Category: Four pillars

The Silent Spring of the Internet: Part II: Understanding “unpaid”

Yesterday I spent some time thinking about what Rachel Carson experienced in the period leading up to her writing The Sea Around Us, and following that up a decade or so later with Silent Spring. How we can learn from those experiences as we hurtle towards wholesale destruction of the internet and all it stands for, particularly with phenomena like the Digital Economy Act, the DMCA, Hadopi and the most appalling of them all, ACTA. I shared some of those thoughts with you here.

Today I want to spend a little more time on the same subject, but from a different perspective. Let me explain why.

Ever since I got visibly involved in the Digital Economy Bill debate, I have been dismayed by the number of people who spend time accusing me of complete naivete when it comes to the download and fileshare debate. The accusations usually begin with an assumption (on the part of the accusers) that I (and people like me) do not want to see “creators” properly rewarded for their work; this is then extrapolated into further accusations that classify unpaid digital downloading as theft, somehow taking the civil offence of copyright infringement and converting it into a criminal offence, despite the “owner” of the asset continuing to have complete and unfettered access to the asset, despite the extreme nonrival nature of the asset.

When I’ve tried to debate with the accusers, their usual stance has been “don’t talk to me about the need to change intellectual property law, don’t talk to me about how badly broken copyright law is, don’t talk to me about downloaders being the primary buyers, don’t talk to me about fair use and free speech and all that jazz. What you’re talking about is theft, pure and simple. Don’t come back until you’ve got sensible proposals for how creative people get paid for their work.”

So that’s where I want to begin.

Making sure creative people get proper payment for their work.

You see, where I come from, software is a creative business. Software is a creative industry… it must be: after all, the fancy figures for illegal downloads include the “lost revenue” for pirated software. [I am now trying desperately not to give in to the temptation to make up sentences that have words like “hoist” and “with” and “own” and “petard”. After all, this is a smelly enough business as it is].

Where was I? Oh yes. Creative people getting paid for their work.

Yup.

Let’s start with Linux. 60% of all web servers run Linux.  “It would take $10.8 billion dollars to build the Fedora 9 distribution in today’s dollars“. Just one distribution.

Or let’s look at the Apache HTTP Server, which went past the 100 million web sites landmark a year or two ago.

Or let’s look at the volunteers who keep the Internet Storm Center manned and productive.

Or let’s go back in time and look at the volunteers who wrote RFC 675, without which there would be no internet.

Or let’s look at the people who work for and with industry bodies like ICANN and W3C and IETF and, more recently, the Web Science Trust.

All possible because of volunteers. Yes the volunteers may get paid by organisations that can perceive the value generated by such voluntary activity; but this form of payment is closer to patronage than anything else.

Volunteers.

I could go on and on, but I won’t. I hope I’ve made the point already. The point is that for the internet to exist, many things have to be in place. There have to be people willing to invest in stuff; people willing to connect the stuff up; people willing to run the many-headed beast that emerges as a result of connecting the stuff up; people willing to protect the beast as it mutates organically, naturally; people willing to keep trying to find faster, cheaper, better ways of doing things.

It all begins with a state of mind. A willingness to share. A focus on being open, a focus on enabling people at the edge to do things they would otherwise not be able to do.

Without that state of mind there are no volunteers, there is no set of standards and protocols, there is no process, cumbersome or otherwise, to let the internet evolve: there is no internet.

Without that internet there is no goldmine for “rightsholders” to strip of all value. Without that internet artists will get paid even less than they do currently, however unlikely that sounds.


Incidentally, here’s a very instructive method of visualising what musicians get paid: [My thanks to @gapingvoid and to @psfk for sharing it with me].

[Also incidentally, Hugh is a good friend, I love the way he thinks, and I really like his recent passion “Remember Who You Are”. He’s got some really great posts together under that banner. Which is why it was a privilege for me to be able to contribute this post over at Gapingvoid.]

Which brings me to the end of this particular post.

We need to remember who we are. Stewards of the internet. The internet, a concept, a state of mind, a set of values, a network of networks of people, things and infrastructure. Where people live and work and learn and read and create. Oh yes, and where people occasionally listen to music or watch videos.

I’m going to continue to think about the internet, particularly in the context of writings like Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet; Eben Moglen’s recent speech on Freedom In The Cloud and David Gelernter’s Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously

The internet was built for sharing. The internet relies on people who share their time freely and passionately.

