Behold! The video of The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You. It’s also on the updated site which contains some choice quotes from participants too.

I thought it would be good to reflect on the process of putting together #rainreminds in a slightly structured manner, as it could be a useful case study in successfully putting together and marketing an event, almost solely online, in a very short amount of time (two weeks). So here we go, headings and everything:

The provocation:

‘We have 100 umbrellas, and a finishing slot in the (pervasive gaming and interactive arts) Hazard MMX festival. We want to do something like a flashmob, we need good pictures.’

This is what I was given to begin with from Larkin’ About and the Green Room, Manchester. The requirements were something impactful in the city, interactive, that involved group action, and good photo opportunities. Having just completed http://walkwith.tumblr.com , the opportunity to work simultaneously with a number of participants was a good next step, so I suggested a soundwalk for up to 100 people. Duncan Speakman’s subtlemobs are the closest to what I was thinking of. The umbrellas led me to ideas and significance of rain that I’d been developing with Walk With Me – the idea of how we used to need rain to make things grow led me also to the idea of spaces like Picadilly Gardens, and how we inhabit these transient spaces differently when young. Then I thought of kissing in the rain, and how it’s quite a ‘young’ relationship thing to do. (as one of the stories I went on to collect put it: “As we get older we tend to get a bit more pragmatic. Instead of lingering on wet pavements, enjoying a romantic embrace, we are more likely to head for the warm and the dry, where we can get on with the more urgent act of fucking.”) So I went and started making.

The process – making and marketing.

I started out by having these as two headings, but really, for the most part, they were one and the same. The very first sniff of the piece in public, was also me testing out my ideas. It all began with a small twtpoll, which discovered that nearly 60% of people (50 answered) had kissed someone in the pouring rain.

From finding this I decided to try and collect some of these stories, so I set up a tumblr site that allowed anyone to submit to, named or anonymously, stories to be shared under a creative commons license. In approaching a piece done by many I wanted my piece to reflect different kinds of experiences. You can see (and still submit to) the collected stories at http://rainonymy.tumblr.com. This is where I first found the title of the piece, people were able to naturally follow up ‘yes I have kissed someone in the rain’ provoking a memory, by then writing down, and the ideas of kissing in the rain, and story telling were tweeted and blogged far and wide.

Looking at the collected stories, Walk Between The Raindrops leapt out as fitting very well with my creative thoughts so far, and I began to write around that as a central thread, whilst also having in my head the sound/aesthetic of Duncan’s As If It Were the Last Time – with the recorded remembrances that sounded as though they came from an answering machine, from a time passed. The writing thickened up as I found my way through, scored through 3 distinct eras – the first kiss, the first broken heart, and the time when you leave the transient public spaces behind for your owned ones. This mingled with 3 key visual moments in order to provide the photos for the GreenRoom – the opening of umbrellas, a moment of precipice – tip toes and first kisses, and a moment on the bridge, telling a story to a place in which they normally only pass through.

I used the hashtag a little cryptically at first, not quite explaining myself, which garnered a few interested questions, and I think those people were the first to re-tweet when I did disclose what it was all about. Roughly a week before the piece went up I released the site, facebook group, and blogged about the project. The facebook group, here, turned out to be the most useful tool, though I don’t like facebook for day to day communications, for ease of inviting people to and spreading events, this still won – especially because it was a location specific event; Twitter spread the event further and to more people, but facebook spread it more usefully. Flickr provided the CC-remix shared image that went on the site, teaser trail, and facebook group.

Because of the different stories I wanted different voices in the final piece, so using friends all over the country and their smartphones I collated readings of some of the stories – I specifically didn’t prescribe which ones, I wanted people to gravitate to ones they liked, as well as making them better readings, it hopefully also meant furthering a degree of universality. I also crowd-sourced 5 minutes of ambient noise from the exact spot the piece was to happen in Manchester, without having to go there, by putting a call out on Twitter. (Do go and read the credits on http://rainreminds.tumblr.com to see all the lovely people who contributed)

The swap teaser was my ‘final push’ bit of marketing, besides all of the tweets. I sent facebook and twitter the offer of a teaser of excerpt audio in exchange for hitting 30 ‘definitely’ attending on the facebook group. This almost doubled the number of invited people on the group, and gave people a better reason to look at the teaser – it wasn’t something I was pushing, but something they’d won. Not that I was thinking that at the time, I was mostly thinking ‘even I’m bored of hearing about this, how can I make it interesting again?’

