Author: JP

Why we share: a sideways look at privacy

This is a follow-up post to one I wrote nearly three months ago, Musing About Sharing and Privacy. This time, I’m trying to focus on just one thing. What makes people share. Incidentally, while talking about sharing: if you’re interested in privacy I would strongly recommend you read this post by Danah Boyd and this post by Stowe Boyd (no relation).

I was particularly taken with danah’s Five Things You Must Know About Privacy In A Digital Context, something I’ve had the privilege of hearing danah speak about in person. Here’s an excerpted version:

  • We must differentiate between personally identifiable information (PII) and personally embarrassing information (PEI).
  • We’re seeing an inversion of defaults when it comes to what’s public and what’s private…. you have to choose to limit access rather than assuming that it won’t spread very far.
  • People regularly calculate both what they have to lose and what they have to gain when entering public situations.
  • People don’t always make material publicly accessible because they want the world to see it.
  • Just because something is publicly accessible does not mean that people want it to be publicized. Making something that is public more public is a violation of privacy.

danah also makes a key comment during her SXSW talk, linked to earlier:

Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows.

The public/private/secret distinctions that Stowe draws out are also worth noting and considering. danah and stowe, in their different ways, have spent considerable time seeking to explain to others what they’ve learnt and understood about privacy, and I don’t want to undermine any of it. Rather, I want to look at things from a slightly different perspective, trying to figure out why people share.

photo courtesy the Green Children Blog

Nearly a decade ago, I was transfixed by a book called Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Organisations. I have no hesitation in recommending you read it; the book did more for my understanding of post-Maslowian thinking than any other I had read before or since. [And I am so pleased to see that one of the authors of the book, Nitin Nohria, is to become Dean of Harvard Business School from 1 July 2010.

In the book, Nohria and Lawrence make a very simple assertion, summarised below:

Editor’s Note: In Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, the authors combine the latest thinking from the biological and social sciences to lay out a new theory on human nature. The idea: We are all influenced and guided by four drives: acquiring, bonding, learning, and defending. In this excerpt, Lawrence and Nohria examine how an organization built around the four-drive theory might look.

We are all influenced and guided by four drives: acquiring, bonding, learning, and defending.

That’s how I look at sharing. Speaking personally, most of the time when I share things (like my thoughts here), I share them because I want to learn. As I share, I make myself vulnerable, and in making myself vulnerable I strengthen bonds with the people I share with. As those bonds strengthen, trust between us grows, and I am less alone, less isolated. Which satisfies my drive to defend when under attack.

All learners are teachers as well, and there may be a sense of acquisition as learning takes place via sharing. So to my warped way of thinking, sharing is one of the mosy natural things for a human being to do: the act of sharing seems to satisfy all four of our core drivers.

Man was born to share.

My thanks to Dieter Drescher for the photograph above

The past few decades have been characterised, at least in part, by the introduction of a plethora of tools that make sharing easier. Tools we call social software or social media and a variety of other names, covering blogs, wikis, instant messaging, community media sites such as YouTube or Flickr or last.fm or blip.fm or the daddy of them all, Wikipedia, social networking sites such as facebook or LinkedIn, news and status update sites such as Twitter, even location signallers such as foursquare or gowalla; without even going into the giant landscape of “vertical” communities like epicurious.

I tend to think of all these things as belonging to one or more of four camps: places where I can share things; places where people can share things with me; tools I can use to share things with others; tools that others can use to share stuff with me.

And all these things are relatively new. So we’ve got to figure out how they work, what they’re good for, what they’re less good for. The only way we’re really going to be able to learn about these things is by using them. And finding out what works, and what doesn’t work. What to share. With whom. How. What to receive from others. Who the others should be.

David Weinberger writes eloquently about the importance of tagging, amongst other things, in Everything is Miscellaneous. Sharing alone is not enough, we have to make what we share easy to consume. So the tools become important.

For the last few years, I’ve been trying out many social sites, learning what makes them tick, how to get value from them, how to create value in them. Many of these services allow you to cross-post to others. Some tools even let you post what you’re saying in one medium on to all others. And by posting stuff all over the place, I’ve been able to learn what people like me to share, what people want me to share. And what they don’t want from me.

