He had me until the bit comparing illegal movie downloads to terrorism and drugs, and how MegaUpload and Google are 'enablers' by allowing users to upload/search for copyright-infringing content. It's quite clear that he doesn't understand the nature of computers. Cory Doctorow has a great rebuttal of that argument in his talk on the coming war on general computationhttp://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html-
"The important tests of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose are first whether it will work, and second whether or not it will, in the course of doing its work, have effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress, Parliament, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it's unlikely I'd succeed. If I turned up, pointed out that bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles, and asked, “Can't we do something about this?", the answer would be “No". This is because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications, but useless to bad guys. We can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we'd be foolish to risk changing them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies—even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies—no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems."
Computers have no notion of what is 'good' content and what is 'bad' content, and we aren't yet able to teach them accurately the difference (even humans aren't able to tell 100% of the time).
A point well made. This article has all the hallmarks of a person who understands that wheels are powerful and that the people who design and engineer wheels are clever. Yet, this person also fails to understand that wheels have limits. Only that clever people can do impressive things, therefore they should obviously be capable of doing a particular clever thing.
The more I read, the more I approach the conclusion that the author should change his name to Rip van Winkle.
The author can write well, but his main point is frankly dumb and reads like a plant from an industry pressure group.
He cites two main facts: that record company and movie industry conglomerates have lost profits, and that tech companies have gained profits. He then asserts that this is due to some sort of implied theft. That's completely asinine.
The posters below implying this is part of the Hollywood Smear campaign are quite possibly right.
> reads like a plant from an industry pressure group
A useful alternate headline could be: Think tank funded by pro-SOPA MPAA board members Viacom, Time Warner, Disney Corp., and News Corp. attacks Google for doing the right thing and opposing SOPA.
The Stop Online Piracy Act was an awful bit of Hollywood-backed anti-Internet legislation.
USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab receives funding from BET Networks (Viacom), Disney, Paramount Pictures (Viacom), Viacom itself, Warner Bros. (Time Warner), Fox Broadcasting (News Corp), according to its web site: http://www.annenberglab.com/about
Those companies are board members of the MPAA. It's true that the think tank lists other donors as well; the question is whether the non-MPAA donors account for any significant part of its budget.
It was a well-written article, but the talking points, as you say, could come from an MPAA blog post. It's a shame because there are important things to say about these topics, and the linked article could have done a good job of framing them. :(
"reads like a plant from an industry pressure group"
Maybe I'm a little biased because I read his first letter [1] and found it quite thoughtful, but do we really need to invoke anything so sinister? I agree with you that he is off base here, but can't we at least assume he is well-meaning and acting in good faith?
But we do pass laws about wheels. You can't drive them too fast, you must have them inspected to see if they are safe. The engines that power them mustn't emit harmful emissions. You can only drive them in certain places, and following a certain pattern.
Why is the notion that you shouldn't be able to drive your computer to support radical terrorism, violate copyright, or purchase illegal materials any more strange than the rule that you can't drive your car over 70 miles per hour on the highway?
We don't try to enforce the speed limit (yet) by limiting the ability of cars to drive fast. We don't limit the ability to own a vehicle with bad emissions or without safety equipment. (We will push you for operating that vehicle on publicly owned roads.)
If you use your computer to commit a crime, you should be punished. If you use your car to commit a crime, you should be punished. (Assuming the crime should actually be a crime.)
What we shouldn't (generally) do is preemptively prevent your from having the ability to commit that crime, especially when that prevents you from performing activities that are not crimes.
No, you seem to be talking about whether certain behaviour involving cars should be allowed. That's not the issue in the article, or being discussed here. The issue is whether it's a good idea to design computers to allow certain actions in the first place. Since fundamentally we can't design computers to detect 'bad' search queries, any attempt would likely be like other forms of DRM: futile against the sort of people you want to stop, and debilitating for everyone else.
> The issue is whether it's a good idea to design computers to allow certain actions in the first place. Since fundamentally we can't design computers to detect 'bad' search queries
Where is the design of computers coming into this? If you host a forum, and someone posts something that you don't like, you have the option to delete that content.
Google hosts millions of online videos, and decides that they will delete child pornography when they find it (whether they use an automatic filter or a system of moderation is irrelevant).
They also decide that they won't delete ISIS videos when they discover them. That decision is not a technical one, but a social one. It is worth talking about, even if, as the article says:
> Certainly the fact that there are 3000 ISIS videos on YouTube and 10,000 ISIS accounts on Twitter should give you pause. Clearly this is a tricky area, and I don’t believe this is necessarily a matter for government regulation. I do, however, think that Google might alter its “Don’t be evil” motto to “Don’t enable evil.”
