Hannah Nicklin

Dinosaurs Will Die

Image by Stéfan, shared via a Creative Commons licence

Cards on the table, music means a lot to me. It’s scored many critical moments of my life so far, and papered over the cracks in the boring bits. Music has brought me back from the edge, when I felt like my brain was going to leap out of my head, music has set me far freer than alcohol ever has, whisky helps, but give me a dirty rock club, heat, smoke, lights and I will dance until I can’t breathe, until I feel like I could disappear.

For every heart break, there’s a song that goes with it, for every break up, an album you have to reclaim, for every beautiful moment, a piece of music. Music is reciprocal, it’s shared, it brings people together, it makes moments, and it is inspired by them. It is an essential form that talks to us of the universal; rhythm scores our lives, all life.

I like music, you get that. But I would have heard none of the tracks above had it not been for file-sharing. I am not poor, not in real terms, I have a roof over my head, food in the fridge, an education. But my food budget for the past two years was something between £7.50 and £10 a week, I have roughly zero disposable income. I download files. Illegally. So does almost everyone I know. If you took that music away from me, you’d be taking away the thickness of experience. You’d be halving the substance of my memories.

This is a blog in reaction to Peter Mandleson’s threat to cut off internet access to persistent file-sharers.  There are two questions here; one is it legal, two, is it useful?

Despite the fact that the 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) Peter Mandleson has since announced a new plan that

Calls for the secretary of state to be given the power to direct the communications regulator Ofcom to implement technical measures against illegal peer-to-peer filesharing. Source

So, is it legal? There’s quite a strong argument against these measures in terms of them being unenforceable – you cannot cut off 7 million people’s internet connections without due process of law. (I shouldn’t have to say this but) you cannot assume guilt; 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. Is Mandleson 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 is he advocating a form of marshal law, where ISPs are sheriffs, and users are guilty until proven innocent?

The second argument against the idea is that it actually directly contravenes our human rights under EU legislation:

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

The action also contravenes what was pretty much the whole conclusion of the Digital Britain report: that broadband internet access was a right, not a privilege.

These actions 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.

It’s all beginning to sound a bit desperate isn’t it?

Whitehall insiders believe the U-turn is more likely to have been caused by a prior meeting with one of the most powerful figures in the British music business, Lucian Grainge, the chairman of Universal Music – Source

Do you know what might save you a lot of money Universal? How about pulling out of all of those lawsuits, cutting down on those very finely paid lawyers of yours. A shiny penny to anyone who can set Universal Music Group’s legal costs against their projected losses to file sharing.

What we are seeing here, is the end of one type of business: the physical distribution of digital products. Source

These movements against progress are nothing less than the death throes of a nasty, parasitic part of a very worthy industry. They are not useful.

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.

Culture is not only enjoyable, it is vital to us as a species, culture frames our existence; it helps us reflect of our selves, it asks big questions. Culture was also vital to our evolution, the ability to tell stories- to imagine differing outcomes was key to our growth– we teach out young using stories, cautionary tales and nursery rhymes. Our cultural heritage is open source, peer to peer, shared. See ballads, fairy tales, myths, legends, and performance like commedia dell’arte (its latter day incarnation is pantomime, but it used to be free to view political satire, kind of like a Spitting Image road show). The ownership of stories (told visually, actively, aurally) have changed since then, with the advent of a market economy, came patronage, and then a global capitalist system decided that not only did it want to own our stories, it wanted to sell them to us too. Distribution. But now the system is changing again.

The great chaotic utopia envisaged by some online evangelists would be culturally impoverished – a world that would create millions of buskers, but no Beatles. Source

I, and many of my peers are not calling for an end to the creative industries, we’re calling for changes to a very specific aspect of them – distribution. I’m not talking about some ‘choatic utopia’, what I am saying is the way that we consume is changing. Myspace, and Spotify have already changed the way that that we access music, and that artist distribute their wares. Youtube allows anyone with a camera and a computer to have their say. The Age of Stupid crowd-sourced the complete £450K production budget and are pioneering a system that allows anyone to buy a licence to screen it whenever and wherever they like – keeping the profits for themselves or their climate campaign.

