don't think it's really a consistent position to try and separate medium and message. I might not know whether your message is targeted at a particular individual or the world at large, but what "immodest clothing" tells me is that you think you have a body worthy of aesthetic consideration. So while I do not dispute in any way shape or form that physical security is your constitutional, heck your human right when you - and I mean dudes and ladies - run amok with only strategically-placed bands of cloth...a public display is a public display. We do have a sort of content filter when you only want to control access to your sexuality, both in the visual and physical capacities. It's called modesty, and it shouldn't be a dirty word just because some people think it needs to be enforced. It's also not a binary choice of covered/uncovered, there's a lot of room I think to choose an image that you're comfortable with projecting. Now, if you want justification I am going to have to tread carefully on this ground...but hear me out: common critics of Anarchy allegedly miss the point when they talk about total chaos in the absence of law. If you ask an Anarchist you'll probably hear something about "social norms" and "unwritten codes of behavior", possibly "natural-" or "divine" law, maybe even "common sense". You would be foolish to equate the absence of a code of law with the complete absence of guidelines and cues for behaviour. Similarly, you would be unwise to confuse the absence of religious persecution against your chosen style of dress with a complete obviation of your responsibility for your own image! We are likewise never free of our responsibility for our own perceptions of other people; what I am - in essence - arguing for is clarity of communication. Don't send wrong messages, and don't get the wrong ideas. Just don't be surprised if you're showing off your tits or pecs or whatever - and someone pays them a compliment. Is it regressive to believe that people shouldn't toy with each other and send mixed messages under the pretext of "I can do anything I want without consequence"? I hope not.

But back (sort of) on the track that I was intending to go upon. If we indeed wish to show that we as individuals and as a culture have an enlightened attitude toward women, let's do that with respect, consideration, and solidarity. This isn't accomplished by clamoring for tits, nor by indulging those who do.

On the matter of solidarity, I bring your attention to "Everybody draw Muhammad day". Look at the comment thread, even just the first few will do. Is this how to advance the cause of free speech, by calling Islam a "death cult"? How blind and shortsighted we are, then; historically we have been blessed with the gift of arabic numerals (way, way easier than those dumb Roman ones!), the concept of zero (or at least Europe got wind of it by way of muslims)...in fact, the preservation of classical philosophy that would spark the Renaissance? That was totally Muslims! So their civilization is not at its height now, but are we going to pass judgement on the whole of their culture and religion while observing only such a narrow slice? One might as well characterize Europeans as being the peddlars of dogmatic barbarism (middle ages and the crusades) or America as being inherently racist and oppressive (slave trade). Worse still we're talking about a narrow cross-section of a narrow cross-section! So much for this farce of the Western thirst for knowledge and reason! Ok, you know this; what I wonder about "Draw Muhammad Day" is whether or not I should participate. On the one hand, I see a noble purpose and intent: to become one with a group of people who have faced death threats and even death itself (RIP. Theo Van Gogh) for the sake of free artistic expression. As the Blag Hag says, to "dilute the pool of targets" seems a pretty funny, interesting way to deal with some of the hostility that has greeted people who are critical of Islam. Ironically, Christianity is vehemently opposed to idolatry/graven images (depends on the brand/translation), it just happens to be one of those "pick and choose" things that gets discarded and under rug swept. Actually, I recall there being vocal outrage in the West when an artist chose to depict Jesus Christ as a black woman. So on some level this isn't cool. I don't imagine all the people taking part are hypocritical, but it bears a striking resemblance to the problem with Boobquake: this event invites people who aren't here to celebrate free speech, but to denegrate Islam. I think that if we desire logical consistency, we desperately need to expand the scope of this day! I think we need a "Depict God and Jesus as not-exclusively-white-people Day", for starters! it's easy to talk trash about Islam because it has some differences in the value system, and a thriving militant streak that the media loves to talk about. But there are militants of all stripes, and maybe if we did more to provoke them, they'd come out of the woodwork. Hell, just look at the utterly braindead response from the religious right at the abolition of that national prayer day in the US.

You can say perhaps that there aren't any death threats at work here, that we're dealing with a religion that does seek to impose upon others versus some that don't. That's an awfully thin argument. Sarah Palin wants to base US law on the 10 commandments: does that mean the manufacture of graven images would become illegal, 'cause that would just be TOO GOOD right now! In any case, that's an imposition right there, one that has a lot of undesirable implications for those who do not share in her faith. You could even argue (successfully, I might imagine) that inherent to the "don't tread on me" 2nd ammendment-happy ethos are death threats, ie. when those arms you so proudly bear come in handy for overthrowing an oppressive government. For once I'm not trying to make fun of gun culture: I think "Governments should be afraid of their people" doesn't seem much too much more conducive to good policy than the converse (think about the kind of distaste people have for legislative deadlock, and imagine if you will the kind of paralysis you might see if the lives of legislators depended upon their never crossing a rather nebulous line). Everyone has their violent streak - from Marxists to Margaret Thatcherites (ESPECIALLY these, even). It seems pretty hypocritical to condemn another culture because their soft spot is your sacrament, doesn't it?

