Quinn Said

I’ve been disagreeing with a lot of people about transparency recently, and even though it’s kind of going out of fashion on the edge of my community, I’m still going to stand up for the principle. Transparency, real and true, is a good thing for many reasons. It’s not magic fairy pixie dust that makes the world a wonderful place, and anyone who sold it as such needs to do their historical homework. What is does it complex, important, but not sexy enough for many activists.

What a lot of people commenting on the debate about government transparency don’t get is that it’s not just about the information. Action always has an inherent politics to it; publishing data about itself is as much about telling government how it’s supposed to behave as it is about the data. Even if you’re wildly juking the stats, you’re at least communicating to yourself how different things should be. The action involved in transparency is the action of telling on yourself. No matter how subverted, two things remain true: you know that you should be doing better, and you’re going to accidentally expose incidental truths.

My least favorite argument about transparency is that it breeds complacency. This is an argument from a position of tremendous privilege that comes from forgetting why we fight corruption in the first place. It is always the case that corruption costs; right now it is taking a terrible price on a real and growing segment of the population which the corrupt entity is meant to serve. You can only forget the proximate hurt if you’re someone in a position to forget it, someone with money, health insurance, the right travel options. Someone with good schools, and probably, it’s easiest to forget the day to day cost of corruption in America as someone with white skin. Without transparency threatened populations have to take up common myths about why they are in the situation they are in. In short, they blame themselves. Not only are they the victims of corruption, but when it’s not discussed, they’re the victims of believing they’ve brought the situation on themselves. If you want a complacent population, ruining their lives and then getting them to believe they did it themselves is a pretty good way to start.

But this is a post at least partly about Wikileaks, and how what they do isn’t transparency. People keep bandying that word around and mixing up the two, and I want to disentangle them. Because it’s not only incorrect, it’s harmful. What they do is akin to whistle blowing, which serves a wholly different function. Leaks and whistle blowing are about arresting a malignantly broken institution. They are about appealing to a higher authority to step in and by force change the behavior of an organization so dangerously off the rails that it’s incapable of self-correction. It’s a place beyond where the gentler tool of transparency can help. This is the problem with leaking government secrets as well– there’s no higher authority to step in. (And no, the electorate doesn’t count. Sorry, but if it did, things we wanted might get done a bit more often.)

When we call for transparency we’re calling for a mindset. We’re calling on the government that ostensibly serves us to trust us, to treat us like adults. We’re calling on them to engage in an act of self reflection on a cultural level. Stealing their diary and putting it on a website might be needed sometimes, but it’s no substitute for the kind of cultural change we’re after. Leaks are not transparency. They are haphazard and adversarial, they do something completely different. They can often undermine the cultural conversations about transparency.

Transparency is about institutions talking to themselves by talking to the world. The changes it makes are slow, tiny, and not very rewarding, especially next to the wild splash of leaks. Transparency is a frustrating battle, but in the end it has much more ability to change a culture than whistle blowing, at least without a ultra-cop to step in. Government transparency is about telling ourselves who we’re supposed to be, and in the frustratingly long run, that will do more to shape who we become.

Understanding what the Venter Institute really did today

The short answer is that they created a wholly synthetic genome and put it in a yeast cell. This goes towards creating a minimal cell; figuring out how little DNA you need to make a barebones organism. This leaves lots of extra possible genetic space to making that minimal cell do stuff we want, whether it be pee out biofuels or Prozac, eat Gulf of Mexico oil, or glow in the presence of melamine, cancer, or anger. With a minimal and reusable platform, doing any of these things just becomes a coding problem. And not even a novel coding problem, because we already have Nature to reverse engineer from. Nature uses the same platform, and at some point or another has already solved all these problems.

It’s techno-exciting, but fundamentally, it’s the next level of fine-grained resolution on the control of our environment, which has been our species’ trick from the beginning. Venter and his cohort are trying to replace petroleum, (and control the replacement, and pretty much rule the world as a result) and others are trying to create complex cancer fighting biologics. Some sweet, wonderful people from the nicer parts of biomed are even trying to figure out how to make a cheap suite of biologic drugs to treat the horrible helminthic NTDs (Neglected Tropical Diseases) that are destroying the lives of about 1.5 billion of the world’s poor. This task will be made vastly simpler with a platform like the minimal cell, at least in theory.

But there’s a paradox built into our tendency to seek more environmental control. The more control we have, the more unpredictable our world becomes. This is because all the other humans with their unpredictable and hidden desires can now also control our environment.

While biopunditry is talking about biofuel, cancer treatment, and growing extinct mammoths, I wanted to bring the implications of this work out of the towers of ivory and industry and down to earth.

Today, we lost the drug war. Oh, it will run around for a while, unaware that it is dead, but we have decisively lost.

You know what’s a lot easier than all the high minded business about environment, or life extension, or even the scary doomsday 12 Monkeys scenarios? Growing simpler molecule drugs. I don’t mean like aspirin, I mean like heroin and cocaine, THC and hallucinogens. They already grow in plants thoroughly studied, and people are motivated and not at all risk averse about getting those sequences somewhere they can use them. Cooking meth is hard and dangerous science compared to the ability to get a starter of a minimal cell that poops heroin and feeding it growth medium in your closet. We may have lost the drug war, but not as badly as the drug lords have.

It’s still hard to grow drugs in medium. But the whole point of this project is to make it easier. Who will be motivated to put in the work to make it happen? Especially if it’s so bad for organized crime? Drug addicts, frankly. You think they look like street junkies with DTs, but a fair number look like scientists, because they are. Drugs will finally be p2p, and governments and drug lords alike will find out what it’s like to be media companies and counterfeiters in a world of lossless copying and 100Mb pipes. Junkies will be victims of their success, and if we don’t get serious about treating addiction instead of trying to fight chemicals, it’s going to look a lot more bloody and horrid than the RIAA’s lawsuit factory. This is just one vision of what this kind of disruption looks like when people get a hold of it.