Here’s a theory:

The world of ideas is changing, the news is becoming mutual, Obama’s politics was mutual- not driven by spin, broadcast control and brand [...] It’s all about the pull [...] Think pirates. Think mavericks, think renegades. They will re-form our world, they can tell us what the future might look like. It’s critical that artists are engaged with the digital world, not for marketing, but to ask difficult, big questions of it – Charles Leadbeater @wethink at Shift Happens

Here’s an industry perspective:

The majority of my audiences watch my films over the BitTorrent system, a system so revolutionarily brilliant that it means I, an independent film-maker, can distribute a film in full High Definition to hundreds of millions of viewers with absolutely no cost incurred to me – Monaghan Media source

And that of a consumer

Now, I muster all the spare cash I have to pay for an internet connection, and go to gigs as often as possible. I tell my mates (and a bunch of strangers on the interweb) about all the new bands I’ve heard of, and encourage them to see them live. So, I’m paying for the music I like, I’m paying the costs of distributing it, and I’m promoting it source

P2P filesharing is revolutionary, it’s zero cost, close to zero in carbon emissions (servers), it runs on recommendations. It is another shift to the ‘pull’ ethic of the digital world. In a hyper-connected, information heavy existence, you cannot deliver neatly packaged tales of what we should buy and how we should be, because there are a million other voices that will simultaneously disagree. People taped music from CDs and radio before now, that’s been going on for years, what really scares the Powers That Be is the peer – peer review, peer sharing. Theirs is no longer dominant voice, we’re building our own stories.

I believe that cutting off filesharing is fundamentally unfair, fundamentally unjust – and penalises the young, and the less well off.

Yes artists need to make a living, but hierarchical distribution is not the only way to do that. Radiohead released their album In Rainbows allowing people to pay ‘what they thought it was worth’, you could pay as little as 1p for it. The average paid was around $6 (source). They also very recently gave away a song for free. In a world where everyone is vying for your attention a loyal fan base matters more than ever, you cultivate that through trust, interaction and recommendation.

Ben Walker, (the man who did the Twitter song [and much else besides]) suggests that “when it’s so easy to make and share music, you’d be an unpopular person if you charged for music.”

Copyright has evolved, we now have Creative Commons, and likewise we can find new models from which artists can make a living, offering “goods that are infinitely duplicated (music) for free and tying them to scarce goods (vinyl records, t-shirts, collector’s items etc.)” source, is one method, Likewise we are never going to be able to duplicate the  singular experience of seeing a performance live, people still pay for that. Artists will still make a living, what digital distribution demolishes is the hierarchy – superstars and massive profit margins.

Johnathan Phan, of Pirate Party UK suggests that

Whereas earlier we had [one] artist making 10 million, we now have a hundred people making 1 million. source

It is not useful for Peter Mandleson to be attempting to tackle file-sharing. What he should be doing, as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, is using the Digital Britain report to offer big business a manual to the digital world, if they want to survive, they have to evolve, Mandleson is doing the country a disservice when he panders to their childish cries to stem the tide of change.

Our world is slowly realising that unrelenting growth is not a sustainable model, in economics, in the environment, in our populace. Unfortunately this message takes the longest to reach the people at the top. What’s the answer? Support artists, not labels. Go to gigs, love music, share your love with others.

And if anyone tries to prosecute you for sharing torrents, show them the Pirate Google, and tell them to fuck off.

