So, the Internet Archive copyright lawsuit thing is more complicated than it appears. This is a good rundown of the legal questions involved, while this NPR piece describes the reaction to “National Emergency Library” that pushed things to the brink.
TL;DR, the IA provides crucial archiving services (including the Wayback Machine), but they’ve recently started a large-scale illegal lending model that put their other services at risk.This is really disappointing to me and I’m going to write a long, dry post about it.
Essentially, the Internet Archive has historically only allowed books to be “lent out” digitally to as many people as the IA has physical copies stored. So if they have 2 copies of Mary Sue’s new book, only 2 people can be reading their PDF scans at a time. This was enough for many publishers and authors to look the other way (although groups like the Science Fiction Writers of America has been decrying the practice for years, since in many cases they were “lending” books they didn’t have licensing for.)
Because, while this is
similarto the system used by libraries,
libraries
payfor each lending copy of their book (ensuring that the authors, artists, publicists, editors, etc are getting paid). the IA, from many accounts, did not pay for all of these books in the first place. but again, small-scale enough that nobody went after them for it.
Due to the pandemic, they removed the waiting list for these books, arguing it was in the national public interest to have access to knowledge. Great! I respect this ideology.
Except that rather than paying ~$0 for two digital copies w/o author permission, they’re now paying ~$0 for
unlimitedcopies w/o author permission. Writers who put years of labor into these books began kicking up a fuss (including Chuck Wendig, who’s receiving death threats because I guess he’s the most recognizable name involved?) and publishers sued.
So nobody’s goal is to get the Archive taken down entirely. Instead, the argument is that the damages claimed in the lawsuit could absolutely be large enough to cripple them. The IA ended the emergency lending program earlier than planned, so we’ll see if the suit goes through after all.
So, why is this complicated?
On the one hand, copyright law sucks right now and many are understandably infuriated at the idea of huge publishing companies suing a free library.
On the other hand, they
were not operating as a library,and creators were failing to be paid for their work. with the new lending model, Mary Sue Author (who, as an average author, receives wages below the poverty line) is worried that this change is actively preventing her from making a living. If she’s a new author, an impact to her numbers is enough to ensure that the publisher doesn’t buy her next book.
If Mary Sue is a marginalized author, she’s especially at risk of economic insecurity. If Mary Sue and authors like her cannot afford to write books, writing remains a domain of privilege.
(Also, there’s some legal argument that if Mary Sue fails to actively protect her copyright, she could lose it. I’m not an expert and won’t weigh in on this.)
But wait! (Common Counterarguments swirling on the Twitters):
“Writing should be a hobby anyway. If you care about making money for your art, you’re not a real artist.” Hopefully we are all familiar by now with how shit this argument is; we see it a lot around here flung at visual artists. Pay people for their work! Also, again: this is how you get a bunch of WASP authors and nobody else.
“It’s actually the publishers screwing the authors, so this is a punishment for the publishers.”Except it is…not. It is not. The people most likely to suffer would be the writers, not the publishers.
“Libraries are closed, so what are we supposed to do about it?”This one is tricky right now, but I’d first check to see if your library participates in an e-lending service (many do). check out OverDrive or Audible, which do pay authors. Project Gutenberg has free classics in the public domain. Amazon has its own problems, but Kindle Unlimited allows access to many,
manyfree books where the author is actually seeing payment.
“Okay, but why should the digital library of Alexandria go down because some authors are mad?”I honestly
reallywant to ask this question to whoever was making these lending decisions at the IA, because I also am very pissed about it. I don’t know why they thought publishers would ignore this very blatantly illegal thing (not even “grey area”–just under current copyright law, completely illegal). Regardless of whether copyright law currently sucks ass, it was a weird move! And now bad things are happening.
“
Fuck off, everybody mad about this writes YA and science fiction, not real literature. Who cares if those guys get paid?” Seriously. This is a very common rebuttal on Twitter right now. Burn Twitter.
