“Under pressure from Hollywood, they are engineering a complete removal of the concept of fair use. They are setting up systems that will completely control how, when and where you can use content that you buy. Even worse, they can retroactively change the rules!”
Here’s an interesting discussion of the strategy and implications behind the transition to digital content delivery that I’ve mentioned before.
The way that this transition to digital is being used to destroy opportunities to use content in my own time-shifting, room-shifting way, a la Tivo, is a primary reason that I have been avoiding the technologies, such as HDTV, etc …
If the media companies put too many restrictions in the way, I will likely decide to forgo their content entirely and I suspect that many consumers will also realize they are being taken through the doors of a prison with gilt bars. It’s bread & circuses, after all.
Much like the software industry, movies and music will be licensed, never sold, and subject to perpetual restrictions and ever under the threat that what little rights are available will be revoked.
What happens when a studio finds that it needs to make money to satisfy investors? What would stop a studio to issue a new release, say with nominally new features, and revoke use on the previous edition? You think the double dipping of special editions and extended releases is bad now? Just wait until your entertainment library, which is a library of culture, after all, is subject to going dark when someone decides to end-of-life the copies you have.
It’s exactly the disassociation presaged in 1984, where the newspapers are the only record of the past, and they are re-printed with changed content, at the whim of isolated, authoritarian, and hierarchical controllers outside the ability of the public to influence.
Here is a primary reason that the notion that everything should be owned, the marketization and privatization of everything, is a heinously, cataclysmicly mistaken.
“We’re talking at each other instead of to each other. Each person seems like they are waiting for their next chance to talk, when they should be listening.”
This is reminder of the notion of drive by debate, the Jackal versus Giraffe styles of communication mentioned by Marshall Rosenberg, of Nonviolent Communication, and the NVC movement. However, I wonder about what real difference there is between “at” and “to” instead of “with” which seems to have greater connotation of synergy and Giraffe style communication. Both “at” and “to” seem to indicate an implicit heirarchy between the participants, which may not be the intention. It’s tempting to view communication as linear, from the speaker to the listener, but it’s more accurate, I believe, to view communication as a feedback loop. Even in the instant, a person speaking is being provided with many clues they can use to change their delivery and content based on the response of the listener, not to mention the amphimorphic, cyclical and systemic nature of communication within a relationship over time.
“As part of a class assignment at Purdue, Steve Visser (a professor of Industrial Design) had one of his classes design a shopping cart that doubled as a homeless shelter. The class tested their design’s effectiveness by traveling from the Memorial Mall to the pedestrian bridge and back, to spend the night in the outdoors Friday.”
One of the videos shown at Antioch, to demonstrate design, is an old Nightline where they visit with IDEO in San Francisco to design a new shopping cart. This new project is an interesting re-visit to that.
Here’s a link to the article, but I don’t see a lot of images, even the “see additional” appears to offer nothing. That’s too bad. I’d love to have seen some of the designs, and designs in use.
After all, why should buildings be the only multi-use objects in our urban landscape? The notion of intense multi-use urban landscapes reminds me of the design goals for Soleri’s Arcosanti.
“Project Gutenberg is offering a complete 345-page scan of The Scientific American Boy, published in 1907. The book tells the fictional story of a group of adventurous and infinitely resourceful lads who embark on a campaign to explore ‘Willow Clump Island,’ a fantastic juvenile Eden that provides the boys with ample opportunities to test their boat-, tent-, surveying instrument-, bridge-, hut-, cabin-, ladder-, tree house-, heliograph-, water wheel-, windmill-, megaphone-, and combination lock-building skills.”
This caught my eye because I’ve developed an interest in the Seton’s Woodcraft work that was part of the development of the Boy Scouts, but centered on the notion of tribe instead of a military unit. I cannot help but wonder how there may have been an influence here from Seton’s Two Little Savages.
“You’ve got a price increase! AOL is planning to raise rates on its dial-up users in order to spur the transition to its re-branded DSL offerings.”
This strikes me as neither surprising nor as a very smart move. The fact that AOL, which is not a monopoly, and has made some really horrible business decisions, is making an intentional choice to screw customers on dial-up pricing. This is not behaviour one would expect from a market that encouraged competition to spur prices to be lowered. Another example of how the market does not behave in the way that advocates of free market want to believe it does.
