Author: JP

The Digital Economy Bill: A taxation on salt

Regular readers will know how I feel about these things: if you don’t know, then please read The Kernel For This Blog and About This Blog, it will give you some idea of where I’m coming from.

For many years now, I’ve been putting forward the notion that artificial scarcity is something to be abhorred, and that every artificial scarcity will be met, at the very least, by an equal and opposite artificial abundance. In fact, a search of the term “artificial scarcity” in my own blog yielded over 20 hits. The Customer Is The Scarcity. We would do well to remember that.

The internet is a wondrous thing, God wot. It can be used to make scarce things abundant, as Kevin Kelly posits in Better Than Free. It can also be used to make abundant things scarce, as Rupert Murdoch would like us to believe.

People have tried to make abundant things scarce since time immemorial; all they need is to be able to control the factors of production and the supply chain. That’s all. So people have tried to hoard things, to corner markets, to create cartels, to act in concert. Thankfully, society hasn’t always allowed them to do so. Many of these things are seen as abuse of market power and are considered illegal in many places and at many times. Nevertheless, it hasn’t stopped people trying.

And sometimes they succeed. Because they’ve been able to control how something is made, how it is priced, how it is distributed. They’ve been able to control supply.

When you don’t control the supply, your ability to sustain artificial scarcity weakens somewhat. If you think about it, that’s what the Dandi Salt March was symptomatically about, although its symbolical value went much further. I quote from Wikipedia:

The Congress Working Committee gave Gandhi the responsibility for organizing the first act of civil disobedience, with Congress itself ready to take charge after Gandhi’s expected arrest.[12] Gandhi’s plan was to begin civil disobedience with a satyagraha aimed at the British salt tax. The 1882 Salt Act gave the British a monopoly on the collection and manufacture of salt, limiting its handling to government salt depots and levying a salt tax.[13] Violation of the Salt Act was a criminal offense. Even though salt was freely available to those living on the coast (by evaporation of sea water), Indians were forced to purchase it from the colonial government.

Gandhi’s choice of the salt tax was met with incredulity by the Working Committee of the Congress,[14][15] though Gandhi had his reasons for choosing the salt tax. The salt tax was a deeply symbolic choice, since salt was used by nearly everyone in India. It represented 8.2% of the British Raj tax revenue, and most significantly hurt the poorest Indians the most.[16] Gandhi felt that this protest would dramatize Purna Swaraj in a way that was meaningful to the lowliest Indians. He also reasoned that it would build unity between Hindus and Muslims by fighting a wrong that touched them equally.[12]

People who are currently debating the Bill should learn from history. Remember the Salt Tax. Deeply symbolic. Used by nearly everyone. Hurting the poor the most. A means of dramatizing a message. Building unity by fighting a wrong that touched people equally.

Unlike salt, which occurred naturally, digital music does not. Someone has to place it there. And you know something? If the music industry went and avoided the use of the internet altogether, then things might have been different. But once they chose to make music digital and accessible on the net, they waved the genie goodbye. And he took his bottle with him.

Now some bands have done just that, they’ve kept off the web. And there’s anecdotal evidence showing that piracy related to those bands is relatively low as a result, because any availability of digital tracks from those bands lights up like a christmas tree and can be dealt with quickly.

In some ways, it’s worth thinking of the internet as a sense, similar to sight and hearing. There are limit cases where some human beings are able to tell other human beings to shut their eyes and ears: parents are able to say to to small children. But in the main it is not possible to tell someone that she can’t use her eyes and ears.

If you didn’t want someone to see something you covered it up.

If you didn’t want someone to hear something you quietened it down.

And anyway, what was heard and seen was done in real time, there were no persistent copies. All you had were memories.

The problem is, we’ve all grown new eyes and ears, external eyes and ears. They’re called mobile phones. And they have persistent memories. So while the music industry worried about tapes and CDs and what-have-you, they weren’t prepared for the flash memory onslaught.

The mobile phones have gotten smarter, and they’ve gotten connected to the internet. So now memories of what you hear and see can be persisted and shared.