I have a sneaking suspicion that we don't actually disagree on all that much, and that most people who are arguing with me here are doing so simply because I am using words that sound slightly different than the ones Corey Doctorow uses.
So far the most convincing evidence of this is that the original article didn't actually mention anything about legislating against general purpose computers.
The original article talks about legislating against certain capabilities (software) of general use computers that allow the commission of illegal acts.
The chain of metaphors has gotten pretty stretched. As far as I can tell it goes about like this:
Author supports SOPA and criticizes Google for allowing people to find copyright content to steal.
Commenter doesn't like this so quotes Doctorow talking about wheels to explain why we shouldn't make running websites or search engines illegal or restrict their capabilities.
You point out that we do restrict the use of cars.
(Thus by metaphorical extension seemingly supporting the idea we should restrict using search engines or websites for illegal acts)
I point out that you are talking about restricting the use of cars, not restricting their capabilities.
(Trying to point out by metaphor the distinction between restricting legal use of search engines and legal capability of search engines)
You say we agree, but quote what I considered to be the obvious and not important part of my comment. (I thought the important part was: "What we shouldn't (generally) do is preemptively prevent your from having the ability to commit that crime, especially when that prevents you from performing activities that are not crimes.")
Assuming that we don't agree on the crucial point, I go further off topic and bring up another unrelated example of ways people are restricting the capability of computers (by making it illegal to export extrusion software.)
So let me see if we do agree explicitly on the original topic:
Do you support SOPA? Do you think that we should make it illegal to index and share links to websites of people who break the law (e.g. distribute copyrighted material or share intrusion software)? Do you think we should make it illegal to provide others the capability to break the law even if we are not breaking any other law ourselves?
...Or did we just get really lost in our metaphors?
I don't support SOPA. I do think that a law similar the the DMCA should continue to exist. However, I would like to see it amended to protect user rights to inspect and modify the software/hardware that they purchase. I would be interested to hear how the law could be structured to allow remixes (releasing a patched version of Skype, mixing a Taylor Swift video, etc.), but I think that gets more complicated.
I do think that it is reasonable to ask that people building automated tools also build automated tools to comply with the law. For example, Grooveshark ought to enforce not just individual DMCA requests against a particular entry in their database, but should be expected to use a content hash of some sort to avoid trivial circumvention of the law. This is technically trivial, and is not an onerous requirement. Google could easily apply similar tools, and to some extent they already do.
When those automated tools are not possible (for example, when running a Tor relay), the organization running the infrastructure should be absolved of all responsibilities related to data that passes through, but is not observable to them. This is a very logical outcome of the DMCA, because if traffic is not observable, no take down request can be reasonably made.
Lastly, I think that while the Google's and Reddit's of the world ought to have no legal responsibility to police truly harmful content -- ISIS videos, or /r/coontown -- they should, as good citizens of the web, do so anyway.
Because violating copyright is not the same as stealing (at all), or stealing a car (which the copyright industry loves to say it is), or detonating explosives in a mosque (which this article conflates it with).
Radical terrorism is an enormous red herring simply because only a very small percentage of the total population will engage in it, they are easy to identify (Israel has been doing it successfully for years), and regulating their _computer_ use will not make or break their aims.
Therefore, we must logically conclude that the article is really about copyright, and not terrorism.
Huh? You seem to be stuck on something that is irrelevant to the current conversation (at least, the point that I was making). I have no interest in debating copyright with you.
If you are stuck on that point, replace "copyright" in my original post with "operating a drone-mounted pistol". Better?
No we don't have laws about wheels. We have laws about cars. Cars are not wheels. Wheels are merely a critical component of cars. And that distinction is absolutely vital to the wheel analogy.
You're losing me here, but I'll try: we can't pass laws about components, but we can pass laws about complete systems? Why is that?
If you can pass a law about wheels only when you've bolted four of them together and attached an engine, can you similarly pass laws about microprocessors once you've attached memory, screen, a wifi link, and a global packet network known as the internet?
Cory Doctorow goes on to discuss that as well in the next paragraph after the one I initially posted, when talking about banning hands-free kits in cars:
"We understand that cars remain cars even if we remove features from them. Cars are special-purpose, at least in comparison to wheels, and all that the addition of a hands-free phone does is add one more feature to an already-specialized technology. There's a heuristic for this: special-purpose technologies are complex, and you can remove features from them without doing fundamental, disfiguring violence to their underlying utility."
Computers and software such as Google and MegaUpload are not special-purpose enough that you can make legislation about their design without "doing fundamental, disfiguring violence to their underlying utility".