The Information Economy

My morning routine: wake up (about 11ish, I’m freelance, I can do that), put on glasses, pick up iPhone. From there I check and flag my emails and read through the morning’s tweets, favouriting anything of interest to look through. If anything looks particularly big I’ll grab my netbook and have a look. Then I get out of bed. This is now my equivalent of reading the morning paper. How and when we access information has changed, and this is almost entirely down to technology. The internet is built on information. 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 may not be a big player, and I sit in a strange place between tech and the arts world, 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. And I want to talk to you now, about Facebook. Unless you live entirely in the analogue world, you will have heard that yesterday Facebook, after having ‘borrowed’ most of FriendFeed’s most interesting innovations, decided to finally put them on the payroll. The reaction to this from the FriendFeed community can be summed up in this video. Not good. And then today comes the news that Facebook are developing a suspiciously Twitter like ‘facebook lite’ which Mashable calls  “Very stripped down, very basic, very reminiscent of Twitter and FriendFeed”, suggesting that

Speculation says it’s a direct assault on Twitter. Facebook continues to find ways to make itself competitive with Twitter. This is why Facebook has been launching features such as public profiles, profile fans, public status updates, and realtime search. Twitter is simple, so Facebook’s fighting back with the same. Source

Now I’m going to lay my cards on the table. I seriously hate Facebook. Facebook is dull. It is flabby, and it is based on what you look like and who you know, before it’s about what you have to say. But you cannot deny that it does what it was supposed to do – it connects people who already know each other, and lets them share their lives. This, I think is some of the reason why it feels like a stale form, because it’s built to contain communities, not to develop them. However, imposing other (open) forms (like twitter) on a foundation built for a specific (closed) one will only result in poorly executed systems.

You can force a square peg through a round hole, but neither will work quite right when you’ve finished.

Facebook are clearly trying to corner the status/simplicity model of Twitter. And why shouldn’t they? Twitter is popular, their tens of millions may not seem like much to the hundreds of millions of facebook users, but it’s still significant. Facebook is operating on a traditional (analogue) business model. They are acting like a Tesco or Walmart in the online world. Microsoft are the ultimate pre-cursors of this, but the key difference is they still operate in tangible products, in a way they have to work within the parameters of RL economics. In these online spaces however, it’s different. In these worlds in which I invest my information,  I have a voice, and I am going to say No. I’ve had enough. Multinational-style models of growth are wrong. They kill innovation, and I’m not OK with that. Fuck, they don’t even work in RL, not even for the companies themselves – unrelenting growth is demonstrably not sustainable, it kills habitats – look at our environment, look at the economy, look at what the supermarkets have done to agriculture and global food supplies.

Maybe Facebook’s new twitalike appearance isn’t going to kill Twitter, but it will suffocate it – it will kill new take-up because Facebook is familiar, and already contains people’s friends.

Of course you could argue that this is not the end of the world, and that there will always be something new and innovative on the horizon, but what this represents is something much more dangerous: monetisation. Applying analogue models to digital worlds.

I shouldn’t hate words, it’s not their fault, but ‘monetise’ makes me retch. When applied to social media you are basically asking ‘how do we turn these people’s lives and words into money’. This is not how the online world(s) are geared. Profit kills them because it requires proof, it requires return, and it measures return in money, not information. The digital world(s) change so often, and so fast that no one is an expert, people are always learning, there isn’t time to measure, but it works because the open-source ethic means that things are tirelessly tested and improved by lots of people who work for the purest information, the best code; truth, not profit.

You need the truth seekers. You need the passion of the underdog. You need people who sit in their rooms and code until they feel like their eyes are bleeding. You need the Next Big Thing. Because the internet trades in ideas, in information. The more varied an environment, the more varied its output.

Groupthink is a recognised symptom of homogenous environments. If the only way for a developer starting out is to work within one form, if they are only going to produce useful work with the Facebook API, or if Facebook headhunts all of the best ideas, there won’t be room for new ones to flourish in their own terms, and this will suffocate our ideas, and it will own our information.

This finds its simplest expression in Facebook’s highly questionable and opaque privacy settings. Here’s a choice extract:

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”).