I’m one of those people who likes going to concerts, watching people play music live. And it’s been quite instructive watching what happens in concert halls nowadays. Years ago it was no cameras. And it was easy to police because cameras were big and bulky, and indoors meant you normally had to use a flash. Nowadays, cameras have gotten a lot smaller and better, mobile phones have excellent cameras in them, and the rule has become very hard to enforce. In fact in many places the rule has been discarded, with a replacement saying “no flash photography please”.

The mobile phone is a sensor. The internet is a sense. As natural as seeing and hearing. And it comes with a memory. And makes sharing easier.

People share narratives, stories. Sometimes these stories are embedded with things they saw and heard. The things that we can see and hear and share are now abundant.

There’s a simple way to make sure that something remains secret. Don’t tell anyone. There’s a simple way of making sure something is not shared via the internet. Don’t put it there.

The internet was built for sharing. That’s fundamental, and will not change.

MPs have the opportunity now to take the Digital Economy Bill in wash-up and do just what a wash-up implies: clean it out. If they don’t, and if lobbies like BPI get their way, we’re in for a satyagraha.

Music is about performance, not constipation. Performing bands have tended to do well in many respects, including merchandising. There is growing evidence that there is a high correlation between downloaders and buyers. There is growing evidence that digital music has a high price-elasticity of demand. There is growing evidence that people are happy to pay the artists, they’re just not happy with having to pay monopolist intermediaries. There is growing evidence that digital music is cheaper to produce and sell, and for that matter produce sustainably.

This is actually not about free or paid. It is about artificial scarcity. A dangerous thing. With dangerous consequences, corrupting the basis of the internet.

Otherwise who knows? We may see the equivalent of a Dandi Salt March as the beginning of real civil disobedience, as people fight for the freedom of the internet.

Thinking about monkeys and engineers and copyright

I just love this. First, take a folk song popular in the 1960s, written by someone born in 1896.

Once upon a time a engineer had a monkey and everywhere he go why he’d take the little monkey along and so the monkey would watch everything the engineer would do so one day the engineer had to go get him something to eat and so the monkey got tired of waiting so he thought he’d try out the throttle and down the road he went.

Once upon a time there was an engineer
Drove a locomotive both far and near
Accompanied by a monkey that sit on the stool
Watchin’ everything that the engineer move

One day the engineer wanted a bite to eat
He left the monkey settin’ on the driver’s seat
The monkey pulled the throttle, locomotive jumped the gun
And made ninety miles an hour on the main line run

Well the big locomotive just in time
The big locomotive comin’ down the line
Big locomotive number ninety nine
Left the engineer with a worried mind

Engineer begin to call the dispatcher on the phone
Tell him all about how is locomotive was gone
Get on the wire, the dispatcher to write
Cause the monkey’s got the main line sewed up tight

Switch operator got the message in time
There’s a north bound limited on the same main line
Open the switch, gonna let him in the hole
Cause the monkey’s got the locomotive under control

Well the big locomotive right on time
Big locomotive comin’ down the line
Big locomotive number ninety nine
Left the engineer with a worried mind
Left the engineer with a worried mind


It’s not just any old folk song, it’s a Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller song. [Do read about him, he’s a fascinating character].

Then, take that song and make it even more popular: make sure that the Grateful Dead play it regularly. In fact make sure they play it 31 times. For good measure, make sure that Bob Dylan also plays on it with them.

My thanks to dead.net for the wonderful photograph of Jerry above.

To make it a little more interesting, make sure someone, David Opie, writes an award-winning book about the song.

So now you have the song. The lyrics. The book. Some dead people. And some Dead people. And some alive people.  Make sure someone makes a video about the song/book/whatever it is by now. In fact go one better, make the video using Lego pieces.

Then get your children to draw what they see.

Song. Book. Video. A bit of Lego thrown in. More people involved than you can shake a stick at.

I think the Copyright Police should try and work stuff like this out every day. Because they’re going to have to.