With a first rough edit tested on my sound engineer brother, and two artsy friends I headed to Manchester to test it in the space intended, for timings and general atmosphere. It was at this point I discovered my big finale of telling stories to the water, which to account for the rare chance it mightn’t rain, I was directing towards the fountains, was well and truly scuppered by their being turned and fenced off. A hosepipe ban. In MANCHESTER. When they split the Higg’s Boson I bet you a fiver they find Sod’s Law written through it like a microscopic stick of rock.

So that night and the following day I re-recorded a new ending (which actually I think turned out more visually interesting, though which also may have made people a little more nervous of speaking out loud as per the final instruction) and re-edited the tumblr site to include the teaser and the download plus instructions. I sent the facebook reminder and tweets, and retired to the lovely sound of silence, highlights of which were not hearing my own voice on loop.

The happening

The event came up at the end of the day, and a very healthy turn out of about 35 people arrived with furled white Green Room umbrellas. Most had the mp3 downloaded and were ready to play, about a 15% had heard about it on the day or were stewards/others who had heard about it as a flashmob only, and grabbed an umbrella to join in. If my next piece offers more of a budget, 10 £5 mp3 players for accessibility and walk-ups will be a must. The piece went ahead, about half the people seem to follow it as I had intended (‘intending’ may have been a mistake) a quarter might have been expecting something else, and played a bit more (no less a valid reaction!) and the other quarter had no track so were a bit bemused by the lack of action, or were sharing headphones (missing the left and right ear specific bits! Lesson learnt on that one). The key visual moments came together beautifully, and the reaction of the crowd was brilliant – “I tell you, they’re recording an episode of Dr Who or something!”

The feedback:

Timings were an issue when there were more people, what worked for me on my own, when I know what I’m doing and where I’m going, will less so for a group of people new to it and nervously checking if everyone else is moving too. In situations where there is no discernable leader, group action is more hesitant. Syncing everyone up is still problematic too. I thought a single air horn blast would fix the issues with mistimed watches that I’ve encountered with other pieces, but it didn’t, and it also meant that people clumped a little too much to begin with. The pictures and video look good though, there was a real buzz and audience as the piece culminated, and Larkin’ About and Green Room seemed quite pleased.

Here’s some nice things participants said:

“I overheard one of the other participants describing it as one of the most peaceful things they’d ever undergone.” - Sam Evaskitas

“It was a perfect blend of anticipation, mystery, cohesion, anonymity, observation, reminiscence, poignant melancholy, beauty and tranquility.” - a facebook comment

“Some lovely moments of reflection – about our relationship to transient, ambient ‘non-spaces’, especially as we grow older” @thederminator

Also someone called my voice ‘narcotic‘. I think that’s nice. I’m not sure.

My thoughts

You can’t predict people, you can guide them; with audience centric work, testing is key. Always add on a bit more time than you think. Find a better way to describe what a soundwalk/flashmob cross is. Find a better way of beginning things. Supply mp3 players on the day wherever possible. People are nice, and generally open to new things as long as you support them. Part of supporting them is not letting the track get ahead of them. People are awesome at telling other people about things if it is intriguing, if they like you, if they get some value out of it, or if they have put some value into it.

Want to listen to it? Right click, save as: The Smell of Rain Reminds Me of You

Thanks for EPIC READING.

Base image shared on Flickr via a (remix) Creative Commons License by AnitaKHart. Shameless Helvetica added by me.

So, if you’ve been following me on Twitter over the past week or so you will have seen that I have been a) collecting stories and b) seeding the #rainreminds hashtag. What’s it all about? Well, I’m delighted to announce that I have a piece of work in the Hazard Festival, next Saturday at 5pm.

The dedicated mini-site can be found at http://rainreminds.tumblr.com/ where there are links to the location and facebook event, and a nice big old Share Button. Please do!

