There has been much talk of Twitter heralding the end of blogging, which is a little like saying Lego killed the construction industry. Twitter is blogging, it is just blogging without the thought process, the craftsmanship or the paragraphs. Which is what makes it so great.
But one way in which Twitter is killing blogs is this new form of lazy writing, whereby a blogger just collects the oh-so-witty things they have said on Twitter that week and calls that a blog post. I won’t hyperlink to any of you, but you know who you are.
So, hypocritical bandwagoneer that I am, I thought I would allow myself this indulgence as I hit my 1000th Tweet milestone. A good time for a review my last year and a half of micro-narcissism (March 2008 is when I first succumbed, which was still six months before Stephen Fry). Surely out of 1000 carefully constructed pithy missives there were at least a few 140-character gems.
I can’t believe my first three-word tweet had a spelling mistake …
I’m finding I’ll buy anything the new French President is trying to
sell us as long as he has his wife standing next to him. Tue Apr 01 10:24:00 +0000 2008
I have to confess I have only ever seen one episode of Britain’s Got Talent. I say this not out of snobbery, but in admission of what a poorly researched knee-jerk rant this post is going to be. The only reason I made the effort to endure an hour of this insanely popular shitefest was Chris TT’s awesome appraisal in his Morning Star column, which gets right to the nub of what the program is about; power games and homogenising public opinion.
“It is a parallel to the corporatist vision of the owner not just possessing everything but possessing everyone’s values too and overseeing what is regarded as acceptable.”
While BGT may appear to be new nadir of prole patronisation as entertainment, I have to say I have seen worse. Probably the ugliest example I can recall was ITVs Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway, (”a cross between Jim’ll Fix It and Dragons Den“) where worthy causes juggled, danced, or gurned for our entertainment, then held out cloth caps to a panel of millionaires, in the hope they would toss them a few scraps. It was truly appalling, and not just because the panel included loathsome twatLord Archer (I struggle to find a kinder adjective).
But I have to take issue with Chris on one point, or more accurately two words, in his article – “The Apprentice“. This programme cannot be dumped in the same shitbox as Britain’s Got Talent, Big Brother, 10 Years Younger and American Idol. Chris has questioned how so many of his seemingly intelligent friends are devoted to this crass reality show. I am one of this faithful, so allow me to stage a defence.
The crucial difference is context. The candidates on The Apprentice are not dreamers with a desire to find an audience for their meagre talents. They are comically extreme devotees of the Capitalist dream. These people are whoring themselves for the ‘prize’ of commuting to Essex for the rest of their lives. The ‘winner’ gets a nine to five job where they can continue to kiss their hairy master’s arse FOREVER.
The contestants on Britain’s Got Talent are victims. It is truly tragic that the only platform they have found that will allow their decidedly average faces on the gogglebox is one where they are manipulated and abused in some kind of emotional pornography.
Whereas the comedy we get from the candidates on The Apprentice is purely down to their own warped ambition, misguided self-belief and unshakable faith in a capitalist road to happiness. These people are exactly the kind of freaks our society SHOULD be ostracising. They should be in the stocks to be ridiculed, as to mock them is to make their shallow capitalist ambitions less socially acceptable.
The Apprentice is a capitalist comedy, it one of the few antibodies in the face of our biggest cultural disease. It is also bloody good telly.
“It’s true: Since the 1980s, it has been possible – in principle – to resolve resource allocation problems algorithmically, by computer, instead of needing a market. Markets are wasteful: They allow competition, much of which is thrown on the scrap heap. So why do they persist?”
Manfred shrugs. “You tell me. Conservativism?”
Gianni closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. “Markets afford their participants the illusion of free will, my friend. You will find that human beings do not like being forced into doing something, even if it is in their best interests. Of necessity, a command economy must be coercive – it does, after all, command.”
We cling to our concept of free will like blood. Declaring one is without free will is akin to admitting you don’t have a sense of humour, it is effectively saying you aren’t human. For what are we without free will – robots; actors; performing monkeys?