“Honestly you’re right but I just want free shit.” is it weird that this is the response I most respect
In case you skimmed all that, my point isn’t “copyright law is good, actually.” It’s that the issue is more complex than donation drive posts have portrayed it as.
They only thing I would add to this very comprehensive account is that it’s not, actually, complicated.
IA were NEVER acting as a library. They were ALWAYS stealing. Libraries are awesome. NO ONE IS COMING AFTER LIBRARIES.
They weren’t acting as a library,
they were just stealing.
P.S. when I was dirt poor I never stole fucking books. Unlike Disney and behemoth visual production companies, publishing companies operate on tiny margins. Producing a book is a fuck of a lot of labour. On top of the author, who often spends literal years writing the book, you have the agent, the commissioning editor, proofreaders, copy editors, possibly structural and line editors, typesetters, cover artists, marketing bods AND MORE.
Most of these are highly skilled jobs that take years of training. When I was a freelance proofreader and copy editor, my standard rates were £27.50 and £33 an hour respectively.
Making books is EXPENSIVE. And readers have a low tolerance for paying for books, so there’s often not a lot of profit on any individual book. One book not selling well and covering that expense puts the author’s ability to publish future books in danger.
So you just DON’T FUCKING STEAL BOOKS.
When I was dirt poor, I read the many books that are now in the public domain. The Count of Monte Cristo is fucking fantastic - and I might never have read it had I not been too poor to read anything else.
It is EASY to continue to read without stealing from living authors.
Don’t be a dick.
So there are some pretty important factual errors in this post.
1. Libraries pay authors every time they lend books.
Not in the USA. They do in some other territories, but not directly; rather, governments create separate pots of money for authors that are administered by collecting societies to compensate them for library use.
But in the USA, libraries don’t - and never have, and almost certainly never, ever will - pay a lending right. This is 100% iron-clad fact and totally indisputable, and any argument that starts with an assertion to the contrary is either bad faith or wrong on the facts.
2. The Archive is not a library.
Of course the Archive is a library. “Library” is not the same as “public library.” There are thousands - probably tens of thousands - of private lending libraries, including those maintained by artists’ organizations. SFWA actually hosts an annual event in one of these libraries in NYC.
3. Digital lending is illegal.
This was comprehensively settled by the Hathi Trust decision.
Libraries are absolutely allowed to scan their holdings and lend them to to their patrons.
4. Libraries need licenses to lend books.
Again, this is 100% false as a matter of copyright law and practice.
Precisely ZERO of the books on the shelves of your local library were “licensed” to be lent. Libraries don’t require permission to lend books (and other materials) that they lawfully acquire. They never, ever have, and they almost certainly never will.
There are open questions about the legality of the National Emergency Library, though it’s important to note several facts about its holdings and usage:
*
Every book in the NEL is more than 5 years old. There are zero current releases.
*
The average NEL checkout is <30m - that is to say, people look up quotes or facts from these books, then check them back in - suggesting that the NEL is more like the refernece desk at your local library than its shelves.
*
The vast majority of the books in the NEL have NO ebook edition. You can’t check these books out on Overdrive. They are utterly unavailable for so long as libraries are closed.
*
The NEL’s ebooks are scanned pages, not OCR’ed text. They don’t readily substitute for Epubs or other “real” ebooks and are - and always will be - a distant second choice and reference of last resort for the people who use them.
Again, I’m here for a factual or legal or ethical argument about the NEL - but if we’re going to have that argument, let’s actually confine ourselves to the facts, not incorrect statements of law, or incorrect statements about the NEL’s holdings or usage.
“Subcultures, countercultures, and fringe communities all serve as insulated social experiments and testing grounds that allow us to transgress memes and ultimately detect weak signals on probable futures.”
Even if you don’t follow Avi Schiffmann, you’re probably familiar with the 17-year-old’s work: he’s the creator of http://nCoV2019.live and http://2020Protests.com, the two leading tracking tools for covid cases and protests you can join.
