Quinn Said

“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.

I found a new website today. But let me tell you more as a robot in a Japanese blues bar.

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

I think we are getting enough examples of what the internet does to things back in the real world to start extracting some possibly slightly predictive behavioral patterns.

The one I think is really important for .gov is that the internet eventually destroys institutions whose main purpose was physical mediation of otherwise interested but unconnected parties. Over time, those middle layers will simply go away. They have to, because they are transformed (through no fault of their own) from conduit to barrier. The transformer is environmental- the internet is kind of ice-9 that way. But this is not a binary, smooth, fast, or simple transition, and the people in the middle of it are understandably confused and angry.

This is why record companies and newspapers are pissed off and pissing other people off that can’t figure out why they won’t just cease to exist. This is painful and hard. This is so painful and so hard that we have an aversion to seeing which institutions are next. Physical mediation is a good starting point to think about it: so what parts of governments exist to physically deliver something that can be described as information? Those parts will eventually go away. They can go away gracefully, or they can not go away gracefully. Government has a possibly unique ability to make that transition as non graceful as possible, but I doubt even it has the power to stop the process altogether.

When I first consulted with all sorts of companies in 1995 about their very first web pages, every one of them did a variation of the same thing: put their catalog or brochures on the web! How cool is that! Not actually that cool, I tried to humbly suggest. “The net,” I said repeatedly until my coworkers were ready to hurl, “is a conversation.” Many of these companies and organizations had never really conversed with anyone connected to them. It never had come up. Learning what that meant is each case has made the last 13 years completely fascinating.

I feel a little like the database fetishism I am seeing is a version of the catalog idea. There is nothing wrong with putting your catalog online, but it’s a serious misunderstanding of the net to think that the net is going to let you do the same thing as printing out all your data and sending it to everyone in the world, only without paying for postage. To explain how it’s different I’m going to dodge the question by hiding behind Tolstoy- pre-internet institutions are all alike, post-internet institutions are structurally disrupted in their own ways.

Like stages of grief, we need to figure out the stages of internet integration for institutions. I suspect grief is in there.

More as my head breaks.

The Brothers Marburger want to rewrite copyright law to save newspapers, and thereby, journalism. They want “aggregators” to pay “newspapers” for linking to/summarizing their pieces, and they want to bar “aggregators” from “profiting” from the articles “belonging” to a “newspaper” for 24 hours after posting. Quotes here are mine, to convey that none of these words mean anything particularly precise. There’s so much to take apart here, I’m stymied as to where to begin.

One thing I should admit upfront is that I have never in my life subscribed to a newspaper. My mother did for a while. I was in one, the Evening Outlook in Santa Monica as a kid, and I liked that. But not only did I rarely read them, when I did it was mostly the comics and the stock prices¹. There’s a simple physical reason- I hate the way the paper and ink feel on my skin. Cheap newsprint on my fingers acts on my nervous system like finger nails on a chalk board. I hate hate hate slightly slightly greasy, slightly crumbly texture, and the way it comes off on my hands, making them feel dirty, dried out, and oily all at once. Just talking about it makes me want to wash my hands.

But boy did I always love the idea of journalism. I knew I wanted to be a writer and journalist when I grew up pretty much from the 3rd grade. Knew. (Why I didn’t start until I was in my 30s is another long and at times troublesome story) For both dermatological and career/personal reasons, the coming of the web opened the door to my first desire. I left what was shaping up to be a lucrative career in interface design to become a freelance writer.

Some friends expressed their confusion; I was jumping off the Queen Mary onto a barge that was not only skanky, but as far as anyone could tell, already actually on fire. 2005/6 was a hell of a time to declare oneself for journalism. I’ve never worked in a newsroom, though I interviewed once at the Chron. I was told ‘morale is very low’ during the interview, for which I had no pithy reply. A few moments later I admitted that I read my news off Google News. I didn’t get the job. When I was asked later by a Reuters guy why the hell I’d gone for that interview, I told him I kind of wanted to work in a newspaper’s newsroom before they all went away, and I figured that was one of my last chances. He laughed the hard laugh of the bitter and damned, and asked if he could quote me.