I think these two issues boil down to a very similar core: people are constructing freedoms in the absence of responsibilities. We have freedom of expression, but we are not without responsibility for the content we express. That is not to say that you "get what you deserve". Clearly, physical attacks are not the correct way to respond to expression that confounds or offends you!

On this general theme of getting things wrong, I saw on BoingBoing the other day a link via Wired to a piece that examined the role of mercenary bloggers in documenting the war on Afghanistan. Some of the comments were very vitriolic, wishing death and ruin upon these individuals, generally to the tune of:

"Mercenaries are the scum of the Earth, I hope they all die."

I'm sorry, I forgot that the purpose of learning about someone in their own words was to justify your kneejerk reaction to their superficial qualities, what was I thinking!? I had imagined in a fever dream for a moment that reading the words of combattants on the ground would humanize them in a way that might challenge our assumptions about who these people are. Yes it is morally questionable that they are effectively paid to kill. Good job. Does the above statement reflect a more developed morality? It would be very hard to argue that it does. Again, you can see that we are receiving information, but not everyone is learning the right lesson. There's something that Christianity says, something like "love the sinner, hate the sin"? You can Godwin that to death if you like, but how else can we approach unsavoury professions like "mercenary"? Are we to decide that some people can be judged solely on the basis of their employment...but not us, oh no! We're just office drones on the weekdays; on weekends we're gorgeous unique butterflies free from the stale cucoobicle! So you don't kill for money - you waste away your life unsatisfied for money. Should I wish death upon you for squandering your human potential five days out of seven? Come on!

These are human beings. Fact. Why do some people refuse to learn that? I don't think any more kindly of the profession, but I can now put words and maybe even a face on these people. I think that makes for a better debate, somehow, if we discard this notion that we are fielding armies of demons abroad in a vein effort at...something, I dunno what. Actually, if you read some of these blogs they are often quite critical of the war effort itself: the uncertain terms of victory, the corruption in government and police forces that we turn a blind eye to...even the anti-war crowd will find some common ground here! In fact, reading these blogs has given me more reason to doubt the war than I might have ever had. I have a much better perspective now, I think, of what we have done wrong. What's very interesting is that there is a palpable level of culture shock going on. Some of the blogs I read bordered uncomfortably on racism, but it did make me think. We're talking about how best to prosecute this war in terms of drone strikes and troop surges, and we're really just not trying to talk about the cultural barriers between our peoples! It seems dangerous to have heavily armed people becoming increasingly jaded and disoriented in a country that we wish to have good relationships with, don't you think?

An Open Letter to Stephen Harper (In Progress)

To the Right Honourable Stephen Harper:

Two recent pieces of news have caused me considerable consternation with regards to the policies advanced by your government; these being - in no particular order - your intent to bring "stronger" copyright law to Canada, and the intimidation of those feminist/womens' advocacy groups in Canada which have come out in opposition to your frankly contemptable decision not to support safe access to abortion for women in impoverished countries. Although these two issues aren't of themselves related, your government's adoption of these policies speaks to a perilous disconnect between the values of the Conservative party and those of the general Canadian public.

On the matter of copyright, our country has been very fortunate that circumstances have conspired against your previous attempts to reform the law, which were met with much resistance by consumers, educators, and even creators themselves. The copyright consultations held by your government last year seemed a show of good faith, a willingness to seek a superior balance between the needs of consumers and creators. Please, do not disregard the will of the people on this matter; it is in their name and their interests that you are supposed to govern. What the media conglomerates are demanding of the Canadian government (and others) is not merely protection for artists, it is support for business models that are dying. It is an end to privacy and even the presumption of innocence, the so-called "three-strikes" policy that would institute widespread monitoring of internet use and automatically disconnect citizens merely accused of copyright infringement without so much as a chance to defend their innocence. It is a lockdown on culture that simply does not make sense in an age of sharing. I do not, Mr. Prime Minister, mean "illegal file sharing" when I say sharing; I refer to a more general set of cultural phenomena. Networks and software aren't only making "theft" easier; they are also giving the means for creative self-expression to more people than ever before in history. People are chosing to create, and in many cases they are choosing to share: whether it's the Free/Libre Open Source Software movement, or the Creative Commons.