What synthbio is inventing right now is the true Bittorrent for things. It’s a platform for generating and sharing materials just this side of geology, since nearly everything but rocks is made by life. Right now you can think of it has having an interface so bad only a few people in the world can actually use it, and our hope for being in control is that the interface stays bad as long as possible. In the history of technology, that has rarely worked in the long term.

Craig Venter is not, despite his press, the smartest guy on the planet. He is not savant like, leaps and bounds in front of everyone and everything else. He isn’t the only one working on this. He’s maybe slightly in front, but probably not. If he is, it’s by inches. This is perhaps his Trinity, or the proof of concept right before it. It’s momentous, but it won’t stay contained.

This is on the scale of nukes, but not for long. Nukes are hard to build, requiring mind-boggling equipment and leave a kind of scent where ever they go. They can only really be used for magawatt power generation, and blowing shit up. Bio can be used for nearly anything you, me, or Charlie Stross can dream up. Imagine trying to stop proliferation if the atomic material centrifuges literally grew on trees and the fissile material floated freely through the air, and tended to show up in great amounts on bread you left out too long.

When you think of this, you can think of seeing a dodo someday, or Jurassic Park, or even taking a drug that a doctor grew just for you. But keep in mind the strangeness of the human imagination and the strength of human desires. A thousand weird Somas are coming, too.

“Everything that’s gone wrong in the news business went wrong first in the music business.” – Brooke Gladstone, On The Media

And before that, in the piracy business.

Create a new technology, and you invariably create a new culture with it. Every great invention of mankind is accompanied by fans, detractors, designers, bureaucrats, leaders, celebrities, and criminals. Computers alone weren’t enough to do this, but once they could talk to each other over phone lines, human roles began to coalesce around them. Computer criminals arose in the 80s, using PCs and modems to reach out and touch other computers.

Back in those paleointernet days, long before online piracy became something anyone could do, it was the exclusive realm of sophisticated users. Pirates, hackers, and phreakers were rarely solitary, stereotypes aside. They were vibrantly social among their own, creating a social system with all the normal features common to companies, governments, tribes, etc. Being an illegal underground, it went deliberately unnoticed as much as possible. It was the canary in the coal mine for what the internet could do to those institutions, but its death passed unnoticed and uninterpreted.

A very simple break down of the computer underground runs something like this: hackers, generally enabled by modems, got into computers they weren’t supposed to be in. Pirates made infringing copies of software, and often shared these around, again, by modem. The modems gave rise to a new form of criminal, focused on getting telephony resources without paying for them, called a phreaker. (Phreakers had an intrinsic fascination for Ma Bell that exceeded that purpose, but I’ll maintain most started phreaking after their first shocking phone bill.) Before long hackers and pirates often themselves became phreakers, to deal with both what could be huge phone bills and dangerous traceability. All of this intruding, copying, and messing with Ma Bell required a lot of social infrastructure. Within a few years the Scene was born, an underground community of people involved with illegal or unsanctioned computer or telephony activity.

Both “pirate” and “hacker” have changed meaning over time, and both of these terms have been reclaimed as points of pride. But the acts of pirates and hackers are, regardless of their inherent morality, generally illegal in some important jurisdiction. Hackers and pirates were not impressive additions to the criminal underworld. Most of them were people who had gotten interested in computers and just didn’t know or care that learning and doing more could slip quickly over the line of legality. Few of them saw themselves as criminals, they happened to break laws they saw as silly or insulting. Some of those laws were pretty silly, basic legislative misunderstandings of the technology that to this day prove incoherent when applied to sophisticated computer use.

I became involved with the piracy end of the Scene in 1995, after many of its key figures had been rounded up and jailed in the 1990 Operation Sundevil. My entré was down to dumb luck. I visited the house of a co-worker one evening. He and his friends were talking about something called God’s Realm, a successor to something called RIP. God’s Realm, it turned out, was the biggest piracy BBS in North America at the time. RIP was the board they’d run before, but when things got too hot with police they’d taken it down, waited a bit, and reinvented it. They were in piracy groups that competed to release mainly Windows software. The three groups I spent the bulk of my time over the next 18 months with were Razor 1911, PWA (Pirates with Attitudes), and DOD (Drink or Die). I met most of the people I would eventually interview on IRC.

Most of the pirates I met in that period were middle aged family men, with the exception of a couple younger guys that came up after Sundevil. I spent my time on IRC, lived with the pirates, and interviewed many of them. I openly took notes, so they taught me how to encrypt my notes. I found that the best way to learn about computer security and even lawbreaking was simply to ask and listen willingly. The Scene was mostly made up of people that didn’t see themselves as the bad guys, and were genuinely happy to have someone listen to their side of the story.

One of the younger guys (we’ll call him S) lived with God’s Realm in the house in front of an guest house I eventually rented a room in. He had a huge bundle of phone lines coming in, but they paid for themselves. S switched long distance carriers every few months without actually ever having an outgoing call, and the instant rebates covered the basic line costs with a few dollars to spare. The board was 15 nodes*, each node representing a phone line and a computer, with those computers networked together. The board boasted 80 gb of data- in 1995. It was an unfathomable amount of data back then. The majority of that 80gb was kept in tape backup. Only the index of the tapes and the most popular and newest downloads were kept live on the board, the rest you had to request and wait a week while the archivist got around to uploading it, so you could dial back in and download it over your modem. Some things required special access, for instance “cookies,” lists of credit card numbers used for long distance dialing, and stolen proprietary source code. I first saw the game Descent and Microsoft’s NT 3.51 in source code form. NT 3.51, I was told, had a check for the Utah teapot. If it saw the teapot running, it would turn off error checking, to deceive benchmark tests. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, and frankly, never had anyway to verify it anyhow, but I was shown the code where it supposedly happened.