People have wondered why I’m not more scared, and the short answer is this: I’m not an employee. I’m a well, a mine. Whatever else gets lost or shuffled, I’m necessary. I can interview, investigate, learn, and then explain. I can write and take pictures. I can give you whatever form you want for those final productions, I don’t care that much. Like the musician and the auteur, I am the natural resource that becomes the product in the hands of an industry. Wherever you put me, however much you pay me, whatever my outlet, I’m still a journalist.

Just like the RIAA isn’t actually trying to save the art form of music, and the MPAA isn’t trying to save the filmic expression, Newspaper people aren’t trying to save journalism. Sometimes the people aligned with these organizations know this, and argue instead for the value their particular infrastructures add to those fields. Those more respectable arguments I can appreciate even when I don’t completely agree.

In an interview I did years ago with Monique Wadsted of the Swedish bit of the MPA (The MPAA’s wee international bit) she argued that in the long run uncontrolled piracy could threaten the huge budget productions that we enjoy. She has a point- a flattened marketplace may not have the investment capital to pour into a yearly summer blockbuster season that costs as much as a small nation’s GDP. I am not actually being flippant here. I love summer blockbuster season. I love the enormous spectacle of the things, their ridiculous scale, comic book motifs and the jewel tone richness. I’m glad we make them, the same way I’m glad people thousands of years ago made the pyramids. But I don’t confuse the pyramids with all building, or Hollywood productions with all cinematic expression.

It seems like every time someone argues for tightening copyright to protect their industry, they conflate their industry with their field of endeavor. But it’s newspapers that are the absolute worst offenders here. Newspapers, newspaper people contend, are the only authoritative source of journalism, the only trustworthy arbiters, the only stalwart defenders democracy can trust. For the sake of our soul as a nation the laws must be changed to ensure the survival of their business model. This argument has the kind of conflict of interest and special pleading that gets journalist salivating, when it’s not about the people that sign their checks.

Some are salivating anyway, like my friend just this guy I happen to know, no friendship stuff or anything, King Kaufman at Salon. He co-writes the Future of Journalism blog, which can be ungentle, at times, with the blithering idiots.

There’s a form of the argument against amending the laws that doesn’t apply to the RIAA or MPAA, which is that newspapers were shitty at their sacred duty. Bill Wyman lays this out very nicely- that the business incentives all pointed towards not upsetting or offending anyone, which kind of runs counter to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” Newspapers did come to play it safe, and safe became more important in many cases than right. As Lore pointed out, “No one ever got fired for installing an evil Microsoft product.” Part of the problem was also biological structural: primates don’t like getting yelled at and avoid it. There are a few that by some accident aren’t too put off by this, and they do often become journalists. They don’t often become managers, even the ones that work at papers.

There’s an argument newspapers were compromised by media consolidation and therefore don’t deserve the protections they seek. These are interesting arguments, and should probably get lots and lots of blah blah blah Inside Journo Baseball. But I don’t actually care about them. Even if they did everything right I don’t want to see newspaper’s special pleading succeed. There’s no reason it has to be them doing it in the future, that journalism has to look like it did in the past.

That there is something good in an existing institution isn’t enough. It has to be better than what we gain when we lose it. For instance, there are a lot of things we might gain from perfect DRM, but creating perfect DRM would require outlawing and destroying the general purpose computer. No contest- we’ll live without.

What the brothers Marburger would ask the world to give up is the fast linking and commentary of the internet, and the diversity of talents outside of corporate newspapers becoming the watchdogs of society. They would also ask the world to give up a lot of reporting, and some of the power media has to afflict the comfortable.

Scandals would be far easier to get out in front of if news spreading is slowed by copyright restrictions. I can get my side of the story out to as many aggregators and blogs as possible, your side has to wait 24 hours. Is an aggregator still an aggregator if it does original reporting or commentary? There aren’t many that don’t. Is WaPo still a paper when it blogs, quotes, and links? Do I get to sue them if they link to and reproduce this post before a day has passed? More news stories then ever are bubbling up from on-site amateurs, will this law protect them? From what? If several people are all working on the same story, does only the first one get to publish? Does it depend on how much one’s employer looks like an aggregator vs newspaper? If so, what incentive does anyone have to take a little extra time to get it right? If I want to make sure a story never really can be written about, can I “register” somewhere as a paper and write about it every 24 hours? What about international sources, are they to be protected/embargoed? If I put my aggregator in Latvia, but live in NYC and take adverts from Google, what are you going to do? What about when the whole situation is reversed, as in the case of Global Voices²?