I am not so naive as to think that in some ideal future, all creators will work for free. What I do think is that the way to ensure that creation continues in this country is not to use heavy-handed legislation to lock Canadians into the old ways, old businesses whose practices are no longer suited to the current market. Apple and Amazon have demonstrated that what your legislation would call "digital locks" are not necessarily the only way forward for digital commerce: both have been selling music without such encumberances for some time now. You have children, and so I imagine that you are not unaware of the artistic medium that is the videogame (I have a bone to pick with Roger Ebert on this matter, but that is for another time and place). Stardock Studios and the website "Good Old Games" sell such products without digital locks, and they do not seem to be in dire straits. Conversely, EA Games' "Spore", a hotly anticipated title, suffered a PR nightmare when it was released with particularly strict digital locks upon it. The fact of the matter is that the more entrenched these locks become, the better (comparatively) the experience of piracy will become. A pertinent example can be seen here: commercial DVDs when played in a standard DVD player assail the viewer with often unskippable previews and warnings. The content of commerical DVDs is scrambled, making it difficult for end-users to make archival copies, or even simply watch the DVD on operating systems such as Linux. A pirated film, by contrast, simply begins playing the film when placed in a DVD player. It is simple to make copies for use in case the original becomes damaged, it can be played almost anywhere, and it can be converted to many different formats to be played on many different kinds of player. Paradoxically, the kind of broad functionality that I and many other Canadians would be interested in paying for is NOT the kind offered by the industry. It is that same industry which has been framing the choice in this debate as between Canadians (and others) being offered their very limited, highly controlled packages...or nothing at all. I wish that your party would take a stand against this, not just from a consumer rights angle, but also because we should not encode into law this caste-like distinction between producer and consumer. We are not passive; I don't believe that culture exists without interpretation, criticism, parody and remixing. These are not valueless acts, but the content industry seeks in law to make crimes of some or all of these!

I have not been very forthcoming with positive suggestions, but as a start there is perhaps NDP MP Charlie Angus'proposal to extend Canada's existing private copying levy to a new range of devices. Here, at least, is found the spirit of true compromise: the industry wants money, and Canadians want relative freedom to format-shift their media once they have legally obtained it. Rather than criminalizing the latter, the private copying levy allows both sides to enjoy what they say they want to enjoy. But if the content industry insists instead on tighter controls, you must ask yourself; if they thumb their nose at money, what is it that they really want? Do they want fair compensation for creative works, or do they want a frankly unrealistic and unfair level of control over our culture?

On the issue of your government's lack of funding support for abortion abroad, and the subsequent cutting of funds to women's advocacy groups I urge even more strongly that you reconsider your position. DVDs are one thing, but your party is endangering human lives in the hopes that it can simultaneously adopt fundamentalist values re: abortion and still somehow stay in the good graces of Canadians by maintaining the status quo on the homefront. With all due respect, Sir, just how stupid do you think Canadian feminists (both women and men) are? At best, what your policy decision indicates is that your government either does not believe in a universal standard of human rights (reproductive and otherwise) or that you intend at some later time to mount a campaign against abortion at home. Either of these conclusions should send chills down the spine of respectable Canadians, Mr. Harper. Women who are denied access to safe abortions will often seek them from less reputable sources. This can kill them, Mr. Prime Minister. I believe in providing and promoting contraceptives in places where women wish for a greater control over their reproductive lives, but if you have been following the issue you will know that it is sometimes difficult to get men to wear condoms reliably. There is an effort to produce a simple, easy-to-use, easy-to-distribute female contraceptive cream (or some similar unobtrusive substance), but this is not at present a reality. The reality is that a balanced approach to the reproductive health of women must include abortion, even if only as a last line of defence against unwanted pregnancy! That you have chosen not only to stand against abortion, but also against those groups who have lawfully and dutifully protested your choice in this matter speaks to an even greater evil than neglect, however. These groups do not exist to stroke your ego, and they will not always agree with you. Disagreement and debate are principal foundations of democratic society, and while I suppose there's no law that says you MUST fund these groups, it rather seems as though you are cheating. Quieting the debate with fear tactics and then claiming that you have won by virtue of being the loudest (or perhaps the only) voice is poor sportsmanship - and I am being generous. What is it that your government fears from these groups? That they might take a stand against what they perceive as injustice? Is that not an invaluable practice in a free society, or do you believe that all of our checks and balances and our Constitution itself are just so much window dressing for your new brand of tyranny? Well this Canadian will have none of that, and will have none of you if this is the most reasoned and mature manner in which you see fit to conduct public discourse in this once-proud nation!


Sincerely,


A Concerned Citizen.



I intend to send this letter in paper form at some point in the near future, but not quite in this present form. The final work will obviously need less of the spleen that makes blogging so delicious, but I'm curious to know what you think could be improved. Yes, I am outsourcing my proofreading. I'll be doing some of my own over the next day or two...but I won't catch everything!

Believe it Or Not

Whom do you believe, and why?

The truth of the matter may be surprising - frightening, even. You may think to yourself "oh, it's just some particular pentecostals", and rest secure in the knowledge that no preacher is holding your on/off switch in his or her hand, oh no. But read the last few lines before you do that:

"It's not clear whether the results extend beyond religious leaders, but Schjødt speculates that brain regions may be deactivated in a similar way in response to doctors, parents and politicians."

You see? It could be anybody. Well, clearly not just anybody, but this effect may just be one manifestation of a multifarious menace. There's a warning to be had here, and while it's common-sense stuff I suppose it bears repeating that you shouldn't let someone get away with the appeal to authority...especially their own! At any rate, it's this last bit that's preventing me from reveling in this news as I might otherwise be inclined to. In some ways it's hardly a surprise; I know I've read before in New Scientist that the human brain is in some ways hard-wired for religion (or for religious experiences, or both?). But it's not just religion, is it? Religion is, after all, pushing buttons that were quite likely there long before there was any such thing as an organized church. We had ritual and superstition long before these were codified. Putting aside divine experiences and focusing on the social and cultural angle, what we're discovering about ourselves - what some people have long known about us - is that we're really quite easy to fool. Ask any illusionist, conjurer, con-man, cold reader...people are absolutely ready and willing to have the wool pulled over their eyes, and they'll even pay you to do it! Today's news? Not actually very bad for religion - oh, I'm sure there will be a fuss as this makes its way 'round the internet, but I don't think it's going to change anyone's mind about what they do or don't believe. Who is it bad for?

