Micro-payment Feudalism

I'm about to propose that micro-payments are a system of capitalist exploitation, the scope and potential of which have not been seen since the days of feudalism.

Ready? Go.

The myth of micro-payments is that the little guy can make money off of what was free, by charging only a small amount for it. Because these payments are in the digital arena, there are basically no raw materials costs, and therefore any payment whatsoever is pure profit.

This is the dream of capitalism: a reduction of labor costs to zero, so that any amount charged is complete surplus value. A money making machine.

But what this forgets is the system of distribution. The system of distribution is fundamental to a market--in fact, it is the oft forgotten twin sibling of production. You cannot sell anything you produce unless it gets to those willing to pay, and so any value of your product is as dependent upon distribution as production.

The market of the Internet is of a feudal land market.

With land as the only material form of wealth, those with land will consolidate their land, using their land to increase the value of their land. In a feudal society, the land is the resource from which anyone lives. Of course, a square mile of land can support more than the people who live on it (i.e. relatively few users per mile) so an ownership class can develop, who are not working the land, but simply owning and coordinating it, providing limited access to their serfs in exchange for the surplus produce.

This changed with the industrial revolution, when a working class could be established that would further the owner-class' capital (value now dissociated from the land) by being paid, as long as profits were still collected. When value was pulled away from the land, and became "materials" or "labor" or "market share", capitalism was invented, because anyone could profit anywhere, as long as they found a way to charge a markup. Anyone could profit, except those working with their hands, of course.

Now that raw materials (at least in terms of media) are becoming valueless, and workers are in oversupply, we're moving back towards that feudalism. If raw materials for media still cost anything, some of that value might trickle back to the workers who are actually making it. But as it is, media is all over the place, and only distributors can make any money off of it. The consolidation of media is taking the place of land ownership, and the micro-payment is the deflationary liquidity by which it is valued. People might pay for some media, but the media with any actual value is the media that is circled tightly around already valuable media. Those with the ability to consolidate many micro-payments are actually making money, while the vast majority of people are working for pennies digging around in the mud compared to those with the distribution networks under their control.

Just because someone can flip you a nickel for doing your media dance does not mean that they aren't going to flip most of their nickels to the naked-on-demand-HD-video-constantly-updated-dance-network. I think there is a belief that because micro-payments are "micro", they will somehow spin straw into gold for the little guy. If anything, by INCREASING the value of money at smaller increments (making these sums liquid to those who can collect on the large scale) they will hurt people trading on small scales, because their fewer transactions will earn them less money. If a penny was all of a sudden the value of a $1 mil., you wouldn't be rich by reaching into the "take a penny" bin. The convenience store would be rich for having 17 cents just sitting on their counter that someone gave them for nothing. It's a type of transactional deflation. Think of it: YouTube starts charging a penny a video watch. At roughly a billion views a day, they make $10 mil. a day. Now, you try charging a dollar per view for your own video. You might have made $10 a day from your 10 video views, except that all those viewers are now going to YouTube for a 99% discount. If you charge the same as YouTube, you are clearing 10 cents, while YouTube is making 10 mil. You might as well make nothing. Micro-payments support capitalists, because it makes consolidation profitable.

We're led to believe that because ANYONE can collect micro-payments, ANYONE can collect a lot of micro-payments. But there is no evidence to support this belief. It is the dream of a minor merchant, hoping to be a lord.

Say you are a photographer, or a writer, or a musician. You produce your media and put it online. You put up a micro-payment system. Maybe you collect enough to keep doing it, to pay for hosting and tech fees. Maybe you even make a bit more, and have enough left over to micro-pay tips to your friends who are doing the same thing. You're basically operating at a digital barter-economy level.

But then, you hit it big. BoingBoing drops your link, the constant unfolding of which is driving they're own "micro-payment" of ad payments per view. Your micropayments sky-rocket. You have surplus wealth. What do you do with it? Distribute it to your friends? Or start your own podcast? Hire some staff writers for your blog? Set up digital-franchises?

Next thing you know, you're being bought out by Gawker Media. You're an editor now, a curator of content. You siphon your friends' media through your big micro-payment mainstream-blog farm, telling yourself its okay you're not paying them, because they each are getting trickle-down micro-payments from your powerful link distribution system. You make or break entertainers, using them to feed the network of links, each one generating a fraction of a cent, with you at the hub. You are the landlord now. How does it feel? Drink the milkshake. Drink it up.

The micro-payment theory of the Internet combines this feudalistic consolidation with a Manifest Destiny view of the infinite characteristic of markets. We could all achieve payment, and make a living, if there were an infinite amount of media consumers, with an infinite amount of nickels to give us. There are a lot of consumers, but they are not infinite. This is a gold rush, a New World. Most of us homesteaders are just going to end up moving back to the city, and working in the factory. None of us are going to strike it rich with micro-payments. The only people who will, will be those in control of the distribution. The big mine owners. Those who can set up the shipping companies. Those selling us the tickets to California. But while the cost of media's raw materials has evaporated, the influx of capital is the same as it ever was. The market is still a market, no matter how small.

So what do micro-payments do for you? Nothing, except re-orient the market so that your work is less valuable, and that those who are already making money can make more. But then again, to some people who are underwater on their mortgages, signing a share-cropping agreement with the bank might seem like a good deal. Or moving back in with mom and dad. Or, you know, like crawling back into the womb.

But, creative media has an advantage over capital. Creativity does not require investment to exist. The economies of entertainment, literature consumption, and media production do not strictly need cash investment--they need mental, attention investment. This is another marketplace that has a different sort of power. There are those who would horde attention as well--but luckily, the human's capacity to supply attention well over-fulfills the demand, and so the consolidation of attention is not as strong as the consolidation of capital. The demand for capital seems pretty near limitless. Maybe by playing this market over the capitalist markets that tend towards exploitation of distribution, we can organize. Attention is the seed of organization, after all--the same process, but different market. Someone is going to control the productive market--will it be those who can consolidate the capital, or those who can organize the attention?

Take away:

A) the myth of micro-payments lie in the idea that they improve market standing for the little guy by increasing "free" to "pure profit" in the digital arena.

B) this is a myth, because micro-payments actually constitute market deflation by consolidating value around pre-existing value mechanisms of distribution and market control.

C) micro-payments, in a void of other material costs (that might trickle back to the actual producers), represent a new feudalism by making cumulative value in distribution the only source of value, and thereby awarding real value only to those who already control value.

D) We're tempted, as always, to participate in the game by a distortion of the way the market actually works, and accordingly, the promise of advance from the bottom up.

E) The good news is that digital media doesn't need capital at all. And attention might be a trumping market.

IF(mp3=digital, createnewrecord, ctrl+A, Del)

I can't believe what a nerd I am. Look at this post I just wrote, and thought was a good idea! Can you believe the nerdy title I gave it? Wow. Anyway, posting anyway, as an example of the weird analytical stuff I actually think about during the day.

So I did this really stupid thing about a year and a half ago. While working as a karaoke DJ (this wasn’t the stupid part, okay?) I decided to copy over the external hard drive of DJ tunes to my own hard drive. I knew it wouldn’t be the best music of course, but I thought, here’s a chance to get all those classic party songs they put on those monthly mainstream DJ compilations, and well, I just never could turn down an opportunity to make my music collection more encyclopedic.

Big mistake.