We already have laws saying that you cannot pirate music. It's called copyright law. The problem is that a lot of people want us to have laws saying that anyone who completely unknowingly facilitates copyright infringement should be punished. This means that any time someone can find pirated content by searching Google, Google would have broken the law, even though it's all automated and Google has no way of knowing that it's pirated. In fact, we already have a law called the DMCA that is supposed to deal with this, by establishing the "safe harbor" provision as well as a means by which IP owners can require service providers to remove infringing content, but that doesn't satisfy everyone.
So in this analogy, our copyright law is like the laws on cars. We already have laws saying you can't drive cars past the speed limit, or do other various things with them. But we don't have any laws for wheel manufacturers that say that their manufactured wheels cannot be used by someone else in the commission of a crime. Penalizing Google for inadvertently allowing someone to find a page (hosted by a third party) that contains copyrighted content is like fining a wheel manufacturer any time one of their wheels is used as a component of a car that was used to rob a bank. Besides being patently ridiculous, there's no way for a wheel manufacturer to know which cars are going to be used to rob banks.
If I wanted [...] to regulate a wheel, it's unlikely I'd succeed. If I turned up, pointed out that bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles [...]
His point overall is sound but I think a better analogy would be to compare the infrastructure of the internet to roads and Google to a GPS -- If there's an area of a city where crime is known to take place e.g. where drugs, prostitution or stolen goods can be found, law-makers, without thinking terribly hard about the problem, place an onus on the GPS maker to block out those roads from being found.
The end result is that the places where illicit goods and services were available remain but are slightly more difficult to find without direct instructions or having foreknowledge of how to get there. No problem has actually been resolved, just swept aside and the GPS maker is the one who has to do the work for no gain - in fact it goes against their core function of navigating roads.
To play the devils advocate: Bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles. Therefore we need a law that all wheeled vehicles have a government backdoor that broadcasts the location of the car and allows remote control.
Yes, but google could trivially remove all searches which contains the words 'free', 'watch' and 'online', or at least not autocomplete on those words. Would it stop all bad guys? No, but it would make it a bit harder, which means the searcher is more likely to get a link to e.g netflix.
> If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly
> recorded music revenues have fallen from $21 billion to $7 billion per year. Newspaper ad revenue has fallen from $65 billion in 2000 to $18 billion
So Joe Schmoe could make a record and market it to the general public (read: get radio airplay) before the internet came and stole everything with their "monopolies" ?
Anyone could start their own newspaper back then too ? There wasn't a huge barrier to entry, like, oh, buying your own printing press ?
I'm not sympathetic whatsoever to "content creators" bellyaching stories about the good ole days when they had control of the monopolies.
Information is free. If the only reason you were making money in 1995 was because HDDs weren't large enough to store hundreds of albums, or because a competing label couldn't afford payola to the radio stations, you never deserved the money you made in the first place.
Companies back then solved the problem of information scarcity. The fact that there is no more scarcity doesn't entitle you to reparation.
The author at several points seems to dither between an insightful consideration of the technological present, and what I can only quantify as an underlying fear indicative of the very sleepiness against which we're being warned. For example:
> My deeper question comes from my position as a professor here for the last 12 years, where I have watched the lure of Silicon Valley grow stronger. If the best and the brightest of you are drawn to building addictive apps rather than making great journalism, important films, or literature that survives the test of time, will we as a society be ultimately impoverished?
Might not have Rip said, on the day of his return to waking life, "if the best and the brightest of you are drawn to building democracy rather than making great works in the name of the monarchy, an institution that is sure to survive the test of time, will we as a society be ultimately impoverished for lack of grace?"
One cannot claim that the future is being misunderstood because it does not look like one's past. Yes, the increasing ubiquity of processing machines has altered society. These are still early days and the changes are so new, it's a bit like bumbling around in the dark. It seems short-sighted to assume that the current state is in any way permanent or indicative of future states.
> I was lucky enough to be involved with some artists like Bob Dylan, The Band, George Harrison, and Martin Scorsese, whose work will surely stand the test of time. I’m not sure I know what the implications are of the role-model shift from rebel filmmaker to software coder.
Neither are we. Something, however, is quite certain: whatever the implications, the future is coming and calling it wrong because it is incongruous with the past is to miss it.
I'm not sure where to differentiate between the rebel filmmaker and the rebel software application developer - at least not in his analogy.
The rebel artist is there to disrupt social norms through a particular medium. In his time, anti-Vietnam messages were a big one.
Now apps like Uber aim to disrupt social norms through the software medium. (I will argue all day that software is art, BTW.) Just because the author doesn't recognize the movement personally doesn't mean it has really changed all that much.