God’s Realm was part of an ecosystem. It started with Suppliers, generally people who worked at software and game companies that snuck their software out to the Scene. Suppliers were carefully guarded resources. They usually got all-you-could-eat leech privileges on the boards, and didn’t spend too much time with the plebs on IRC. Their identities were hidden, often from everyone but the very heads of the groups. From Suppliers software was courried to the the Crackers, who used decompiling software like SoftICE to hack out the copy protections within hours. Only once did I get to see the SoftICE team work, three youngish guys huddled over their computers muttering to one another in some primitive, addled, and illegal version of pair programming. They were ripping bits out of games and rebuilding them, at the time trying to get the soundtrack to work after taking out the serial check. Once they were satisfied they passed it to a packager, it was approved by the leadership (who often, but not always, doubled as the packagers) and handed to couriers to spread to the BBSes like God’s Realm. From there the privileged and the lucky had access to huge stores of software in addition to those zero day warez. The process was focused on speed, but quality mattered too. A group would “win” on a title if their version got to a board first, but they could lose quickly too, if that version was buggy or broken. That would cost them download credits.

Couriers were the lowest rung of the ladder, and the most at risk. They used phreaking and carding to pay the enormous phone bills of passing data around the system of boards, and most of them weren’t very good at phreaking and carding. Couriers were the youngest, most likely to get caught, least in the loop people in the Scene. But even they had their legends, like a pair of twins known as the Thrust Brothers. They had two computers and four modems. They’d download from one board, hand the disks between them, and start uploading to the next without ever disconnecting.

There were people who maintained the channels of communication and coordination, those that recruited suppliers, people that acted as advocates, negotiators, spies, more roles than I ever fully understood. The scene had lawyers, landlords, archivists, and even me, their new pet amateur anthropologist.

THe center of this social space, the boards, were becoming harder to justify. Everyone met up on IRC, communicated over email, increasingly worked for ISPs, web companies, or did networking for their real jobs. Running an FTP server was much easier than running a board. But most people didn’t want to move online; they complained that the net was more dangerous and less exclusive. And for the most part, that was the prevailing thought in the Scene. You joined an underground to be separate, and the net was the least separate thing in the world.

But it was so damn easy.

S, whose house played host to God’s Realm, got a job at a game company that was once quite famous, but has since gone out of business. At the time it was doing well out of a game called Descent. The local group of Razor 1911, of which he was a member, sat S down to tell him not to fuck this up. This was a good job, and winning on his company’s titles wasn’t worth risking it. But he was too tempted by the chance to win and gain status on popular game titles. Soon enough he bounced a large pgp file mailed from his work address to his outside email right after an internal release of the Descent 2 beta. No one had any doubts what was in the mail.

He was fired and escorted from the building. The next day he was asked to come down to the local PD for questioning, and brought along a scene lawyer. Somewhere in the course of questioning he was arrested, and the lawyer left and called the guys who ran God’s Realm to tell them to take down the board. The police had a warrant to search S’s house for the pgp key. The crew of God’s Realm swung into action to take the board down before the police got there, and destroy S’s key if they could find it. (Coincidentally, the whole 80 gig mess of tapes was in my car trunk that day, along with the archivist’s server.) Four or five people descended on S’s house and ripped up masses of computer equipment, carrying all of it to another house down the street, hoping like hell they wouldn’t be caught. The police arrive hours later, after the board had been destroyed and mourned. The police were looking for computers or a disk, what they found was a huge trunk of telephone lines terminating nowhere, and 15 square clean spots on the carpet. They were absolutely, lividly, pissed, but totally powerless. They’d screwed up the investigation, and the guys got away with it.

There was some talk in the next couple of weeks about reviving the board, but nothing ever happened. The search warrant had administered the fatal hit to an already terminal patient. Other boards were dying too, or migrating on to FTP and web sites.

The internet was already destroying phreaking. It did this two ways. First via flat rate isp access that let you reach any node in the world. No more shocker phone bills, no more specific need to phreak. The second was how its inner workings were documented. The net was open and built by standards bodies amenable to question and comment. If you wanted to know how the whole magic system worked, you read the docs, maybe even mail the creators with question, to which most of them would respond cordially. If you found a way to break something, likewise, they might mail you and ask you to help fix it. What was phreaking Ma Bell internet architecture made not only socially acceptable, but a marketable job skill.

Way to ruin the party, net.

As for piracy, all the roles but cracking vanished. Supplying was no longer a zero day affair because download quotas made little sense on warez websites. Couriers, always the least safe, made no sense at all in an end to end network. Archivists, packagers, none were really needed anymore. The cost of disk was coming down, the bandwidth was going up. The need for massive groups and hierarchies dissolved. It now took one person to release, and he or she didn’t need to be part of the in-group. With the exclusivity gone, there was nothing to stop anyone from becoming a pirate.

The true death-stroke came with P2P, and what had been leeching became the central role in piracy. Intentionally anonymous, technically easy, socially vacuous, digital piracy could no longer support its little society. No one was part of the 415 or the 212 anymore, what would that mean online? Rootkits were even making hacking something any shlub could do, and the shlubs in old world organized crime were starting to take notice. With nothing to compete over the members of Razor, PWA, and DOD blew to the four winds, generally to computer jobs that paid well for skills gotten as part of life in the Scene.

And with its social structure destroyed, piracy itself was unstoppable.

The difference between piracy and the music business, or publishing, is that because the scene was never legit, no one saw or mourned its passing. It happened faster because no one could plead the Scene’s case as a social institution, and no one could praise the network for making piracy democratized to the point of social incoherence. But everything that happened to the music industry happened to the piracy scene first, and, importantly, as a prerequisite for disrupting the music business. The Scene was never going to scale to threaten music and software the way P2P has. Instead, the story of its passing is an example of the de-cohered future for whatever institutions the net touches. Because there was little institutional resistance to the effects of the net on the Scene, it gives us an accelerated view of how the net eventually comes to transform institutions. Also, a slightly inaccurate one, because conflict changes the outcome in some ways. But we see the fundamental post network effect. Today’s piracy represents the new stable state of a post-net institution, more etherial than corporal, more smoke than body. This is what all the other institutions the network disrupts will eventually look like, unless they succeed in destroying a network that is mathematically incapable of compromise.