Not only did I severely over-estimate the number of “classic party songs” to pure crap, I also forgot to take into account that the guy whose hard drive it was is one of the most unorganized, non-encyclopedic people I’ve ever met. My music library became clogged with unlabeled, mis-labeled, duplicate tracks, most of which I didn’t want anyway, with their titles written in all caps. To the tune of about 200 gigs.
If you are not acquainted with the true depths of my analytical neurosis, let’s just say that such a poorly organized “library” has been a heavy weight bearing on my database soul for the past year and a half.

But never fear dear reader, because I am working through. Little by little, I am making my way through the genres and deleting, re-categorizing, consolidating, stripping, and re-writing the metadata. I first did “alternative”, “punk/hardcore”, “classical”, and “jazz” so at least I could listen to some music without going crazy. I got rid of the “other” and “uncategorized” categories little by little, and eventually consolidated “hip-hop”, “hip hop/rap”, “gangsta rap”, “rap/hip-hop”, and “hip-hop/R&B”. Last night, I finally finished “pop”. The only ones left are “rock/pop” and “rock”, which are large, but by this time I am being brutal with my deletion, so I hope to finish this week. If I don’t immediately recognize the name, it goes. If they have a single song I don’t like, it goes. If they have a single song with a Christmas theme… Ctrl+A, Del.

Throughout this process, I have had much time to lament how horrible the music player programs are at sorting music. I use iTunes primarily (iPhone user). But for sorting purposes, I also tried Songbird, Media Monkey, Windows Media Player, and Winamp. They differ a little bit, but without buying extra modules, there really isn’t any improvement. The best thing one can do is to sort by a metadata category, and just brute force your way through it. Even so-called “duplicate” finders are pretty weak, with no way to qualify how close or far a supposed duplicate might match its pair. And then, they are remarkably proprietary. iTunes is notorious (at least among the people who discuss music library databases online) for not allowing the language of its library files to be touched. There are some Applescripts out there for making some changes, but amazingly, it is very hard to re-organize a music library any other way than through a browser.

Just so we’re clear, I’m talking about the music library, which is different than the actual mp3s on your hard drive. The library is basically a database file, in some derivative of XML, for organizing the track names, numbers, artwork, actual file locations, and other metadata for display through the player’s browser window. There is a re-write process between the file itself and the database (what iTunes calls “organizing”, or maybe “mediaTunes” now?) that will adjust the actual metadata of the mp3 to cohere with the library database.

Now, I know when I say this, the reason it is so is because so few people have the disposition to categorization that I have, but all the same—the databases available for media organization are abysmal. I don’t really see why—it is easy enough to add XML interpretation into a program. Your word processor can probably do it. But I guess in the effort to make media players as “cleanlined” as possible, (i.e. iPod/iTunes-like) these are abandoned in favor of tools that let the program do all the work.

And I’m not interested in trashing the iTunes mentality, because through it all, they’ve still put together an excellent media player. Sure, it’s a bit heavy for a media player program. And it has a tendency to do things “automatically” that really screw up—like losing user-uploaded artwork trying to auto-download it, and we don’t even need to get into the DRM stuff. But as basically a front end for their music store, it is still pretty damn usable for someone like me, who has only bought maybe two things from the iTunes Store ever.

For example, I love the Smart Playlists. This is the sort of functionality I’m talking about. These are basically database queries, where you can define ranges of the metadata variables like “times played” or “date last played”, and insert randomization and total record quantity. I have several personal “radio stations” made from these tools, and they work great. Of course, there is not as much flexibility as I would like. The same thing goes for the Genius function, which is basically a personalization query, based on variables iTunes doesn’t disclose. Of course, you can’t edit this, and for someone with +100 gigs of mp3s and a computer 5 years old, it kind of gums up the works. But it’s the right idea.

The thing I realized, while deleting 50+ copies of duplicate shit-club mixes of Akon’s three biggest songs of 2007, was that despite the hysteria about intellectual property insinuating that a song is infinitely replicable, and a mere collection of digital bits, we still don’t look at our music files as data. There is an aspect of the commodity in every mp3; it takes on more than what it is. An mp3, to a consumer, is purely the music experience, not the possession of data which can create the music experience. My DJ associate with bad file habits thinks to himself, I want this song in my music collection, and adds it in, with no thought of where it will go. When he wants to play the song, he searches for that particular track, and plays it. There is no browsing, no querying, no organization. The more duplicate tracks he has, with different spellings and different data in different categories, the more likely he’ll find an instance of it when he searches for it in the search bar. The entire analytical process is, Want->Get. It’s the purest sort of production/consumption there is.

This is good for record companies, who try to institute the fear that if they can’t make money, then you won’t have any more mp3s. Actually, with DRM, they’re probably right. But it isn’t true—being able to drag and drop an entire collection of mp3s proves the point. An mp3 is only data. Music has long since past the point of expressive performance, and has entered the realm of digital data, along with many other aspects of our life. Now, expressive performance, the actual production and consumption, live within the differences of binary digits.

So what are you going to do? Well, as any database administrator will tell you—stop doing that! That is, having poor data habits. We know to back up our data, and to be careful where we get our data, but now we need to learn to organize it. A well-kept database is a useful database. Only one item of data per variable, each record separate, no duplicates, proper linking conventions. Clean query programming. It’s just what makes sense.

Of course, no 13 year-old just starting their mp3 collection is going to do this. You just throw ‘em in a file as you download them. So instead of instituting my Universal Rules of Epistemological Fortitude, as I would like to do, I instead look to the media players. I want MS Access, with a media player function. I want write combo boxes for my playlists. I want SQL queries in mp3 queries. I want to add IF/THEN statements to my iPhone syncing. Maybe with some top-down redesign of software, we could start treating our mp3s as what they are—valuable data.

Staying Content with Forms

Reading this article, I had a little thought about some descriptive terms for media, so please bear with me, (or don't, it's a free Internet) while I flesh these out.

The article is discussing the difference between "content" and "experience" with media. e.g., Music consumers care more about the experience than the content, so they will buy iPod and iTunes, rather than simply downloading them for free, because this experience trumps both free torrents and big box music retailers.

This argument aside, (which characteristically, I believe to be a narrow interpretation of a wider ISSUE which I will now lay down the metaphysics upon), it got me thinking about two similar terms, which I have thrown around a bit: "content", and "form".

I'll cut to the chase, and say like all dualities, these are two elements of a compound. So, if you are quick on the dialectics, you could probably skip to the end. However, I'll probably do some loop-de-loops before then, so look out.

The effect of the deployment of "form" and "content" depend on where you draw the line. Basically, we are taking a material/ideal ruler, and laying it down somewhere, over top of another discussion. "Content" ends up being the more material aspects of a particular thing, while the "form" is more ideal. You can pick your own example. This is a good differentiation to make, useful for many things, not the least of which is splitting between the specific and the general. Within the general form of poetry, we find many specific instances of content, which might vary, but still fall under the same taxonomy. And because this is a taxonomy, we can move our duality-rubric around, deciding that two examples of poetry have the same poetic content, while being under the same form of writing or linguistic expression. It's all relative, of course. "Content", as a material classification of the specific, tends to be different than other similarly defined content, whereas "forms" unite various content by their similarities. And this extends up and down micro/macrocosms in various directions, overlapping and subsuming previous distinctions, as we need to. After all, "form/content" are only words, and they must work for us. As long as they work, who cares?

But when we're trying to understand media, of which words are only one form of "content" (heh heh), we should probably be a bit more delicate. Especially if we are attempting to predict the future of a particular medium, and its associated technology. Calling something an exemplary form (or "experience") does not necessary speak for itself. Different people will privilege content over form, or form over content, in various instances, depending on what they are referring to by each. It's the writing that matters; no, its the technology; no, it's the delivery; no, its media form itself; etc.