Well, that's obvious, isn't it?

Acknowledgements: First seen on Boing Boing, followed up at New Scientist, later seen at my new sidebar link: Blag Hag, recently of "Boobquake" fame (I actually first encountered her blog by chance perhaps a month or two before the whole "Boobquake" business, but I started reading it more during and thereafter, hence the link now). In the interests of being more fair to Ms. McCreight, I should mention that outside of her viral popularity she's an entertaining writer/blogger and a soon-to-be PhD student. My hat is off to this atheist in unfriendly territory.

Copyright and Copywrong at age 300

It startles and astounds me just how right someone (or several someones) can be in one moment:

"The wide availability of content delivery platforms is based on standards and hardware for which interoperable content management technologies are critical [...]This calls for a heightened degree of standardisation within the digital media chain; in a highly networked environment, cross-sectoral cooperation is required to an unprecedented extent to ensure the interoperability of metadata for exploitation of primary, secondary and even tertiary markets and user need"

-WIPO

And how blatantly wrong the next:

" In most countries, there are many more consumers than creators and performers, creating political challenges for policy-makers in managing discussions on copyright"

-WIPO (emphasis is mine)

 Same document. Successive paragraphs.

Now, before you take up your keyboard in anger and strike me down with all your anger, please allow me to explain. Remember what I said a few posts ago? I said:

"I think we're so used to thinking of ourselves as consumers that we almost don't consider what we are actually doing. I'm creating something right now. I took my camera to school with me, and on the way both there and back I did even more creating! As I have said, with the means of production becoming cheaper and cheaper (on the software side moreso, perhaps) there are fewer hurdles between you and creative expression than there have ever been in history"

And I'm right. We're the generation of ubiquitous connectivity and social media. All those pictures you take and the posts you write and possibly your twitter posts as long as you can prove that they constitute original expression beyond a simple statement of fact? That's all your creation, and that's all protected by copyright BY DEFAULT, thanks to the same kind of extensions to the law that Big Media wants to keep going. Look here:

"#2  Sharing Your Content and Information

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

   1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
   2. When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).
   3. When you add an application and use Platform, your content and information is shared with the application. We require applications to respect your privacy settings, but your agreement with that application will control how the application can use the content and information you share. (To learn more about Platform, read our About Platform page.)
   4. When you publish content or information using the "everyone" setting, it means that everyone, including people off of Facebook, will have access to that information and we may not have control over what they do with it.
   5. We always appreciate your feedback or other suggestions about Facebook, but you understand that we may use them without any obligation to compensate you for them (just as you have no obligation to offer them)."

-Facebook Terms of Service

These seem like some pretty reasonable rules. Facebook needs a relative amount of freedom in order to provide effective services, and most people seem unlikely to care about stray backup copies of party photos that they have already implicitly decreed are safe for public consumption. Facebook isn't directly profiteering from your work, but indeed if it did not have these liberties its service would be greatly inferior, and hence their survival as a cultural and financial entity does in some way derive from the way they use your content. But ask Big Media if you can take about this level of liberty with the music that you buy and I guarantee you'll hear them scream bloody murder. Why is it ok for some creators to be treated worse than others, though? If this is good enough for us it should be good enough for everyone who creates, right?

Well, not really.

First, you might be thinking "well, what about quality?"

That would be a mistake. Do you mean to tell me that the moral high ground in this argument should go to the best art, because let me tell you that is NOT in the slightest what the content industry is trying to secure in this fight. Second, creation is supposed to come from the heart, not the pocketbook. Why should funding or publishers matter in whether or not we believe a creator should have some reasonable expectations about the kind of terms he or she can get for their work. I think the difference is that if the public as a whole had the kind of hold on the legislature that Big Media does (a terribly ironic conundrum), Facebook would be PAYING US to use their content in exchange for its continued presence as an advertising platform and cultural icon. But alas we do not, and are consequently treated as second-class creators.

If one looks at the world of webcomics, you'll see a lot of quality. You'll also see a lot of self-publishing. The comics that have attracted large readerships have not necessarily needed large corporate funding; they have grown because of the quality of their content. WE DID NOT NEED publishers or editors or agents to tell us which webcomics were worthy and which were not. Hey, what would you know, the invisible hand that everyone likes to talk about so goddamn much DID ITS JOB! Grassroots creativity does not mean "hatchet job" anymore, and perhaps our culture will wise up to this fact.

So, where are we now?

We are leaving a culture of passive consumerism, and we are building one where many people create, or become indirectly involved in the creation process through feedback (see: Imogen Heap's fan outreach and crowdsourcing from the making of her last album, or ANY popular blog with a thriving comment community). WIPO's stance is still rooted in the frankly archaic notion that modern content delivery is, and will continue to be a one-way process. There are many people who have been saying this for years; Lawrence Lessig being the obvious example.