Philosophy has wrestled with free will vs determinism for as long as there has been philosophy. In more recent times science has pitched in on the debate too. Physiologist Ben Libet, who died in 2007, conducted a number of experiments in the 1970s on the timing of neural events. His measurements demonstrated that when the decision to perform an action is made, the beginnings of the action occur before the corresponding activity in the consciousness centre of the brain. These findings seem to suggest that the conscious mind, the area we regard as our decision making centre, is actually nothing of the the sort. It is subconscious processes that make all our decisions; the only role of the consciousness is to retrospectively justify these decisions to ourselves.
Our sense of free will, if Libet’s experiments are to be believed, is nothing more than an illusion. It is just another bi-product of our massively over-sized brains. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox in quantum mechanics seems to back up this conclusion, I burbled excitedly about this realisation in a post two years ago. But even if we had something more accessible than conceptual psychology or quantum mechanics to prove this point, would we ever be able to accept it?
My answer: who gives a toss? We are certainly the only animal who believes in, or cares about such a concept. The dog I questioned on the matter was very clearly disinterested in the subject, and I suspect his may be the right attitude. Does it really matter whether we have free will, or only the illusion of it? Our actions will still be the same either way. Whether we have a strong grip upon the rudder of destiny, or we are just socks thrown around in the washing machine of chance, our lives will still be the same – messy, chaotic and surprising.
Believing in free will is akin to believing in God. We are welcome to do so, but it’s probably ever-so-slightly nutty of us. If the concept makes us feel better about ourselves, and we can pretend we are more important than all the other bundles of matter in the cosmos, it doesn’t cost us anything, and it doesn’t do us any harm, does it?
Um, yes, I think it probably does do a lot of harm. But that’s another post.
My friends at Cauliflower have given me some amazing poster prints of my recent generative art work. They look like this:
They have also produced a set of glossy postcards of the same design too, which are also great, in a more, um, compact way.
I want to share these with you, so if anyone would like one please send me your snail mail address using the email link under my photo. There are only a few of the posters, but plenty of the postcards, so everyone will get something as a thank you for supporting the project. This especially applies to the many nice folks who have left comments, twittered, linked to me, or given me your opinions in some way. All feedback is greatly appreciated, even if you think the stuff is rubbish.
Unfortunately I have discovered that the generative art stops being quite so generative the moment you lay it down on the page, so if you want to see the works in action you’ll still have to visit the site.
Both of my boys are too young to be interested in any life tips I may have to share right now, and (according to the Nick Cave Conjecture) by the time they are old enough to listen to me I’ll doubtless be so uncool and embarrassing they won’t take me seriously anyway. So, for the ages, I’ll impart everything I know about getting on in life here and now, in a single blog post, and they can then choose to ignore me at their leisure, without having to disturb me when I’m trying to watch the bloody telly.
Success is easy. There’s no “secret” to success. In the absence of luck, privilege or sleeping with the right person, you just need focus, dedication, passion, hard work, persistence and maybe a few good ideas. The only hard bit is finding the right field in which to apply your focus, dedication, passion, hard work, persistence and ideas. This is the challenge.
If you find something you truly love doing, that you care about enough to to be able to dedicate your life to it, the rest comes easy. I can’t claim I’m the expert on this, but I’ve done okay; I have a job that doesn’t make me weep in a morning, or forces me into inebriation every Friday night; that allows me to listen to loud electronic music while I’m working and has earned me the respect of at least seven (at last count) of my colleagues. I’m happy with my lot.
It’s probably too late to steer me off my path of least resistance (especially with you two little darlings bleeding me dry) but I can still give you one epiphet of advice to enable you to do better, and it is this – spend your twenties farting around as much as you can.
This is my message. The thing that needs the hard work is finding the thing you love doing; the thing you could still bear to be doing when you are as old and uncool as your dear old dad, the thing that will still mean something to you long after you’ve got over the need to impress your mates, or bed beautiful ladies, or pay off your gambling debts. And the only way you stand a chance of finding this elusive vocation is by trying everything.