If you are a frequent reader of my blog, you will probably have noticed that I tend to deploy the "material" aspects of a particular situation, over the "ideal". This is because I read a bunch of books by this guy with a beard one time, and it has kind of stuck as a habit. However, if you really follow what I'm trying to say, (if I am not totally opaque and obtuse), you will notice that normally I am rounding upr aspects of what be called "ideal", in order to point out that it is actually more effective when they are considered part of the "material". I am shifting the taxonomy, playing my own little word game, but for this reason: "ideals", "genera", and "forms" are often used as givens, or unchangeable elements of a situation; whereas "materials", "species", and "content" are seen as mutable, able to be manipulated, and at various levels of accessibility and provenance--also known as available through PRAXIS (to use another of those words lodged in my brain).

My point is, we should not honor boundaries of Form, simply because we have identified them as such. Even the most dogmatic of beliefs are usable as a material to be built upon, and tools to be deployed to improve our praxis. The evolution of the word praxis is exemplary; like many philosophical terms, it has been re-appropriated from its original, Platonic and Aristotelian uses, to more, ahem, material forms. (Riddle me that.)

Anyway, back to media. When we think of content, as opposed to form, we might very well think of music or literature, opposed to iPods or Kindles. And yes, it would seem that the form is more important to the user's experience than the content. If you have a good technological form, you can move units of content.

But, we could also pose it this way: think of, as content opposed to form, sound waves or words opposed to genres of music or literature. If you have a good genre, can you move crap words to the consumer? Sometimes yes, but not always. You can't just put a heavy bass line over some shitty hook, and then sell mp3s of it. I'm giving people with bad taste the benefit of the doubt, thinking of them more as "ill-informed" than really liking crap music. I don't think this is going out on a limb--if you look at the demographics of people who buy "bad" music, they are often those whom, for whatever reason, have not had a chance to be exposed to anything better. But I think this is moving away from the point--which is, you must have some content that is, experienceable (regardless of merit) before you can sell anything to anyone. Even if its vampire fiction or club bass, someone has to like the content before they're willing to buy anything. This is a lesson the media industry has yet to take seriously.

Let's move in another direction. To oppose "content" to "form", let's oppose iPod to Digital Media Player. Ah ha--now it seems that it is not the form which really prevails, but the specific instance of that form. Now, I'm aware the article I was reading talked about "experience", not "form", to quote exactly. But they are deploying "experience" as both content and form, depending on what aspect of it they are referring to. It is form, in the sense that it is a digital media player, but it is content in the sense that it is THE iPod.

This brings us to an important point, which might make it a bit clearer how they are using both content and form: commodification is the unification of content with form. The material becomes the ideal, and vice versa. It is not just any media player, it is The Ideal music player, though it is still very much only a music player. Any IT object is not only what it is, but the ideal of that classification. It might function very well as what it is, or not at all. But it must be both material and ideal, content and form, for it to be a commodity.

Apple succeeded in this regard, but a commodity is nothing new. However, the delusion that commodity-status is necessary to move units is new. This is the erroneous belief of the publishing industry, which is desperately searching for its "iPod moment"; they think that when the content of publishing can be unified in form, suddenly everyone will want them, and they can sell Primo-Golden-Hyper-Books, or whatever. Making a commodity isn't going to save any industry, though it might generate sales in the short term. Some books still sell lots of copies, because they are commodified. But a single commodity is not an industry. You must continue to refine and produce new content in addition to interacting with the formal aspects of the medium, if you want to move units. Nobody will buy simply The Idea of anything, any more than they will buy a bunch of words tossed in a heap.

For evidence of this, look at an iPod now. It's a completely different device than the original, crappy LCD, click-wheel crap. It plays games now! It has a compass, a telephone. It's a goddamn video camera/DVR/baby monitor! The fact that it can also be an end-device for digital music is now entirely incidental. The content of the thing, in terms of its technology and functions, have far exceeded the form it was supposed to maintain.

Technology is content itself. Technology is a medium. The Internet is Language. The fact that content now let's use view other content, by nature of their combined content is interesting, but not a revolution in form. Once reading and writing was also a unique form, but it doesn't mean that linguistic communication was new. You can call it HTML if you want, or mp3, or even YouTube: it is all language. It is a language which enables the expression of other languages. Code is both a form and a content. It all depends on what you want to manipulate. If you want to write English language books, you probably see English words as content, and the book as the form. If you want to sell consumer electronics, you probably look at mini-processors and touch-screens as the content, and slick, thin form-factors and UI as the form. If you want to distribute literature to many people who want to read it, you probably should look at quality literature as the form, to which acceptable content-networks are applied. The genera of form can help you think about the species of content, but in the end, the generic and the specific are merely ways of thinking about meaning.

Which brings me to a last, elusive point, which I will not fully explain. Because content and form are really interchangeable depending on your conscious point of view (a coordination of content and form itself), neither are material in the sense that they cannot be transmuted into an ideal perception of material (what we call specific objects, as opposed to just things). If you really want to access the material roots of both content and form, you will have to go after something on which it is much more difficult to maintain a metaphysical handle: the human "expression" of form and content, and both the production and the consumption of this expression. Expression is found in both content and form, and controls the interaction between the two categories in our mind. It is closer to Kant's Transcendental Ideal, but between you and me, we might just say it is the force flowing through the pipes, no matter what sort of liquid they contain, nor where they might take it.

[For further reading, by a pair of dudes who grip it way better than I do, you might want to check out Deleuze and Guattari's essay on form, content, and expression in A Thousand Plateaus. It might be, "A Geology of Morals", but I can't remember right now. I'll check when I have the book in front of me.]

[Also, it should go without saying (though I'm saying it) that this argument about the form and content of material in space, also applies to Time. Say wha? Never mind! Another time then.]

Now, this flu:

I'm taking a break from the scheduled Interdome "era of good feelings" media channel to bring you a little update on H1N1: the dreaded gripe porcina.

But the reason I am doing so is to present some facts, so I will keep the commentary down to one paragraph, beginning now:

After the hysteria of the discovery of the flu, it was only natural to have the media hype give way to the hype about the media hype. And of course, now it's all a big joke, kind of proceeding like this.

CDC: knock, knock.
Public: Who's there?
CDC: flu pandemic.
Public: PANDEMIC?!?! FUCK!
CDC: flu pandemic.
Public: PANDEMIC!!! FUCK!!!
CDC: flu pandemic.
Public: oh, FLU pandemic? Fuck that.
CDC: flu pandemic.
Public: ....
CDC: flu pandemic?
CDC: flu pandemic???

Once everybody realized what they had been saying all along, that it was a pandemic of the flu, not of ebola or Mexican-Immigrant-Insta-Death, they stopped caring. But it doesn't change the fact that it is a flu pandemic. Still serious business. And yes, there are those statistics out there, that are oh-so-easy to retweet, small number of people get pig sick, everyone wears masks; lots of people get AIDS, nobody wears a condom. Here's another one: someone comes up with a witty twitter post, and everyone retweets it; someone tries to teach you about pandemics, and you still don't wear a condom.

So that little rant about meme pandemics aside, here are some actual statistics about the current pandemic.

We are not yet one month into the pandemic. This means we don't have a lot of data, but we have some. Here's what it shows.

Less than one month in, there have been nine deaths in the US, and 6,552 confirmed cases. This does not sound so bad, especially compared to a disease like AIDS. But this is less than a month in, and the rate appears to be accelerating.

The same thing is true for the world at large. Today, we stand at 86 deaths, and 11168 reportedly confirmed cases.

Here's a graph of what that looks like.