Over the years a few truths have emerged:

1. People are different in different electronic communities, and you have to figure out the frequency of information flow that each community feels comfortable about.

2. People are interested in different things you do, and uninterested in many other aspects of what you do. So you have to learn how often a particular community wants to hear from you; your facebook community is different from your flickr community is different from your twitter community is different from your blog community is different from the community you work with every day. I tweet every now and again in bursts. Covering conferences. Cooking. Reading. Listening to music. I have to figure out where each type of tweet should be shared, something I continue to learn about.

3. Everyone is learning about all this, so you’re going to have to subscribe and unsubscribe all over the place, as you figure out what’s useful and what’s not.

So.

While everyone worries about privacy, spend some time thinking about sharing. Think about what you want to share. Why you want to share it. With whom you want to share it.

We’re still in the wild west phase of all this: we’re learning about what we like to hear from others; we’re learning about what others would like to hear from us; and we’r learning about how we want to “control” all this. In the meantime, people who provide the services that let us do all this are trying to figure out how to make money while giving us those services. And everyone’s trying to figure out who ‘owns” what, all during a time when emerging generations are questioning the very concept of ownership. Maybe it’s time everyone re-read Lewis Hyde‘s The Gift.

Some of us, like me, are the experimenters, trying to figure out how to use all this stuff. So when I share that I’m going to a Cat Stevens concert, I’m gratified when someone thanks me for sharing that. Because their partner was a Cat Stevens freak and it made a difference.  When I share what I’m cooking for dinner, I was encouraged to use photographs, something I wouldn’t otherwise have done. When I share what I’m listening to, people complained that I was filling up their view, and I had to “turn the noise down”. When I shared my location, my daughter complained that her ex-boyfriend was stalking her through my tweets, so I cut off the Twitter-facebook feed.

These are all just examples. Real, but examples. The truth is that we have a lot to learn. And that is something that happens with anything new.

I had the privilege of meeting Freeman Dyson via his daughter Esther some years ago, at a Flight School event. It may even have been the inaugural one. And there, Freeman was regaling us with talk about what it was like in the heady “nuclear” days of the late 1940s, when they really thought they could use nuclear power to send rockets into space, without any real deep knowledge of the damage that would follow.

It didn’t happen. We learnt about the impact of that kind of radioactive fallout in time. Not in time for Hiroshima or Nagasaki, tragically, but we learnt.

And that’s what happening about digital privacy and sharing. We’re learning. And there are going to be mistakes. And there will be hurt. And out of all that new value will emerge. People like danah help us and safeguard us, because they’re looking at some of these issues deeply. People like the Web Science Trust are looking into this. People like the Berkman Center are looking into this. Even people like the World Economic Forum are looking into this. Because it matters.

In the end, it’s what danah says: privacy is about having control over information flows. What goes out of you. What comes into you. You choose. That’s privacy. And sharing.

Thinking about social objects and limbo dancing

There was a time when people had real beards and real names and real jobs. People such as Theodatus Garlick pictured below, one of the world’s first plastic surgeons, and perhaps one of the world’s first daguerrotype photographers. [Incidentally, I am grateful to the delightfully named Increase Lapham, whose wonderful collection of cartes-de-visites and cabinet cards is made accessible by the Wisconsin Historical Society, whom I must also thank.]

There was a time when it became possible to capture unusual juxtapositions of famous people, such as the photograph below, where a young Mohandas Karamchand (“Mahatma”) Gandhi appears to be wistfully unaware of his companion, the then somewhat more famous Nobel-winning poet, playwright, musician and novelist Rabindranath Tagore. My thanks to the Rare Book Society of India for making the photograph available to me.

There was a time when it became possible to capture incongruous events like this one, of Fidel Castro golfing, apparently with Che Guevara (captured by Alberto Korda, who also took the iconic Che shot that now graces t-shirts the world over):

There was a time when telephone engineers were top-hat-wearing Very Important People, festooned with tools (including some in the top hat) and nonchalantly carrying ladders and cables, as one does…. my thanks to BT Heritage for the photograph. [Incidentally, you might enjoy visiting the TeleFocus service there].