It’s hard for most people to understand and identify with the experience of digital piracy, even though at this point, most people online do it. But what about librarians? Everyone loves librarians, including librarians.

Next: Part Four, Two non-profits you’ve never heard of, fighting over a catalog you didn’t know you were using.

* Possibly 11. My notes are unclear.

There’s all sorts of interesting arguments about the inherent politics of the iPad out there, like Cory’s and Aaron’s, or maybe most interestingly, Dale’s. But none of that has to do with why I won’t be buying an iPad. I didn’t get as far as those thoughtful concerns. I simply don’t have the money.

Rich people looove to hug the iPad

I’m known among my friends for generally having less money than they do, for living hand to mouth, and for having thoughtful critiques of the American Poverty Trap, but from the inside. (In some future post I’ll try to explain why there is no point in me (& many others) trying to save or work my way out of the Trap, but that’s for another time.)

I have a laptop, and a car. But like many poor people, my big ticket items are old and I need them to survive. The poor make their durable goods really durable. People are resourceful, and the poor have ways of getting what they need that generally trade time for money. It falls down sometimes, and we can’t get what we need, but in general it’s amazing what someone will eventually lay their hands on with enough time, thought and determination. Increasingly I am seeing a lot of homeless people with older laptops, some of the straight up street people, huddled near public outlets and presumably open wifi. It’s exciting, because it opens up worlds of knowledge and communication that were always closed to the poor. The net is becoming simply a part of everything, to the point where taking a break and moving back into early 90s technological life seems to have the feel of going on an Arctic adventure. Did bears try to eat Aaron in his month off? Mysteriously, he never says.

I live a really rich intellectual life and get to do lots of things most poor people don’t, and I appreciate that it’s because almost none of my social group are poor. But sometimes my social group kind of goes crazy and forgets that while they have a lot of power, my class is a whole lot bigger than theirs. And none of them will be buying iPads.

A few of them do have iPhones, because phones are one of those durable goods we need to survive and that’s most of their meager disposable income. A few probably have iPod touches that they got as gifts, hand-me-downs, or because that was their one nice thing they wanted. But the iPad does absolutely nothing vital, and nothing a cheaper piece of electronics doesn’t already do well enough to get by. I’m pretty sure Apple knows this, and couldn’t care less. Poor people do buy iPods, sometimes even new, but they’ve never bought anything else Apple has ever made. And that’s fine. I’ve never felt the urge to get me some Tiffany, and they’ve never felt the need to try to get my money. Similarly, Apple’s just not a brand very open to the poor. But why does this mean anything to the political arguments? Because other vendors out there do want to take our money. We don’t have much, but there’s a lot of us, and unlike the other classes, we’re getting a lot bigger.

These vendors squeak by on razor thin margins, especially in electronics, and their value adds are generally rip-offs of features from more expensive products. We don’t have any walled gardens in our world, because there’s no margin in controlling things for poor people. When the iPad becomes old news and is massively ripped off, no one is going to wall in anything.

Curate my content? Hell, you're not even going to be here next week.

This is important, so I’m going to say it again: There will always be people trying to get the disposable income of poor people, and there will never be a margin in maintaining a walled garden for us. You might reply to this by saying ‘Sidekick’ and I’ll point out that was a lesson in there being no margin in it. Just because something doesn’t work doesn’t mean people don’t try it occasionally. This is also the failing of the Zittrain argument. Even in his worst case scenario, it really is just you rich people that get locked up for your own safety. We will still be free, and living in dangerous lands¹. Just like in the real world, our neighborhoods online will be built from crap materials, mildly dangerous, old, and interesting².

Which means that it will always be true for you as well. Like fashion, technology is primed for occasional revolutions that come from below and are recycled from the top. Those will impact many parts of society- and even change the walls the rich³ build around themselves as well. As the internet devolves knowledge to something we can get, you’ll decide something else is required for accreditation into your class. Oh wait, you already did that. You’ll do it harder the more knowledge we get. But I’m so excited about seeing everyone get your used netbooks. I think the halcyon days are ahead for the life of the mind among the poor, and we’ll do it with the same freedom we’ve done everything, the freedom of the forgotten.

Don’t worry about freedom going away because of the iPad, just becoming the kind of neighborhood you wouldn’t visit.

1. For most poor people, the idea that the net is dangerous is pretty laughable. We actually do live in dangerous places, and mostly the police don’t really protect us so much as protect you from us.
2. Also, the iPad seriously looks like thief bait. We’re not idiots, we know what our drunk uncles are going to do with it if we come home with one.
3. Rich includes the middle classes. You all look the same to me.

The First Time You Ever Heard of the RIAA

The Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group of the music industry, has been around for 58 years, founded in part to create open standards for vinyl playback so that everyone’s records would play on everyone’s record player. In general, it has come to manage the part of the music industry where the industry needs to cooperate. Here’s it’s mission in a nutshell, from the website:

…the RIAA works to protect the intellectual property and First Amendment rights of artists and music labels; conduct consumer, industry and technical research; and monitor and review state and federal laws, regulations and policies.

Like many trade groups, you’d almost certainly never heard of it. Heard of the Metal Roofing Alliance, or the Professional Liability Underwriting Society? Probably not, and there’s so many more. To know all of these groups you’d either have to be a professional conference organizer or a lobbyist, and that knowledge isn’t the sort of thing you’d drop at cocktail parties to look impressive. No one knows about trade groups because no one cares about trade groups.

