Category: Retarded hippie

Musing about Digital McCarthyism and Digital Nonviolence

While researching aspects of the lives of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, I was reminded of the works of Richard B Gregg. While I had come across Gregg while reading Economics, I hadn’t appreciated quite how influential he’d been on King, or for that matter just how dedicated he’d been in seeking to understand Gandhi. If you don’t know about Gregg, do take a look at his Wikipedia entry.

I’m currently reading a 1938 Gregg pamphlet titled What is The Matter With Money? It’s a reprint from the Modern Review for May and June 1938. In it, Gregg spends a lot of time looking at trust, and some of the things he says jell with me.
I quote from Gregg:

…A money economy makes security depend on individual selfish acquisitiveness instead of on trust. Trust grows when men serve first and foremost the community and the common purpose. There has sometimes been an element of service and community purpose in the making of private fortunes, but it has not often been predominant. Money splits up community security and plays upon men’s fears, — fears of the future and of each other’s motives, fears that compel them to compete with one another to a harmful degree.

Gregg concludes the paragraph with an interesting assertion:

Money has worked on us so long that it is now hampering the further development of science, art and technology.

At reboot last year I spoke about the things that had to die before we can regain some of the things we’ve lost, in keeping with the conference theme of renaissance and rebirth. [Hey Thomas, what’s happening with reboot this year?]
Gregg’s words have served to remind me that concepts like identity and trust are fundamental parts of community and not individuality; culture too is a community concept, be it about arts or sciences or even forms of expression; community itself is a construct of relationships at multiple levels. Maybe the reason why much of what is now termed IPR (and its cater-cousin DRM) is abhorrent to me is that these things focus on the individual and not the community.

I am all for making sure that creativity is rewarded, in fact I believe that any form of real value generation should be rewarded; but not at the price of stifling the growth of culture and of community. This, I believe, is at the heart of what Larry Lessig speaks of, what Rishab Aiyer Ghosh speaks of, what Jerry Garcia believed in, what opensource communities believe in, what democratised innovation is about.

Culture and community before cash.

I recently bought a book by Gregg called The Power Of Nonviolence. When describing the book, the bookseller noted that it [the particular copy I was buying] was signed by Gregg; unusually, the recipient’s name had been erased and carefully at that; the bookseller surmised that it may have had to do with fears about McCarthyism.

You know something? At the rate we’re going, the battles about IPR and DRM are going to get uglier, to a point where we’re going to see something none of us wants. Digital McCarthyism. What we’re seeing in the software and music and film spaces already begins to feel like that.

We need to find a better way to work it out. And it makes me wonder. What’s the digital equivalent of Gandhian Nonviolence?

Alienated by Hollywood

I’m still trying to settle into a rhythm of doing as little as possible, something I’m not quite used to. I’m getting better at it, though.

One of the things I’ve decided to do is “desk research” into a murky area. That dark and gloomy space where copyright meets “content” and chains the strangest bedfellows together.

I want to do this by researching an event I know very little about. When I was around ten years old, one of the more esoteric topics in “cocktail party” conversations in Calcutta was a particular Satyajit Ray Hollywood episode. Definitely not something a schoolboy would get deeply into, but it stuck somewhere in my head anyway.
Apparently he went to Hollywood in 1967 on a mission, to sell a particular project. He wanted to direct a film called The Alien, based on a script he’d written. By the time he got to Hollywood, he found that his script had already (a) done the rounds (b) been copyrighted by someone else and (c) already been acquired by the studio he was dealing with.

a saga of calamity
happenstance
and hard luckHe found all this hard to believe. He left Hollywood, naturally, in very high dudgeon. That particular Calcuttan’s first experience of creativity meeting copyright was, shall we say, less than good.

Here’s an extract from his wikipedia entry, touching on this subject:

In 1967, Ray wrote a script for a movie to be entitled The Alien, based on his short story Bankubabur Bandhu (‘Banku Babu’s Friend’) which he wrote in 1962 for Sandesh, the Ray family magazine. The Alien had Columbia Pictures as producer for this planned US-India co-production, and Peter Sellers and Marlon Brando as the leading actors. However Ray was surprised to find that the script he had written had already been copyrighted and the fee appropriated. Marlon Brando later dropped out of the project and though an attempt was made to bring James Coburn in his place, Ray became disillusioned and returned to Kolkata.[27] [28] Columbia expressed interest in reviving the project several times in the 70s and 80s but nothing came of it. When E.T. was released in 1982, many saw striking similarities in the movie to Ray’s earlier script – Ray discussed the collapse of the project in a 1980 Sight & Sound feature, with further details revealed by Ray’s biographer Andrew Robinson (in The Inner Eye, 1989). Ray believed that Spielberg‘s movie would not have been possible without his script of The Alien being available throughout America in mimeographed copies.

If he were alive today, his views on Hollywood and copyright may have been interesting to hear. Who knows, he may even have made a film about it. Opensource.