There is a catch, however. These people expect something in return for the investment they made, the investment they make, the investment they are prepared to continue to make. And that something is this: a free, unfettered internet.

So when the talk in cafes and dinner tables turns to creative people and the need to make sure creative people get paid properly, do make sure you include all creative people and all modes of payment.

The silent spring of the internet: cyberspace needs its stewards

Maybe it’s because of the events leading up to the Digital Economy Bill becoming an Act here in the UK. It’s been a bit like Chinese water torture for many months; then, more recently, as the BPI saw their chance to corrupt parliamentary process and took it, it felt more like being waterboarded. I have had it up to here with people who think the internet was built to become a distribution mechanism for Hollywood and Universal Music and David Geffen.

My first objection to the Digital Economy Bill was to do with technical difficulties in proving who downloaded what: the complexity and inefficacy of technical solutions, the guaranteed waste of time and money, the likelihood of erroneous accusations, the unwanted consequence of driving dissent underground. My second objection was to do with the nature of the punishment, completely out of proportion with the crime, possibly illegal in human rights terms and with definite and unnecessary collateral damage on non-participants. My third objection was to do with the manipulation of data, the extrapolation of questionable samples into WMD-like justifications, but then I have to accept that statistics and lies have been kissing cousins for many years now. My fourth objection was to to with the corruption of process, the way the Bill was timed, how debate was avoided, how all parties achieved nothing but grubbiness in the process. And my final objection was to do with the people involved, the vestedness of their interests.

Many of us who opposed the Bill vehemently were quite happy to see legitimate and proportionate action taken against thieves. Legitimate. Proportionate. Against thieves. Sadly the Bill had nothing to do with words like those.

The industry lobby did their work well. Now we have to get used to a world where filesharing and downloading are both wrongly equated with theft, where damaging action can be taken on mere suspicion, and where dictatorial powers may be assumed almost at will. All to try and hold on to a dying business model. There will be consequences, unexpected consequences. [For those of you who are interested, I wrote about the data here, here and here, about the Bill’s inappropriateness of punishment here, about the unreasonable bias here and about the core issues related to the Bill here and here. And if you want to understand how retrograde all this is, read this. ]

What’s done is done. And we will live with the consequences. And learn from them, and maybe even change as a result. The Digital Economy Bill was a skirmish, maybe even a battle, but it wasn’t the war.

The War is about the internet: what it is, what it means, what it stands for, how it works, who it works for, and many such related questions.

It’s been an interesting week or so in this context.

Apple and their SDK terms; Twitter and Tweetie; the Appeals Court and their ruling on the FCC and Net Neutrality; Microsoft and Kin. European telcos catching the Ed Whitacre disease. All this in an environment that has Google and China,  Android, the Droid and the Nexus One, all apparently living in perfect harmony.

By the pricking of my thumbs…..

I think we’re heading towards the cyber equivalent of what Rachel Carson saw and understood when she wrote Silent Spring nearly 50 years ago, having established her reputation with The Sea Around Us.

  • The internet is a sea around us, and we’re polluting it. We’re polluting it for short-term gain, we’re polluting it without really understanding the ecosystem that has evolved around it, the creatures that live in it.
  • The internet is an ocean around us, still somewhat unknown, still being mapped. It is capable of nourishing and sustaining us, capable of supporting and encouraging trade and commerce, capable of giving us incredible enjoyment, helping keep us clean and healthy.
  • The internet is all the rivers around us, capable of being dammed and isolated, capable of being corrupted and polluted at industrial levels, capable of being poisoned, capable of drying up, capable of killing us.

[And yes, the internet is capable of supporting piracy as well. But let us first understand what extreme nonrival goods are, how copyright infringements are different from theft. If Labour use unlicensed images in a campaign advertisement, is it called theft? When John Fogarty can be accused of plagiarising himself, is it called theft?]

We will soon begin to understand what the internet is. What identity means in an internet context. What intellectual property means in an internet context. The establishment of a Web Science Trust may well accelerate all this.

When we do learn about all this, we will begin to enact laws. Laws that protect the internet. Laws that make criminals of people who damage the internet.

Rachel Carson may have helped us with an understanding of what it is to become stewards of physical space. We now need to become stewards of cyberspace as well.

In that sense, the Digital Economy Bill may actually be a godsend, bringing together disparate groups of people with common, passionately held aims.

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.