The piece will be somewhere between stealth performance, soundwalk, and flashmob, will involve up to 100 umbrellas, and will take place in the middle of Manchester. Full instructions, and an mp3 to download and bring with you will be released 24 hours prior to the event, so if you’re interested, do sign up to the Facebook event so I can send a nice reminder out when I release it.

The hashtag for the event is #rainreminds, and over the past week or so I’ve been collecting stories, voices, and sounds from people all over the internet. These will either be used directly in, or help to inspire the 10 minute long piece, which I will be writing up until Tuesday, recording and editing until Thursday, and then releasing at 5pm on Friday with accompanying instructions in advance of Saturday.

In the meantime you can have a read of (or add to) some of the awesome stories coming into http://rainonmy.tumblr.com – and if you want to be credited make sure you leave your name in the *body* of the submission (if you missed that in the submission guidelines and you do want crediting, drop me an email or @ on twitter). Also, follow the  #rainreminds hashtag for trials, tribulations, and exclamations in the writing/recording journey.

So, see you in Manchester, and spread the word.

Hurrah!

This is a post about identity politics in the spaces between personal and professional that we now inhabit.

My ideas aren’t fully formed on this yet, but I thought it was important to open up a discussion, because (as I intend to go on to say) it’s important to get a collective as well as personal view on this, because as much as new mediums suggest that I am at the centre of my social and political universe, and as politics and marketing turn their sights to the hyperlocal, I believe the collective, and the universal should still be part of the dialogue.

At the NCVO New Politics conference that I attended in early January there was a real sense of charities and not-for-profit organisations turning towards the ‘hyper-local’, an approach that especially suits relatively new social media tools that allow unmediated (in a conventional sense) conversation with individuals. In this interview with a couple of NCVO members organisation representatives, I chatted about this trend.

In a lot of ways a hyperlocal approach is empowering for both parties, but in another way I believe a radical or uncritical shift towards the hyperlocal could be incredibly dangerous. If you forward your cause or politics only on an individual basis – this is how this directly affects you, and why you should care – you lose a sense of the bigger ‘better good’. You lose the politics that acknowledges that in some aspects we are all alike, and should all have equal footing, privilege and rights. Why should someone have to empathise on an individual level to support human rights and environmental causes? How far is hyperlocal different from a proactive version of NIMBYism? This is not the fault of the tools (social media) but how we use them.

There’s another aspect of this shift in personal/professional spaces which is endlessly fascinating to me. As someone who’s very resistant to advertising (it’s the main reason I don’t watch television) and any message that attempts to shape me to a hegemonic vision of consumer driven happiness, I am very conscious of how we are now opening up and splitting ourselves over different platforms, and how vulnerable that makes us to pernicious outside visions of identity.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that twitter, facebook, digital photography, photoshop et al are necessarily dangerous, these are new mediums for a very old way of communicating, I believe we are operating by the same rules as we always have done, just that on here the longtail is evidential, physically left. Recently I’ve been looking after a couple of friends who’ve gone through pretty bad break ups, both of which has been made almost insurmountably worse by the presence of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr – public spaces that are experienced personally, hyperlocally. Whenever I’ve broken up with someone, we’ve always done the 3 month mutual block/unfollow. But it’s always *there*. The long tail to your relationship. The relationship status change.

I went out on Friday night, and found that rather than asking for people’s numbers, 18 and 19 years olds are now more likely to ask for a full name – like a QRcode can hold so much more information than text, a facebook profile gives you so much more upfront. But it is also meticulously constructed, groups are the badges showing politics, bands, humour, unflattering photos are untagged, people are constructing online versions of themselves, whether you want to call it a profile or an avatar or a character, we de- and reconstruct ourselves daily. Are we making ourselves more vulnerable?

Enter personal brand ambassadors

More so than ever before children are being used to influence their peers, via social networking and IRL, on behalf of certain brands. Likewise throughout Twitter and blogs we hear the calls to the ‘personalised brand’ or the personal-as-brand. People (myself included) now find Twitter a space that shifts from personal to professional daily, and indeed this is technically no different to how we exist IRL – we shift between personas daily, at work me, public transport me, parent me, partner me – however extra dangers persist and in the preservation, we can lose context. Does social media focussing on the personal as brand, political, important, or central, distort our world view? And how do we critique a world built on personal brand? What happens when the brands we tire of are implicit? Integral?