We should not have to ‘opt-out’ of their owning our content. And what now becomes of the information posted to FriendFeed? Do Facebook now own it? Should there have been a new license of terms offered by FriendFeed after the take-over? This is no longer money we’re talking about, this is people’s ideas that companies are trying to monopolise.

But the thing is, we are all shareholders here, and we have a say. The internet provides us all with a platform, it allows us to amplify ourselves, and it allows us to work together in ways not possible even a few years ago. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling online worlds utopian, they show us the worst as well as the best of us. But they show us a collective – built out of nodes – but connected. We live in a global village. Share, attribute, contribute. Group-ownership. This is the ethic of the open source movement. Together we can oppose analogue ways of operating, how? By innovating. By always thinking, by recognising tired forms, and by forever learning.

So I’m dedicating this to all start-ups, all coders, all ideas people, all early adopters, and everyone who picks things up to see how they work:

Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Fight.

A Tuesday Afternoon Rant

So this is the second day I’ve taken my finest feminist troll food out the cupboard and wandered over to the Tory enclosure. My first outing wasn’t too bad, my second however, not so fun, and I got so ranty that I forgot to cut out the beginning bit which I was responding to so it looks like I’m agreeing in an odd echo-y way in the comment section of this blog post.

What I really mean to say:

>>>“Government is not and must not simply reflect society. To even suggest that it should is simply moronic.”

I’m sorry, I don’t know if you’ve seen, I think your moron is showing.

>>>“I don’t need representating [sic] because of my gender, sexuality, ethinicity [sic], or anything else like that”

UM IS THAT BECAUSE YOU ALREADY ARE???

>>>“ Whether they’re male or female, straight or gay, whatever the color of their skin doesn’t matter. It’s entirely immaterial.”

If it is, then why are you complaining?

This is an argument we hear again and again. ‘oh but equal representation should never come at the expense of ability’. Ability, ability, fuck ability. More accurately: fuck your definition of ability which assumes it is in opposition to better representation of women (and BME) in positions of power.

I do think the way Harman’s language has been portrayed (READ: taken out of context) presents an unhelpful argument, both men and women are entirely capable of running things on their own, the point is that a government that seeks to represent a people should be representative of those people. Why? Because a government can and should not make decisions for an electorate that it does not understand. That does mean roughly 52% women, that does mean BME men and women. Of course in an ideal world you cannot and should not have to manufacture that balance – in a true meritocracy it would not be necessary. But the fact is that even if men are judged solely on their merit – women most certainly aren’t. Women who are just as worthy, intelligent, hard working and talented as men are throughout their careers not taken as seriously, in their ability, their commitment.

Jaqcui Smith’s first major speech on terrorism as Home Secretary was covered not as it should have been – as an attack on civil liberties to ward off one of the least of the dangers of our modern world – but rather on the cut of her top and the size of her tits. While these attitudes exist women will continue to be taken less seriously than men, and as thus you cannot say that women will be judged fairly on their ‘ability’ next to men.

It’s not elitist to say “I want to best people for the job to do the job”. But it is FUCKING SEXIST to assume that this precludes the equal involvement of women in government. It is a patriarchal society’s judgment of ‘ability’ which has heretofore been applied. A world where no matter what sense comes out of a woman’s mouth it is her looks, the cut of her clothes, and the man she stands next to which counts. This world where women are taken less seriously impairs them at every step – in education, in employment, in promotion, in experience. You cannot judge ability truly in an unequal context.
This is not a simple problem, and to tackle it once and for all there would need to be a massive societal sea change in how women are seen in the public and private eye. How likely is that? If it is achievable it will take years, it involves tackling the UK’s approach to family care, to female power, to objectification, and an address to the media, it needs a grassroots approach that encourages people to see that politics is real, alive, and relevant, not just the dour (largely male) faces they see droning on their television screens. It means a redefinition of core values, such as how we (as a society) fetishise ‘family’ (see this rant) It means that young boys and girls are taught that there is no such thing as a ‘boy’ toy or a ‘girl’ toy, that boys can cry and girls can play with cars. That boys can read books and girls can build mechano sets. Let’s say that happens, and let’s say, realistically speaking, that it takes about 3 lifetimes. roughly 225 years. (According to the 2008 Sex and Power EHRC report “A snail could crawl the entire length of the Great Wall of China in 212 years, just slightly longer than the 200 years it will take for women to be equally represented in Parliament.” – SOURCE) That is what we need to do before we can even begin to talk about ability. And how is that even to come about if there aren’t women in positions of power – who really understand the problems and barriers involved- working to make it happen?