There's also a clicky map here.

This shows us that yes, it appears that we are really in Phase 5 of the WHO epidemic speedometer. No, not a panic, but a real pandemic.

The basic reproduction number, or R sub 0, is "is the mean number of secondary cases a typical single infected case will cause in a population with no immunity to the disease in the absence of interventions to control the infection." From analysis of the cases in Mexico, researchers guess the number for H1N1 to be 1.4 to 1.6. Genetic analysis guesses 1.2. This is higher than seasonal flu, but on the low end of other pandemics (1918, 1957, and 1968 was 1.4-2). It is early to be guessing this number, and Mexico is an interesting situation because of the discrepancies in reported cases of the disease in the early stages of March and April. Yet, some scientists seem to be comfortable enough to publish. So, this is not just the seasonal flu in terms of transmission potential.

Now: mortality. Preliminary findings put the case-to-death percentage at 0.3% to 1.4%, with the number most likely being 0.4%. In the US, the current percentage is 0.1%; in the world it is 0.7%.

Once the pademic reaches stage 6, the WHO implements the Pandemic Severity Index. Using the limited data we have now, if they were to declare today, the world would be in stage 3, one step up from Asian and Hong Kong flu, but not as high as stage 6, which was the severity of the 1918 Spanish Flu, with a case-fatality rate of over 2%.

Okay. Now the point (briefly).

No, we are not going to be dying in the streets. But this is still a real pandemic, and it seems that it will not stop. Barring any consequences like mutation to a very different virulence, or the new symptom of projectile bleeding eyeballs, there are still going to be a lot of sick people in the world over the next year or so. YES: SICK WITH THE FLU. ONLY THE FLU. But even .4% or all of those people dying is a lot of people dying.

Not to mention the incredible strain on the health care systems of the world to deal with 30% of the world getting sick. No, the actual fatality rate is not too impressive, especially compared to the amount of damage we humans are able to inflict on ourselves with war, and the like. But our infrastructure is going to be strained. Can you imagine health insurance companies dealing with 30% of their customers coming in for diagnostic tests over the course of a year? What about those without health insurance? What about those in countries without health systems?

As of now, most countries are even delaying or stopping their reports to the WHO. When so many people are getting sick, and the storm shows no signs of abating, what's the point? Indeed, what is the point to care about H1N1, when it's pace seems unchangeable? What's the news in that?

This Revolution Should Be Downloadable

You may have heard of Creative Commons, which helps us creative folks distribute our work in open formats. But here is Open Access, which is a similar proposal to not only distribute scientific articles in open-format, but also to maintain access via open, accessible databases.

Although they do not offer the different levels of protection as Creative Commons does, they do take it a step further by arguing that permissions are only half the battle. The database is equally important, or opening one's re-print permissions is no different from having a CC blog.

Here is their Open Access Publication Definition, pulled from the Statement on the Bethesda meeting on Open Access in 2003:

An Open Access Publication[1] is one that meets the following two conditions:

1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship[2], as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).

Notes:

1. Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers.

2. Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now.

I like this for several reasons (besides the fact of its general opposition to intellectual property arguments).

1. It notes that "Open Access" is a distinction of the work itself--in other words, not the author, printer, publisher, or content provider. The work itself is denoted to be free and clear of copyright restrictions.

2. Related to the previous, "Open Access" does not mean that the work is free from copyright by its authors. You can copyright it, CC it, chisel it in stone if you want. All the denotation means it that the work itself must, in addition to whatever else, be available free, forever, and to whomever.

3. Furthermore, it specifically states that an Open Access Publication is available digitally. This is not a free-for-all, bootleg as you like permission. You can't print and sell copies. But it does this without the proscription of CC's "non-comm" category by taking advantage of the digital medium. By forcing it to be available "in any digital medium", it is by substantial fact making it free, un-controllable by material means such as DRM or anything else. "Any digital medium", means, materially, free and endlessly distributable.

This is perhaps the most important feature of the statement. In an essay I wrote about digital reproduction and intellectual property, I argued that the change digital reproduction engenders to our material conditions is forcing us to consider "property", and accordingly, labor, in new ways. Open Access takes this principle up directly by not simply stipulating that a work is "free property", in the form of Creative Commons, which despite intentions, still recognizes the material fact of intellectual property as a form. On the contrary, Open Access does an end run around old-form notions of property by defining a new sort of property: it takes digital reproduction as the de facto material process for its publications, because if information must be available in digital form, it is simply inconceivable that the content could be owned as property in the old way. You want to print journals? Fine, make a business of it, go wild. But if you want to publish, it better be Open Access, and therefore, digital.

4. Which leads to the fourth point. By taking this approach they are ignoring the form of production entirely, and focusing on content. If a document is available in any digital format, it cannot really be formatted or typeset. The goal is the propagation of the information: plain text. As a writer, printer, and publisher, I abhor plain text. Typesetting is part of the art. But these are scientists, and they are interested in the conclusions of research--publications, not publishing. And so, through this selective targeting of text via the material conditions of information reproduction, they are absolutely brilliant in crafting this definition. They allow authors and publishers to retain any rights they want, as long as it is available absolutely free, digitally. This should in no way impact publishing. People who want to read books, subscribe to journals, and collect first editions can go on doing so. But the people who need access to the information, like students, researchers, historians, database compilers, and etc. will have all of the text for free. They are drawing a line between published materials, and digitally-available text, and are doing so clearly, distinctly, and concisely.

5. The second half of the definition deals with the digital access--which is the current issue, in my opinion. Copyright is dead; that fight is over. Of course, there are still partisans out there in them hills, but everybody knows we're not going back to the pre-mp3 days. The fight currently, is one for access, which could potentially be more complicated. The Google Book controversy, for example, is exactly what's important these days. All books will be scanned eventually, and I don't think anyone has a problem with that. The big deal is not that the books will be scanned, it is that Google will hold the keys to the library. Of course, they've made many homages and odes to the "ease" with which content rights holders will be able to "manage" their works through a no-doubt free Google app. But who are you going through to manage your rights? Google. Who has control the second your rights lapse? Google. Who controls who gets to access, and more important in the days of masses of content, when and at what rank? Google. Google is shaping up to be the Amazon of digital books, because they are doing what Amazon did right the first time--be the paradigm of digital access to ____. Amazon chose print books, and "look up something on Amazon" is the Internet-synonym for the common task of finding something the way the all-mighty search engine is for search. Amazon chose wrong with Kindle, because they still thought digital content was the same as print content (DRM). Google choose correctly, betting there would be much more money in free content than in paid. Which Napster was popular, the old, illegal Napster, or the new, crappy subscription service Napster? And Google Book Search, it is becoming increasingly clear, will remain legal. The problem is, the analogy to Napster is not true, because with Napster you could download your mp3, but with Book Search it's all on the Internet. Cloud based, in this case, means you don't actually own the material, you simply get to stare at it from the ground. And the best and only view is on Google's grassy hillside.

Hence, the requirement in part two of the definition of Open Access, stating that the publication should be "deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving". Google likes to pretend it is an academic institution, scholarly society, and maybe even a government agency, (Always look to the future with a fear of the feet of the giants of today!) but it is none of these things. "At least one" is the key. Does Google Book Search allow you to copy one of their works to another database? Why not? Because controlling digital media is about controlling access--the work itself does not matter. Open Access has realized this next fight, much as Google has, and is putting itself on the side of information's freedom.




So, I like this Open Access. It's a major step forward, not just for science (the importance of which for humanitarian goals is immediately obvious), but for property theory in general. We are moving towards a new conception of property and labor, and this is a part of it.