There’s something to be said for easing people away from hegemonic visions of identity, encouraging fluidity, but we should also acknowledge that to assume the fluid transition of personal to professional, person to brand, in archived spaces assumes identity is a blank slate, sculpted, opted. Does this also apply to people who aren’t white, CIS, hetero, able bodied, middle class, developed-world men? What about the majority cast as as an ongoing ‘Other’ – to whom identity is more important, or more integral, people who are defined by their difference? Identity is dangerous when it is thoughtlessly fragmented or assaulted – and is at the root of an awful lot of hurt, destruction, and aggression throughout the world.

Acknowledging the cartesian mind/body split is all very well, but the split mightn’t be so simple with people whose bodies have shaped their mind’s experience – as a defining characteristic, a battleground, an Other.

My own experiences haven’t been particularly traumatic, but I have certainly been faced with difficult decisions when it comes to being female and on the internet. For a while I used an unconnected name (I still do on Comment is Free etc.) and photos that you couldn’t really discern me from. I got a bit angry at this, though. Although I’m not happy to fill the public internet (my facebook is mostly private) with pictures of myself as my main ‘selling point’, I also don’t feel like I should have to divorce myself from my image in order to be taken seriously. Which prompts people (even people I valued the opinions of) to accuse me of only having a certain amount of Twitter followers, or interaction online because I was ‘a pretty girl’. In what space will I ever be my words first?

These are fragmented thoughts, on a political, professional and personal level. I want to emphasise that in no way do I think social media, longtails, hyperlocal politics and activism are in any way bad. What it cannot be, however, is the only tool, left uncriticised. I’d be interested in what you think, and whether you think it’s something that’s being talked about enough, or too much. Go forth and comment.

People “have something to lose if they are regarded solely as informational patterns, namely the resistant materiality that … has marked the experience of living as embodied creatures […] Although VR may afford simulated access to a virtual and digitised community of representations — arguably a kind of “global public sphere” achieved at the loss of embeddedness and context — given the individuated manner in which the technology is being developed and will be accessed, the conflation between the conception it affords the user and the user’s own perceptivity needs to be acknowledged and theorised” pp.15-6 N Katherine Hayles in Digital Sensations, by Ken Hillis.

NB I know it’s a bit of a wanky title, but I thought the one I really wanted to use (Cybrands – like Cyborgs, geddit?) looked a bit like a pharmaceutical product, so there we are.

And yes the robot picture is me. I was BORN A GEEK.

I struck a deal with my PhD supervisor today. After being told in no uncertain terms that I was never to publish any of my thoughts or work for free on the internet in my induction, I had a small altercation with person running it – because my work is so closely tied to examining open processes and wiki ethics in the arts, and my personal politics are more of the idealistic, free and open for all persuasion – I thought it was important to keep my research open, or otherwise risk horrible hypocrisy.

However, the fact remains is that the university is paying for me to generate original research on their behalf, it’s not useful for me to be a liability, and I do value the opportunity to get paid to do something I love and care about with as many fibres of my being that aren’t already taken up with friends, family, and political activism. So I thought finding a nice, sensible, but still open middle ground was a good idea.

Here’s what we worked out:

• - I’m fine to carry on blogging and posting quotes, thoughts, breakthroughs, snippets, points of interest the whole way through.

• - I’m also fine to blog large chunks of my first year which is mainly exploratory – and so much not the deep, critical and original thinking of the final 2 years. (I will soon be popping up a blog post of my first 1/3 of this year’s work).

• - When it does get to that thicker stage of thinking then it’s useful to release extracts, talking points, struggles and particular sticking points, anything up to about 800 words is fine.

• - Then I make the decision of whether I want to play the game of academia (write a book), try and redefine the rules (work on making ebooks and web-published, open stuff just as important as writing a book), or go in an entirely different direction (and just release the material as is and run off into the sunset with my arms flailing)

So that’s where we are. I think that’s pretty fair to the uni, myself, and my principles, and much further on than the ‘say nothing to no one’ approach demanded at my induction. But what do you think? Do you think that’s too much? Too little? Do you even care? Well, you read this far so I imagine you do a bit. Or you’re really bored. Go and do something useful. Or comment.