In fact, prices are part of an over all mission to shape comsumer behaviour, and that means that consumers are given information filtered and packaged through marketing plans. Advocates of the free market like to pretend that consumers will be able to make choices that maximize their own self interest in the marketplace, but fail to recognize the nature of the market as a space where information is neither free nor is it perfect.
Information shaping is a billion dollar industry, and that means that individuals are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to having anything other than the mere illusion of perfect information about the best choices they have available. Further, the history of the market shows that even with information about better choices, consumers tend to stick with the products with which they are familiar even when something better is available. This is why consumers stuck with providers like AOL for so long, even when their support for the Internet was reluctant and still aimed at maintaining proprietary control as a gatekeeper. This tendancy of the consumer to stick with the familiar is also something that has been noted in the way that people have stuck with Microsoft products in spite of bugs and viruses features and opportunities for 3rd party developers.
Vendors are not blind to the way that pricing can be used to manipulate. There’s a reason that prices end in .99 instead of .00 so often, after all. Also, vendors know very well that if prices are too low, consumers will assume the product is cheaply made and refuse to buy.
Also, I recall the case where different catalogs, with different prices were being sent to consumers by a single vendor. The pricing was set based on information that the vendor had gathered about the consumer. Also, let us not ignore the fact that a huge percentage of what passes for news and entertainment is actually marketing, or derived almost verbatim from press releases. That certainly cannot mean unbiased and unfiltered information, even though it specifically is masked as being such.
So, not only are prices not going to be lowered by the vendors in a free market, but also, consumers participate in their own fleecing. I doubt that any of this is unrecognized by advocates of the free market, so I cannot help but wonder if there’s another agenda behind their advocacy.
The hidden part of the pricing mechanism is privilege. Privilege and class have a great deal to do with what prices one pays in the market, even now. The free market, one with no protections for anyone, would be an absolutely heinous playground for prejudice and manipulation.
A “free” market is no such thing. It would be expensive, unjust, unequal and the only people that would ultimately benefit are those that already have inordinate power and wealth. It’s important to remember that the protections in place as now, which are by no means absolute, are in response to problems that the market was unable to address, problems that, I suspect, are inherent in the marketplace metaphor.
Things like customer service and being treated well are luxuries in a marketplace that is trying to be efficient. Anything that interferes with the flow of money from the consumer to the vendor is a market inefficiency. That means anything less than a hard sell without any service or courtesy is inefficient, to the market. In a “free” market, these luxuries would be even more quickly sequestered away from even the above average consumer to an ever increasingly rarified demographic.
The only freedom in a “free” market is an anarchy of unfettered, frictionless power and privilege. That may not bother those that are already able to exert their ever increasing power in the market, or those that think it is in their best interest to support the regime of hegemony. However, it should be something that sends chills along the spine of anyone with a conscience or a believer in the attempt to acheive equality and justice.
And, this does not even start to talk about what would happen in a “free” market to the environment or long term stability and sustainability. Externalizing machines would be the accelerating death of health and safety, not to mention everything previously mentioned.
For a greater quality of life for everyone, there must be controls on the market, but it should be clear that even that is not enough because of the overwhelming power of pursuasion to shape and occult information in the market. In order for a market to be free, it is not enough for the vendors to be unfettered, but the consumers must have freedom as well. The only way for the both the vendors and consumers to be free in a market is for there to be protections against the natural tendency of power to distort and infuence the market, therefore a free market paradoxically requires conditions and controls.
“Today, the public discourse is so clotted and constrained, so limited to the right and far right, that it really is imperative for those of us who object to the direction the country is going to speak out, strongly and often. Not because we all deserve a prominent media role but rather in the hopes that eventually the media will be forced to broaden its coverage of political opinion to acknowledge voices like ours.”
Very well said.
Reminds me of something that has stayed with me, said by civil rights activist Jack O’Dell, “[Protest has] got to be organized or it’s meaningless. We can’t become private revolutionaries. Private revolution only effects you.”
“After dissapointing movie ticket sales, it seemed that Joss Whedon’s Serenity would en up as a failure in the books. Think again. Over 2 million DVDs sold, plus rentals and TV rights add up to more than $60 million. Could this convince Universal to get a Special Edition out? or even a sequel?”
Certainly, there’s an HD-DVD version scheduled as well, so the story is not over on that account. I do not know if there are features to the HD version that are not in the already released DVD. However, this is certainly good news.