Reminiscing

Now as the years roll on
Each time we hear our favorite song
The memories come along
Older times we’re missing
Spending the hours reminiscing

Hurry, don’t be late, I can hardly wait
I said to myself when we’re old

We’ll go dancing in the dark

Walking through the park and reminiscing

Little River Band, Reminiscing

It’s been a bittersweet week for me.

It was the week I had a really worthwhile session with the group board on Tuesday. I’d spent a lot of time preparing for the session, been coached and advised by many friends and wellwishers within the firm, and it went well. Really well. BT is going places and I’m delighted to be here and part of it. We’re moving along apace with Ribbit, and there’s a real sense of excitement, a real buzz developing. [Disclaimer, for the few of you who may not know: I work for BT; BT owns Ribbit; I chair Ribbit on behalf of BT]

It was the week I learnt that my boss, friend and mentor Al-Noor Ramji has decided to return to his banking roots and leave BT. He’s had an incredible impact here, helping set the direction of 21CN, getting the whole company behind the Right First Time program, moving us down the road in the SDK initiative, all while transforming the back end of the company into Innovate & Design and its sister function Operate.

There are a number of us here who’ve worked with him before; for quite a few, BT is the third company where they’ve worked for him; for at least one person, the fourth; and there are many like me who are two-fers.  That in itself tells you something about the man, his leadership and his ability to inspire. For many of us, working for him is like Hotel California in terms of checking out and leaving.

Some of us went out for dinner with him last Wednesday, and we spent the evening reminiscing about Al-Noorisms; there was laughter and joy aplenty, amidst the unavoidable sadness. We wish him well in his new role at Misys.

It was also the week I learnt that there’d been a tragic fire in Calcutta, bang in the centre of the spaces I occupied during much of my youth and adolescence: the corner of Park Street and Middleton Row.

At least 24 people died, many unable to escape the flames. Horrifying. My heart goes out to all the families affected, it must have been terrible.

I felt slightly confused when reading the reports of the fire. They kept describing Stephen Court, the building whose top two floors were affected, as a “multistorey”. But that’s not the way I remembered it. I could only think of it as having a ground floor and three storeys above it, hardly a multistorey. Turned out I wasn’t wrong: the so-called multistorey was only six floors high, and the top two floors had only been added since I left Calcutta. So what that means is that a building built in 1910 managed quite well, thank you, for getting on a hundred years, while the twenty-seven year old extension pretty much burnt down. Says something.

The building, the location and the restaurant on the ground floor all form a deep and intense part of my nostalgia. But this time around, I want to concentrate on the restaurant. Flury’s.

I was so pleased to find this photograph while searching for something to illustrate the post. I really think that Victoria Bernal captures the essence of Flury’s in many subtle dimensions: its metropolitanness, its sense of being a cool oasis in a hot and busy city, the sheer scale of the place, the incongruousness of finding an amalgam of swiss chocolatier and colonial tea-room in a frenetic and pulsating urban landscape.

Here’s another of her photographs. [Thank you Victoria, I found your whole Calcutta set a delight.]

Flury’s. A place out of time set in a city where no time is out of place. A place known to have been frequented by the Satyajit Rays and Mrinal Sens and M F Husains; even though Ray and Sen spent time at India Coffee House, College St (below), they were also known to like their Flury’s visits. In fact, Husain himself confessed to sitting down on the Flury’s steps waiting for it to open, looking across at the Alliance Francaise where his first-ever exhibition was held in 1951.

[My thanks to lecercle for the photo above.]

It says something about Calcutta that one day you could be sitting comfortably in Flury’s, the next day you could be in the coffee house in College St, and the day after you could be drinking tea out of mud vessels by the roadside at the Maidan.

Memories of Flury’s are many and variegated.

As a child, I remember going there with a sense of wonder and amazement at the sheer range of cupcakes available there; I was particularly fond of an all-chocolate boat-shaped offering, the size of a large finger. I don’t actually remember going there for tea, just queueing up to buy assortments of cupcakes.