We live in amazing times, where it is possible for me to share such amazing photographs with you. Some hurdles remain, particularly in the context of copyright, but they are easing. Incidentally, this gives me an excuse to publish, for the nth time, my all-time favourite photograph, of an orphan boy hugging his first-ever new pair of shoes. [And the web has made it possible for me to identify the orphanage, the time, the year, the photographer, even the name of the boy!]. Here it is:

So where is this post heading, and what does it have to do with social objects?

Everything.

Ever since Hugh Macleod spoke to me about social objects, and pointed me towards what Jyri Engestrom had written, I’ve been fascinated by the concept. I had the pleasure of hearing Jyri at Reboot (I think it was in 2008) and he didn’t disappoint, he was excellent.

You know what makes an object “social”? We do. Without us there is no “social”, even if we use objects to extend and enhance that socialness.

Photographs are social objects, which is why it would come as no surprise if Facebook now had more photographs than Flickr. Films are social objects. Songs are social objects. Books. Sporting events. TV programs. Concerts. They’re all social objects.

When we see lists like that, we can start believing that all social objects are “content”, which gets the “rightsholders” of content salivating up the wazoo. Perish the thought.

Content is not what makes an object social. We do.

There was a time when “content” was created by a tiny minority of people, largely because the tools for making that content were elitist in nature. Scarce, expensive, needing specialist skills. To make matters worse, the techniques for distributing and sharing that “content” were also elitist in nature. So people who “owned” that “content” felt like kings.

Now things have changed. There’s been some limbo-dancing. The barriers to entry for creating, publishing and distributing “content” are getting lower by the minute. Which means that the content kings are all dressed up with nowhere to go. And so the only option they think they have is to try and recreate the barriers they used to enjoy, in paradigms where they are technically and economically difficult to recreate.

The most valuable social objects are the ones we create. Our narratives, our stories. Our memories. Our lives. Hopelessly intertwined with our family and friends, our associates, our acquaintances, our colleagues, even our enemies.

We are our stories. We used other, weaker, proxies for our stories at a time when we could not capture, publish and share our own stories. And, as long as there are no paywalls or DRM or suchlike, we will continue to use proxies, but only to augment our stories. They are not the stories. We are. They are not social objects per se. We make them social.

People who used to “own” “content” still have roles to play. While digital content will continue to trend towards free, there are many ways to make money because of that content rather than with that content, the “because effect”. Time-based premia. Analog sales. Authenticity. Merchandising. All the “better than free” ideas that Kevin Kelly tells us about.

As the cost of producing content drops, as the cost of distributing content drops, as the process of creating the content gets more and more democratised, something new happens. We start having too much content. Which means the role of curators increases in importance. Curation is about access, about trust, about relationships, about expertise, about context. So the content rightsholders of old have an opportunity to excel, since they have the inside track to providing these. We used to go to them for content they generated. Now we can go to them for content we generate. That is, if they stop their paywall tomfoolery. We pay for service, not for content.

I think that’s what Andrew Savikas was trying to say.

So remember, content does not a social object make. We make objects social. Our stories. Our narratives. Our memories. Our photographs. Our songs. Our shared experiences.

Back to Hugh Macleod, who taught me so much about social objects. Thank you Hugh.

As Hugh says, it’s time to …..remember who we are.

Books I’m reading

Maybe I read too much.

People often ask me to share my reading list with them, and yet I haven’t really done so except in fits and starts. There are a number of reasons for this. One, I read too much. Two, I haven’t particularly liked any of the book-sharing websites I’ve been pointed towards. Three, when I do share the list, I want to do more than just list the books, I want to say something about each of them. That’s the way I am.