In an interview with Tanya Basu for MIT Tech Review, Schiffmann describes how he taught himself to build these dashboards when he made a site that scraped his school’s athletic stats portal and made it legible and useful.
When he decided to use those skills to build his covid tracker, he put a call out on some coding sites and attracted a dozen high-school aged volunteers, many in Asia, who helped write the scrapers that pull in the data for http://nCoV2019.live.
As the project grew more sophisticated and then begat his protest tracker, he used online tutorials and communities to acquire the knowledge he needed to overcome new challenges (“The thing is, you can learn anything online”).
Since the first days of the maker movement, it’s been clear that the ability to search and discuss is the major thing that differentiates “makers” from earlier generations of tinkerers, like the radio and electronics hobbyists that kept Modern Mechanix in business.
Schiffmann is a self-confessed “bad student” with a 1.7GPA and 60% attendance, which he attributes to his consuming passion for his programming projects. It’s a testament to how much of pedagogy turns on getting out of the student’s way when their passions are inflamed.
I read my first novel - Alice in Wonderland - one day in second grade. I pulled it off the shelf before class started and sat on the carpet to read it, and my teacher, Bev Panikkar, saw that I was engrossed in it and didn’t call me to class.
She let me sit there for two consecutive school days while I read, and while I was kicking off a lifelong passion for literature (also, I married a woman called Alice!).
As interesting as the pedagogical and makerish implications of Schiffmann’s story, I’m also fascinated by the role that scraping plays in making these essential information resources.
Scraping went from a honorable practice (the core of Google Search, for example) to a potential felony over the course of decades, as companies that made their fortunes scraping others turned around and sued, banned and blocked anyone who returned the favor.
But scraping is one of the key tools for attaining Adversarial Interoperability, which once kept tech dynamic and responsive to users, and the absence of which has contributed greatly to its stagnation and corruption.
The people who perpetrated genocidal settler colonialism needed a way to square their slaughter and theft with their conception of themselves as moral actors. They settled their consciences with the doctrine of “terra nullius.”
Terra nullius - empty land - is a variation on Locke’s labor theory of value, the idea that the only thing you can be said to truly own is your body and its labor, and when you blend your labor with natural resources, the finished product is yours.
Locke is a key grifter thinkfluencer, because at the core of Locke’s theory is the idea that there are natural things that no one else is using for you to come along and pick up and blend with your labor to turn into property.
Inevitably “stuff no one is using” turns out to be a fancy way of saying “stuff that is widely used by people I consider to be subhuman.”
So when settler colonialists arrived in Australia, they declared it to be empty land, and the people who’d lived there for as long as behaviorally modern humans have existed to be non-persons.
This relegation to subhuman status created the conditions for genocide, enslavement, torture, rape, and more.
The Australian establishment’s means of escaping this legacy is to simply pretend it doesn’t exist.
That’s why Australian PM (and noted piece of shit) Scott Morrison’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests in Australia by flatly stating that there was “no slavery in Australia” and accusing protesters of not being “honest about our history.”
Morrison’s claims are easily refuted. For example, the State Library of Western Australia has an 1896 image of enslaved aboriginal people in neck-chains, outside Roebourne Gaol. This image was posted to Facebook as part of the discourse of Australia’s history of slavery.
But it was immediately removed by Facebook’s nudity filter, a fully automated machine learning system that enforces the system’s “community standards.” The user who posted it had his account restricted in punishment for violating these standards.
Facebook removed 39.5m “nudity” images in the first quarter of this year. At that rate, you won’t be surprised to learn that more than 99% of these removals were fully automated and untouched by human hands.
It’s true that FB is largely free from nudity, and this fact is often cited by advocates of other kinds of filtering - say, copyright filtering - as evidence that FB COULD block the content they object to, but it chooses not to.