This conflict consisted of 3 sides.

On one side, Simon Cowell, and everything that he stands for about homogenised music and coercive narrative driven so-called ‘reality TV’. He turns people, and art, into product, which he sells rather well, incidentally.

On the opposing side we find the #RATM4xmas collective, thousands and thousands of people who bought the Rage Against the Machine track, Killing in the Name, in order to protest the capitalisation of the music and entertainment industries. The song’s main message was ‘fuck you I won’t buy what you tell me’. People involved in this campaign also donated to Shelter.

And then, somewhere off to one side we find the tech-intelligentsia (tech, for the most part because the RATM campaign was fought largely online) who pointed out the irony that the RATM track was owned by SonyBMG, Cowell’s company, and that Killing in the Name’s anti capitalist lyric somewhat opposes rebellion-by-purchasing.

Cowell and the avatars of his narrative made their pleas, they spoke in the ‘emotional dialogue to camera’ format that their viewers recognise and their detractors despise. And from the the angry opposing side bile spilled forth.

“[..] nobody’s buying The Climb in order to actually listen to it. They’re buying it out of sedated confusion, pushing a button they’ve been told will make them feel better. It’s the sound of the assisted suicide clinic, and it doesn’t deserve to be No 1 this Christmas.” Charlie Brooker – in The Guardian

This campaign wasn’t just against Cowell and what he has done to music and entertainment, it was against the people who subscribe to that entertainment too. Oh, not always with such malignancy, but almost always with a sense of pity for those deluded enough to buy into the Xfactor – as if they didn’t understand that it was a simple and constructed narrative, as manufactured reality isn’t a part of all of our lives, as if ‘quality’ was an empirical judgement.

The Xfactor the cultural equivalent of a Disney film, but with less kitsch value. It represents a collective dream, a wish upon a star – the wish to be Stars. It is also easy viewing for people with heavy lives and tired minds. Sure the Xfactor pretends to be real, but so does theatre, film, television drama, video games. Reality TV just pretends to be a different type of real, one that is potentially dangerous. To rival this constructed spectacle is necessary, to discount its cultural importance is ignorant. If you consider Xfactor to be a blight, look for the source of the illness, and not the symptoms.

There’s also more that the rebellion of the #RATM4xmas collective represented – the fact that they *were* a collective was incredibly important. This was a people-driven, peer-to-peer campaign using primarily social media driven action. Hundreds of thousands of people were mobilised, it was Christmassy because they were Giving To Charity (the act that absolves all) but above all, hundreds of thousands of people voted with their wallets, they stood up against the spectacle – and in a way they would have been unable to do so more than 5 years ago. They were empowered by technology – this was action, not just outrage, not just words.

The most impassioned, and nasty debate that I’ve heard on the matter has, however, come from the last camp, from some of the tech-intelligentsia. “These kids have no clue, they’re stupid, it’s a black and white act in a grey world, it’s symptomatic of a whole generation who can’t see past the façade to the machine inside”.

Sure the RATM campaign reacted in a binary sort of way, but do you know what? Most of them knew by the end that the money went to SonyBMG, most of them understood the irony of singing ‘fuck you I won’t buy what you tell me’ as they bought along with thousands of others, but they didn’t care. They didn’t care about the money, or charity, they cared about their culture, so they changed it.

They pressed the button that they had decided would make them feel better. And it did. Because it wasn’t just them, there were thousands doing it. To misunderstand this, to dismiss thousands of people as stupid is callous at best, and at worst, ignorant.

This was no revolution. This was a more-generally working class viewing public, versus the tech-literate, generally young, largely university educated (Facebook, certainly) online population, arguing how they wanted society. Not how they wanted it to be (this is just a Christmas number one, after all) – but that they wanted collectively to change it. Action to take, cause and effect, a kind of community that those who grew up in the 80s and 90s haven’t  really known. Big action, without anything between you and the button.

Did I buy the RATM song? No. I did buy White Wine in The Sun, mainly because I liked it, but also because a couple of people suggested it might be a nicer alternative to a sweary angry Christmas song. I also bought Pamplemoose’s song Always in the Season, because I really love the way it sounds and the things it says. Which I think is a good reason to buy something. And is no better or worse than anyone else’s choice.