Notwithstanding his experiences of Hollywood, he may have had more positive views about the digital world we live in. The state of the Satyajit Ray film archives seems deplorable despite the best efforts of a bunch of people, a saga of calamity and happenstance and hard luck. Just stuff that I found while digging around for the Alien script story.

The World Is FlatSuch tales of person A claiming person B’s copyright, and being paid for it in good faith by person C, still continue. The most recent I can remember is that of the cover illustration for Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. The publishers did their bit, found the copyright holder and paid their dues. Wrong copyright holder, apparently. So the books were recalled and new covers issued.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere for all of us. When we finally figure out who gains from all this DRM guff. It’s not the creative guys. It’s not the consumers.

Musing about opensource: The threat is stronger than the move

What do you do when you’re told to take it very easy, when you’re told to make “slow” a polysyllabic word? If you’re me, and you also have a deep-seated protestant work ethic in you, you struggle. Big time.

Well, that’s what I did for a little while last month, struggling to get past the denial stage. I really didn’t know how to do nothing. Then, come the new year, I had a Road To Damascus experience and then I settled down into an easy rhythm of eat-read-sleep-potter-about-aimlessly, interspersed with the real joy of spending time with my wife and kids. While on the subject of convalescence, my thanks to all who sent me get-well-soon messages. As you can see the messages are working…

Now to the point of this post.

As part of the pottering-about-reading-aimlessly time, I came across this post by James McGovern, whose blog I get to reasonably often.

Read the post, it’s worth it. James commented on a perception held by some developers that many opensource communities aren’t particularly welcoming, and that developers are put off joining as a result.
And it made me wonder.

I’ve always believed in a community participation rule of thumb, something I’ve written about before here and here. The numbers tell the story:

  • For every 1000 people who join a community:
  • 920 are lurkers, passive observers
  • 60 are watchers, active observers capable and willing to kibitz
  • 15 are activists, actually doing something
  • …and 5 are hyperactive, passionate about what they’re doing, almost to a point of obsession

And this is what I was musing about.

Does it really matter, the number of people who actively contribute to an opensource project? Is there something about the way opensource communities work, something that will always ensure that a very small number are the hyperactive core?

The more I think about it, the more I believe that there’s something important here. Linus’s Law is about eyeballs, not hands, and it’s for a reason:

  • At the heart of every successful opensource community is a small cottage industry. And it is this cottage-industry mindset that makes the community different from other “commercial” ones.
  • The core doesn’t have to scale. The core needs to behave in such a way that Linus’s eyeballs are attracted, and this is done by upholding the right values.
  • Jerry Garcia and gang only needed to make sure that Grateful Dead concerts had “taping rows”; the number of people who sat in them was not relevant (although they were full). In a weird kind of way, the core is the band. The tapers are the activists. The kibitzers are the roadies and volunteers.
  • Together with the audience, they formed a whole and vibrant community.
  • Not everyone needs to be on stage for the community to work. In fact there isn’t space.

It is the freedom of access, represented by the taping rows, that really matters. That’s what makes opensource opensource.

Or, to take a chess analogy:

The threat is stronger than the move.

Welcome to the Pleasure Dome

No, not the album by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I’m a tad too old for that.

Instead, it’s about this. A 1949 album, “an audible anthology of modern poetry read by its creators”, edited by someone called Lloyd Frankenberg. And the album is a Long Playing Microgroove Record, the first I’ve bought in twenty years.

Amazing stuff. Readings by TS Eliot, Marianne Moore, ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Ogden Nash, WH Auden, Dylan Thomas, Eliazabeth Bishop.

  • Never knew such an album existed.
  • Never thought I’d ever hear the voices of some of these giants of my youth.
  • Never dreamt I would be able to acquire such a collection.
  • Particularly an album with ink autographs of some of the poets.
  • And none of this would have been remotely possible except for the web and for trust and for humanity.
  • Without collaborative filtering on some other purchase I would not have known of the album’s existence. Period.
  • The seller preferred to deal locally, having been burnt by international would-be buyers before. Without my PayPal and eBay credentials, and without my Google visibility (this he only told me about later) he would not have sold it to me.
  • Without my innate belief in humanity, and without my trust experience with eBay and PayPal, I would not have paid the pretty penny it took.

But. It’s in my hands. And Barry’s happy; Paypal’s happy; eBay’s happy. And I am happy.

And I am even happier that all 8 poets had Wikipedia entries.

 

Couched in our indifference

….Like shells upon the shore

You can hear the ocean roar

In the Dangling Conversation

And the superficial lives

The borders of our lives……Simon and Garfunkel, The Dangling Conversation

 

Doesn’t that describe everything a blog shouldn’t be?

The words “You can hear the ocean roar” came zooming into my head when I read Malc’s Steve Wozniak telephone story. An absolute hoot.