That said, I don't think I am ready to contribute any of my work to Open Access, as a writer. A good amount of my writing is available online for free, via CC non-comm (see the bottom footer of the blog, for example). But to let it completely out of my creative control, I'm not quite ready. Then again, this blog has only been in existence for a little over two years, and anything I would consider "publishable" has been written in about the same time period. Maybe once it's aged a bit, I will feel differently. Also, if I had a teaching job paying the bills, I might be totally fine with giving the fruits of my "research" out for free and letting it completely out of my control. Who knows--time will tell.

The one thing I'm sure of, is that standards like Creative Commons and Open Access have definitely helped me move in the direction of a new relationship towards my production and my product, both intellectually, and to its actual physical/digital incarnations.

We Bring You an Important Interruption:

Swine Flu, otherwise known as Influenza A H1N1.

Not to be alarmist, but even if you are not normally interested in these sorts of semi-apocalyptic world events, you may want to pay attention, at least until there is some real idea of how big this is going to spread. Unfortunately, because of the way rumors spread about these sorts of things, and the really, truly unbelievable USELESSNESS of the major media on this issue, we probably won't know what's really happening until its over, and by that time it will be too late for the people who will be the casualties.

The media is providing this, generally, as the story:

"Some people, we don't really know how many, are like, pig-sick, or something. California, Kansas, Texas, New York, Mexico. Maybe some other places? Some disease researcher types think it might be serious."

Thanks.

Twitter and Wikipedia, on the other hand, are much better, but still not the magic media bullet. @timoreilly passed on this Google map of current outbreaks. This is not really that informative, but contextualizes the current status well.

He also passed on this posting, by a former flu researcher, Terry Jones, that while not providing that much in the way of new, breaking information, cuts away A WHOLE LOT of the bullshit.

As far as the exact, current state of things, (not including the late-breaking news reports that are more "late" than anything else, not to mention conflictual) I've found the often-updating Wikipedia page about the current outbreak to be the best summation, because it lists all the info on one page, with sources.

Terry Jones is also Twittering at @terrycojones. The current Twitter tags for the epidemic seem to be #H1N1 (which in itself is much more factual information than any media report) and #swineflu.

Here are some of the most important facts about epidemics in general, pulled from Terry Jones' blog posting, which I feel deserve repeating:

"The current virus is already known to be resistant to both amantadine and rimantadine, though oseltamivir is still effective."

"If you ask virologists what the probability is that there will be another pandemic, they’ll tell you it’s 1.0. It’s just a matter of time until it happens. it’s like a non-zero probability state in a Markov process.When it does happen, what you do in the first phase is critically important."

"The current WHO standard influenza test kit is not very useful in identifying this strain. They have issued instructions warning against false negatives."

"The acting-director of the CDC has already said: “There are things that we see that suggest that containment is not very likely.” That is a remarkably candid statement. I think it’s very clear that the cat is out of the bag. The question is how bad is it going to be. That’s impossible to tell right now, because we do not know what the virus will look like in the future, after it has had time to mutate and adapt inside humans.:

"The new virus has been popping up in various places in the US in the last days. I expect it will go global in the next couple of days, maximum."

"Instead of peaks in just the very young and the very old, there was a W shape, with a huge number of young and healthy people who would not normally die from influenza. There are various conjectures as to the cause of this. The current virus is also killing young and healthy adults."

"The social breakdown in a pandemic is extraordinary."

"History dictates that you should probably not believe anything any politician says about pandemic influenza. There has been a strong tendency to downplay risks. All sorts of factors are at work in communicating with the public. You can be sure that everything officially said by the WHO or CDC has been very carefully vetted and considered. There’s no particular reason to believe anything else you hear, either :-)" [emphasis mine]

"In conclusion, I’d say that the thing is largely out of our hands for the time being. We’re going to have to wait and see what happens, and make our best guesses along the way."


Other things:

Facemasks don't prevent viruses. But, they do prevent spittle, fluids, and that sort of thing, which transmit viruses.

While I implicitly do not trust governments or leaders, I do trust the CDC and the WHO. They are run by scientists, by and large. If the CDC or the WHO approves a vaccine or a certain procedure, I would take it/follow it. I've done a little bit of reading about the spread of outbreaks, and it is most often that one person who slips past quarantine spreads the virus to a new location. You may hate needles, or believe some conspiracy about vaccines, but in taking the risk upon yourself by refusing treatment, you are putting the entire population you may contact at risk. Sorry--I know, but its how biology works. Put the species before yourself, this one time.

However, that being said, I do not trust FEMA in the slightest. Not that we are at that point--but just to juxtapose, while CDC is run by scientists and doctors, FEMA is run by politicians and Blackwater types, who would totally doom a portion (especially an "undesirable" portion) of the population to save themselves. Or at least, they would have their heads so far up their gold-bricking grafting asses as to not know hand sanitizer from napalm. I don't know how much has changed since the previous administration, but if that agency is anything like what it was in 2005-7, I would dodge those criminals. CDC are the folks who are going to save our asses, whereas FEMA are the ones hoarding virgins in the Dr. Strangelove mine-shaft bunkers. The really sad part about some conspiracy theories is that some are true. Remember I said that.

Okay--enough scaremongering for now. Really though: just pay attention, listen up, and don't believe rumors unless you get the facts from someone trustworthy. In lieu of that, cover your mouth, and wash your damn hands.

Emotional Revue

If you've ever thought to yourself, "man, I wish the American media wasn't biased against Palestine," you should probably be reading The Angry Arab News Service.

"News Service" is perhaps a bit misleading, because for Americans that signifies a stereotype of supposed cool, impartiality, and words like "mediated", and "balanced".

Of course, if you know even a bit about the issues, you know all of those ideals of media are a crock of shit. And this is why As'ad AbuKhalil's site is excellent, because it makes no attempts to be any of those things.

He posts the news of course, and his reactions to the news, but this is information that is theoretically already available to anyone on the internet. The reason I appreciate his site is because he adds a certain emotion to the news, which is against the idea of "un-bias", and precisely what is missing from consideration of the issues. During the invasion of Iraq, he posted photos and news reports, but he also posted poetry from Arab poets describing the emotions of the time. When I say that American media is biased against Palestine, this is what I believe is missing from the news. Its the anger, the ability to commiserate, and the feeling of suffering. We feel these things towards Darfur, or towards other genocides, or towards ourselves. But every news article about Palestine is steeped in the rhetoric of terrorism, which of course affects Americans in their own small appreciation of suffering, and immediately galvanizes the issue. Terrorism is the apprehension of horror from the perspective of the state--it makes the people a simple constitutency rather than a body, and favors pluses such as "security", "information", and "control", rather than safety, knowledge, and freedom. Americans don't know what it is like to be bombed from above, to be shelled, or to have soliders in our streets--perhaps this is simply our reverse-tragic benefit of history, for which we are not worthy. We only know reports, data, video feed--the abstractions of fear. But by reading As'ad AbuKhalil's site, we might be able to find a taste of the anger and horror of those who have, or those who have not forgotten how to have such emotion.