Talking about book-sharing websites, what I’d really like is a smartphone app that does something like this:

  • scans barcode or ISBN number.
  • identifies book, gives me chance to confirm and augment the data.
  • lets me point the data towards one or more digital places it lets me set up: my library, borrowed, lent, blog post draft, amazon/abebooks/others recommendation engines, etc.
  • lets me know when authors of books I’ve starred are in the vicinity, current or planned. e. lets me know who else in my network is reading the book or related books.

Regular readers will be familiar with my reading style. Around ten books at a time. Books read at different paces. Books usually a mixture of fiction and nonfiction, even reference. Some books read more than once.

So here’s my current list:

  • Tainter, Joseph: The Collapse of Complex Societies. 1st reading. Because Clay Shirky suggested it. Fascinating. Hadn’t really got into collapse theory before. Think it is very important for anyone who seeks to understand why companies fail in paradigm shifts.
  • Johns, Adrian: Piracy. 2nd reading. Random bookstore buy, never heard of the author before. Still spitting at the idiocy of the Digital Economy Act, I owe it to myself to continue to delve into the entire issue in depth.
  • Sankar: Chowringhee 1st reading. Another bookstore purchase, the illustration on the spine caught my eye. Silhouette of man, umbrella, bike. Something very Calcutta about the set-up and the lighting. An enjoyable regression into a Havanaesque Calcutta.
  • Leonard, Elmore: Comfort to the Enemy. 2nd reading. Been a Leonard fan for years. More a dipping into than a reading. The Carl Webster stories are divine, and this a great triple.
  • Eisenstein, Elizabeth: The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. 5th reading, at least. I try and read and re-read and re-re-read this book regularly. For me to really understand and appreciate the nuances of the internet and the web, I need to be steeped in the learning of print. And it’s a fascinating subject anyway, one that has significant light to shed on copyright and IPR and socio-economic implications.
  • Zanini de Vita, Oretta: The Encyclopaedia of Pasta. 1st reading. Amazon recommendation. Trying to read this seminal tome from cover to cover. I love food, love pasta, and this is a great book for beginners and experts alike.
  • Gawer, Annabelle: Platforms, Markets and Innovation. 1st reading. I was aware of Prof Gawer’s earlier works, but hadn’t come across this recent publication. It’s a collection of essays by the great and the good in the sphere of platforms. Made all the more enjoyable by having a presentation copy from the author.
  • Gambetta, Diego: Codes of the Underworld. 1st reading. Very unusual book by a very unusual man. Bought via a book review somewhere I can’t remember. Shame. Fascinating study by someone who really knows his subject, presents an intriguing set of observations that we can extrapolate into all kinds of areas of strategic communications.
  • Miller, Donald: A Million Miles In A Thousand Years 1st reading. Loved Blue Like Jazz, was therefore positively inclined for any new Donald Millers. Urged to buy the book as  a result of something Chris Brogan said, probably on facebook.
  • Crawford, Matthew: The Case For Working With Your Hands. 1st reading. Serendipitous visit to bookstore while waiting for someone or something. Wonder why I’ve never heard of this guy before, loving the book. Reading it very slowly as a result. Described as Heidegger and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
  • Dodd, David: The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. 1st reading, if you can call it that. Amazon recommendation. Didn’t know when the book had been published, the Dead oeuvre is large enough to warrant a Harry-Potter-sized book designed to give you wrist strain as you read. I’m random-dipping into it.
  • Perez, Carlota: Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital 9th reading? Something like that. One more of those books I keep picking up regularly to learn about the environment we’re in, its causes, the implications.

You will notice I haven’t panned any of the books. You know why? Life’s too short. If I don’t like a book, the best thing I can do is not to mention it. If I read four or five hundred books a year, and mention maybe 30 in the blog, that’s a sign in itself. Why waste energy?

Talking about energy, hope you find the list useful. Tell me what I can do to improve it.

Thinking about predictability: More musings about Push and Pull

Chichen Itza photograph courtesy JuanRojo

If you’ve been following this blog for long, then you’ll probably know that I’ve been interested in a number of themes to do with information and its implications on business structures and process. You will also know that every now and then, I use the arenas of food and music to illustrate points or issues.