In a sense, those critics are correct. FB has demonstrated that it is willing to accept immense collateral damage from its filtering - whether that’s censoring survivors of terrorist atrocities in the name of filtering out “extremist content.”
Or blocking images that prove the genocidal history of a nation at a moment when its leadership is denying that history even exists.
FB doesn’t intend to block this speech, but it knows this “overblocking” is inevitable when it turns over moderation to automated filters.
By its actions, FB is telling us that this is an acceptable price to pay.
But that doesn’t mean that filtering on broader criteria - harassment, profanity, libel, copyright infringement - is just more of the same. These categories are FAR broader than “nudity.”
What’s more, the consequences of overblocking are far more damaging to the purpose these filters are supposed to serve. A copyright filter that is supposed to protect artists and then goes on to censor artistic work that’s mistaken for infringement HARMS artists.
An “extremist content” filter that is supposed to protect us from terrorist violence and then goes on to block the images and stories of survivors of that violence literally adds insult to injury.
An anti-harassment filter that blocks the discussions of harassment targets who describe the words used to harass them helps harassers, not their victims.
FB got 2.5 million takedown appeals in Q1/2020, and restored 613,000 pieces of content. Even if you accept the dubious claim that FB’s human checkers got it right, that’s 613,000 acts of illegitimate censorship.
As for the photo of the enslaved aboriginal people, it was restored too – after The Guardian’s Josh Taylor asked FB embarrassing questions about the removal.
“Getting reporters to take up your cause” is not a scalable solution to errors in mass automated filtering.
FB can’t moderate at scale. No one can. Adding filters “works” in the sense that you can block most “bad content” if you don’t care how much good content gets blocked by mistake alongside of it.
And the fallout from this overblocking is not evenly distributed. Not only are some disfavored minorities (sex workers, queer people, people of color) more likely to have their discussions censored.
They’re also less likely to have access to reporters who’ll embarrass FB and it into taking action.
The answer isn’t to lard FB with more censorship duties for it to fuck up even worse - it’s to cut FB down to size, to a scale where communities can set and enforce norms.
Because the problem with FB isn’t merely that Mark Zuckerberg is uniquely unsuited to making decisions about the social lives and political discourse of 2.6 billion people.
It’s that NO ONE is capable of doing that job. That job should not exist.
PS: Scott Morrisson retracted his no-slavery claim:
it is 2100. we have long since entered post-scarcity due to Kuiper belt mining and the Dyson sphere around Sun. your consciousness, hosted on Amazon’s Europa server, is about to be erased by MIT Press, now part of Disney, because you shared a DRM-protected PDF with a friend
“I cut the cake, you pick your half” is basically the only good political idea anyone has ever had. Everything else is either derived from that, or self-serving behavior dressed up to look like an idea.
The transformation of Teen Vogue into a radical leftist publication is one of the brightest spots in this ridiculous timeline. I am so here for their big think pieces explaining socialist feminism:
And for their timely dunks on the likes of Andrew Cuomo, whose shuck they were onto long before he publicly sided with the violent criminals in uniform that have turned NYC into a battleground.
And now, true to the spirit of lifestyle mags, they’ve got some practical advice for readers: “What to Do If the Police Shoot You With a Rubber Bullet,” by Laura Pitcher.
tldr: Rubber bullets aren’t (just, or always) rubber, and they can kill or maim you. Wear protective clothing. Watch out for collateral injuries as you race to flee the cops who are shooting you for protesting police violence.
Seek medical care, because fractures aren’t always obvious (co-signed - I once stood up and walked for like 15 mins after getting creamed by a drunk on my bike; I didn’t walk without crutches for 6 months afterwards).
If a fragment is lodged in your body (or eye socket, etc), get a doctor to remove it. Don’t try to remove it for yourself.
Look, it’s fucking terrible that Teen Vogue has to explain this stuff to its readers.
But it’s fucking AMAZING that they’re there to explain it.