An example: As'ad AbuKhalil recently debated the Israeli Consul General of San Francisco. Americans, especially liberal democrats, in my experience, have a certain holy appreciation for terms like "fair debate", "free speech", and "rational dialogue." As such, I might imagine that they would be slightly horrified by emotions and actions such as these. But then, rather than having the anger he has, they have instead a great, unmediated swath of "un-bias" filling their minds. Here is As'ad AbuKhalil's own description of the debate, posted in full, so as not to break up the context (link to the original on his blog):

So I had a long day yesterday. I woke up late, but I had a deep sleep. During the day, I was preserving my voice. I had these Halls drops and would avoid talking on the phone. The few times I spoke on the phone, I had to say that I was preserving my voice for the debate. And at one point yesterday, Amer asked me about preparation. I had to say: that this is a job that I have been preparing for all my life. Two days ago, I jotted down some notes here in bed, and I had to throw the notebook after a few minutes because I got mad. Usually, when I have to deal with a debate of this kind, I remind myself of the massacres that Israel committed against our people: one after the other. I know the sources and the facts, so I only write down an outline of what I am about to say. I arrive there and I get pissed early on--which is a good thing for my debate performance. I learned there that originally one professor was going to invite the Israeli Consul General by himself, until somebody else suggested that maybe somebody else with a different point of view should be invited. I go there and I notice heavy security and police presence. I then meet the professor who was going to moderate the debate. We go to the hall and I notice that there are two chairs and two name signs: for me and for him (the Israeli representative of the usurping entity). I did not like the arrangement. So I tell her: I don't want to sit next to him. I would like you as a moderator to sit between us. She asked me whether I was kidding. I said: do you see me in a joking mode? Do you see me kidding with you? You think that this is a joking matter for me? She realized--let me just say--that Angry Arab was not kidding. She said that she was planning to make her remarks and sit in the audience. I said: that is easy: instead of sitting here, we can move your chair to separate between me and him. I also was told that she (or the university) was planning to host a reception for the two guests before somebody who knew about me told them: I can assure you that As`ad will not agree to a reception with the Israeli diplomat. So the reception was scrapped. I then told the host that I will not be recognizing or talking with the Israeli guest. She looked baffled but nervous. She asked me why do I have these positions? I said you will understand after you hear my remarks. She was getting more nervous, I could tell, by the minute. She then upset me more by saying something about "academic" environment or collegiality and then added something about "us" getting along. I was more angry at that. I got more angry (but that was a good preparation for my debate) and said: this is no joke or a game or schtick for me. This is about killing 400 Palestinian children in Gaza in three weeks. I don't "get along" and I don't want to "get along." The security and the police only got more visible and more extensive. The moderator then remarked that the security was required for "his safety" in reference to the Israeli speaker. I was here more pissed (all that getting angry before the debate was preparation as far as I was concerned). I said: what about my safety? Did that enter into the picture? or do Arabs don't deserve safety? They were searching backpacks and I was told that he notified police and various security agencies. I sat there and I was happy before the debate to see my students from California State University, Stanislaus. I had to warn them: You will see a different side to me from the one you see in the classroom, I said. I then met a Palestinain student from the University of San Francisco: probably the only one on campus. I also saw a student of mine from 7 years ago or more. While I was seated in my place (with the moderator now seated in the middle), I see the shadow of a man (because I made a point of not looking) come in front of me and extend his hand and say: Nice to meet you, professor. Hi Professor. I kept looking straight, as if there was no one in front of me. He repeated that a few times: and I kept totally ignoring him completely. He then gave up (finally) and took his seat. I can really tell you that I debated a man yesterday but I don't know what he looked like. I did not look at him or address him once. I have no idea what he looked like. And during the talk, he at one point asked me to look him, but I of course ignored him. He then looked at the audience and said that I have not looked at him and that I didn't shake his hands and that I refuse to humanize him. I muttered into the microphone: that I see them the way they see the children of Gaza. During dinner with Amer and Riad both commented to me that they would have had difficulting ignoring him the way I did but Amer added that me being so lacking in shyness, timidity, or the need to be polite helps me in those situations. It is so easy for me to be socially rude, when I want to. I had to tell them: are you kidding? These are my favorite moments when I ignore an Israeli who is trying to greet me or shake my hand. The president of the University came personally to greet...the Israeli guest. One university administrator noticed that and expressed his displeasure to me. The moderator did not even flip a coin or ask about who would speak first, but simply gave him the opporutnity to speak first. Of course, she did not know that I always prefer to go second because I get to say what I want and then respond to what was said before me. We also had five minutes to respond after the presentations. Now here you must understand that I cant evaluate my own performance or say how I did. I will leave that to witnesses or your own opinions when you watch it on video. Yes, I am told it was taped and will provide you with further information. As soon as it was my turn, I felt a rush. My voice was back in full force and I could sing Fayruz at that point. There was a woman who came with the diplomat and she was sitting in the front raw and after two minutes of my talk, I could see her squirm and look with sympathy at her Israeli colleague. I could not read her face but felt that she was telling him that "we did not expect this would happen." But it happened, and As`ad was on a roll. I can't tell you how I did but I can tell you that I really enjoyed the task and would do it at the drop of a hat, and would waive my speaking fee for it. When I came to the US and I used to watch debates between Israeli and Arab speakers, and I always found myself being critical of style and substance. I had no excuse: when I am debating, I can say what I want. So I can do it my way, and I did it my way last night. I explained to the audience about my policy: I said that I want you all to know that my pariticpation was at the invitation of the University of San Francisco and that I strictly adhere to the boycott of Israel and I call on them all to boycott Israel at all levels. I told them that I met I(armed) Israelis first under occuapation in South Lebanon in 1982, and I resolved then that I would meet them only on my terms. I explained to them that I am strict against terrorists and terrorism: that I am opposed to any deal or negotiations with Al-Qa`idah or with Bin Laden and accordingly, I am opposed to any deal or compromise with the state that pioneered the practice of terrorism in the region. And I went on. The moderator was clearly nervous. I told her that later: she was getting nervous as soon as I spoke. She told me that she never gets nervous. I said: well, I saw you nervous many times today. The audience was largely sympathetic to the Palestinian view and most were very knowledgeable of the issues and many had been to Palestine which put the Israeli speaker in a difficult position--not that I felt sorry for him. There was a British visiting professor at Stanford (who has a teaching job in France) who kept yelling at the Israeli speaker. He was so furious. Amer, and Riad and I later commented that it is rare to see an American professor venting such anger at an Israeli speaker. By the time I finished my first 20 minutes presentation, I was relieved. I felt that I did my job although I said more later. But I felt that I was pleased with how things went. I will let you know when the video will be uploaded (I am told that the first 20 minutes (the presentation of the Israeli speakr) is mysterisly missing from the university taping. Oh, and during the talk, I did criticize the moderator. At one point in the Q and A, I was making a point, and the moderator started to interrupt me. I said: look. I can tell that you have been nervous regarding my attitude since I started talking. I said that it was clear that you were not expecting this: it is clear that you were expecing an Arab who would hold hands with the Isareli speaker, and that I was disappionting you but that I would say what I want and in my own way. On the way driving back at night, they called me from AlJazeera Arabic to offer some remarks about US reactions to Lieberman's remarks. I agreed: they called me and I started yelling in my cellphone but my voice was weak by that point. It was a long day: statisfying (for me) but long. But lest we lose sight of the realities, I told Amer and Riad that no matter who won the debate, they still occupy the lands and they still kill our people.

Bomber vs. Bomber

I've done this sort of east-west news comparison before, but unfortunately, we meet instances of the cheapness of non-western life over and over again.

The main headline on the Guardian web site is the Glasgow airport fire attack, which is the most recent of the string of "terror" events in the UK.

Now the UK, US airports, and also Ibiza (Ibiza?) are locked down because of the security threat.

Western media is also locked down with coverage of these incidents.

But, although apparently now the media is abuzz with indignation because the second car bomb in London was planned to target rescue workers from the first blast.