And all of this might not even save newspapers, even while the damage to journalism would be intolerable. And I like journalism more.

1 Mom’s requirement. I have the distinction of being the only person I know that knew how to read the financial papers, operate several kinds of firearms, hide illegal drugs on my person, relate and analyze good portions of Greek mythology, and identify and sabotage a distributor cap by around age 10. My parents were never, ever boring.

2 GV is pure and simple, simpler than most, a blog aggregator. When it studied its readership, it found that a very high number of people reading were journalists, and most of them admitted they’d gotten stories from GV and written about them in ‘legitimate’ news outlets. One of those journalists was me. Thanks, Global Voices! Please don’t sue me for the thing you kind of wanted me to do! Oh this has gotten so confusing.

It’s arcane. It’s hidebound. It’s niche, intentionally obfuscated, and elitist. It’s written almost entirely in -cue retching noises- passive voice. That’s right, it’s the world of academic publishing, boys and girls! A world not only irrelevant to most people’s lives, but anti-relavant, deriving its sense of status from exactly how far up its own ass it can crawl. (Ok, that’s a bit harsh. But… you know who you are.)

For reasons that run in the same direction as but aren’t exactly like my copyright interests I am fascinated with methods of publishing in the world of academic journals. By methods of publishing I mean Open Access and alternative models to traditional peer review. Since a 2006 article for Seed which I over researched in my unfortunate way (‘here’s 4000 words of your 1300 word article… pick the ones you like’) I have known more than is useful about the changes in both, and their complete irrelevance to one another. Well, nearly complete. OA journals can be peer reviewed in any ol’ way, even the ol’ way, but toying with peer review models doesn’t really work with the old print system, so it helps to have some OA platform to play on. But let’s ignore changes in peer review. Assume all journals use the same system of rigor, and that it produces the same result. (Ahem.)

OA means simply this: you academic journal is published online, free and available to all comers. It sounds weirdly like The Pirate Bay, or Grokkster or something, but there’s a few important differences. The people that write in academic journals do it for impact, not money. Never money. “Publish or perish” is about status, not pay, and getting paid is a breach of ethics. You pay to get published, just like the person on the other end pays to read you in the old model. The people that peer review don’t pay money to do it, but they don’t get paid, so they do pay with time. The friggin’ editorial boards usually aren’t paid. It would be as if Lars Ulrich and his producers would never dream of taking money for their work, and only hoped that Elektra was hard at work doing whatever it could to get their tracks into the hands of true metal heads as fast and easily as possible. And that’s how all of this field has worked for hundreds of years before the wah wah was even invented.

If the creative and intellectual work of journals is unpaid, who the hell (you might reasonably ask) is collecting and pocketing all that money? Basically, the printers and manager/secretary types. Elsevier is the purest of middlemen- they not only don’t add intellectual value, it’s pretty much against the rules for them to do so.

If the past 17 years have shown anything, it’s that the net is hell on middlemen. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that with all the same academics offering to do all the same work for the same price (free or negative), charging on the other end for journal subscriptions is just a way for researchers to hide the material they are trying to promote and finally achieve a zen like balance of life long expert toil and total obscurity.

The world wide web was actually invented to do the thing that turned companies like Elsevier from vital parts of intellectual infrastructure into increasingly desperate parasitic lampreys attached to the body of human progress. Science has taught us that organisms displaced from their ecologies go crazy and fight like hell to survive. Nothing, with the possible exception of giant manatees, goes gently into that good night. Expect no different from the journal publishers who archive those ecology notes.

The writing is on the wall, yeah, but that still doesn’t explain why you should care, especially if you are here because you like my desserts or something. You should care because you want a jet car, a simple pill that cures cancer, perfect schools for your children, to live on the moon, the reversal of male pattern baldness, kumquats that never go bad, or perhaps even a planet your grandchildren can safely inhabit in 100 years. Science (and all academia really) seems like it’s about braniacs pelted with apples in patent offices or something, but it’s actually about tiny pieces of the puzzle of how things work being slowly assembled by more people in more directions. It’s an accelerating accretion of understanding and power over the world as it is. It’s exponential, metaphorically speaking, in how every piece of new knowledge opens up the door to n more pieces, etc. The fuel for this growth is eyeballs. (No, actually this time, really, not like the .com bubble.) OA is the rocket fuel approach. Let everyone see it the instant it happens, add small amounts of time, and viola, you get to live in the future.