This is the future, and these days adolesence doesn’t end with your teenage years. I believe that at least the first thirty years of one’s life should be dedicated to experimentation, to making mistakes and trying new things, while avoiding anything that might be seen as habit-forming; – religion, hedonism, the civil service, over use of drugs, or Her Majesty’s Forces. There’s plenty of time to worry about making a living , and being a good citizen, later. And, if you find you are afraid to try new things, remember there are enough people on the planet for you to be able to get away with making a total tit of yourself in front of several thousand souls and never having to see them again.
Stick with this plan and you stand at least half a chance of a successful life. And if you haven’t sussed it by thirty, splash around for another ten years or so. Do whatever it takes to find whatever is bareable.
But if you’re not rich enough to support your mom and me by fifty, consider yourself written out the will. No-one likes a sponger.
Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee’s travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty-four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines he’s never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy, does he patent a lot – although he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project.
In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he’s the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain – not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he’s the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.
Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.
Copyright has a cultural purpose; it incentivises artists by enabling them to profit from their work, and prevents others from exploiting them for their own profit. It has a history going back almost as long as the printing press. Modern copyright law is based on the Berne Convention of 1886, and has served us well for a century. But this is also where it falls down, because copyright law is getting increasingly out of touch with the way artists communicate with their audiences today. The legislators of the 19th Century could not have anticipated the technological advances of our last two decades, nor those of the decades to come.
When we have the ability to reproduce and distribute digital work very cheaply, and to very high quality, it might seem copy protection is of even greater importance, because it is so much easier to exploit an artist’s work. But this kind of thinking underestimates the extent of the cultural changes we are living through. An inevitable consequence of the ease of digital production and reproduction is ubiquity. The internet means that all markets are now global markets, and with a playing field this large the problem for the modern artist (and by artist I mean anyone who produces digital content – musicians, filmmakers, writers, programmers, etc) is not protecting your work from improper use, but trying to ensure it is visible in such a crowded space.
There is little point protecting something when there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others with the capability and comparable talent to create work similar to that you offer. The laws of supply and demand dictate that as supply increases, price must drop. And in an economy of abundance, the price of data drops to zero. If an artist is not prepared to give their work away for free, someone else will.
So How Does An Artist Make A Living in 2009?
Established creators, those who have made their money from the economics of scarcity, are the ones who will have the greatest difficulty giving up on the concept of copyright. The perfect example of this was Metallica leading the fight against Napster in 2001. They were ultimately successful, but there was a huge cost to their credibility. The generation of artists who will succeed the money makers of today will simply adapt to a world where copyright is no longer enforcable. There are, after all, other ways of monetising your worth. A world without copyright does not mean a world without incentive for creativity, especially as for most money is not the chief incentivator anyway.
Creative Commons licenses mean that work can be given away, distributed, and reputations grown, without fear of exploitation. The kudos of a respected creator can be monetised in ways that doesn’t involve selling the commodities they produce, the worth is in the person; their mind, their presence, their flow. Monetising commodities simply doesn’t work in a culture of abundant digital content.
It won’t be easy evolving past the current phase, but it is inevitable. People will still buy CDs and DVDs, but they won’t buy a TV box set without having first downloaded the few episodes for free. Those who have made the most money from copyright will be the ones who will cling to it the tightest. But even they must accept that if they were starting out today, they would have struggled against copyright for their success, rather than benefitted from it.
If a new band won’t allow their songs to be webstreamed for fear of them being ripped, they simply won’t have their songs heard. An author who will only write for money will have a much harder time building the following than the writer who blogs. The programmer who obfuscates their code for fear of copying will be less likely to be employed than the one who has the superstar reputation for their Open Source work. The short film-maker who refuses to work for nothing, will soon find themselves begging for a job from yesterday’s YouTube sensation.
“Data Protection”
There is a telling misnomer used by the defenders of copyright – “data protection“. They claim that by enforcing copyright they are “protecting” data. But isn’t it obvious that the only way to ensure the survival of a piece of data is to reproduce it as freely and abundantly as possible. To limit its reproduction is to cut off its wings.
Data wants to be free. For our culture to continue to evolve we need to let it, not fight it.
Hi, I'm Matt. I'm a creative coder, pub philosopher, retro futurist, methodical engineer, comics nerd and all round pretentious tosser. I am also the author of this blog.
Please feel free to leave your comments, or send me an
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