(P.S. All of author's heroes listed are rich. I fully believe both art and riches can be pursued at the same time, but being paid well for doing what you love is the same as it's always been.)
Well, they are also out to disrupt the government enforced taxi monopolies using VC money.
I agree that there isn't anything patentable about their approach. We'll see how hard it is to compete with their combination of infrastructure and network effect.
However, I think there might be some (quite substantial) difference between a terrible war and a terrible government-regulated taxi service. The importance and weight of an issue and so on.
In many ways I think this article is exploiting a false dichotomy that has always bothered me: Libertarianism vs. Communalism. I've believed for a long that both Rand and Marx were very important thinkers who both fundamentally believed in the freedom of the individual: Freedom from control by 'Capital' and freedom from control by the 'Government'.
I get worried as I see the ever tighter cooperation between capital and government in our society. We risk approaching a world that both Marx and Rand would have been united in opposition of.
At the same time, I have hope. By freely choosing to cooperate, choosing to do what we love, by choosing to give whatever we can back to the world, by choosing to support free software and free platforms, we have shown that we have the opportunity to outpace the ability of capital and government to react to this revolution.
We'll see where things go. I'm sure it'll be interesting.
I understand what you're saying and I agree with it, but it hurts to see Ayn Rand mentioned along with actual philosophers and economists (even Marx, who's largely out of favor in the political and academic realms these days).
There's this sense of necessary equality of the ends of a spectrum (sort of like the two-sides-to-every-story fallacy), and Rand gets to sit on one end of that spectrum as its de facto representative, garnering some kind of scholarly-econo-philosophical legitimacy in the process. It rankles.
I wouldn't call either Rand or Max a philosopher. I would be more inclined to call Rand a poet and Marx an economist. (I must admit I am much less familiar with Marx's writings).
I place them in opposition to each other mostly because of their rather unique ability to instantly draw the ire of one large segment of the population while rallying another.
marx is definitely a philosopher in the hegelian tradition -- dialectical materialism is his great contribution. i wouldn't say it's inaccurate to describe him as an economist, though
Nicely said. I always take note when I see libertarians and left-liberals in agreement (e.g. on the war machine, or surveillance/privacy) and wonder if there might be some more substantial basis for a coalition there.
If I may make an even stronger statement, to hopefully spark an interesting conversation:
I have hope. Spontaneous cooperation between equal peers which unintentionally upsets the status quo and becomes the inflection point for political change for the good has been a longstanding tradition.
The requirements are:
1. Equal peers who abide basic human rights such that cooperation is possible.
2. Pent-up desire for political change for the good which needs a catalyst/release valve.
3. Critical mass of willing participants who, if they discover new status quo, can immediately grasp its significance. (a.k.a. The Innovator's Dilemma)
4. Method of communication which enables #3 to cause the political change.
I don't personally have much faith in political change as a starting point. Political change may happen. I suspect it will be the results of a paradigm shift, not the cause of one.
I do agree that innovations in communication, especially in the area of collective decision making, are key.
Ok, I apologize if it sounded like political change was the starting point. (Good! I obviously need to clarify!)
Political change is definitely the result -- but media outlets frequently claim it is all four: cause, method, effect, and definition. (Of the paradigm shift.)
He makes some really good points about the way that the capital owning classes actually don't want greater democratic enfranchisement. He also makes some great points about how there doesn't seem to be as much inclination towards revolutionary art.
As people come to grips with the decline of American power and begin to realize that, in fact, we aren't free or special or really living up to any of the high ideals that are described in some of our founding documents and rhetoric you will see more arguments like these.
At the root of his critique is that he really does believe that we are special and this place can be magic. It isn't and it won't be.
EDIT: Libertarianism is a dying hooker licking 9V alkaline batteries for that metallic taste of excitement every time it gets to posit a counterfactual notion about some basic human tenant. It's a foolish sounding semi-sorta ideology when espoused by the middle class who are algorithmically incapable of seeing any benefit from it's implementation and a smug blanket of self-serving satisfaction for the wealthy who use it to make their social position intellectually palatable in a "dinner party" conversational sense.
While the wealthy capitalists in this article may really entertain ludicrous thoughts of building a treehouse-fort-island where they are the biggest bully, they don't do so in any way that might upset their own apple cart's on the way to markets created and policed by a political process that they go out of their way to openly despise but are intravenously connected to in ways that conjoined twins sharing a single heart would consider too close for comfort.