One of the only solid downsides of OA is that the horrid scholar’s passive voice is now googlable, and not restricted to other academics who are presumably in on the joke. (“We noted across archives that vicious abuse of the English language had been seen.”) It’s the price you pay for progress.

The problems is publish or perish is about status as well as impact, so big name journals get to exist for a while longer largely holding up the progress they once solely enabled.

Which brings us to government action. Moves like the NIH requiring all research they fund to be OA within a year and FRPAA do a lot to get us closer to our jet cars and full heads of hair, even when those things aren’t directly being researched. Also, it takes a government to put an industry out of its misery when the time has come. But most governments are irresponsible twerps and ignore the painful screaming, letting the beasts suffer terribly before finally expiring on their own.

Peter Suber, a philosopher that accidently became the OA guy in the 90s, points to Ireland as a good example of what to do. They simultaneously launched OA archives at their universities while requiring funded research to end up in them. Coordination like this is a great idea, both in the potential mercy killing of Elsevier’s publishing model and in boosting both Irish and non-Irish research. (Is there an Irish word for Goyim or Gaijin? There should be.)

Science as an act of public participation

The idea of open science began with The Royal Society of London, an idiosyncratic groups of talkative 17th century Gentlemen Scientists. Mostly they were the middling upper class – third sons of lords, a group that had more free time than responsibility. They met in a hall to talk about science, read letters from absent colleagues and perform experiments in front of each other. They were so taken with the idea that a theory should be judged on its merits rather than the status of the person advancing it that they started a journal in 1665- the Philosophical Transactions- whose articles were chosen by a review of expert peers rather than the eminence of the presenter. The Royal Society’s motto is “Nullius in Verba,” Latin for “On the words of no one.”

Since then science changed all of society, and the barriers to understanding and participation have steadily declined. Charles Darwin was probably the last of the Gentlemen Scientists. He published The Origin of the Species just 10 years before Nature first rolled off the press as one of the early modern scientific journals. From there the standards of rigor would solidify, and science would move into the academy. The 19th century was the death knell of the class system barrier to scientific participation. This changed how we fundamentally saw science- no longer the pursuit of Great (Smart) Men of history. Progress became the many dots of published research that made up the pointillist portrait of the natural world, conveyed largely by the journal. The next century exploded as a result.

A search on the Nature website alone turns up references to over 370,000 articles across a meager 72 journals. The largest publisher, Elsevier publishes over 2200 journals¹. Elsevier’s motto, which dates back to the 17th century, is “Non solus,” Latin for “not alone.” It’s a beautiful motto for the 400 year old peer review system. Science required a community, it could only really happens when we are not alone.

The net brought this community to a new place, a place where a layer of mediation (publishers) can be safely removed. This is the Open Access movement. Open Access is about scientific publishing being quickly posted online, freely available to all comers. It’s peer reviewed in some cases, not in others.

Compared to the rich history of the Royal Society and Elsevier, the world of Open Access journals is tiny and new. But the internet is changing the space between scientists, which in time will change the shape of science entirely. According to eprints.org there at 753 open archives of research, and many of those are small archives with little more than minutes of local scientific society meetings. The largest of these, arXiv.org, boasts 388,000 articles², but no peer-review.

arXiv.org started as a “preprint” area, but evolved into the place where physics and math can iterate quickly, making math and physics into a conversation, and the conversation is vibrant. Formal peer review is replaced by constant peer interest. Into this environment came Grisha Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré conjecture. The unlikely proof, along his refusal of the Fields Medal captured the media’s imagination. A portrait of a sensitive and grumpy mathematician came out, someone unwilling to submit to the social processes of science for personal reasons. It didn’t matter how valid those reasons were if it kept him out of the literature- generally, that’s the end of the story. But this time we didn’t have to do without his brilliant math. Importantly, in this story, Perelman isn’t the beneficiary of Open publishing; the rest of us are.