Then came callow youth and adolescent time. I remember there was an occasion when a bunch of us were trying to make money selling tickets to the 1977 Mohun Bagan versus New York Cosmos match (the Pele match) using Flury’s and Cappucino (the 24- hour coffee shop that used to be part of Park Hotel) as bases.

It embarrasses me to think about it, but Flury’s was also where I did something quite ridiculous involving tomato sauce and a man in a white suit. I tried to splash my sister with the sauce. She ducked. The white suit became a red-and-white suit. People at the other table graciously accepted my apology. And everyone tried not to laugh while the red-and-white suit’s remonstrations went unheard.

Flury’s remained a key location during university, especially given its location between my then all-men’s college St Xavier’s, and the all-women Loreto College on Middleton Row. It was also a place frequented by the more affluent of the backpacker class, another reason why it was popular amongst young adults.

The location was also close to a whole slew of popular night-time spots: Blue Fox, Trinca’s, Mocambo. I think Peter Cat came late on, and Sky Room went early. There are vague memories of places called Moulin Rouge and Bar-Be-Que as well. But one way or the other, the not-quite-four-way junction of Middleton Row, Park Street and Free School St was a veritable Clapham Junction, everyone in the city centre passed through there, so “in front of Flury’s” became a popular place to meet.

[Incidentally, using these place names reminded me of an earlier post about Hamilton Bridge.]

Which brings me to the end of this post. I have very fond memories of Flury’s, understand why it is now shut, and hope that it opens up again by the time I arrive in Calcutta with my family in December.

Musing about the need for j’adoube in a digital world

For some time now, we’ve all been leaving digital mouse droppings all over the place as we wander around the web. And people have gotten good at analysing what the droppings mean. What you “touched”. When. For how long.

Sometimes this information is actually made available to others, particularly to people who created the digital social object that you touched.

Most of the time the information presented, usually metadata, is anonymised. So I can see how many views a flickr photograph has had, but I can’t tell who did the viewing. This is common practice for many photo sites. Visitor numbers are regularly collected and published in relatively small grain; for example, you can check the number of views, and for that matter the number of watchers, by page in Wikipedia. All very useful and all very anonymous.

But sometimes it is not. Especially when you get the chance to vote or show liking or dislike. So I get told how many people liked a particular post I wrote, when the post is fed via friendfeed and transforms into a facebook note. And I can even find out who did the liking.

When I move to somewhere like LinkedIn, I can see how many times my profile appeared in a search; I can see how many people looked at me; I get to know something about the lookers; sometimes I can even see the name, rank and serial number of the looker.

We now share many things via tools like twitter; what we see, what we read, what we listen to, where we eat, who we spend time with, our likes and dislikes. And for the most part this is useful.

As lifestreaming and the provision of such ambient information evolves further, we will evolve tools that can be used to adjust the information where there is palpable error. Like when I forget to sign out of last.fm and my daughter decides to use my Mac; suddenly I get transformed into someone that listens to High School Musical betwixt and between the Allman Brothers and John Mayall. Or when you use my Amazon account to buy a Christmas present for a sainted dowager aunt.

The ability to correct palpable errors is important; and, because it is understandable, people will come up with the right tools.

Me, I am intrigued by something else. The need to declare intent. In chess, a player declares ” j’adoube ” or “I adjust” in order to signal that he is just adjusting the position of a piece, not moving it.

When a colleague tends to fill in expenses once every three months, and suddenly starts filling them in every week, there is a very good chance that he’s planning to jump ship. Reduction in expense-filling delay is usually a good leading indicator for the arabesque out of an institution.

A more common leading indicator is the polishing up of your CV. So now let’s get on to LinkedIn. Today, if I go and edit my profile, just for the heck of it, the act of CV sprucing-up will be interpreted as a leaving signal.

Even if the intent were to be different.

Which made me think. Maybe we need to have a j’adoube for our digital footprints, a way of signalling innocent intent.

Just wondering.

It all began when the fat man sang

One of my favourite t-shirts, second only to Help>Slip>Franklin’s. [That’s a reference to one of the finest sequences ever played live or laid on vinyl: Help On The Way, Slipknot and Franklin’s Tower, taken in sequence from Blues for Allah.] Both t-shirts, by the way, available from zazzle.