What turned the RIAA into a household name was an internet application named Napster. Napster was many people’s first exposure to file sharing, especially of the peer to peer variety. It was that peer to peer aspect that made the difference. Napster was the first great collection of music (on or off the net) that was completely uncurated and open to all. Music was free, easy, and didn’t require putting on clothes to get. Discovering new music was easier than anyone could have imagined. Type in a favorite- in my case, for instance, Ani Difranco, and browse through other Ani fans’ libraries. This led me to a decade long love of Utah Philips, and the strange pride of making the discovery myself. I hadn’t relied on anyone to tell me about new music, and I hadn’t had to go out and spend (much) time and money discovering a jewel in the rough. I never even had to leave the house to develop my musical taste. With Napster, I happily reported to friends, it wasn’t so much that I could get tons of popular music for free, it was that my musical taste itself improved.

Some new bands and musicians began to see how this could help them from the other end. Get into a few libraries and get discovered, not by an A&R man but by a fanbase, one fan at a time. It wasn’t going to look like getting signed and turned into megastars, but it also didn’t look like having to win the lottery to do what you loved for a living. Most bands were still playing the label lottery, but it was only a matter of time before they figured out that music could have a middle class, and that a smaller fanbase with a more sincere love of their music was something they could live with.

Helping these musicians along was advances in software and plummeting hardware costs for music recording. Absolute top of the line music editing was still expensive, but a $1000-2000 amateur recording studio was getting better all the time. In fact, with the increasing role of sampling in music, by the late 90s or early 00s many fans couldn’t tell the difference between a professional studio produced track and a carefully and competently produced track from someone’s spare bedroom. It was amazingly fun, and people loved it. Whole genres were invented on a weekly basis. Name a segment of the society, and someone probably invented a -core for it. Nerdcore, Breakcore, Doomcore, Horrorcore, Jewcore, -core was like -gate, but for music. There was a growing sense that anyone who loved music could make music. Maybe it would suck, but it would suck because you sucked, not because your production values sucked. But even if you sucked, your friends could love you. A major label was never going to produce a song about your Everquest guild, and nothing could take the place of the pleasure of rocking out with 15 people to the soundtrack of your own tiny homophily.

And so it wasn’t the copies of Enter the Sandman that made Napster interesting. It was that Napster built the largest library of music in the history of the world, accidentally, over the course of 9 months. Everyone downloaded a few of the usual hits, but those tracks began suffering an attrition of time and interest to those parts of other people’s libraries that segmented the market by consumers’ extreme homophily. This wasn’t much, but it completed a list of threats to the way things had been.

Everything Right is Wrong Again

After about 1999, there was no function of the ‘industry’ part of the music industrial that was not under immediate existential threat. Whatever your opinion of the music industry, it had found itself in a dangerous position, through no particular action of its own, good or bad. The labels, whom the RIAA represented, had handled selecting, recording, distributing, and marketing nearly all the music anyone ever heard. It was good at it- the proverbial hit machine. As an institution the music industry studied and catered to nearly every market niche it could identify for a hundred years. Whether it was serving the greater purpose of music or music artists is immaterial. The music industry wasn’t so much the only game in town as the town itself. But the technology of the 90s took away, piece by piece, recording, distributing, marketing, and even selecting, and put it into the nebulous and ill-defined hands of ‘the people,’ who were eroding the need for ‘the industry’ altogether.

The music industry began to fight for its life. Napster was the obvious weak point- a company that could be attacked on legal grounds. Napster was destroyed in 2001, and it was in the course of its destruction that the RIAA became for the first time something people had heard of. We were aware of the blackbox in the middle of the institution of music only at the point where it became threatened with extinction. People don’t go down easy, and the RIAA was made of people, most of whom couldn’t see where they’d done anything wrong or different than they’d ever done. When shuttering Napster didn’t make the problems go away they started attacking anyone they could, and hitting them as hard as they could. One group of four college students was sued for roughly the GDP of Peru. What seemed insane made sense when you realized how entirely they were threatened.

But what were they fighting? From inside the offices of music executives this trend must have looked like the Borg, or the Blob, or even the zombie apocalypse. Everything the net touched turned against the way things had been. Artists and fans were bypassing the conduits that had been connecting them for the length of living memory. The only thing the industry could do was get between them and force them apart in an effort to remain relevant. The conduit had become the barrier, not because it had changed, but because everything around it had changed, quietly, quickly, and with no warning. The industry wanted to live.

But before the internet threatened to destroy the RIAA with digital piracy, it had already destroyed digital piracy.

Next: Part Three, The brief and illegal life of the Scene.

Part One: The question and the answer.

While this essay represents bits of 18 years of thinking and observing human institutions responding to the various forces I’ve encountered (primary in technology and medicine) I was prompted to write it in response to a question a man asked me last summer at a conference on the future. His question, roughly put, was this: How do you tell what institutions are about to get disrupted? My answer, equally paraphrased was this: any part of an institution that was there to facilitate information is going to go away in favor of the internet. This answer was both too general in that I never really explained what facilitating information meant or how the internet would destroy it, and too specific, because I only talked about the internet, as if it were the only technological force looming over these institutions.

What follows is a longer reply to the question about the fates of institutions, past, present, and future. I believe we are entering an age where these disruptions come at a speed we’ve never dealt with before. It’s bountiful in destruction and utopianism. It’s a stochastic time, with too much of everything. These changes so severe they break social institutions before new institutions can evolve. These changes are so many, it’s the defining characteristic of the age: an age of excessions.