Other important topics include whether or not these attacks were planned in conjunction with Al-Queda or whether they were simply Al-Queda-like.

I would wonder about why these bombs were so luckily both found by "accident." Particularly when there was no warning of any threat at all. It sounds like a pretty good fear-drum to beat, especially for a new Prime Minister who might need some public support to further the goals of the party maintaining power. Is it too early for conspiracy theories?

Maybe not, especially because no one except for the bombers were hurt. Sounds like a perfect caper. Just remember, "the police are clear that the most important contribution that the public can make is to carry on reporting anything suspicious and to remain vigilant." That, and keep going shopping, but that goes without saying.

Oh yes, back to the point: no one except the bombers was hurt. For news in which everyone but the bombers was hurt, we'll have to go to the Other side of the world: Afghanistan.

At least on the Guardian web site, the second story was "'Up to 80 civilians dead' After US Airstrikes in Afghanistan." Wait, what? Oh, you hadn't been paying attention? Yeah, that puts the number of civilians killed in the last month by coalition forces in Afghanistan over 200, according to the UN. And, far more than the Taliban has killed.

The commander of Coalition forces in Afghanistan, Dan McNeill, seems to favor aerial bombardment rather than local peace deals as his strategy. Some call him "Bomber" McNeill as a result. I guess this strategy gets the maximum of "results" with few casualties if any for the coalition. Not to mention the fact that it is much more expensive, and expensive wars are good for the countries who supply the materiel.

So there you have it folks. On the home front, only bombers hurt, civilians now under surveillance. On the Other front, 200 civilians dead, bombers are just fine, and sending the bills back to the former, which, in case you forgot, is exactly the argument that led to the latter.

Headline:

Terror bombing kills Zero, and 80. Media unsure of identity of terrorists, or good guys.

Playin' With Propaganda

So the world is abuzz with indignation about Hamas' use of a very familiar MouseHead to sell their politics on TV. The Washington Post took a typical stance against it, doing a disservice to unbiased media reporting everywhere by quoting the Israeli-core Palestinian Media Watch in saying this use of MouseHead takes "every opportunity to indoctrinate young viewers with teachings of Islamic supremacy, hatred of Israel and the U.S., and support of 'resistance,' the Palestinian euphemism for terror." Whoa. Maybe propaganda directed at children, the "most impressionable audience" according to the Post, is going a little too far.

Or maybe what everyone is actually upset about is copyright infringement. This is the age of intellectual property, after all. And using MouseHead as propaganda to children is proprietary. We ownz that, Hamas. We can't have children listening to a MouseHead that doesn't have US inside it.

As anyone who knows the history of images can tell you, Mickey Mouse has been fighting for our side since the old days. He fought the original Nazis.

(Click on Cartoon for larger view. Note: the number 23 juxtaposed to the swastika on the Nazi's hat proves that not only is Disney owned by the Illuminati, the Illuminati were against the Nazis. A subject for another post!)
Pluto also bit the bad guys. Find more adventures of big-eyed animals thwarting Fascists here.

And Disney was hardly the only animation studio to be drafted into nationalist service.

Check out Superman fighting the Japanese, and Bugs Bunny training soldiers.

My all time favorite cartoon ideologue is definitely Donald Duck. Maybe it is because so many modern propaganda merchants sound and act a lot like Donald that I find it so apt. Or maybe it is because seeing Donald wearing a Nazi Uniform, even in jest, just touches me somewhere only Michael Savage can.

While I couldn't find the actual videos anywhere online (although hardly an exhaustive search, I know they are out there as I have seen them before) I found this article that provides some good images and detailed description of the relevant episodes. The best is definitely Der Fuehrer's Face, (image to right) in which Donald dreams that he lives in "Nutzi" land, and is forced to work in a factory making munitions (they obviously don't force workers to make weapons in any other countries) and to salute a weak-kneed Wagnerian Hitler. You also get the titular song, which I believe was quite a hit during the WWII period, featuring all the poignant critique of Nazi ideology that a fart-noise can provide. Don't worry Donald, it was just a dream! You really are a member of the greatest generation!

So look it up, Hamas. America owns the intellectual property of propaganda. No children are going to get their minds adjusted except for our kids, 'cause we adjust them right! Right!

Hmm. Well, I think regardless our children's minds are poisoned beyond all repair. If it's not the mercury content of their tuna salad, then it is Laguna Beach. Personally, I like Voltron. Firing your lion hands into an evil robot to blow it into space is a moral lesson I think we all can agree on. From now on, I decree that no child of the earth shall watch any TV other than Voltron.

I also decree that the Washington Post shall be forced to take a nap until it is ready to play nice with the rest of the children.

Why Haven't You Learned Anything Yet?

I'm watching Bill Moyers Journal on PBS right now. He's reviewing media coverage of the lead-up to the current war (don't you know there's a war on?) starting since 9/11. (That's 9/11/01, as opposed to the other 9/11's that happen every year. Also, it is different than 9-11, which is the number you call on your phone in an emergency, as I heard a Virginia Sheriff refer to it on the news recently.)

It's a wonderful program, going over a horrible thing. Bill Moyers rarely disappoints. He cites almost every single network, outlet, and paper in how they have stood up and lied along with the government in order to push the case for war. In addition he refers to pundits by name, numbering the times they have flat-out echoed lies.

The sad thing was, I knew all of this before the war even started. Not because I am smart, or because I had done a lot of research, but just because it seemed so obvious that the ideas proposed were full of shit. Neo-cons all of sudden deciding that a country that they had sought to control but had gotten out of hand was a threat and so why not spread a lil' bit of the ol' democracy over the area. I didn't know if there were WMDs or not, frankly, it didn't seem to matter, because Iraq didn't just decide to go out and pick them up in the "post 9/11 world" (that we were reminded so often that we were living in), they either already had them, or they never had them. Same thing with Al-Qaeda. Why would anyone believe that all of sudden "it was revealed" that there was a link. For anyone paying attention, we were tracking Al-Qaeda for years (ever since they stopped being our puppets, ours and the Iranians, that is...) so why, after 9/11 would we all of sudden find out (from people we were paying off no less) that "there the were!" hiding in Iraq. Ridiculous. Yet, presented as the "truth".

[find out more about the history of the United States and our so-called enemies' common causes at the excellent site, Cooperative Research; all sources are from the media; it is amazing that among the lies you can also find the truth, its just on the back pages and nobody connects the dots for you.]

I don't mean to be arrogant, and I don't want to say "I told you so." (Well, at least not very much.) I think the real point is that this idiocy is not going to stop, but just re-cycle. Iran is next. Again, it doesn't matter whether or not Iran has nuclear weapons. What matters is that we want to prevent them from forming an oil burse, we want the oil fields adjacent to Iraq, we want to continue to spread our influence in the Middle East, and we want to counter the influence of the SCO (see my recent post about the building war against Iran, and again, Cooperative Research.) But none of this is in the media, only the specter of the "threat to us". Whoa.

The media is full of tools, and that is why I never trust anything that I will ever read, hear, or watch to be fully ingenuous and conducted under the spirit of actual research and enlightenment; in other words, I expect the media to be completely devoid of truth. That doesn't mean that there are not facts. They are just hidden, watered down, misappropriated, countermanded, and obscured. It requires research of one's own to be able to actually piece them together.

Anyway, you should check out the Moyers piece. Here is the link to the transcript, but it is not up yet due to the show being so recent. I'll check back and make sure the link works tomorrow. And for goodness sake, think about what you are reading! Don't let them lie to you with a straight face! It's like the goddamn Ministry of Truth out there...