But they are saying something right when they talk about interoperability. What they should have said in the next paragraph is that industries need to work together to create products that continue to foster two-way communication between creators. Not between "creators and consumers" because while indeed some people have become better or more prolific than others, we have already seen that giving everybody the same tools does in no way cheapen the best work done in a category of creative works. Did good webcomics not arise and gain fan followings because everyone and their dog could post one to the internet? The answer is beyond obvious. So give everyone the same tools for sharing their work. Some will take to it naturally, and others will leave it alone...but it will no longer be up to the creaking dinosaur industries of the past who gets to be transformed into something famous and who does not! To some extent we can already see this phenomenon in action: just watch the rise of a viral video.

Of course, if we envision a world without promoters and labels, the infamous words of Warhol look more and more like the literal truth of the now*. Perhaps being a famous artist will cease to be a true career option, and we will just spend our years constantly hunting down the latest viral sensation.

I'm not sure I've touched on sharing in this future world yet, but of course I am no oracle. I can say that I believe if creators were treated equally I think we might see agitation for truly balanced copyright law. The profit motives would be properly aligned for once, as what you have is no longer two adversarial groups, each trying to swindle the other. What you have is one group that has to weigh the protection of its individual livelihoods against the protection of cultural heritage. What you have is one group that has to balance its need to eat with its desire to remix, review, and renew its culture from time to time.

-Loud!

Oh yes, and check this out.

*"15 minutes of fame", in case that wasn't clear

Contagion

Gnomesque has passed on to me the task of revealing 10 little-known facts about myself, as per this Honest Scrap thing that's going on. Without further ado, I present:

10 Things You May Not Know About Loud:

1) Of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, I have read only The Fellowship of the Ring all the way through.

2) I used to think (like when I was REALLY little) that a lot of words needed to have the sound of "é" tacked on to the end. Most embarassing? The word "Chef". I thought it needed to sound more french/debonair.

3) At age 10, my imaginary self-at-age-20 had invented faster-than-light travel, was the head of what in retrospect I guess would have to be a corporate government entity on the scale of Weyland-Yutani*, and fought "robbers" with (among other things) a laser rifle (of his own design).

*I was way less evil

4) As a child, I once tried to slice a banana by - and I am not kidding - shoving it in my ear. Hey, IT WORKED FOR THE CARTOON CAT, OKAY?

5) I got kicked out of the Ottawa museum of nature for sliding down one of the really big marble railings on the main staircase.

6) I watched the first season/series of Digimon and to this day I think it was better than the Pokemon TV show.

7) I have never broken a bone, or if I have it wasn't bad enough that I noticed?

8) I have a recurring worry that I live in a simulated universe or I'm in a coma and dreaming my entire life and one day I'll wake up, and I'll have to live my life over again except all the laws of physics will be different and no one I know will have been real. I realize after not very long that this is probably not the case.

9) It is plausible that I will go to my grave having never owned a cell phone.

10) I had asthma, but I seem to have grown out of it.


I don't know if there are seven active bloggers that I can tag to continue this meme, but I'll do something about that within the next couple of days.

Free Beer and Swords

I imagine I am not unlike a significant fraction of you, dear readers, in that I like to leave a nice, generous space between waking up and getting up. I like to fill that space with the reassuring tones of CBC radio (if for no other reason than it’s pretty much the only thing you can listen to on the radio unless your interests are “the same awful – read: popular – music over and over again” or “trying to solve your midlife crisis with a liberal application of hair metal”*) Today, I awoke to a very compelling treatise on economics, in particular the “hidden” or “deferred” costs of our purchases: Raj Patel*’s The Value of Nothing. The author’s first example was an icon of western consumer culture – the hamburger. A hamburger will run you about $4 under our present economic system. Calculate the overall resource use, social and environmental damage, what you might call the “true” cost of a burger, and you end up with a figure (supposedly) approaching $200. Where’s your “value menu” now, Ronald? This is but the tip of the iceberg, of course. Approaching “Third World Debt”, Mr. Patel invited listeners to consider that what “they owe us”, in terms of loan repayments and the like, is nothing in comparison to what we owe them as recompense for what we take (in, among other things, natural resources)***.

*As solutions go, I suppose this isn’t bad.

** You can find the interview here (scroll down to part 2), which I reccomend you listen to because a) it's actually quite engaging and b) this dude has a fantastic voice.

***Political realism would suggest that you can’t really call this a ‘debt’. After all, ‘debt’ on the international level is what you can effectively demand from other governments. In other words, we’re living in a great spherical high school where the bullies are free to live off the lunch money of the weak.