An excession is something that exceeds the current frame of reference, and therefore wrecks it. I’ve stolen the word from the illimitable writer and thinker Iaim M. Banks, but it’s not my intention to attribute my definition to him. For my purposes an excession doesn’t have to just come from outside the frame of reference, like the WWII troops that landed on Micronesian islands bearing Cargo. They can also arise internally, like puberty. As a matter of fact, laying aside the occasional meteorite, hurricane, or well armed British explorer, almost all do arise from colliding forces inside humanity. But they all feel like the weather, an unpredictable thing outside our comprehension or control that tends to smack us around without warning. Many excessions arise from colliding forces of social power structures and technological progress. One of the reasons that so many excessions are so surprising is that politicians and technologists usually think they are where the really important stuff is, their worlds providing the invisible climate to each other. There are other spheres that provide more invisible climate, but even trying to talk about these two is confusing enough to start with. Technology and politics are incredibly compelling, and looking closely at either will convince anyone that they’ve found the cornerstone to history, stories of progress that really explain what’s going on, and what they can’t explain was random chance or the hidden variables- more weather. If a political thinker looks at the history of New York in the mid-century they uncover Robert Moses as an explanation of everything. A technologist looks at the same story and sees the inevitable result of advances in building materials and automobile engineering. Arguing who really has history figured out between the two is like arguing nature and nurture in children- turns out to be incoherent and not as interesting as you think. I will try very hard not to do that.

The greatest institutions meet one of history’s poltergeists

In the 1980s the nascent social force of the internet entered a world of unprecedented consolidations. Nation-states, corporations, and even religions were larger and more coherent than at any other time in history. Partly that was the first order effect of rising population levels, but it was came from the need for cohesion in scaled up societies. We were not merely millions of Americans together, we were part of the capitalist faction of humanity, employees of megacorporations, and citizens of a government so sprawling it couldn’t be held in the mind. One of the benefits of the project that both consolidated and segmented the world is that we could substitute categories for people, something the modern mind needed desperately.

The 19th and 20th centuries had done something disturbing to humanity; it had made us aware of there being so many more people than we could ever know or form opinions of. Even if you managed to spend your life in in the village of your birth and not know more than 150 people (and fewer of us could manage that) you now had more and more a sense of the oppressive other. There were millions of people out there, then billions, a crush of humanity that the social human mind couldn’t take in. Being able to make simple statements like ‘capitalists are like me, communists are evil’ was a way of managing the terrible weight of the unknowable other. Capitalism itself was an attempt to scale social institutions to keep up with populations, as was socialism. They were the organizational systems humans desperately latched onto to deal with the sudden logistical problems of there being so damn many of us.

We often think of this process of happening slowly, but if you were to extend the history of humanity back to the founding of civilization at 12,000 years, or reasonably even to the beginning of our speciation around 200,000 years ago, the last 200-300 years suddenly looks like what it is- the adaptation of human institutions at a breakneck pace. For the first time changes routinely lapped generations. The elders couldn’t even recognize the world they’d always been meant to comment on. Their roles of wisdom were stunted: the world they knew so much about was gone.

The internet (and here I include the greater telephony it’s part of) was about accelerate and rearrange everything it touched, creating and collapsing scaling problems in institutions like a mad poltergeist of history. Not necessarily via the usually discussed channels, like blogging, but by rendering obsolete the mass infrastructure of information wherever the net arrived. The middle layer of communication and cultural cohesion that had once been the largest, richest, most articulate part of the economy and culture was rendered obsolete without even the courtesy of being dismantled. Overnight, the conduits not only ceased to be conduits, they became barriers, without ever changing their behavior. Tt was as if the world had spun 180 degrees around them. People don’t handle this sort of thing well. In fact, they kind of go crazy.

Next: The first time you ever heard of the RIAA

My friend Matt Dickerson recently told me of the existence of centaur chess, alternatively called cyborg chess or, harder to google, advanced chess. Advanced chess is Kasparov’s pretty lame name, so I’m going to called it centaur chess. It’s a simple concept. Instead of trying to beat Deep Blue, Kasparov decided to join him.

I read a lot of essays of the general form of When We Can Engineer Our Babies, Will We Be Human Post Feminist Cyborg Identity Constructs, or Post Human Post Feminist Cyborg Identity Constructs? and they generally don’t do much for me. I don’t understand why academics and thinkers feel like they need sci-fi technologies to start talking about what augmentation is going to do to us, given how much is floating around not only in our present, but our past. Beyond that, I find what we’ve already done to be difficult enough to understand, implication-wise, that we can chew on that a good long while without having to speculate about how as yet undeveloped technologies might change society.

Seriously, keeping up with now could be a full industry on its own.

Centaur chess is yet another example of the interestingness of now. The computer and human play as a team, building on each other’s strengths in a kind of UI enabled decision making synthesis. The consensus seems to be the computer is good at tactics, and the human is good at strategy.

There were briefly tournaments, but these floundered. I suspect this is because while the point for Kasparov was to become the perfect chess player, it’s not clear that watching perfect chess players would be any more fun that watching a very well maintained threshing machine. We enjoy sports because they are imperfect.

What makes more sense is that several sources (including my friend Matt) have suggested that centaur chess has quietly taken over correspondence and online chess. Being the more perfect player is a lot more fun than watching. Scores of people out there are learning how to augment- to surrender the weaker parts of their ability to their computers and reintegrate the ability of the computer into a new identity without surrendering their egos. We do this all the time with certain mental capacities, but not the very special mental areas we think of as things like smartness or wisdom. That’s changing now. It bodes ill for other games like poker, and well for expanded human capacity.

Most of the things I learned in the last ten years (like perl, what the hippocampus does, or how to build a ring flash) aren’t very useful to most people. But I learned many amazing, terrible, and funny lessons this last decade about the nature and doings of humans. Here are some, and may you come by this knowledge easier than I did.

