Hannah Nicklin

An Open Letter to Peter Mandelson

Hannah Nicklin
@hannahnicklin
hannahnicklin.com

28^th October 2009

Dear Peter Mandelson,

I am writing to you regarding the #3strikes internet piracy legislation that you have recently confirmed.

I am involved in both the sectors of which you are taking such a damaging interest in, and although I don’t have the money to lobby on the same level as the music industry, I speak to you now as an investor. As an investor in the online world.

The analogue world is fleshy, simultaneously both tactile and ineffable. This is why we can invent concepts like money – you can hold on to it, and it can also be represented on pieces of paper, can change in value without changing in essence. The online world, on the other hand, is built on definite points, and logic. Oh it can contain the ineffable, just as infinity can be expressed as a value, but it’s built on single points, on values. If there is an online economy, its currency is information. And if we participate in online worlds, we are investing our information, our content in that world.

So I speak to you now, as an investor. I am a member of both the arts industry, and the online world. I work with arts companies on their online involvement, I blog opinion pieces and engage with politics and ethics, I write plays, and I am also researching art and digital technology. I may not be a big player, but I have a vested interest in online spaces that I participate in. I have a right to talk about how my share in these worlds is treated.

Despite the fact that your very own in depth Digital Britain report released in June 09 ruled out cutting off P2P sharers (“The most draconian penalty considered at the time was to slow down a persistent filesharer’s broadband connection”. Source) You continue to attempt to enforce a strategy that is at best foolish, and at worst illegal.

If, as you maintain, there are 7 million illegal files sharers in the UK, you must consider that you cannot cut off 7 million people’s internet connections without due process of law. It’s perfectly easy to piggy back on unsecured wireless connections, just as it is possible that a connection is shared by a building, a family, a business. Furthermore, are you proposing to process each illegal filesharer through the justice system? (And at the cost of the taxpayer – “Her Majesty’s Court System currently holds 200,000 criminal cases per year” source – how is it going to deal with millions)? Or are advocating a form of marshal law, where ISPs are sheriffs, and users are guilty until proven innocent?

Disconnecting people from the internet does not fully comply with EU legislation. In fact it directly contravenes EU legislation. I am referring to amendment 138/46 which [...] declared that access to the internet was a fundamental human right. source

You seem to be so eager for the Royal Mail to modernise, I wonder why you don’t see it equally as important for the music industry to do so?

I’d like to believe that the U-turn after the digital Britain report had nothing to do with your meeting meeting with one of the most powerful figures in the British music business, Lucian Grainge, the chairman of Universal Music – Source, soon after which you announced your resurrection of the draconian #3strikes, but it’s hard to understand why else you have decided to make this fallacious decision. And fallacious it is, the figures bandied about are bolstered by false accounting for losses to the creative industries, and even aside from the exaggerated and erroneous figures involved in the headlines (see Ben Goldacre’s excellent blog post for more) their maths is flawed at the point they assume every download is a lost sale.

Copyright was originally brought about in 1709 to “encourage the creation of artistic works by granting a right to copy for 14 years.” It now stands between 50 and 95 years Source. Its aim was to encourage a profession. I am not arguing for an artistic community that consists solely of amateurs, I understand, boy do I understand that artists need to be paid. But being paid is not the ends for which art is made, it is the encouragement. The leveller. Not the stick with which to beat the consumer. Continue reading…

The Cracks Between the Worlds

Situationist Space, and Pervasive Gaming

In scattered and barely noticed ways, the desire to construct one’s own life was shaping the twentieth century p.10

Those who have been following my tweets over the past two weeks are so will have seen that one of the places I’ve started reading for my PhD is contemporary philosophy. Now there’s a degree to which you could argue philosophy has nothing to do with the advent of technology and the arts. And that’s the degree to which you’d be wrong. Philosophy takes a step back from the world, from society, and looks at what it is to be. It is the science of thought, it brought us into the age of enlightenment, it showed us why we felt empty after religion became irrelevant and it shows us how we’ve tried to fill that gap. The two main movements I’m looking at to kick off with are the situationists, and phenomenology. One looks at the reclamation of physical space from the spectacle of advance capitalism, and the other attempts to form a science of subjective realities.

OK, it may not be sounding strictly relevant yet.