Of late, much of my time has been taken up in reading (and re-reading) The Power of Pull, and I’ve written a couple of posts on the subject. Messrs Hagel, Seely Brown and Davison have really made me think about things; they’ve answered some of the questions I’ve had for a while, and raised a number of new ones.

In parallel, I’ve also been delving into collapse theory, sparked off by Clay Shirky’s excellent post on the collapse of complex business models. That led me on to digging deeper into Joseph Tainter; I ordered and read The Collapse of Complex Societies straightaway; if any of you is interested in collapse theory, I would strongly recommend you read it; it is also really worth reading a long book review that Professor Tainter did, headlined Collapse, Sustainability and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed.

Clay has also been responsible for putting a third, connected, stream of thinking into my head, via Kevin Kelly, another must-read person. The Shirky Principle. [Incidentally, you can rest assured I will be reviewing Clay’s upcoming book, Cognitive Surplus. I’ve already ordered it; how nice it was to see that the book was actually being released same-day US and UK. I am so sick of artificial scarcities.]

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky

So that’s where my head is right now. Thinking about institutions built fundamentally around “push” principles trying to survive in a “pull” world. Thinking about institutions that are designed that way through no fault of their own; these principles have been the basis of management and economics thinking for the best part of a century. Thinking about institutions that “try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. Thinking about institutions that grow more and more complex over time, and then collapse.
Which leads me to the main point of this post. Predictability.
In the Power of Pull (pg 37) the authors articulate a number of “instincts, assumptions and beliefs” that make up “the philosophy of push”:
  • There’s not enough to go around
  • Elites do the deciding
  • Organisations must be hierarchical
  • People must be molded
  • Bigger is better
  • Demand can be forecast
  • Resources can be allocated centrally
  • Demand can be met
I am particularly taken with the Demand can be forecast/Demand can be met statements. For some years now, I have been bemused at the things institutions do in order to make something fundamentally unpredictable into something somehow more predictable.
Through sheer serendipity I was at Burroughs Corporation when the firm, and the industry, began to realise that the money was moving from hardware to software; I was at Data General when the firm, and the industry, began to realise that the money was moving from proprietary to open; I was at Cap Gemini when the firm, and the industry, began to realise that IT services were moving from national to global scale; I was at Dresdner Kleinwort when the firm, and the industry, began to realise that financial services were moving from analog to digital.
In each case, there was a significant shift taking place in the industry, one that was going to transform the entire market radically. In each case, there was a clear institutional response. And in each case, the response was expected to provide a predictability of outcome that was required to be of unusual precision for such an emergent venture in such a changing environment.
I saw the same thing when it came to “agile” methods and practices. Everybody seemed to understand what the methods and practices were; and then, for some strange reason, everyone expected some incredible level of precision in planning and outcome which militated against any concept of agility; this is what I was referring to as the “planning horizon” problem in a recent post.
These behaviours caused a level of cognitive dissonance in me, and I’ve therefore been thinking about it for some time now. Right now I don’t want to go into why people want this predictability, suffice it to say that it appears to be a Push principle as articulated in the book. What I want to do is concentrate on the things people do in order to achieve this state of predictableness.
The easiest route to guaranteeing predictability is to control the market, have a monopoly. Many companies have tried this in the past, many continue to try this, despite legislation and regulation to prevent this. It is easier to do this in some jurisdictions rather than others; surprisingly, it would appear that some companies in “developed” countries seem to be as adept in sustaining monopolies while pretending to be otherwise, as their emerging-nation counterparts: the processes get more sophisticated and get called lobbying rather than bribing, but the outcome’s the same. Nevertheless, global monopolies are hard to sustain: artificial scarcities (eg region coding on DVDs) get met by artificial abundances (eg chipping of DVD players).
If you can’t have a monopoly, the next thing you do in your quest for predictability is to try and control your customer, make it hard for the customer to leave you. This is not surprising, since financial backers (quite possibly the ones wanting the predictability in the first place) are trained to ask “where’s your lock-in” as part of Due Diligence 101. Overt ways of controlling the customer start looking anti-competitive; as a result, the practice has begin to ease, although there are worrying signs that it will resurge in the guise of customer data import and export.
If you can’t lock in your customer, then you do the next best thing. You convince yourself you have predictability. You use a variety of financial and reporting tools to sustain this pretence, often under the guise of “risk management”. [In this context, I would strongly recommend you read Michael Power’s The Risk Management of Everything, a wonderful little tract that you can download for free here.] Sometimes when I look at everything that happened in the financial markets, I cannot help but feel that the same principles that Clay Shirky speaks of in The Collapse of Complex Business Models applies in modern financial markets. The problem with this approach is that you land up having no defence for “black swans”. In fact I would go so far as to state that the process of pretending predictability is one that systemically creates and increases black swan risk.
If you can’t convince yourself, then it all begans to unravel. Because you’re left with the temptation to convince others of the predictable nature of business while not being convinced yourself. Why? Because “push” organisations work on this basis of precision in predictability. The techniques people use to “convince” others in this respect are immoral at the very least and illegal at the extreme.
Institutions, particularly “push” institutions,  have grown up on the mother’s milk of predictability, of smoothed-out forecasts, of a level of precision that is no longer sustainable in a “Pull” world. They’ve resorted to using an extensive variety of techniques to try and hold on to that predictability; some of them are sustainable in the short term, some of them are downright illegal, none of them have any real value in the long term.
Which brings me to the question that’s keeping me awake. Can a traditional Push institution really become a Pull institution, bearing all this in mind? is that transition, that hybrid state,  really possible? how long can one institution uphold two sets of radically different principles under one style of management?
I tried to imagine a Push institution outsourcing work to a Pull institution, to try and understand what the working agreement would look like. And I didn’t like the answer.
Comments and advice welcome.