Libertarianism's philosopher's are the unpopular clowns at the children's birthday party of society hoping that bending their "business innovation's" into balloon animals will convince the starving attendees to actually enjoy watching them eat all of the cake. "Look it's a lion! Rawr!"
EDIT EDIT: COME ON. You know that's good. Come on!
In fact I think that you can have a functional Democracy without any freedom. That's kind of what I mean. I don't think that people are interested in freedom and I don't mean that to sound like a tea party fan. I just think that this place wouldn't be the way it is if people were genuinely interested in freedom...in fact it's such a nebulous term that it's almost meaningless.
Remember in Braveheart where Mel WahtsHisFAce rides in front of the soldiers waiting to go into battle to establish yet another monarchy, "What will you do without freedom?" That's a great summation of Americans arguing about freedom during an election cycle. We are an open society. We are a little d democratic society. I don't think that we are a free society.
Sorry for the blahblah blah stuff. It's just been on my mind a lot for some reason. Back to the salt mine.
This is a really interesting piece and it is imperative that this generation of techies really takes to heart the war between tech enabling people and tech trapping people, but a quote in particular made me question a lot of the statements and notions presented.
He quotes Thiel's "competition is for losers" statement, which is prominent in Zero to One, to suggest that Thiel doesn't believe in competition. But really Thiel is just saying that from a business perspective, you should be looking for non-competitive markets.
While true, the combination of the Thiel's beliefs ends up feeling a little bit "For me, but not for thee". Relying on the free hand of the market to take care of things depends on there being a market, but any given company is massively incentivized to distort the market as far as humanly possible.
> So I want to explore the idea that the last 20 years of technological progress — the digital revolution — have devalued the role of the creative artist in our society
I disagree. Technological progress has just mostly devalued the old institutions of middle men and gate keepers. Now anyone with a digital video camera, mic, and computer can become a star. They no longer need hollywood's or the record labels' permission
New boss, same as the old boss. The would-be stars need Youtube's "permission", though actually I think this really means that the media company profits by the work of the artist more than the artist does.
Getting Youtube's 'permission' is way easier and way faster than securing the same thing through old media companies.
> actually I think this really means that the media company profits by the work of the artist more than the artist does.
Can anyone really tell though, since the accounting methods of both Hollywood and the music industry is really shady where the numbers are just not available for anyone or even the artists themselves. With silicon valley this is a lot more transparent.
There's another blog post I can't find about an artist not being able to get access to the exact sales of his music online from his record company, which didn't make sense to him since pretty much every online music servic make it available.
Perhaps this is not revolution, but a return: For much of human history, workers have been paid poorly, if at all. Labour was always cheap. This changed in the late 19th C and early 20th C. Perhaps 20th C costly labour was nothing but a blip, an oddity, and we are now returning to the mean?
The article contains the line economic gains will flow to those who own the platform rather than to those who do the work which makes me think of Agatha Christie's comment about her youthful perspective I never thought I would be so poor as to not have live-in staff, or so rich as to have a car and driver.
> For much of human history, workers have been paid poorly, if at all.
I think you are extrapolating the experience of the 19th century industrialization into the distant past. There have always been poor people, but I think "labour" is a relatively recent concept.
i.e. Medieval serfs had a place fixed in society. It was a lousy place, but a place still. It had more to do with lord-vassal relationship than in had to do with the calculus of labor's value added.
Well, a more detailed comment from me would have expanded upon themes of reward, social mobility (which requires resources or connections or both), etc., etc. But as a quick comment, it serves.
For example, consider serfs as examples of hardly paid at all: They made enough to survive, but even if they had surplus and managed to sell it for a luxury item or two, they stayed stuck in their fiefdoms, by and large, unless they had skills or talents both in demand and recognized, e.g., qualities for the priesthood, for becoming a mason, etc., or unless they fled and/or joined the military.
I guess they key follow-on to both the original article and to Christie's comment is one disposable wealth and choice: For much of human history, most of us have had neither. For part of the 20th C, many of us have had both.
Perhaps that is the return to the mean (that I honestly hope we are not experiencing - otherwise, my daughter's world will be far crappier than mine, regardless of the efforts of either of us, unless one of us should win the platform creation-and-ownership lottery).
Thought provoking on a lot of levels. I believe that the technology we're creating is cutting both ways.
It has allowed us to become more connected, but it seems that connection is at the shallowest level and has resulted in a disconnection from our deeper selves as the added distractions take energy away from self-reflection and self-awareness.
The opportunities that we've created that allow any given idea to go viral, become a killer app and make billionaires has distracted us from finding deeper ideals that could be shared to show us how to lead a more meaningful life and create a civilization worthy of stepping out to the stars.
