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April 17th, 2009
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.
- Charles Stross Accelerando 2005
Accelerando is the new Neuromancer, in that our real world is becoming more like the fiction every time I re-read it.
The nine short stories that make up the book are published under a Creative Commons license, so there are various versions of it available for free online. You can even get it for the iPhone.
Posted in agalmics, culture, literature, open source, philosophy, tech |
April 5th, 2009
 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.
Posted in agalmics, culture, open source, philosophy, tech |
November 1st, 2007
Only days after my piece on Radiohead’s open pricing policy, another music industry dinosaur announced a significant shift in business philosophy. Madonna is leaving Warners, her record label of 25 years, to sign a deal with Live Nation, a company primarily interested in concert promotion. It has been widely regarded as an acknowledgement of the declining importance of album sales over other forms of revenue for the music industry.
These recent business ideas are discombobulating the music industry, but the concepts of free data and reputation trading are quite familiar to another group of cultural artists – Software Developers. Software Developers and Rock Stars now have a lot in common since the world went digital. Both professions are trading in pure information, the product they produce, and sell, is nothing more than data – easily reproducible, distributable, storable, stealable.
Data is a post-scarcity commodity. Post-scarcity, as the name suggests, is the successor of scarcity, upon which our current economic systems are built. When you consume scarce goods – eat a chocolate bar, or buy a CD – there is one less of that commodity in the marketplace. But when you consume a post-scarce item – download an application, or an mp3 – you copy it. Meaning there is now one more of that commodity out there, not less. This is how the success of a post-scarce product is measured, by the number of times it has been reproduced.
And this is of course very similar to how the music industry works. Or how it would work if you were to take the record companies out of the picture. In a crowded marketplace the greatest issue for a new band is being heard, getting their music to as many ears as possible, not maximising the profit on shifting units. There are a hundred thousand people with the talent to write a great song, but there are only a select few who can attract a wide audience with it. This initial recognition has nothing to do with the pricing mechanisms of CDs, it is to do with reputation. Kudos is the main commodity of agalmic economics.
It might sound crazy to a traditional capitalist to give away one’s goods and services, but this is what Open Source Software Developers have been happy to do for years, and what digital music artists are now coming on board with. Both groups make their reputations this way, to enable them to stand out from the crowd and make themselves a marketable commodity.
When Kurt, Keef or Kat smashes up a guitar at the end of a set it probably doesn’t make the best sense to their accountant, but it does to the audience. This what rock and roll is about. Just as giving away free code is what the Open Source movement is about. There is probably no easily measurable correlation between number of guitars smashed and CD’s sold, or indirect kudos benefits reaped for every line of code given away, but it is clearly an important economic factor.
Radiohead’s (and others) decision to give away their music, and to a lesser extent Madonna’s shift of focus away from CD sales to concert promotion, are reflections of Open Source principles creeping into the mainstream. It is not the production of the commodity that is the revenue earner, but the kudos gained off the back of it. The Rock Star will cash this in with tours, merchandise, personal appearances etc. The Software Developer cashes their kudos with consultancy, corporate commissions, and conference appearances.
As for me, I only got into programming for the chicks.
Posted in agalmics, culture, music, open source, philosophy, tech |
October 8th, 2007
There was a lot of talk last week about Radiohead’s decision to release their new album, In Rainbows, as a free (well, free-ish) download. It has been widely dismissed as a publicity stunt to sell the deluxe £40 CD/Vinyl edition to follow. This might be a factor, but such cynicism is perhaps missing the point in this case.
Radiohead are employing a “donation’ system to pay for their work, something not very common for major label recording artists (Radiohead are “between labels’ right now), but quite familiar to some webmasters, myself included, who rely on this source of income to keep a site live. The internet, with it’s abundance of information, has been forging new ways of thinking about economics for fifteen years now, so it was inevitable that they would begin to escape into the economy at large eventually.
Information, the commodity that webmasters, digital service providers, and anyone in digital media (including recording artists, newspapers, television channels, film-makers etc…) are dealing in, is not a scarce resource. It is in abundance. Traditional economics is based upon scarcity, with prices determined by laws of supply and demand. It is very difficult to fit these systems into Post-Scarcity economics.
The music industry are one of the first to suffer the winds of change, as the bits and bytes they deal in are extremely vulnerable to copying. The corporate approach to this seems to be DRM (Digital Rights Management) which is perhaps the stupidest thing I have ever heard of. The idea is that the mp3s they sell are locked to a certain player. For example anything bought through the iTunes store is locked to only play through iTunes, limiting what a consumer can do with their purchase. What they are effectively doing is making sure that the mp3s they are charging money for are actually of less value to the consumer than the illegally downloaded, free equivalent. This can only encourage file sharing, rather than combat it.