Dead Can't Dance

Interesting Traits of the Species # 847301:

Why do we lionize people after they are dead? No matter who a person was in life, we tend to create an incredibly rosy picture in our obituaries. Eulogies, of course, should be positive, because these are designed to help people getting over the loss of a close person at a funeral. And additionally, I see nothing wrong with painting a positive picture of some one's life, glossing over some bad moments or personal flaws in order to emphasize the individual's good traits and memorable acts in order to create a more ideal characterization in order to remember the person in our daily lives.

But that positive-humanistic dreamitism aside, the body is being thrown in a hole, or better yet, committed to rapid oxidation. Why must we act, for decorum's sake if nothing else, like there is some sacredness to the departed soul?

I'm thinking specifically of Boris Yeltsin. All the news coverage talks about the "passing of a leader", and even those who hated him say, "I have no good words for him, and do not want to say anything bad about the deceased." In the CNN article (first link in this paragraph), a woman is quoted as saying, "Of course he made some mistakes, but who doesn't?" Yeah, everyone makes some mistakes, but not every one's mistake is invading Chechnya. (More warm remarks for Yeltsin by world leaders, as compiled on Wikipedia.)

This reminds me of the lionization of Pope John Paul II when he died. (Although, perhaps a term other than "lionization" is implied by his religious standing.) You would have thought he was an American hero by measure of the American media coverage of the death. What gives? Naturally, I would expect Catholics to be upset, and with reason. But this country has a history of fairly critical coverage of the Vatican. And I think that the coverage far exceeds due decency to a dead leader of a religion and borders on propaganda.

The person is dead! You would think that this gives us the chance to say whatever we want about the former person. But instead, we heavily critique when they are alive, and then once they are dead, we recognize the innocence of the soul, seperated from its corpse. Naturally I could take the religious angle to explain this phenomenon, but I don't think that it is really necessary.

I think we do this out of fear. Immortality of the soul aside, I think that we are literally scared of people talking shit about us when we are corpses. And therefore, we refuse to talk badly about the dead as a taboo. But maybe if we didn't have this taboo, and still cared about what people thought about our lives as a sum of our human existence, we would think a little harder about what we did while we still had some life in our bones. How will we be remembered? Well, if the media surrounding death is any indication, reverently and respectfully, no matter what we did. Of course, some people will be demonized. But these few "absolutely evil" characters are no more than scapegoats for the banal evil that exists in every human on earth. By their destruction (and therein, lack of "human" death; where, for example, is Hitler buried?) we can be buried with all according homage and dignity.

Maybe we need a bit more of the old "I've come to bury, not to mourn." Or an "airing of grievances" along with the grieving. What have we learned from Yeltsin's death? Pretty much nothing, except that he has departed from history: both as an living actor, and as a remembered character. Now there is nothing but a flat, polished, sterile memory, as useful as a tombstone.

Cho Seung-Hui and the rest of the world

I'm having a hard time comprehending the descriptions of Cho Seung-Hui's writing. (sample.) I read the plays that are out on the internet, and while they are certainly bizarre, I feel like they are really being misconstrued. They are being depicted as a example of lunatic incarnate.

Now, I'm not defending them as having literary value. I do think that if they were actually presented to a class, it obviously represents a loud cry for help. But I have this weird feeling like they are going to be intentionally printed out just so they can be burned at the stake.

Look at the first comment on the blog where the plays were posted. The person says "It reads and sounds like something a 9th grader might write." That's exactly what I thought! It sounds like a pre-pubescent mallrat with a bowl cut calling every person who passes "dumbass" or "a fag" or some other such stupid meaningless insult. Three 17 year-old characters screaming "ass-raper" and "mutha----er"? That's not "horrible, inconceivable macabre violence." It's just idiotic.

Then the poster is chastised by others for not realizing "why they are posted". The plays MUST be recognized as "written about his twisted mind." Others mention: "How was he not kicked out of school for this? My alma mater would not have permitted it." Who would even accept anyone with that writing ability? That's my question. Any fan of horror films could come up with material far worse. What worries me is how this could be authored by a supposedly socially and psychologically competent adult.

My first thought when I read the plays is that they were fakes. However, articles quote various teachers and students regarding the content, so I assume they were actually presented to be workshopped in an english class. It seems obvious that the guy had some issues, if he would present these to a college class. But what was he even doing there? Why didn't people realize that there might be something behind his creepy, bizarre behavior other than a vague, uncomfortable threat? Any person can think up a violent fantasy. Cho Seung-Hui doesn't have shit on Burroughs, Steven King, or even CSI's writers. But who presents work like this to a college class as if it was actually something of substance? I think, only someone who either doesn't care, or someone so warped emotionally and socially as to have no sense of connection with outside reality.

I think that people should probably be asking more questions about his personality and life than simply showing this as another piece of evidence that he was simply a psychopath. Because what does that mean? We already know he shot 33 people, including himself. I think we know that he was crazy, the massacre itself is a pretty horrible piece of evidence to that end. But why? Is it simply that he was just one of those 'evil, dangerous, stalker-criminals' that are lurking all over the place, primed to explode? Or was it more complicated than that? Unfortunately, we'll probably never know now.

Oh yeah. In other news, 157 people were killed in Baghdad (don't you know there's a war on?) and abortion is a bit more illegal that it was before. [update: as of 12pm thursday, it was up to 183 killed.]

Another day in the world, eh...

Have you heard about this "Brute Press?"

So through certain "connections" I have been made aware of the launching of a new independent press out of New York City. They are called Brute Press, and publish small works and compilations of cutting-edge literature and art. They just released their first publication, appropriately titled "A".

A short story of mine and a couple of (shitty, but apparently worthy for publication) poems are published in it, but regardless of that, you should check them out, tell your friends, or just show them a little love. It's hard to be in the print business in this digital age, they deserve some props. I've seen the issue, and its actually pretty cool, and only costs $2, including postage. If you invested in it, you wouldn't be disappointed. I mean, hey, where can you get quality literature these days for only two bucks?

Check out their blog and their MySpace.

Interdome is my past time, but could it be my job?

I watched a segment of a Frontline documentary on PBS last night about changes in the media. A lot of it deal with the "blogosphere", and how it may or may not be siphoning interest away from traditional sources of media, etc., which has somehow become news itself for most media sources. Insert headline, "Newspapers Lie Unread in the Streets" here... hahaha.

The special also drew attention to some actually interesting things that at least I hadn't heard mentioned before, although I've thought them many times. For instance, now news agencies are expected to turn a profit, and so are accordingly turning to more entertainment oriented news, like "hidden camera" exposes and celebrity news. Also of interest was that many papers are turning to local news to win readers, because they can get the corner on the market this way, while anyone with a computer can report on the national stories.

But what I really took away from this was that the paper print industry is doomed. Of course, I naturally take this away from many things, seeing as how I would like to make more paper things in the future, yet people have little interest. Although I have sneaking senses of paranoia for many reasons, not all of them hallucinatory, one I have been feeling more often of late is that I must learn html otherwise I will never get a job ever. This program made me think that this was an astute paranoia. It's not merely learning some html tags in order to be computer literate, either. It seems that to really make it in media these days, you have to not only have cutting edge content, but your form has to be amazing as well. It's not just streaming video, its taggable, uploadable, searchable streaming video. It's not just podcasts, its portable, tradable, interactive podcasts. Semiotics used to be a clever manipulation of words, but now in order to write you have to know how to make the paper as well.

So I'm doomed. Burn my corpse with my books. That is, unless I am an html savant and I don't know it. Or, if you'd like to pay me to write for you. Call me?