I don't know if what I'm saying makes any sense to anyone else, but something has definitely been bothering me for awhile and I think articles like this one are starting to help me articulate it and at least let me know that I'm not alone.
You are echoing a notion that I see and hear regularly from a number of my more artistic, spiritually inclined friends. That technology is isolating us from one another, preventing people from connecting as we did in times past.
Honestly? I think it's not true. In days of yore, people read newspapers or books to isolate themselves. Or whittled. Or knit. Or just looked busy. If anything has changed, it's that it is now possible to connect deeply to a person many thousands of miles away. Most of the connections in life are superficial, yes. That's true today and has been for centuries.
My artistic and spiritual friends are, sad to say, mostly pining for a golden age that never existed.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you've never been to a 3rd world country for an extended period of time. If I'm wrong I'd like to apologize for making this assumption to make the rest of my point, because you can easily step on the way back machine by moving someplace where only a few people have computers.
During my time in Bolivia and Haiti I experience massive culture shock at the way people interact with their community. At night you can walk around the central plaza in the Okinawa Numero Uno (mind you this is a TINY town) and someone will find you to chat with you. In bigger towns (in Bolivia) people are friendly, because they have to interact to get directions, ask for a good place to eat, or just chat. There are community events ALL the time.
Was it a golden age? No, I don't think so, but it was a time and culture where people KNEW their neighbors because if you want to stave off boredom you have to hang out with them to laugh, eat, drink, etc. I don't think technology has changed this per se, but instead that TV and the culture of entertainment that we have has changed this.
I know that comparing the USA 30-50 years ago and Bolivia is an oversimplification, but there definitely was a culture difference before everyone had a cellphone in their pocket. It may not have been a golden age, but for some people it was a period where the risks were easier to understand.
That said, I also think people were still able to find isolation who wanted it, the main difference is people who were seeking a way to fight boredom had much fewer ways to do that in their house by themselves 50 years ago.
The difference you are describing is societies where physical mobility is possible and the norm versus societies where it is not. Places where it's possible to know all the people around you and places where it isn't. Places where actual cities exist versus places where they don't.
There are parts of the US like those you describe. I've lived in some of them. People KNOW their neighbors. Very intensely. It's very rare to have a neighbor that you haven't known for at least a decade. They still have TV, a culture of entertainment, Facebook, and iPhones. There's a constant sense of community, and an apparently endless stream of events.
And you know what? I can't stand life in those places. I found them incredibly insular. Stifling. Conformity-enforcing. It's not something I found to be beautiful, uplifting, or pleasant. They are not a thing I wish to encourage or would call a desirable model.
Did you notice that the things I cited - newspapers, books, knitting, and whittling - are all at least several centuries old? That was not an accident.
The difference is that the forms of entertainment you list are things you learn to do. You must be taught. Tv, music, audiobooks and some other new forms of entertainment don't require thought. They are shoved at you. They may provoke thought but don't require it. Then you add other advances on top of that, the internet, the avialbility of cars, planes, cellphone, etc. It changes society.
To argue that these things haven't changed society and that the older generation hasn't lived through it is ridiculous. Is it better? That's an opinion, and the older generation may think so. My dad LOVES working on old cars, but hates working with electronics (i.e. new cars)... Does he miss the "golden age". Heck yeah, but does he also love watching TV at night, heck yeah.
>And you know what? I can't stand life in those places. I found them incredibly insular. Stifling. Conformity-enforcing. It's not something I found to be beautiful, uplifting, or pleasant. They are not a thing I wish to encourage or would call a desirable model.
Again totally an opinion, but society has changed even there with the advent of the car/tv/internet/cellphone. These are things that expand our world, but shrink where we feel comfortable (I.E. I feel more comfortable driving an hour to see my friend then hanging out with my neighbor). Some people have adapted to the "new world" very well and others would prefer to reminisce about the golden age.
I'd like to take the best of both worlds, which is why I'm working to get to know my neighbors better, but also to enjoy the community I've found here on that interwebs thingy.
I think the core difference is that you think ideal a society where people are continually coerced into unwanted social interaction is ideal. I think it dystopian. I much, much prefer a society where i get a choice.
I don't think unwated social interaction is ideal, I want that interaction and I want the people I'm interacting with to want it too....
I get your point though, if you feel like you don't want that type of face to face interaction then it would seem like hell (See the TV show Ascension for what I'm talking about).
It reminds me of a quote from vince vaughn. http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0396269/quotes?qt=qt0329774 see " I apologize to you if I don't seem real eager to jump into a forced awkward intimate situation that people like to call dating."