• Busy is not the same thing as important, but it can sure seem that way
• If you want to see the future, don’t look at how people are using technology. Search out how they’re misusing it
• All people substitute belief for reality sometimes, and waste their time arguing with what is happening to them. Some people do this with business, some politics, some relationships, and some physics. This is how you get speculative bubbles, wars without end, horrendous breakups, and Darwin awards.
• The things you actively think will never happen to you are much more likely to happen to you than the things you just never considered at all.
• Just because everyone is doing it doesn’t mean the business world isn’t insane and stupid. It really is.
• Cultures can have nightmares. A Whole society can become sick, It can roil in somatic pain as its own subconscious tortures it. History records these times with confusion. They are disturbing and inexplicable moments that don’t seem to have a real cause. They’re no fun to live through, and living through them gives you no more insight than looking back on them. You just hope to get to the other side.
• Compassion, even for the very worst, costs nothing and opens up possibilities.
• It may be possible to forgive absolutely anything, and it may be necessary in order to survive. But to say you forgive someone before you can is a lie.
• Ten years ago I thought there was no such thing as a free lunch. But actually, they’re all free. “The sun pays all the bills.”
• I’ve been to Asia, Europe, North America, the Middle East, Africa, islands in the Caribbean, the Pacific, nations and states of wildly varying wealth and culture. Africa is different. Everywhere you go changes you, but Africa changes everything.
• Dreams can creep up on you and come true while you’re doing other things.
• Power and status are not as correlated with good decision making as I had hoped.
• You can’t love away illness.
• Some technologies will change your whole life for the better without you noticing, like text messaging, GPS, or spellcheck. Some will disrupt your life in ways you have no tools at all for dealing with, like the web vs newspapers or filesharing vs music labels, or when automatic spellcheck likes to correct your typos to say ‘incest’ when you meant to type ‘insect’.
• In the tech world you don’t have the luxury of believing your preferences. When you run up against a technology you don’t like, you have to figure out why you’re wrong. When you come up against one you love, you still have to figure out why you’re wrong.
• Storing a good collection of maxims, aphorisms, and proverbs in your head can actually get you through a lot.
• Most people explain their faults upfront, but it’s very hard to hear them while it will still make a difference.
• Ten years ago, I was in favor of Brinworld- radical transparency. Now my views are moderated, more complex. I thought it would usher in an age of tolerance, but I’ve learned that people can hold double standards in their heads I have no theory of mind for. But more importantly, I learned that privacy is vital for creativity. We need safe places to think strange thoughts. Sometimes they are what embarrass us, waste our time, or sink us to our lowest depths, but they are also the seeds of new worlds.
• People are about as smart as you tell them they are.
• You’re all geniuses.
• I never understood the capacity for addiction before I had my daughter. Now I’m pretty sure drugs and alcohol are just taking over the same circuits in addicts that would make me do anything for her.
• Humans have terrible memories. Most of the time, memories are just stories we make up about the past to explain how we see ourselves now. But memory is quite useful this way, and takes on an almost literary truth to make up for its factual error. However, it’s no way to measure or understand how we change over time, and it’s worthless for figuring out what happened.
• I have killed far too many ideas for being born infants instead of springing fully formed and battle ready from my forehead.
• There are people that just use a huge amount of toilet paper, and they seem to have nothing else in common, not bowel diseases or hygiene or so on. I have no idea what the hell they are doing with it. Perhaps that’s for the next 10 years.
• 30 is a great age, when you can start to relax and get some perspective.
• Graphic novels seem to make pretty good movies.
• Becoming an expert is the delightful process of learning enough to understand far less of your field of endeavor than you did when you started. These days it’s practically my main signal I am getting somewhere- a sense of my grain of knowledge in an ever widening sea of my ignorance.
• Whatever constraints, limits, or rules you come up with for humanity, there’s someone out there breaking them. And there’s a decent chance they’re blogging it.
• When humanity communicates instantaneously over vast distances and across all cultural and national boundaries, there’s almost nothing we can’t turn into porn. But it turns out porn isn’t the end of the world.
• Democracy doesn’t work very well anymore, if it ever did. The models I was given for how politics and policy work were completely false.
• The founding fathers were a bickering pack who largely hated each other. They spanned the political and cultural spectrum, and universally agreed on exactly nothing. They were rich, they were poor, they were monarchists, anarchists, aristocrats and demagogues. There were some saints and heros, but there were some downright evil people, and there were a few that were all of the above.
• This makes me wonder how the founders of the global network will be seen by history.
• Writing a first book is one of the hardest things a person can do.
• Minor tragedies always remain tragedies, but major ones can go either way.
• Most of the easy problems have been solved. The ones that look easy are hiding the most terrible complexities.
• Institutions are made entirely of humans, and all that implies.
• It is easy to forget that unsustainable things can’t go one forever, because you expect them to start failing as soon as you realize they are unsustainable. Instead I have found that stupid things can go on much longer than I thought they could.
• Unsustainable things are still unsustainable.
• Torturer, tortured, trainer, trainee, conqueror, conquered, these are all misleading distinctions. No one really comes back out of those rooms.
• You will likely reach a point when it seems life is not really your own, when it is filled with career, interests, family, obligations, and things. It will so architected, so set, you will believe you are trapped. You’re not. You can walk out anytime.

From Dylan Tweney, friend and dad of two, who brings up the practical problems with a protective parent culture:

I can’t leave a comment on your blog without a login so I’m just going to email this, since you asked for feedback.

I’m really sympathetic to your argument and it’s one I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. I want Clara and Curtis to have the same kind of independence I enjoyed as a kid. And while I grew up in a very different environment than you (small-town Ohio, in my case) I had some of the same experiences: biking all over town, exploring things on my own or with friends, and in general having my days wide open within very broad limits.

Lots of the parents I talk with also had similar childhoods and want their kids to have the same. But none of us do.

The reason it’s different now is structural, I think. It has less to do with fear than simple logistics. When I grew up there were a lot more parents around — usually moms, but my dad too. If I went to a friend’s house there was a good bet that an adult was there, or nearby. Responsible adults were never far away. And for that matter, it seems to me that work hours were shorter — my dad was home for dinner at 5 or 5:30pm every single night. He often had breakfast with us too. And while he was a university prof, my friends whose parents worked in different fields had similar schedules.