I believe in 3D thought – I think that theory is nothing without practice, and also, that practice is nothing if not situated – to some degree, within theory. I don’t necessarily mean the dry theory of academia, anything, even art for arts sake is situated in theory – in thought – by design. I’m going to look at the situationists here, because they have everything to do with an event I’m attending tomorrow – a city wide pervasive gaming event held by Hide&Seek.

The situationists came out of nothing. Literally. They developed out of Dadaism, which, in reaction to the horror of the world wars, made art out of nothing, and nothing out of art. Dada had seen life treated as nothing, the situationists had seen the beginning of this nothing being replaced with a bigger, newer, shinier absence: consumerism.

If society is organized around consumption, one participates in social life as a consumer; the spectacle produces spectators, and thus protects itself from questioning. It induces passivity rather than action, contemplation rather than thinking, and a degradation of life into materialism. […] Desires are degraded or displaced into needs and maintained as needs. p.8

The situationists talk about a life built on spectacle, a virtual world built of everything we’re told we should think, say and feel. It’s not just the tools of consumerism such as “advertising, or propaganda, or television. It is a world. The spectacle as we experience it, but fail to perceive it, “it is not a collection of images, but a social relationship between people, mediated by images”” p.9

Our society is dominated by the spectacle- by the spin of modern politics, by the narrative of modern life, by the dreams we’re given and happily ever afters we’re taught to crave. The situationists saw this. But they also saw that we are united.

Foreclosing the construction of one’s own life, advanced capitalism had made almost everyone a member of a new proletariat, and thus a potential revolutionary. p.11

The solution? The reclamation of our world, the subversion of the spaces dominated by narratives not of our own making. They suggested two modes of change: the dérive, and détournement. Continue reading…

Two New Plays.

Hurrah for a less didactic blog post!

Yup, this is a (shock-horror) creative update.

It seems like while since I’ve spoken about my creative writing, and this is mainly because I’ve been working on one particular thing, and wasn’t certain I had the go-ahead to talk about it. But I definitely have that now, so here goes.

I handed in the first draft for my first ever proper commission this Monday. It’s going to be part of a showcase of new writing, of 4-6, 15 minute newly commissioned pieces called Word:Play, and produced by the excellent (well yes I would say that, but I genuinely do think they are excellent) Box of Tricks Theatre Company. The pieces are all written in response to a single word, and the word for this Word:Play is obsession.

Here’s what I’ve been writing:

AWAKE

Awake is a monologue for two voices- the play happens somewhere between real and not, focussing on the relationship between avatar and identity. J0n thinks he is real, but he is Flo’s avatar. Flo has been playing an MMORPG until passing out from dehydration. She awakes, and meets J0n, finding herself in what appears to be a kind of digital limbo. The meeting is initially an affable (if confused) one, but as it emerges that only one of them can leave the space it becomes a fight for survival. Flo is dying, and to survive, J0n has to convince her life is worth living.

There have been several deaths and child-neglect cases related to MMORGS over the past 3 or 4 years. This short piece explores the identity politics, obsessive personalities, perfectionism, and the revisionism/escapism involved in the hardcore gaming community. It asks why people want so much to disappear from ‘our’ world, questioning how much we invest in our online/virtual presences, and how real our online personas are. The place in which the two characters are trapped could be some kind of digital limbo, but it could also be Florence’s mind. In this space J0n is realer than he has ever been, and Florence is dying. It becomes clear that Florence has a choice to make – between her obsession, and her life. What does she really have to go back to?

The first draft went… well it went the way of most first drafts do for me, it felt like my brain was bleeding. But I got it done, and in time. There’s a lot to work on – in character, and my ideas about the universe of the play etc. But the first step is there, and (considering how time is flying at the moment) it won’t be long until I have my first fully kitted out production (this Winter, probably in the new year, in London).

In other writing news Scary Little Girls Productions have offered me full a weekend in November to workshop Eismas (PDF), the first draft of which they seem really interested in, possibly for presentation in London just before or after Christmas. This is bloody excellent news, as I really do need a proper actor/director reading of that piece to love and hate it enough again to redraft. Plus to get it in front of an audience, to get them asking questions and poking holes would be very useful. Spec-fic theatre is still quite a rare thing, so in a lot of ways I’m writing into the unknown – I seriously appreciate feedback and debate about my writing, for me, theatre should be a testing ground as much as it should present polished ideas. So yes, here’s to general excitement.

And finally, in shamless-plug fashion, do check out the latest shows from both Box of Tricks and Scary Little Girls.

I’m not kidding, do it.