I know light humor is frowned upon in HN but when I thought of it for this situation it made me laugh a little I hope you get a giggle out of it :-)
I find myself reminded of a personal experience from the "early" days of the net.
Back then it was dialup that was the thing, and IRC was the main communications system. This resulted in local and regional channels popping up on various networks.
But then came IM, in particular with MS bundling MSN Messenger with Windows.
Over a year or so i watched the IRC channel dwindle as people moved to using IM.
And yet, despite that increase in face to face interaction--Bolivians love Facebook in a way that few communities in the US would understand. The world is really shrinking when for 1 Boliviano (paid to the owner of the packed to the gills internet cafe) people can chat in real time for an hour from the heart of the Amazonian jungle with New York, London, or Singapore.
People have always wanted to be distracted or sought solitary hobbies, but what I'm talking about is more how we interface with one another.
The way we used to interface with one another was face to face and when you looked someone in the eyes it was simply harder to lie or hide your true feelings. Language is a pretty crappy interface, which is why tone and speech pattern and body language are all a part of the communication methods we evolved.
However, as we move forward we drop more vocabulary and use acronyms, we don't construct texts instead of speaking and we share perfectly captured moments with captions instead of simply sharing authentic moments.
A stupid anecdote, I went to some concert and a bunch of us were tailgating and it was super hot and most people were just chilling having normal everyday conversation. But a few people felt the need to be taking pictures as if it was some kind of wild fun time. It wasn't, it was just fine, but the pictures for some reason needed to be setup and made to create a fake representation of what was actually happening.
We can all share what we want with each other instantly, but what we share seems to need to merge with an identity that is perceived to be under constant scrutiny. How can our children develop an authentic self when the primary method of interfacing with others is subject to that sort of social pressure?
I know I'm just wasting my time since people simply say "If you want to do X, just do it" or "I just do Y and it's not a big deal", but it still feels like we're creating a culture dominated by a constant masquerade and today I felt the need to rant about it.
Any time you have two people interacting in any way, you have a culture dominated by a constant masquerade. All that's changed now is that you're more aware of it than you were before. I suspect quite strongly that you'll find this to be true in pretty much all of human history. It comes with being a social animal with a theory of mind - we care about and wish to shape how others view us.
> Any time you have two people interacting in any way, you have a culture dominated by a constant masquerade.
Often, but not always. And maybe that's another way to look at this. People are longing for authenticity, both in themselves and their interactions, and all they're getting are Facebook posts. In the non-tech society, you got phoniness, certainly, but you probably got more genuine interactions than you do now.
You got more interactions, but they weren't more genuine. They were every bit as much about building and maintaining an image.
I suspect they were less genuine, on the whole, because you had less ability to opt out and limit yourself to only more genuine interactions. In the non-tech society, keeping up appearances was and is of paramount importance.
I don't know about that. It's true that I can maintain relationships with people all across the world, in more or less real time, without months-long delays for letters to travel. But...
It used to be that I'd go into the bank and talk to a teller. Now I use an ATM. In the grocery store, I used to have a checker. Now it's mostly self-check-out. I used to go to the ballgame with thousands of other fans. Now I watch it on the internet.
Once upon a time, I would go to the theater, and watch live humans on the stage. Then I'd go to the theater/cinema, and watch a movie. Now I download it from Netflix.
In short, life has gotten a lot more impersonal in a lot of ways. It's more efficient, but less human.
The parts about addiction ring true to me, too. Paul Graham has talked about this with distraction. But I suspect that it would be valid for you to classify me in with the "artistic and spiritual" people.
What's happened is that a lot of things that used to require human interaction are now human-interaction-optional. We have choices that didn't before. Many people seem hellbent on not considering the possibility that these mandatory interactions were not desirable for many people.
I don't want a conversation with the bank teller. I just want my cash so I can go do something that I actually do want to do. Maybe I want to be entertained and get sloppy drunk in my PJs instead of going to the theater. It turns out I'm not even slightly alone. A lot of us seem to prefer our "less human" lives.
That's the way I feel too. I understand why extroverts want to have people around to chat with, but for me all that interaction just exhausting. I don't go to the theater any more and do all my shopping online. I'm happier for it, too.
I get the sense that the extroverts are confused by the revelation that we're not all extroverts. They feel something has been "lost" now that we have the choice to avoid being nonconsensual extroverts. And that said choice is exercised on a regular basis.
Well, I feel like I've been liberated from coerced interpersonal interaction. Others paint this as being disconnected from my community.
Maybe they define community differently. I don't consider the random set of people within a half-mile of my apartment to be my community in any kind of deep and meaningful way.