Most of the parents I know now are in two-working parent families. Even if you wanted your kid to wander around all afternoon by herself, there would be nowhere for her to go, because all her friends would be in after-school programs or soccer or dance class or swimming lessons too. Whole neighborhoods are absolutely deserted between 8am and 6 or 7pm because of working, commuting parents.

On top of that my daughter has far more homework that she’s expected to do than I had at that age, and her school day is longer.

In other words, the center of children’s social lives has shifted. It used to be child-centric, open-ended and relatively unstructured. It is now adult-driven, centered around programmed activities and highly structured. Going against the grain is not a simple matter of decided not to be afraid and sending your child out into the world — because the world you want to send her out into doesn’t exist any more. Her friends are going to be in those structured activities.

The only hope, as I see it, is for lots of parents to band together and decide to do things differently, preferably on a neighborhood-wide basis. I don’t know of any place where this is actually happening, though.

Side note: I know one stay-at-home dad who insists on giving his kids lots of independence. He has let them walk around his (fairly safe) neighborhood since they were 4 or 5 years old, and often sends them off to play unescorted. It is working just fine for him & his kids. However, he is very nearly a pariah among most other parents, who view his approach to parenting as appalling and possibly reprehensible. Not sure that exclusionary kind of tactic extends to his kids as well, but I worry. But then, the suburbs may be more repressive in this way than urban environments.

And from my mother:

Many people my age and older think this overprotectiveness is just weird.

We live in a contracting world, with diminishing options to travel far from your home and meet people of unfamiliar backgrounds- if you’re a child.

With increasingly regimented time, homework starting in Kindergarten and ever-constricting public space children are sent a message the world is too full of dangers for them, that the world is not for them. In short, They are told their lives are too precious to be lived. If they aren’t, it seems to be they are told they aren’t precious, and being allowed into the world devalues them.

The irony is that it’s far less dangerous than it was when I was a child. I regularly rode my bike far and wide, explored up the local creek for hours with and without friends. I explored the city I lived in, which was not only Los Angeles, but LA in the 80s. I learned to steer clear of scary people. I learned how to navigate the roads, and how to talk to people. As a teenager I hung around the mall and snuck around the beach at night. I ran around Westwood, lost my wallet a few times and had to avoid the occasional civil unrest. I saw strange things my mother never did, and sometimes I even told her about them. I nearly got locked in a mausoleum one night. I used to bring my mother a flower from nearly every trip when I was very young. In fact, I would stress out about leaving the house without at least a dollar- the price of a carnation. I got into some trouble and had to call her a few times. She came and got me, and chewed me out, but I was out there again next week, still tromping out the steps of my childhood in all the wonderful and strange environs for LA- even hours spent swimming hard in the Pacific.

My six year old daughter is the most precious and wonderful thing in the world, but she is not a Ming vase. She’s entitled to the choice and freedom I have, even if she chooses a riskier life than I have, or a less risky one. She’s entitled to make informed choices about the level of risk she assumes, armed with an understanding of how to cope with situations as they arise, and how to analyze both the world around her and her level of comfort with it. We do our child a great disservice when we protect them from all risk and harm, as great as letting them go into the world unable to read. These experiences are the things that lead to the social skills and confidence that let them find their place in the world as adults. To prevent them from talking to strangers or explore strange places is as disabling as protecting them from reading books because they might get ideas from them.

Horribly, my social group is creating a construct whereby I can’t easily give my daughter her freedom without sending her the message that I don’t care about her. This is a first attempt to strike out against that. When enough parents are saying they restrict their children’s freedom out of love and responsibility, I have to defend my desire to let my kid experience new things- it’s not indifference and negligence. It’s being the kind of parent I would want to have, and putting her as a person above my own desire for comfort.

I won’t ever teach my daughter to not talk to strangers. I will teach her that context matters, and we will work together to learn how and when it is safe, and perhaps even safer than not. I won’t be teaching her to automatically trust anyone in a uniform. I’ll be teaching her that situations where a number of strangers are gathered together make even bad actors behave, when they know they’re being watched. I will not teach her to run to abstract authority figures when she’s in trouble, I will teach her to build up goodwill and social connections in her community, and to have a number of people always in the back of her mind she knows she can turn to.

I won’t be telling her there are bad people out there- I will tell her even good people can get sick from things like drugs, depression, or anger, and do bad things. I will give her the skills I can, and teach her above all to know herself and trust what she knows, and to seek help without shame where she needs it. I will talk to her about the consequences of her choices. I will hope that a few painful turns early on will inoculate her from big unconsidered choices as a teen or adult. I will be trustworthy for her, and I will show her trust.

At the end of all this I will- yes, possibly nauseous with fear- let her go. As far as possible and reasonable I will always be a resource for her, but I accept that role will diminish with time, that it’s even far diminished now from what it once was. I will always express my interest in her life, but her life truly belongs to her, just as much at 6 as 36. For now I am the steward of abilities and knowledge she doesn’t yet have, and where I make choices for her and limit her it should always be guided by giving her the benefit of my life experience as she makes the choices she can for herself. It’s not mine to choose what she wants and is good for her, but to help her keep safe from immediate, non-theoretical dangers and to give her tools to keep safe in as wide a set of circumstances as possible.

There are no guarantees. I can’t keep her completely safe, ensure she’s happy and that nothing bad happens to her. I know her heart will be broken, and that she will face loss and death in the fulness of time. I know she’ll get hurt in all sorts of ways. I know there is always a chance I could lose the most wonderful thing in my life, and I know that she could lose me. None of this is a reason to cower in our houses. That bit of safety isn’t worth trading the adventures of the world that filled my childhood, and I hope will fill hers.