I think all female and BME shortlists are necessary. I think that we need to use every means possible to get women and BME people into parliament. And I would argue that in any situation. YES EVEN IF WE LIVED IN A FUCKING MATRIARCHY AND WOMEN RAN THE WORLD.

One of the problems of privilege- of any kind, male, white, class – is that the nature of privilege means that it is something that is natural to you, it’s hard to understand and see that others are not. All female (or all BME) shortlists are not a perfect solution, but I fail to see how else we work for the better good. We live in an imperfect world, where often the choice has to be the ‘least bad’ for all involved. I think that getting more BME and women into parliament requires several different approaches, but I do think that all-female shortlists are one of them. They were all male by law up until 1945, it’s time we redressed the balance. Sooner rather than later.

PennyRed puts it really well  here:

“You may feel powerless, but equality agitators aren’t the reason for your lack of power. We aren’t the problem here. We took nothing from you – well, actually, we took one thing, and one thing only, and we’re still in the process of taking it: the right of people who are white, or male, or rich, or straight, in any combination, to gain preferment over and to expect to enjoy a better and safer life than people who are not. And yes, the fact that we stepped up and demanded that right back slightly decreases the average white man’s chance at a top job, decreases the average white man’s automatic right to status and power and respect, if suddenly he is competing against not only his own race, class and gender but all the others as well in a capitalist world where status and respect are finite. In short, we’ve taken nothing you actually needed.

Now, you may think that you NEEDED those things, those free passes to the top, that unspoken advantage over women and minorities, to get the good things in life. But trust me, you didn’t. I have met a great deal of white men and loved some of them very deeply: white men have the same potential as everyone else to prove themselves without the advantage of unfair selection which currently – still! – is weighted in their favour in almost every sector of work and citizenship. Trust me. You don’t NEED your privilege. Not half as much as we all need a fairer world.

Reducing unfair advantage is not the same as prejudice. Just because something inconveniences you doesn’t mean it’s about you.”
I urge you to read the rest of that piece, which puts my point far more eloquently.

Finally, if you want teh proofs: recent research by the Anita Borg Institute has found a correlation between the presence of women in higher management and financial performance of the organization, as measured to total return to shareholders and return on equity (ABIWT, 2009) Likewise “social scientists have long posited that groups that are too homogeneous were likely to suffer from “group think” and make worse decisions.” (ABIWT, 2007) DIVERSITY DIRECTLY BENEFITS A WORK ENVIRONMENT.

I think if we didn’t have a lazy right wing media that practically breathes male-privilege (IE, if the media actually addressed men as well as women, there wouldn’t be a need for the pathetic ‘women’s sections’) making a big deal about this whole ‘politically correct’ non-story they could be seen for what they are – an honest, though less-than-perfect attempt to redress imbalance. (by-the-by I think the media characterises shifts away from prejudice as ‘PC’ because they’re reminiscing about the days when they sold papers and when the Tory Party ran slogans like ‘if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’ (1964))

I’m not asking you to apologise for your gender, nor for the privilege into which you were lucky to be born. But you should recognise that things are not OK and that while removing privilege can make people feel disadvantaged, it isn’t disadvantage, it’s the removal of unfair advantage, and it is necessary.

Posted via email from hannahnicklin’s posterous