Which is the thing really, that this is heading towards. No choice is less valid than anyone else’s, here. And in a way, all of these points of view yearn for the same thing: cultural and political engagement on a personal level. Which with betraying bankers’ bonuses, shamed politicians, a lazy, fact-less, right wing mainstream media and Cop15 having collapsed like a flan in a cupboard, might just be coming to a head just when we need it.

Here’s to a new decade.

Merry Christmas.

Today I am leafing through the barely penetrable Digital Economy Bill, and I am thinking. I am thinking that we are not being heard. For all of the petitions that we sign, the words we pour into blogs and articles, the posturing we do on twitter and facebook, how much are we – the online tech-literate – how much are we simply talking to ourselves?

It’s been almost a month since I sent my Open Letter to Peter Mandelson. I have had no reply. No acknowledgement. No engagement.

The Digital Economy Bill is not about a digital economy, it is about how an analogue one can cling to profit within it.

This is the creative industry versus the distribution industries. The online world is a hive of creativity, of emerging technology, of passion and code, of distribution of information and means, it is a place to be valued beyond money. It is also a dangerous place to operate if it is control that you want, that you need. This is an amazing and incomprehensible thing for government.

The 20^th century creative economic model has operated on a basis of scarcity – of distribution, of controlling numbers and controlling access, and this was all orchestrated via the grand narrative of fame. As web 2.0 musician Steve Lawson puts it:

I no longer need to pretend to be a rock-star. The mythology of rock ‘n’ roll is nowhere near as interesting as the reality of creativity. Whereas the reality of high-dollar touring, promotional duties, photoshoots etc. is phenomenally dull. That’s why the rock ‘n’ roll myths were created – to cover the tedium that is the day to day reality of most touring musicians. The number that ever made millions from it is so small as to not really be statistically relevant when discussing what’s best for ‘music’ – they just had an enormous media footprint. Source

We are, for the most part, not calling for some creative chaotic utopia where the creative industries are either funded, or amateur, and we should not be losing artists because they are not ‘jack of all trades’ people – because they can’t design, market, distribute, and create. But we should be encouraging open and collaborative processes. It is in those spaces that you learn, and that you can plug your skills gaps with the expertise of others. It is in online spaces that you have direct access to your fans, your audience, your participants. That you can remove the necessity to market, or reform what marketing is.

You cannot legislate material that can be translated into information. You can, however, market experience, physical possessions, skill in a studio, the binding of a book. People like to touch. They like to breathe the heat of lights and smoke at gigs, they like the run their fingers over the cover of a book. I do not believe that the online world opposes that.

It also is worth mentioning that for those with money – those who lobby, and those, for the most part, who are in government, have never or can no longer recall what it feels like for finance to be finite in real terms – it is very hard for them to understand the motivations behind downloading something that costs less that £10. They see it as flippant, lazy and dishonest. They don’t understand that for many (and including myself) £10 is the weekly food budget. They don’t see that these things are done out of love, and that every spare piece of cash longs to be spent on seeing a band live, garnering what is worth more to us than money – physical experience.

So how about we bring this love to the physical world? Open Festivals – free to attend, sponsored, artists and musicians performing across the country– raising money for the Open Rights Group. We celebrate creativity, and we raise awareness and money.

This kind of action, as well as garnering money to support important and organised IRL action and lobbying (a power direly in need, not least to rival the weight of money behind the distribution industries), will also raise the profile of this issue to the ‘real’ sphere. Plenty of people who this bill will affect have no idea about how it will do so, or why they should care. We need to take this information to the streets. This will also speak in a language government understands. Clicking a petition is an important thing to do, but physical bodies in psychical spaces (and in British weather), that is action the establishment understands.

Also, how much should we condone civil disobedience? Proactive protest that does not harm people, or property, but that disrupts media events? Or DDOS attacks? Benign hacks which disseminate the message “it’s this easy to infiltrate a system, consider that when you vote on the Digital Economy Bill”. Raising the profile of the message in a way that demonstrates how much they don’t know about our world? Civil disobedience is a difficult point to consider, but I don’t doubt that some people will do so without consideration, should we gather ideas on how to do so without denigrating our intentions?