Not all of the “true cost” of that hamburger is extracted from poor nations, however; look into your own pocketbook, and you may find a very unwelcome siphon.  With your tax dollars* you’re subsidizing the criminally low wages that the hamburger joint is allowed to pay its employees. With your tax dollars you are paying for a healthcare system that is someday going to have to deal with the great reckoning of cholesterol and sucrose. With your tax dollars, you’re ideally going to be paying to counteract the environmental and climactic effects of all the deforestation and diesel-burning that goes on in the name of cheap meat.  Whenever someone says they are “I am passing the savings along to you”, what they probably mean is “I am passing the costs along to you, minus the sticker shock”. If - having become aware of this burden - you are uncomfortable with it, you’ve got a few options. The simplest of these is to try and rein in the excesses of the free market with legislation; you know, what we’ve ostensibly been trying to do pretty much since the industrial revolution. This is at least a serviceable option, but just how many asterisks can we append to the statement “Free markets are the best way of providing services” before we entertain the notion that just maybe we’re dealing with more than just errata?

*Ok so probably not many of you pay taxes. But you will.

Raj Patel’s ideas about a more just economic system seemed to hinge on what we might call “The Commons”, a useful concept which is also invoked in the work of Lawrence Lessig (and, as we will see, the two are very much connected). Most people, Patel said, hear commons and think:

Commons - a physical space which people are free to access without bias (in this case, the big field).

But it’s really more useful to think of The Commons in terms of resources. Space is a valuable resource; indeed many a developer would likely love nothing more than to pave over land with the kind of property value that a municipal commons must have! However, people like to have space, but individually can’t all afford to own little chunks. Allowing private development might create more wealth than leaving the commons as they are, but that wealth would be restricted to a select few. As a society, we’re okay with a certain amount of inequality, but we have decided that access to recreational space is something that we’d like everyone to have. What Patel (and also Lessig, but I’ll get to that later) seemed to me to be arguing is that we as a society should perhaps raise the bar a little. We should declare a few more resources to be made ownerless such that they can be shared by all, regardless of individual wealth.  Before the consolidation of capital into wealthy hands, we had de facto rules for managing these resources to ensure that they were equitably divided and – more importantly – preserved for the future.

If you’ve read Lawrence Lessig, you’ll find a lot of this very familiar. Just as the consolidation of capital in the hands of the few deprived so many independent craftspeople of their livelihoods, Lessig might say that the consolidation of content in the claws of communications conglomerates is doing much the same to creators who choose to operate outside the world of studios and record labels. Enter the Census (sic) of Files Available on Bittorrent*, which I stumbled upon this morning with thoughts of alternate economic systems lodged firmly in mind.

*As it is a mere representative sample, the term Census is somewhat misapplied.

So the data suggest that piracy is pretty much the rule on the ol’ inter-tubes. The comments on the article seem to be about a 2:1 mix of “people who might be free-culture moderates”:“people who are peeved at the cultural prevalence of theft on the internet”.  To my mind, one of the more interesting comments is:

“Of course, given that copyright has been a part of our history since long before the existence of the internet, it shouldn't surprise us that the number of cultural artifacts under copyright vastly outnumber the number outside of it.”

The piracy we see now could be a transitional phase on the way to a new model of culture. That’s probably not much of a relief to the purveyors of content, but then there’s not really anything they can do anyway, right? Zearle's* Hackers and Crackers proposes that warez are a form of liberation from economic oppression. After all, the creative power afforded by programs like photoshop and maya is only available to those who can, well, afford them. Now, from the data in this study it would look like the majority of bittorrent users are pirating tv and movies (also porn), not content-creation programs with which to empower themselves. It would be too easy to write this kind of behaviour off as lazy, cut-and-dry theft. Consider the following:

“I'm not ok with the fact that 99% of the culture that people want to share is somehow "owned" by someone. That's not how culture works, and trying to force it to work that way simply ends up destroying that culture. Culture is fundamentally a shared experience. Take away our ability to share it freely and what you have is at best commerce, not culture.”

* I have written about Zearle in the past with...interesting results.

I could not tell you just how politically-motivated your average bittorrent user is, but I know that as a student I can't really afford to buy new DVDs, for example. Does that make downloading them on Bittorrent a form of protest? I don't really imagine so. What, however, is the net difference to the creator if I download something as opposed to buying it used, or from value village? I don't think the producers, creators, actors, set designers, etc. see an additional penny either way. Bittorrent happens to be the cheaper option for me, it has a superior user interface, and better selection to boot. Probably there will never be a paid option as compelling as bittorrent, nor perhaps could there be. If we're lucky, though, there won't have to be. Enter some alternative economic systems.

Frankly, we have opened the can of worms when it comes to free and ubiquitous copying; I don't believe there is really any hope – not in the near- to mid-term, at any rate – of returning to some gloriously ignorant past. The question, then, isn't how we go about ending piracy by force, but how we establish a relationship with creators in which no one starves. And we all get to enjoy our favourite TV show or whatever. There are at present a number of schools of thought on this issue, which can be generalized under the heading “post-scarcity economics”. That's probably an oxymoron to at least one of you reading this, isn't it? Economics is all about supply and demand; what do you DO when you've the capacity to all but eliminate both (even for just a subset of all possible commodities)? A surprisingly coherent answer is “sell what cannot be copied”. Sell a personalized experience that simply won't have the same kind of value to another person. So what if someone gives away a virtual concert, programmed to sound as though it were performed in their very own living room (as per an example in the linked article)? It won't be the same thing to anyone else, unless perhaps they recreate the space themselves! It's not a bad notion, and it does dovetail nicely with some of the other options I am about to explore, but I don't find it without weakness. Like the business model we're heading away from, this sort of philosophy will seem just as antiquated as the onward progress of technology slowly erodes the list of “things beyond copying”. Some sound devices already come with a calibration utility to help you arrange audio channels in an ideal way to suit the space, so what happens when we develop the technology to take an audio file and have it sound as though it is being played live in any given space?