Anti-Globalization movement is to supporters of Globalization what anti-federalists were to the federalists. Which is a s much to say that things are not what they seem.
The anti-Globalization movement is one which is a populist opposition to supporters of Globalization. This is much the same as the anti-federalists were a populist opposition to the federalists. Both the anti-Globalization movement and the anti-federalists consist of a broad, and fractious coalition of interests that align against the narrow economic interests of their opposition.
However, the anti-federalists were actually federalists; the federalists actually nationalists. Further, the anti-Globalization movement is a global and globalization movement; the supporters of Globalization are actually supporters of an elite capitalist concentration of wealth.
If it were not for the loose coalition grouped under the term “anti-federalists” we would not have a Bill of Rights. It is likely that the anti-Globalization movement will have a similar place in history.
I was thinking about the logical typing of “monopoly” where both XY and XZ appear to be X, neither are V. Public and Private entities can appear to be “monopolies” however, they are different magnitudes of X where governments are X prime.
To see public entities to be of the same order, or lesser order, than private entities requires that one presume that everything is a market, that the market is not conditioned and controlled by governments but rather an independent thing.
This presumption is the result of a paradigm shift over whether a government conditions the “market” versus the “market” being an inalienable entity in which governments participate. This is a progression from the developments of early industrial evolution through Adam Smith and culminating with the interpretation of the 14th Amendment as granting corporate personhood, with inalienable rights as individuals participating in current events.
However, the application of the 14th amendment seems incomplete. If corporations are people, then they also must not be owned. Either corporations are property or they are not. If they are people, then they must not be property.
If the corporation is freed from its owners, the collective voice of the body should have self-governance. That means the voice of the collective, comprised of the individuals in the collective, should have self-determination unfettered by ownership. However, if the voice of the body cannot self-determine, then the body must become a ward of the state. Either the collective is self-determined or state-run. I doubt this is a comfortable conclusion for any supporter of corporate personhood because it makes corporate personhood internally inconsistent.
If the government conditions, as guardian, the corporation; this is the same as if the corporation is not a person independent of the state conditioned market. Or, in the alternate, if the people that comprise the body of the corporation are the voice of determination unfettered by ownership, this is the same as if the collective is of many individual voices, not the single voice of an artificial person.
Applying the full standard of the 14th amendment ends corporate personhood, which collapses under internal inconsistency. However, even if this is not the case, that one liberates the corporate person from ownership, then it should be clear that the fruit of a corporation’s labor is being expropriated by the owners in perpetuity, making the corporation an indentured servant to the corporate owners. Again, there is injustice taking place from which the corporation must be freed.
The paradigm shift surrounding the relationship between Governments and private enterprise means that people can use the same words but have different meaning, depending on which side of the shift from which they speak.
There are nominally three types of monopoly: government monopoly, private monopoly and hybrid government endorsed private monopolies. The push to privatize every aspect of the government has been to diminish the number of government monopolies by pushing all activities toward either the private entities or, more often, toward hybrid government-endorsed private entities.
It appears that a government-endorsed private monopoly is a the kind of monstrous hybrid that Jane Jacobs speaks about in The Nature of Economies. Examples of a hybrid here are private entities granted special exclusive rights through the DMCA, patents or copyrights. (Although, there is some interestingnews about these lately.) These special grants, which are not rights themselves but actually the space offered when the collective, represented by the Government, places an easement on its own rights in order to encourage innovation and creation through market compensation.
However, the market, and life, are governed by laws which are the rules developed by a legislature, enforced by an executive and applied by a judiciary. The market is in fact conditioned by governments. So, if the government grants itself exclusive control over providing some service this is not a government monopoly after all. This is the government removing from the marketplace the provision of that service.
This suggests that there are no such thing as government monopolies, only private and hybrid monopolies. Governments do not have monopolies in the market because they determine the scope and conditions of the market.
With apologies to Lincoln, the Government, like Soylent Green, is People! The people take on the responsibility for a service they require when a government takes the provision of a service out of the market. There is complexity here because the government often contracts with private entities for the goods and services that the government itself has taken responsibility. That’s apparently another kind of hybrid enterprise.
At the same time, very often, when the Government takes on the provision of a service, it does not actually exclude the market from also providing that service. This is another way in which a Government may not have a monopoly even when they have exclusive control because the exclusive control of a Government is not in the same domain as the market. They are of different magnitudes.