On pasta and music and copyright

I love food. I love cooking. I use the analogy of food to learn about information: in fact, I’ve nearly finished writing a book that looks in detail at information as if it were food. One of the foods I love is pasta. Glorious pasta.

[I’m attributing this to Red Giraffe, though I came across this elsewhere without any attribution.]

Nobody quite knows precisely where pasta comes from, where and when pasta began. The web is a rich resource for satisfying any curiosity you may have on the topic; suffice it to say that most of the stories involve thousands of years, a lot of dead people (usually Greeks, Romans and Chinese) and even the odd saint or two. Marco Polo doesn’t quite make the cut, but that doesn’t prevent the Chinese having a stake in the ground millenia earlier.

Some of the stories are more recent and more enjoyable (albeit slightly less credible) such as this one, harvested from the Alexandra Palace Television Service over fifty years ago:

Some of the stories may be hard to believe, but nevertheless people agree on a number of things:

  • Pasta has been around since the year dot.
  • Pasta is made by mixing ground kernels of grain, usually wheat,  with water or egg; while Italian pasta tends to be made of durum wheat and no other, other types of grain are in use elsewhere.
  • Pasta used to be made by hand (or more precisely, foot); since 1740 or so machines have also been used to make pasta.

[attributed with thanks to Donovan Govan]

Pasta comes in many shapes and sizes and forms; if you’re interested, read the wikipedia article. If you want to delve deeper, there is probably no better book than Oretta Zanini de Vita’s Encyclopaedia of Pasta.

[Attributed with thanks to FoodieSteve’s blog]

Pasta proclamations, even patents, have been around for a long time, perfidious and pusillanimous attempts to pervert people’s creativity. There have even been designers who’ve tried their hand at new forms of pasta:

Giorgio Giugiaro’s Marille pasta

Philippe Starck’s Mandala pasta

Think about pasta. Today, anyone can make pasta. Kafkaesque bureaucracies can make up rules about the nature of the grain used, the water used, the egg, whatever, but basically every human being has a right to decide what to make pasta out of. You can buy machines to make pasta. But you don’t have to. You can buy “readymade” pasta made by someone else, or even try and make similar pasta at home yourself. You can even go to the extreme, and buy not just the pasta but the love and labour that goes into making and serving a dish with pasta: you can go to a restaurant and pay a chef to do that for you, pay waiters to serve it to you.