The sensible solution, obviously, is to embrace post-scarcity. I’ve been banging on about this for months now, ever since I discovered agalmics, Robert Levin’s theory of post-scarcity economics. With our information technologies copying data is the easiest thing in the world, so it would be fool-hardy to try to fight it. Five years ago we had the technological capacity to store and copy the entire works of one recording artist between hard-drives. Today we can store and copy the entire works of a film director with ease. Where once we could transfer a book’s worth of information, now we are able to trade in entire libraries worth of data. We have to be prepared for a market place, not many years away, where we will be capable of storing and copying the entire digital output of a culture.
This is why the idea of charging for information is already starting to seem rather archaic. In agalmic economics the main commodity to be traded will be reputations, kudos, respect, all of which are earned in a variety of non-Capitalist ways. Information will be abundant and free.
It’s good to see the first signs of this trend taking hold. Prince, in need of a comeback, chose to give away his new album with a Sunday newspaper recently. This, I’m very pleased to say, had the executives threatening murder, which is now the surest sign of a powerful phenomenon. Paul Quirk, chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association, is quoted as saying “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores”. Big deal Paul, kids don’t buy their music in record stores these days, surely in your position you should know this.
Meanwhile, smaller bands are happy to give their work away, as the struggle to be heard in a crowded marketplace is a much bigger concern than making money from CD sales (the majority of which goes to the label anyway). They can then make a living from touring, when they get to cash in their kudos.
There are clearly some exciting things going on in economics at the moment. There is a similar movement going on in publishing, with many authors making free downloads of their books available at the same time as they see print. Also last month, one of the bastions of ‘old media’, The New York Times announced its decision to stop trying to charge for its online content. About bloody time really.
I’ll be observing and reporting upon further developments of this trend with unrestrained glee, so watch this space. But if you require further reading now, I recommend the following articles:
Agalmics, by Robert Levin
Free Data Sharing Is Here To Stay, by Cory Doctorow
(and the rest of his Digital Rights, Digital Wrongs series for The Guardian)
Clicks and links will bring all the walls tumbling down, by Jeff Jarvis
See also my earlier posts:
Grow Your Own Sofa
Agalmics
Posted in agalmics, open source, philosophy, society, tech |
August 1st, 2007
agalmics (uh-GAL-miks), n. [Gr. "agalma", "a pleasing gift"]
The study and practice of the production and allocation of non-scarce goods.
While I worry myself over the clash between Open Source principles and Capitalist economies, there are other thinkers who are already miles ahead of me on this subject.
I recently discovered an excellent essay by Robert Levin from 1999 that introduces the concept of agalmics, taking the gift culture of the Internet (which has been an ever increasing trend over the last ten years) and extending it into “an economy of non-scarcity”. His ideas are convincing, accessible, and very exciting to anyone who may be disillusioned with traditional capitalism.
“In games theory, a ‘zero-sum game‘ is one in which one player’s gain is another player’s loss. Conventional economics often describes zero-sum games. When two suppliers compete for the dollars of a single customer, or when two government agencies compete with each other for fixed budget dollars, a zero sum game is played. A ‘positive-sum game’ is one in which players can gain by behavior which enhances the gains of others. Efficient agalmics is a positive-sum game. For example, when a free software programmer gives his source code away, he gains a large population of users to report bugs; the users gain the use of his programs. By awarding the other players points, the player gains points.”
Levin points out that the idea of a gift culture is not new, or even particularly radical. It is just humans learning to co-operate for everyone’s advantage, a concept we would conventionally refer to as civilisation. Gift cultures have existed before in our history, but have often fallen to overwhelming capitalist influence. The Chinook tradition of Potlatch, which I have discussed before, is a good example.
After a lifetime under the influence of traditional capitalism, an agalmic economy sounds almost utopian, but can it actually work? Current market forces are very powerful and deeply entrenched, but societies, like any other organism, change as they grow and a system that works well during one stage of development may be highly inappropriate later in the cycle, like an adult wearing diapers. We may be at the point where new economic ideas are not only desirable, but essential, for society to advance.
If the rise of the Open Source movement, the eager adoption of file sharing, the growth of Wikipedia etc., are just early portents of a much larger trend, these may be very exciting times.
[follow up post: The New Information Economics]
Posted in agalmics, open source, philosophy |
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