We also need to offer solutions. How to find and prosecute those who share copyrighted material for profit. Those who crack, propagate malicious code, set up bot nets and phish. Draw up new models for the music and film industries, fund studies into the gain vs. loss of people who love culture enough to ‘illegally’ download it. We need to do the work which the digital economy bill doesn’t, and set up a wiki to assess how the creative industries can and should operate in the online world. We can offer a publicly submitted memoranda to the bill, a 3,000 word document (about 6 sides of A4) offering our personal and industry expertise on a bill being proposed to parliament.

We need to speak up, because the most important things are only conspicuous by their absence. While the Digital Economy Bill includes measures that allow complete disconnection and up to

£50,000 fines if someone in your house is accused of filesharing. A duty on ISPs to spy on all their customers in case they find something that would help the record or film industry sue them (ISPs who refuse to cooperate can be fined £250,000) source

And also allowing the Secretary of State

the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright. source

Including imposing jail sentences. There is an awful lot that is missing:

[there is] nothing about ensuring that broadband is cheap, fast and neutral. Nothing about getting Britain’s poorest connected to the net. Nothing about ensuring that copyright rules get out of the way of entrepreneurship and the freedom to create new things. Nothing to ensure that schoolkids get the best tools in the world to create with, and can freely use the publicly funded media — BBC, Channel 4, BFI, Arts Council grantees — to make new media and so grow up to turn Britain into a powerhouse of tech-savvy creators. source

We need to make ourselves seen and heard. Why? Because we are this world; in varying but no more or less important ways we are stakeholders in the digital economy. The Digital Economy bill speaks entirely of the ignorance of our policy makers – but we can’t forget that it is our responsibility to speak to them about these failings, and in a language they understand. I am of the creative industry, some of you are too, but we are all the digital economy, because it trades in information, not money. We need to take this IRL, we need to take this analogue, we speak in their world, they need to learn about ours. Let’s act.

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.

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’ (Source), 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 real 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 I believe really scares industry is the peer – peer review, peer sharing. Theirs is no longer dominant voice, we’re building our own worlds. Yes we need to deal with people who make a profit out of illegal filesharing, but criminalising a large proportion of your electorate is not the way to go about this.

A Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what you should be doing 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, you are doing this country a disservice when you pander to their childish cries to stem the tide of change.

However, I have to say that so far these simple facts seem to have evaded you, you seem determined to press on. So let me tell you now that #3strikes will not work. Because we will not allow it to. No one will.

Aside from the impossibility of monitoring and prosecuting all (let’s call non-profiteering sharers ‘domestic’) p2p filesharers, we will stop you from penalising any of them. If you begin to cut off people’s internet access, then everyone who can afford to do so will set up alternative unsecured wireless networks across the country. If you aim to track torrent usage, we will proliferate details on how to obscure or re-route your IP address. If you shut down those sites, we will use private chat to discuss what we want, and private cloud storage systems, drop boxes, to share content. We will rename files, disguise track identites with a couple of bytes worth data, break meta-data, and come up with new ways of encrypting our actions. The industry will not only lose out on ‘sales’ but valuable usage figures too.

You are attempting to solve a digital problem using analogue solutions. We are open source, we are anonymous, and we are everywhere. Don’t fight us, don’t push, help dying industries reform, and remarket themselves in a sustainable way.

Here’s some further reading from prominent musicians/Bloggers:

http://www.stevelawson.net/wordpress/2009/10/featured-artist-coalition-backs-lily-wtf-says-everyone-else/

http://agit8.org.uk/?p=336

http://www.challengerappears.com/blog/2009/09/connection-failure-mandelson-takes-on-the-internet/

http://www.stephenfry.com/2009/07/27/series-2-episode-4-itunes-live-festival/

Please don’t make this mistake. Because you will regret it.

Kind regards,

Hannah Nicklin.

________________________________________________

If you wish to send this letter to Peter Mandelson, or send something of you own, you can contact him via Writetothem.com. Don’t forget to replace my name and details with your own.

Do also check out this entry just posted by Steve Lawson, a musician and thinker who is making a living out of digital distribution.

If you want to take further action, read more, or get actively involved in the fight for our digital rights, please do check out, and where possible, support the excellent work of the Open Rights Group and 38Degrees.

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.