This does not even take into account the black and gray markets, which are further examples of how the Government may claim exclusive control of a service or good, but cannot stop the market from continuing to trade or provide the same. In fact, when Governments claim a product or service from the market in order to prohibit its use, very often this makes the trade of that good or service increasingly lucrative in the black or gray markets.
However, in a republic or an oligopoly, there is a potential for the Government’s control and conditioning of the market to be captured by special interests. This is also true when expansive hybridization occurs, because those entities with endorsed power in the market can exert government-like powers over others in the market, often without the appropriate public oversight to those powers.
Republics and oligopolies limit the scope the franchise, and therefore concentrate influence and participation in the Government away from the population into the hands of special, in this case economic, interests.
Either the law (which is an extension of a Government’s conditioning on the market and of life) apply to corporations or they do not. If they do, then the Government actions in the market are of a different order of magnitude than those of other entities. In this case, X is not X. Again, this suggests that there are no government monopolies, only private and hybrid monopolies. The law both conditions and protects corporations in the market. If not one then neither.
Just following in the footsteps of George Bush Sr, who was at the NSA table when the decisions about the Contra weapons was made … I’m sure they can trade stories about what they didn’t witness.
“Speaking of homeless people, that reminds me of another rumor somebody told me: allegedly, Seattle was (or possibly still is) operating deals with other cities and regions where they send us their homeless people, along with some money for our trouble.”
I seem to recall that a province in Canada was doing that. I forget if it was into or out of BC, but I remember there was a kerfuffle over that a while ago in the Canadian press. I suppose a google news search would settle that, but I’m offline right now.
“PLAN, or the Progressive Legislative Action Network, has launched. This outfit is being driven in large part by David Sirota and Nathan Newman and is meant to be a legislation incumbator for the states. PLAN’s mission:
Fighting the Conservative Machine. For thirty years, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – a right-wing think tank and legislative network backed by America’s most powerful special interests -has spoon-fed corporate-written, fill-in-the-blanks legislation to conservative legislators interested in carrying water for America’s most notorious companies, like Exxon and Philip Morris. ALEC has been largely unimpeded in its efforts and needs to be stopped.”
This news about PLAN confronting ALEC reminds me of something I heard recently. Apparently, there’s a group going head-to-head with the ALCU, on the case over the ban on partial birth abortion, called the ACLJ, which clearly indicates an intent to position a group in opposition. This seems like the early moves in a chess game where each side takes positions to block the other …
Are these moves the opening gambit in a game that will result in an actual division between the factions of the corporate parties? There’s always hope.
“So listen, next step is to get as many more people (not repeat persons, but new people) to comment AND I just found out that the more people who link to me, the better chance I have to get sponsors-and when I do I will make NEW cartoons for you! I have more crap to show you, so as soon as I hit 400 comments…”
John Kriscfalusi, the artist behind Ren & Stimpy, is discovering the power of popularity on the Internet. His blog was linked at Boing Boing on the 15th, and elsewhere on the ‘net, and he’s been surprised by his reception, apparently.
The amount of traffic necessary to make direct marketing between the producer and consumer is significantly less than when there is a oligonomy determining the prices offered to producers and costs to consumers between them and filtering projects out which have significant appeal to the long tail.
This is the spring from which hope flows for the future of popular properties that the media conglomerates do not support, such as Firefly and Dead Like Me, to name only two that have been significant to me recently.
On the cusp, where projects like Rocket Boom meet the public demand and are rewarded, of a new world of media. The print revolution put democratized the transmission of knowledge. The computer democratized publishing. The Internet has been trying very hard to democratize radio, television and cinema. Internet radio failed to survive the legal onslaught of major media, once they awoke to the fight. I wait with baited breathe to see if podcasting will survive being co-opted by major media. Although it is not completely out of the woods yet. It does seem there are new platforms for distributionand creation almost daily. Perhaps the next step will manage some kind of victory.
This pattern of democratization brings to mind the democratization of virtual space, such as the place of MMORPGs in increasingly player-driven games. I’ve been thinking about all the waves that have attempted to provide a topology to the virtual world, and just a little while ago I thought to include the MMORPGs in this. These virtual spaces have routes and sights and crossroads wherein many of the activities of socialization occur, but bound by a geography.