Basically, you can do what you like with pasta, starting with the wheat and water and ending with the cooked meal. At each stage, you have the choice of whether you want to pay someone else to do something or not. Someone else can make the pasta for you. Sell you a machine to make pasta. Write a book and tell you how to make the pasta. Or the meal itself. Someone else can cook it for you, amateur or professional. There are a million ways people can participate in the design, making, cooking and eating of pasta, a million ways people can make money with pasta.

Wonderful, isn’t it? The freedom and creativity that has given us over 1300 types of pasta over centuries, shared and enjoyed by billions.

But you know something? It would take very little to screw all this up, to make a complete codswallop out of pasta. Imagine this scenario:

  • Step 1: Patented genetically modified durum wheat begins to displace “organic” wheats. Over time, all the durum wheat grown in the world is covered by patent. People continue to share recipes and cook and eat at home, and in restaurants.
  • Step 2: The GM wheat manufacturers do deals with pasta machine manufacturers (also patented, of course). You cannot use the machines except with official durum wheat. [This is called putting the DRM in durum, which then gets trademarked as DuRuM]. People continue to share recipes and cook and eat at home and in restaurants. Some people have the gall to build their own machines, some don’t even use machines; they knead the dough with their feet.
  • Step 3: The pasta and pasta machine manufacture and distribution industry does not like this, so, under the guise of public safety, lobbies and gets legislation passed that outlaws all wheat bar non-GM wheat, as happened for a while with mustard oil in India. While they’re at it, home manufacture of pasta is also banned. People continue to do what they’ve been doing for thousands of years, and the legislation isn’t taken seriously.
  • Step 4: The internet arrives, Moore’s Law continues to march, and the digitisation of the pasta world continues. 3D printing becomes reality. People don’t just share recipes with their friends and neighbours any more, they now use the internet to share recipes with people they don’t even know, people living all over the world. Even worse, people start making their own pasta machines even though this is “illegal”. RepRap pasta machine cells spring up everywhere.
  • Step 5: The pasta and pasta machine manufacture and distribution industry, which had been going so well since the middle of the 19th century, is distraught. They find all this modern technology so unfair, despite the irony that they themselves disrupted an entire industry as a result of technological advancement 150 years ago. So they lobby government for even more law, to declare sharing of recipes illegal, to declare 3D machines illegal, to declare the transport and distribution of such recipes and machines illegal. Up goes the cry, the pasta bandit must be stopped. Billions at stake, millions of jobs lost, all because of the pasta bandits.
  • Step 6: Government is so busy looking for WMD in Iraq, looking through their expense claims, looking for oil, looking for lucrative post-government book deals, speaking assignments and suchlike, that they don’t have time to worry about all this. Their noses may have been deep in the trough, but they know what to do every time they hear words like “bandit”. Bandits? We can’t have them. Thieving uncivilised louts, we need to put a stop to this forthwith.
  • Step 7: And so the pasta “bandit” is born. And over time, five thousand years of eating pasta comes to a halt.

Don’t worry, none of this could happen in a civilised country, we have nothing to fear. Especially in civilised countries like the UK, the USA and France.

Think about pasta. And think about music. Think about laws that require you to take down a home video of people singing Happy Birthday to You. Think about laws that require people’s internet connections to be cut off for alleged acts of music “piracy”, somehow seen as criminal theft while being at best, and that too only if proven sufficiently in a court of law, civil offences of copyright infringement. Think about laws that make it impossible to provide free wifi.

Think about the freedoms that are being traded. Yankee Doodle, as the song says “put a feather in his hat and called it Macaroni”.

Soon we won’t have the right to call anything Macaroni. Forget calling a feather macaroni, at the rate our freedoms are being traded we will soon not have the right to call macaroni macaroni. Not unless it was made out of GM durum wheat made using licensed machines on licensed premises, using officially endorsed recipes.

The Digital Economy Act is not about thieves or bandits. It’s about preserving 150-year-old business models that prevent human beings from enjoying 5000-year-old freedoms.