As long as we keep the current paradigm of money, I think it's safe to say that people will try to save as much as possible. Would adopting an alternative currency help the situation? Consider the notion of “Whuffie”, which is sort of like a measure of prestige, or social credit. You can see this kind of system pop up in the fiction of several Science Fiction authors, among them Cory Doctorow (who coined the term) and Charles Stross (pretty much everything past the near-future in Accelerando). What I find interesting about this system is that it allows for a person who would in any other case be materially poor to live quite happily through their reputation. Where we tend to measure wealth in terms of purchasing power, liquid assets, etc, social credit systems are – as I understand them – a complex interplay of favours and loans with your integrity as collateral. Let's look at an individual – say Richard Stallman – under the lens of two different kinds of wealth measurement. We might expect, under traditional economics, to see a wealth breakdown that looks something like this:

But I would argue that even in our world of hard currency this doesn't REALLY measure all available wealth. I mean, think of all the free software geeks who would buy the dude a beer, or put him up for a night or several, or buy him a katana because of xkcd. We're not really accounting for the value of what this guy could have if he really wanted. Below is a chart more reflective of social credit:

Sweet Jesus the man is made of free beer and swords!

(I officially disclaim any relationship of these charts to the actual wealth of Richard Stallman, this is just an amusing example because who else can count both free beer and katanas in their pool of potential wealth?)

The idea of social credit based accounting is an interesting one, and its pretty internally-consistent. Where does all the beer come from? Well, if you make good beer, that's the kind of social credit that can probably alleviate most of your material concerns. Just sponge off people and provide delicious brew in return, right? Of course, if we follow this "who would you buy a beer" logic too far, you start to wonder at what point the beer itself shouldn't just become the currency?

The wonderful thing about beer-as-currency is that it allows for denominations which are currently impossible. To wit: behold the minus-ten-dollar bill bottle!

The obvious issue with a social-currency based economy is more or less evident when you consider the kind of person proposing it: they command a great deal of respect, they produce content, and they're active participants in at least some kind of community (online or otherwise). The pressure to make something that other people will like enough to credit you is kind of analogous to the struggle faced by the starving artist in present economics, isn't it?

I think we're so used to thinking of ourselves as consumers that we almost don't consider what we are actually doing. I'm creating something right now. I took my camera to school with me, and on the way both there and back I did even more creating! As I have said, with the means of production becoming cheaper and cheaper (on the software side moreso, perhaps) there are fewer hurdles between you and creative expression than there have ever been in history, more or less! And speaking of the commons and cameras, there is no better story to illustrate why the former is so important than that of the legal status of the latter. The whole story is - I believe - contained in Free Culture, but here's the deal: you can take photographs in public, and pretty much only famous people have any veto power over that. If the law had not sided with photographers, and made permission necessary, think of just how few people would actually take up photography as a hobby...or even as a career. After all, what would stop people from charging exorbitant amounts for the use of their image, if that was their perogative? Photographers enjoy a magnificently expansive commons, and pretty much everyone is the better for it. Without ubiquitous photography, we would be lacking not only a key technology which helps us archive our lives, we would be giving up an art form and a powerful ally in the service of democratic accountability (read: we couldn't really take pictures of police brutality)!

I'll upload more later, but for now my internet service is uncooperative. The Wonderful thing about creating is that it doesn't have to be a "good once only" kind of thing; by applying a Creative Commons license to my photographs, these become a potential springboard for future creativity....even a gift of sorts. Even better, the terms of the license stipulate that any derivative works YOU make have to be shared on the same terms - the gift keeps on giving!

-Loud!

Castigation, Cancer-Corn, and Cavemen

Rose-coloured lenses are a dangerous accessory, one that should not be worn too readily, nor to the wrong parties. As an incurable optimist and romantic, I accede to a certain hypocrisy in this admonition. If it helps, know that I am not to be held blameless in my own sight; I have been proven wrong in certain judgements, to be explained hereafter:

Probably, I can also be held responsible for the punctuation in that last couple of sentences. Yikes.

It would seem - I am fact-checking as I write this - that certain varieties of Monsanto GM corn have been linked in clinical studies to organ damage. Among those organs affected are the heart and kidneys, so a big heads-up to all my corn-crunching homies: if you're going to be stuffing your gob, you may want to lay off the cob! It is not so much troubling that we've invented food which is bad for you, because let's face it: we're really good at that without the aid of recombinant DNA. What's shaping up to be the distressing part of this story is that while it's some newer data analysis shedding light on this correlation, the studies themselves were performed in 2002, and the results made public in 2005. Of course, proper data analysis takes time. It's one of those common misconceptions of science that you do a study and the answer to your question is sitting there on a page in front of you just like that. But here's the thing: if whatever we had in 2002-2005 was good enough to approve these crops for human consumption, then our standards clearly do not demand sufficient rigor. OR the unfortunate side effects were known and disregarded somehow, so our standards aren't very good at safeguarding your health it would seem (and from what I have read this corn was both FDA and EU approved). Kinda spooky stuff if your idea of government regulation being for the purposes of curbing the worst excesses of the free market like, say, a biotech company that doesn't want people to know about the health risks associated with its frankencorn monster.

