Day: 22 October 2006

Numbing down: The art of playing with numbers in order to make things seem to be what they are not.

I guess many of you, like me, wonder “How did they do that?” when looking at something novel and unusual. It’s good to be curious.

As against this, do you ever wonder “How could they possibly know that?” when you trip over statistical references? I do, and it is a source of frequent frustration for me. We live in an age of spin, and battles are fought not just with words, not just with pictures, but with numbers as well. Presidents and Prime Ministers justify what they do with statistics and polls, and much of what is behind the numbers is complex. That is, if you accept “complex” as a valid synonym for Lies and Damned Lies.

Which is why I’m such a big fan of John Allen Paulos. It’s been many years since I first read Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. Douglas Hofstadter, when reviewing the book nearly two decades ago, said:

Our society would be unimaginably different if the average person understood the ideas in this marvelous and important little book.

I was hooked from the first anecdote on the first page:

“Two aristocrats are out horseback riding and one challenges the other to see which can come up with the larger number. The second agrees to the contest, concentrates for a few minutes, and proudly announces ‘Three’. The proposer of the game is quiet for half an hour, then finally shrugs and concedes defeat.”

Read it for yourself, it’s worth it.

It is in this context that I’m delighted to see that Anant Rangaswami has started a blog about media and advertising in India, and related matters. He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.

In these days of citizen journalism, much has been written, much has been said, about authenticity and relevance and integrity in blogs and podcasts and video phenomena. Much of the pushback has come from MSM. Anant is someone who really understands what makes the media sector in India tick. The sector is important to all of us, but even more so because the learning he exhibits is in India. The sheer scale of the middle class there, the endless variety they have in the touch spaces between media and entertainment and sport and politics (is there a difference between the last two? I’m no longer sure…).

So welcome, Anant, I look forward to bigger and richer conversations.

I’ve been fascinated by the stuff that Jon Lech Johansen has been up to for quite a while now, he first came to my notice sometime in 2000, soon after he started his reverse-engineer every lock-in campaign; take a look at his blog, So Sue Me, if you’re interested. In fact, if you’re really interested, you should see his Wikipedia entry (which I’ve linked to above) and use that as a date filter into his blog archives.

In a recent Fortune article headlined Unlocking The iPod, DVD Jon (as he is often referred to) is quoted as saying:

“I was fed up with not being able to play a movie the way I wanted to play it”. [He wanted to use a PC running Linux.]

His frustration led to his working with a few people to develop DeCSS. When you take a look at the Wikipedia entry for DeCSS, you find the following:

The licensing restrictions on CSS make it impossible to create an open source implementation through official channels, and closed source drivers are unavailable for some operating systems, so some users need DeCSS to watch DVDs at all.
We’ve all felt some, if not all, of his frustrations. Poorly implemented DRM can create content jails and denude and blight the open spaces where many of us want to live. As with any jail, there have been many attempts to break out. What’s curious about Jon’s latest attempt with the iPod is that he’s breaking in, not out.

There’s something about it that really grabs me. It’s a sort-of hide-in-plain-sight Purloined Letter response to the problem.

I think there is something for all of us to learn from developments like these:

• People are generally very frustrated at not being able to listen to, watch or otherwise interact with music and film and video. We may not be able to see it, but that’s because we’re dinosaurs. Generation M can see it. Unlike us, they will do something about their frustrations. There will be many DVD Jons out there.
• Even where solutions exist, or can be made to exist, we have a lot of licence issues to deal with. The generation I belong to probably put most energy into solving the wrong problems, often creating ill-starred tax wheezes and get-rich-quick schemes. Generation M isn’t into the same stuff as we were into, and they will work around current licence issues. There will be many DeCSSs out there.
• Generation M’s ingenuity isn’t to be trifled with. Our generation may spend time building our walled gardens and using terms like “content” and “IPR” and whatever else we come up with. They’re not going to break out with “our” stuff. They’re going to break in with “theirs”. What Jon did to the iPod was a bit like creating a master key at a hotel in order to solve the different room keys problem. Master keys are used to break in, not out. There will be many master keys out there.

Opensource has always been about free as in freedom, not free as in gratis. Generation M’s values are different from ours, their facility with modern technology is considerably greater, their ingenuity in solving problems comes from quite a different perspective.

People like Jon will devote an awful lot of energy into removing what they see as unfair obstacles. Too often, the obstacles are really about creating artificial scarcities, about protecting some perverse lock-in.

There are many people like Jon out there. Many more than people not-like-Jon, interested in building walls. And soon, with the continued growth in usage of social software, they will have some serious muscle in terms of critical mass.
Think about it before you try and build the wrong walls. Sand castles don’t do particularly well against tidal waves.