You guessed it. I’m one of those. A Deadhead. And proud to be one. If you check out the end of the About Me section of this blog, written when I started blogging, you’ll find these words:

my thoughts on opensource were probably more driven by Jerry Garcia than by Raymond or Stallman or Torvalds

It’s been a long strange trip for fans of the Grateful Dead recently: For example, the March 2010 edition of the Atlantic Review had an article entitled Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead.

Image credit: Zachariah O’Hora

The article talks about the inauguration of the Grateful Dead archive at the University of Santa Cruz. Some years earlier, Strategy + Business, a prestigious management journal, published an article entitled How to “Truck” the Brand: Lessons from the Grateful Dead.

Atlantic Review. University Archives. Management Journals. Just what is it about the Dead? A fan site that’s really a social network, one of the earliest to understand the value of social media in bringing the fan base together and giving them a space to inhabit. A dominant position in live music: the Dead have their own tab in the Internet Archive (the only entity, band or otherwise, to have one) and account for 10% of the overall Live Music collection there. A Google Earth mashup that shows you the precise locations and times of Dead concerts. Sites dedicated to trading the music of the Grateful Dead. A shirts Hall of Fame. A gazillion ties. [I should know, I have over 50 of them…]

A long strange trip indeed. So here’s my personal perspective on why the Dead succeeded.

1. It’s all about performance. Unlike most other bands, the Dead were a touring band. They played. And played. And played. Between 1963 and 2007 the Rolling Stones performed live 1597 times, or about 35 times a year. As against that, the Grateful Dead performed live 2380 times between 1965 and 1995, or about 77 times a year. Very few bands keep up that level of performance.

And so it is in business. People care about what you do, not what you claim to have done or how good your marketing is. Particularly now, when the cost of discovering truth is lower than ever before, what matters is how a company performs. Not how it says it will perform. Which is why customer experience has become so important.

2. It’s all about participation. Studio performances are not the same as live music: when you see what gets traded in Dead circles, you begin to understand why. Live sessions are real, organic, they change from session to session. Audiences are not locked away on couches or straitjackets, they participate. Because they can. And they want to.

Companies need to understand this as well, particularly as the analog world shifts to digital. The cost of participation gets lowered. There was a time when I used to get really irritated with management consultants who would bring their powerpoint decks when meeting with me, always in analog, always taking care not to leave it behind. [In case I tried to copy it or, Heaven forfend, amend it, add to it.] What tosh. I’d already paid through my nose for the material.

Contrast that sort of short-term thinking with the vision inherent in Garcia saying “When we’re done with it, they can have it”, when asked about fans taping their shows.

3. It’s all about improvisation. John Lennon, another of my favourites, is reported to have said:

Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans

When you look at the way they performed at concerts, there were many interesting charcteristics. They didn’t seem to have a predefined list of songs or sets; there was a lot of jamming and improvisation within the songs, drawn from a vast array of songs whose “design” made such improvisation possible. Garcia suggested more than once that they made up the song list as they went on, basing it on active feedback from the fans.

Lineups varied; band members performed in other bands or groups; everything about the culture of the band screamed responsiveness, adaptability.

4. It’s all about passion. Quality matters. And quality is a function of passion, of persistence, or practice. What the Dead did they did as a labour of love. Unless you enjoy what you do, there isn’t any point.

When you’re passionate about something, then you take the values inherent in that something and live your life according to those values. They permeate everything you do. I had the privilege of spending some time with John Perry Barlow, erstwhile lyricist for the Grateful Dead, cattle rancher, founder member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, poet, what-have-you. And he was a perfect example of how his values affected everything he did and does.

If you haven’t done so already, you should read his essays The Economy of Ideas and  The Next Economy of Ideas, along with the oft-quoted A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

In the end, what the Grateful Dead stood for are principles. Principles of openness and participation, principles of performance and passion, principles that allowed them to improvise and respond.

Companies would do well to pay heed.