It has allowed us to become more connected, but it seems that connection is at the shallowest level and has resulted in a disconnection from our deeper selves as the added distractions take energy away from self-reflection and self-awareness.
Distraction is what you allow.
I hardly have any notifications on my phone or my desktop or do any kind of 'social networking' as related to going on facebook and twitter.
Yes, the narrative that we are will-less slaves to our electronic devices is just as disrespectful as the conspiracy theorist shouting "Wake up Sheeple!"
> Since [...] 2000, global recorded music revenues have fallen from $21 billion to $7 billion per year. [...] So where did the money go? Two places: into the pockets of Digital Monopolists and Digital Thieves.
The author here is making an absolutely incredible assumption here, which is that the decline in revenue for the entertainment industry is somehow fundamentally wrong and must be caused by bad people.
But it's far more likely that the revenue seen by the entertainment industry leading up to 2000 was an aberration, caused by a very brief window of time where technology enabled mass production and distribution by corporations without easy copying or sharing by individuals. But if you go further back than 2000[1], I'm sure you'll find that their revenue was much lower not all that long ago. I'd be very surprised if that $21 billion number didn't represent their all-time peak, meaning 2000 wasn't the start of the decline, it was actually just the end of a bubble.
[1] I'm having trouble finding that data myself, anyone know where to look?
Addendum: It turns out the worldwide music industry revenues actually haven't fallen since 2000. Which I guess explains why the article explicitly said "recorded music". According to http://www.businessinsider.com/music-industry-revenues-chart..., the worldwide music industry revenues in 2013 are about the same as in 2000 [2]. But what's actually happened is that most of that money is now coming from tours instead of recorded music [3].
This further reinforces my "bubble" argument. Before the advent of easily-produced recorded music, the music industry revenue must have been mostly live music. So the bubble here is just the short period of time when the music industry was able to make a killing on mass-produced recorded music sales. But that bubble is over, we're back to the industry needing to earn its money from live music and other secondary sources. But of course the music industry doesn't want to admit that this is a bubble. They want to pretend that the business model of selling recorded music is sacred and must be protected by law, regardless of the consequences.
[2]: It's 3% lower, but that's pretty meaningless.
[3]: It says 36% of the revenue is recorded music.
> If the best and the brightest of you are drawn to building addictive apps rather than making great journalism, important films, or literature that survives the test of time, will we as a society be ultimately impoverished?
The opportunity to create art still exists. Distribution channels are more varied now; they're more inclusive and perhaps (ironically?) less conducive to middle class salaries. But since when has creating art ever been about financial reimbursement? You're either creating or you aren't. The incentive exists for those that feel one, for those that have to create or go insane. If you "were going to be a novelist" but decided to be a programmer or an economist because you wanted to make money, well...
> As my colleague Ethan Zuckerman said, “It’s obvious now what we did was a fiasco, so let me remind you that what we wanted to do was something brave and noble.”
Can we find role models who were successful at achieving their "brave and noble" social goals? We can draw upon centuries of negotiation between labor and rent seekers.
> Your generation does not need to surrender to some sort of techno-determinist future. Let’s try and “rewire” (Ethan’s term) the Internet.
The article mentions SOPA but not TPP/TTIP/TISA/RECP which will "rewire" the Internet, computing infrastructure and more. Caution is warranted when listening to rewirers bearing gifts.
The author has some good insight on many things, but the insight is mixed up with ...something else, and that makes a conflated spaghetti. For example, why I and most of people I know opposed SOPA wasn't exactly because of piracy; I'd remind that opposition included also organizations like Wikipedia, EFF, ACLU, HRW and Reporters without Borders.
Most of the confusion seems to be there because being a content creator affects his viewpoint... which is understandable. But in a grand scheme of things, the future of professions based on copyright is quite minor issue compared to the other problems of technological revolution and politics intertwined with it.
well, the trick was the same as usual - under the guise of protecting the "struggling artist/creator" the public was sold a law - DMCA (and supporting ideology&moral) - which main purpose and function is to protect the platforms who as the result of it got to exploit the "creators" instead of the Studios/labels who did it in the pre-Internet/pre-DMCA time.
"The important tests of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose are first whether it will work, and second whether or not it will, in the course of doing its work, have effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress, Parliament, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it's unlikely I'd succeed. If I turned up, pointed out that bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles, and asked, “Can't we do something about this?", the answer would be “No". This is because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications, but useless to bad guys. We can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we'd be foolish to risk changing them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies—even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies—no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems."
Computers have no notion of what is 'good' content and what is 'bad' content, and we aren't yet able to teach them accurately the difference (even humans aren't able to tell 100% of the time).