On a lark, I checked Zhonka’s website and learned something I did not realize:
Founded and managed by experienced Internet pioneers from OlyWa.net …
I had mentioned OlyWA in previous posting in relation to smaller ISPs being purchased by telecoms, in this case OlyWa purchased by ATG. So, now it turns out that at least some of the OlyWa people have moved on. Also, the OlyWa website now goes to a 404 at ATG/Eschelon.
It’s interesting to go back and check on old players. I used to check every once in a while on old players like Spry and others, but slowed down when things got boring. However, here’s proof that there’s still some entertainment to be had in spotting the changes to the old guard.
As an aside, I notice that on the bottom of the Zhonka page is the following:
“As per RCW 19.190.40, it is a punishable offense to send unsolicited e-mail to Washington state addresses.”
Which is a statement that I find specific to a certain generation of Internet savvy people in Washington state. It’s something I added to the bottom of my page back in the day, and still retain there.
I enjoyed “Waking Life” and was excited to learn that Linklatter was doing another movie in the same style, and more excited when I heard, many moons ago, that it was going to be an adaptation of “A Scanner Darkly” that wasn’t a silly slasher movie. Now, I’m even more excited to see the trailer. [QT MOV link]
Although, I have to be honest. I would rather see exploding lamb’s guts (which, for the younger me was the biggest reason to see the old adaptation of the story, though I was not allowed to go.) than watch Keanu Reaves … but I will try to keep my lunch down for this movie.
“A recent study suggests that unattractive individuals commit more crime than people who are average or good looking.”
Is that more likely to commit crime, or more likely to be caught and result in being punished instead of let off? Not having read the study, I am suspicious of whether there is a hidden function of privilege in the reporting of crime, where some are let off more than others. Also, privilege means being able to bend the rules in ways that are not reported as crimes in the first place, although still technically not by the book.
Indeed, I have been thinking of using a system where, to use terminology from these new discussions, my categories are facets to which tags are associated. My current system is one of all tags are categories, and visa versa, with a subtle hierarchy offered by the ability to make some categories parents of other in Wordpress.
However, if the categories were facets, and then, perhaps, all tags were stored as keywords I would have the ability to collect posts but also have freeform tags, without the creep of so many categories.
The problem with giving authority over hierarchy to a wiki is that it becomes just another external authoritative schema. The only way to stay with the spirit of tags is to allow users to provide, on the fly and as they will, the relationship between tags. If there were a useful way to specify that a tag has some relationship to other tags …
For example, if one could offer a list in, something like, PREV to tags that are more general terms and, something like, NEXT to tags that are more specific, there would be utility and folksonomic wisdom in that. This would continue to allow the dynamic to determine the relationships, instead of a more static schema. Certainly, this could be reported on programatically, just as tags are now. Imagine a DMOZ like directory that is dynamically rendered from a folksonomic understanding of tag relationships.
This is about how to create a thesaurus. How can a tag be represented as having a relationship to other tags on the fly by the end-user, instead of via a schema? This is not a simple issue. There is a MARC format used to record various classification schemes, for example, MARC Classification which addresses the issue of Tracings and References.
Relationships include See From, See Instead, See Also, Broader Topic, Narrower Topic …
My preference, when thinking about implementing classification schema is to offer a thesaurus of relationships, but also include a freeform field in which a user can characterize the relationship.
Perhaps the folksonomic way of handing this is to offer only the freeform. A field which offers to complete a sentence between two tags could be very useful. For example, “X is similar to Y” where X and Y are two otherwise arbitrary tags and “is similar to” becomes the statement of relationship.
Another option would be simply to artificially promote facets as special tags which contain other tags. Meaning that one simply takes some tags to be more important than the others, an artificial two-layer hierarchy, but ultimately that seems to be just the beginning of a slippery slide.
Why not let go of defining the thesaurus in the same way that tags have been liberated?
Every author’s domain of tags is potentially distinct from all others, though functionally there are more convergences that divergences, and that domain may shift over time for even the same author, as tags develop new and altered meanings to the author over time. So, to extend this logic, each author has the potential to have their own, and should be assumed to have, their own classification scheme, and perhaps many schema, especially over time.
Update: Here’s a link to an implementation of a radial browser that allows one to explore data in the CIA worldbook. The more important element is that the radial lines have smaller spheres which express the nature of the relationship between the nodes. This is an interesting programatic way of representing classification data. This is a really simple, elegant demonstration.