But Open Access publishing isn’t just the subscription model sans subscription fees. It’s a different way of doing science when anyone can potentially point an RSS reader at the latest work, from eminent to downright dodgy. They can mark it up, discuss it, blog it, cross reference it, and even integrate it into their world view- and then head off to breakfast.

It’s jarring, even shocking, to be disrupted this way, and to many it looks like a revolt against the publishers of journals. Historical context suggests something different; that perhaps wide dissemination and opening of the process is just part of the natural progression of scientific dialogue. This step, like each before it, takes advantage of the technology and social shifts of the time, and each step has accelerated the progress and widened the breadth of science. And every step has been scary for those who went to the Academy for stability, as well as the euphoric high of understanding.

For scientists in the developing world, or outside the university system, or just those hungry for speed, it’s resources like arXiv.org that have made them “Non solus.” This is touted as one of the triumphs of Open Access, that people outside the usual sphere of science can finally get the latest research. But in fact, it’s the community of science that benefits the most by swelling their ranks.

Taking research out of the segregating world of the of the journal invites the general public to participate in the act of science. They are no long safely outside the walls of the 19th century’s privileged classes or the 20th century’s academia. They are going to watch and comment. They are going to help, and get in the way. Science trolls will harass legitimate work, celebrity pressure will push publishing popular results on popular topics. Rituals of scientific professionalism will become archaic, the status derived from publishing itself will muddy. But it will all be worth it: every endeavor of research with be at last ‘Non solus’ – no one is alone on the internet. With tools for data analysis and statistical modeling falling into everyone’s hands, novel patterns impossible to see in the walled gardens of journals will emerge. Amateurs whose only qualification is interest will transform every discipline they touch. The public will study science and science will study the public. They will delight each other, they will horrify each other with misappropriation, they will drive each other until they are so fast and wide they are one thing. It will be hectic and unstable. Newly opened doors will require new gatekeepers. What the open form of science will bring us is as beyond our imagination as current daily life would be to Darwin. Here the culture of technology informs the culture of science: this is what open interconnectedness has already done to tech.

Perhaps the most important change will be generational. Children growing up in an environment of open science will have a fundamental scientific literacy that we who have learned to love science like a second language will never fully be able to experience like the native speakers. Not all children, but certainly those that lean that way. The natural reasoning of our grandchildren will baffle us as much as the computer literacy of our children has.

It was a radical departure for science from the appeal to authority to the idea of experimentation and collaboration- a wildly egalitarian idea for the 17th century. To “Nullius in Verba,” (On the words of no one), Open Access might add “Omnium Iudicio”, or “to the judgement of all” – the wild idea of the 21st. Summing up from my 2006 Seed piece: science in the 21st century will be vandalized and common, and better for it.

1. 2006 numbers.
2. Haven’t updated these numbers either. Suffice to say, a lot.

The basic story of the Google Books settlement (and why you should care) is this:

In 2004 Google announced plans to start scanning and putting online both out-of and in-copyright books from partnered university collections. There were a lot of other scanning efforts, like the OCA, and Project Gutenberg, but they stuck to scanning books in the public domain- works whose copyrights had expired. Google was the first scanner with the voluminous copper and zinc alloy cojones to just scan copyrighted books and post them where anyone could search them. (If not actually download them.)

In 2005, the Author’s Guild and publishing industry started suing the snot out of them. Of course, what gave Google this previously unforeseen courage was a ridiculous stock price (“Well it was this or hire someone to start shoveling money into the bay…”)(not an actual quote) and grinning phalanxes of lawyers.

In 2008, Google settled. But what the settled for was the Las Vegas buffet of publishing rights. To plagiarize Wikipedia, the terms were roughly:

==Settlement==
In October 2008, Google signed a settlement with the Author’s Guild for $125 million. A share of the settlement, $34.4 million dollars, will go towards the funding of the [[Book Rights Registry]], a form of [[copyright collective]] that will pay copyright owners a portion of the profits made by Google Books.

Google created a Google Book Settlement web site that went active on February 11, 2009. This site allows authors and other rights holders of out of print (but copyrighted) books to submit a claim by January 5, 2010.[10] In return they will receive $60 per full book, or $5 to $15 for partial works.[10] In return, Google will be able to index the books and display snippets in search results, as well as up to 20% of each book in preview mode.[10] Google will also be able to show ads on these pages and make available for sale digital versions of each book. Authors and copyright holders will receive 63 percent of all advertising and e-commerce revenues associated with their works.[10]

Yes, leaving in the citations amuses me.