Frankencorn monster. Now I'm talking like the sort of person I might have scoffed at before I learned about this whole affair.

You see, I do have a lot of sympathy for the various environmental movements around the globe. Anthropogenic climate change or not, it's pretty hard to argue that we're doing good by our home planet. I've argued with Etarran in the past about the extent (or, indeed, the existence) of our obligation to the Earth. In general, I have argued for the approach called 'permaculture', that is to say a philosophy of design and resource consumption that strives to minimize the depletion of resources vital to future generations. I have also argued that we ought to take a certain responsibility for the stewardship of the Earth, because we have made a grand old mess here and we ought to clean it up. Etarran has argued that the generation of wealth is more important to human well-being than is the preservation of one puny planet's ecology; there is a galaxy of available raw materials out there for the taking if only we slip the surly bonds of Earth's gravity well to seize them. I believe that we find common ground in the theme of preserving human civilization through the colonization of space. Putting all of one's eggs in the same basket - forgive the tired adage - is clearly not a very good survival strategy in anyone's book. A particularly effective metaphor in our debates was the notion of an infinite series of kitchens. Why would you ever bother cleaning one when you could move on to the next whenever the gunk in one became too much to bear?

This is, of course, all rather tangental. Where I often differ from the views of the more vocal activists in this sort of debate is on the merits of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO). Anti-GMO protesters seem to me the kind of people who watch too much bad science fiction. Bad science fiction where the smart guy is the bad guy, and the various fields of SCIENCE! are populated by a nearsighted bunch whose collective hubris would be enough to sentence one man to a century of homeric trial-by-ordeal. "Oh, please," thought I, "world-ending shit doesn't happen in a world of peer-review and repeatable results!".  Well, maybe Demeter is angry with us or something, because here we are with more or less the closest real-world equivalent of dystopian SF, in which the evil megacorporation is trying to poison us with food. How does that even happen, anyway? I understand that genes are in many ways like what programmers call "spaghetti code": there are a lot of technically unneccesary linkages, and when you run into one accidentally it is liable to cause bugs*. I understand that GMO are probably not as strenuously regulated as they ought to be. I understand that it's in the economic interests of Monstanto to lie to us when the marketability of their product is at stake. Maybe that's it, but it seems to me that in the long run the credibility of the biotech industry would be more important than a few bucks in the near-term. GM Corn is kind of, uh, unexciting when you think about it. I mean, some of the very first human forays into genetics (rather, cross- and selective-breeding) were awesome things like making a whole new grain (Wheat) and making dogs into all of the funny and adorable shapes and sizes in which they are now available. Those are pretty awesome things to do for a species for which sharp rocks were probably still a HUGE DEAL. Now we have some ten thousand years of breeding experience behind us, we're armed with a much more complete knowledge of the mechanics of inheritance, and we have very, VERY fine tools with which to manipulate the very code base of life itself...and the best we can do is CANCER CORN?

WHAT THE HELL? Why aren't we busy making up wacky, alien fruit? Who wants to eat a genetically modified organism that is even the remotest bit like anything they could just buy in mundane form, anyway?

So when I was talking about the rose-coloured lenses of romanticism, I was thinking about people who were romanticising the "natural lifestyle", conveniently ignoring the vast and undeniable benefits of technological living (like, oh say, hygiene and medicine? You like being able to live for more than 30 years, yeah? Or how about the printing press and the computer). To draw some kind of technological line in the sand somewhere, like Star Trek seems to do (ie. Warp Drive is ok but Artificial Intelligence is either irreproducable or evil and sometimes both) seemed to me a really silly sort of position on the matter. In the light of this "cancer corn" revelation, I feel like I should take myself to task for believing perhaps a little blindly that technology would always make things better, and dismissing claims to the contrary as naive superstition fueled by a nasty anti-intellectual streak.

And speaking of neo-primitivism, it's refreshing to see an unromanticized strain which has taken root in New York. It's all about eating and exercizing caveman-style (lots of meat, extended periods of fasting, running around as though pursued by some paleolithic predator). As a vegetarian who really likes to cook I realize that there's not a lot of common ground, but I sort of appreciate their adoption of the diet without glamorizing the actual, historical cave-person existence. To wit:

"Mr. Averbukh, who drives around town in a red Smart Car, said the thought of “throwing yourself in the forest with a stick and seeing how long you survive” held no appeal."

On the other hand, where's his sense of adventure?

-Loud!

PS: Debt of gratitude to Boing Boing for directing me to both of the stories which inspired this post. 

*Ironic, then, that we talk of making crops "bug resistant".