2008-present and probably future, intellectual and legal drama galore.

Why? Because as with any blanket copyright deal there are upsides and downsides, but unique to this one is Google. As in: Google brings its own unique character to it, yeah, but also as in, only Google gets to be part of it, which is kind of an odd idea for a collecting society.

The upsides are instantly obvious. For anyone that cares in the slightest about the fate of the 20th century’s orphan works the Google has come in at what might be the last cultural moment with a deus ex machina that happens to scan 1000 pages per hour. It has thus far lifted 7 million mortal titles up to be ever-teaching constellations shining down from the Google server farms. From the perspective of we plebs, that means the chance to search a previously unavailable vastness of human knowledge from that text box, and maybe even buy orphan books. And certainly look at targeted ads crafted from our profiles and the work itself. We are feeling luckier than ever.

But, as they say, nothing vast enters the lives of mortals without a curse. The curses of the settlement are many and subtle. The deal applies only to Google, effectively shutting out other scanning efforts that might be more in the public interest. Google is answerable to their shareholders, not our cultural legacy. They and the associations stand to make a lot of money, but actual authors seem like they might be largely left out in the cold. It requires copyright holder registration, unlikely to reach the people that might be helped by the deal. The deal gets fuzzy on implementation. It’s US centric. It has no provisions for privacy, and nothing to guard against censorship. It’s really obviously anti-competitive. Google gets to determine a work’s ‘optimal price’, whatever that means. It’s Google, so they’re going to gather gobs of data on anyone using it. Unlike ASCAP, with which it is often compared, there’s been no government investigation and review. Libraries may see woefully incomplete access to the digital versions of their own books. It may take the wind out of the sails for real copyright reform that would do more to protect our cultural legacy. Oh, and did I mention enough times that Google, and only Google, gets to play?

Now for the more than you want to know part:

• Google Book Settlement website
• NYRB: Google & the Future of Books Thoughtful, concise, hits most good points.
• NYTimes: Libraries Ask Judge to Monitor Google Books Settlement Tackles the privacy implications.
• Association of Research Libraries’ page on the Google Book Search Library Project
• Google’s announcement of the settlement
• Google Book Settlement – author’s FAQ
• Wired: Who’s Messing With the Google Book Settlement? Hint: They’re in Redmond, Washington
• James Grimmelmann (Who is really The Man on this topic) and Siva Vaidhyanathan discuss the settlement.
• Brewster Kahle in WaPo: A Book Grab by Google
• Slate: Your Search Returned 12 Million Books
• Techcrunch: Google Book Settlement Site Is Up; Paying Authors $60 Per Scanned Book

By the way, if you were looking for some over arching and final conclusion about the settlement from me, tough.

I’ve been watching the story of (probably) accidental censorship on Amazon with interest, and I think there’s a valuable sociological lesson in it. In short: Amazon de-ranked books with GLBT themes as adult over Easter weekend. People were outraged by the apparent moral prescribing censorship, a Bantown prole called Weev claimed he did it with a cross site reference forgery, and then Amazon said it was a cataloging error.

What’s interesting is that all these answers are pretty much equally possible. That’s just weird though- because it suggests that there’s not so much of an entry barrier anymore to the kind of book burning mind controlling corporate/state master propaganda stuff that the ruling class can use to dictate our punch clock existences. Is technology democratizing the tools of fascism? Why not? What’s so different about them? Here comes everybody indeed, whether they like it or not. We’re all going to be shooting mind control rays at each other, obeying Markov chain commands issued by our zombie army computers, living in an anarchist/fascist quasi state of cultural strange attractors, capable of free will only in topics of obscurity and total market failure.

Good times.

Then, just when I thought I’d mentally explored/perverted the scenario to its fullest, I received this ad: #powellswin: a 20% off book sale capitalizing on Powell’s not having (accidently) censored their search results. I like Powell’s, if I wasn’t in debt to my eyeballs (hey….) I’d be tempted to buy something. In the mean time, I’ll just have to let my phished cc do my opinion expressing for me.