Request from Great Ormond Street hospital for 1,500 face masks from Cornwall Cloth Mask volunteer makers, needed by Sunday (just in case anyone was under the mistaken impression that our government was handling anything, anything at all). Anyone ready to get making?
Speculative fiction writer, sustainability researcher and friend of the blog Andrew Dana Hudson pointed us towards a show piece he wrote on the new gameplay footage for the new VR FPS shooter ‘Solarpunk’
Perhaps I’m being ungenerous to an early-stage trailer for a game that will eventually be very different. But in less than three minutes, the gameplay video seems to embrace most everything solarpunk as I’ve known it has been reacting against: soulless corporate aesthetics (covered up by plants), a future empty of diverse peoples and cultures, gunplay as the answer to delicate social and environmental problems, the centering individual heroes rather than collective action.
Worth a read if you are interested in the future of Solarpunk and how its aesthetic will get used as it moves into its new more widely known phase in culture, out in the sun. I think it speaks to our communities need to continually restate our commitments to create a multitude of spaces for indigenous sovereignties, reproductive justice, and radical queer politics.
Between 17th March 2020 and 17th May 2020 we found ourselves in isolation within the extended cityscape of Singapore. As inhabitants of what become known as “The Circuit Breaker” we watched and listened…
“What the word means is simple enough in German. Antifa is short for antifaschistisch, or anti-fascist. In the most literal sense, one might hope this label could apply to almost all modern German people and politicians.”
“Ethnographers can provide accounts that start from first-person experiences of otherwise-global phenomena, like changing rainfall patterns and frequent, high-intensity wildfires, and demonstrate how these layer into other lived encounters with sociality and infrastructure, like supply-chain ruptures, ventilator shortages, vaccine distribution, and digital contact tracing.”
“I hope us in the space sector can help young black, hispanic, white & asian kids have hope. Hope is having a future to look forward to. We are responsible for changing that narrative from despair to hope. Space is that future, not to abandon Earth but to help save it.” @capogloupic.twitter.com/d96e0ug1Kr
“Progress means: humanity emerges from its spellbound state no longer under the spell of progress as well, itself nature, by becoming aware of its own indigenousness to nature and by halting the mastery over nature through which nature continues its mastery.”
Cassandrafreude (n). the bitter pleasure of things going wrong in exactly the way you predicted, but no one believed you when it could have made a difference.
I’ve finally discovered the word that describes how nearly every climate scientist feels, h/t @fretmistress.
“Every photograph is an act amid a complex structure of choices. These choices, which extend beyond the time of the photograph, influence the photograph before, during and after its instant. Reading photographs in context is a participation in this complex”
–Between The Eyes. Essays on Photography and Politics. David Levi Strauss
Early in the crisis, the Right to Repair campaign came into its own, as hospitals - all of us! - found themselves in the same position as farmers (R2R’s staunchest advocates): isolated, far from parts and service, with urgent needs that could not wait.
Right from the start, the folks at Ifixit were on the case, putting out an open call for the repair and service manuals that hospital techs have long squirreled away and traded in secret for fear of reprisals from manufacturers:
That, after all, is medtech’s dirty secret: despite manufacturers’ claims that their products can’t be safely serviced without their consent (and without paying them), hospitals have ALWAYS fixed their own gear, because the alternative is letting people die.
It was manufacturers who were endangering patients, by making it harder for technicians laboring under time-pressure to save human lives to get the information they needed. No wonder state officials started demanding respirator repair guides.
Hospital technicians answered Ifixit’s call for repair manuals, opening up their secret hard-drives and inundating the service with more manuals than they could handle, so they enlisted The Maintainers and the American Library Association to help organize them.
Today, Ifixit’s Medical Device Repair portal is open and thriving, with manuals for repairing a vast array of medical equipment, during the pandemic and beyond.
They’re reversing the trend of deadly information hoarding. As Paul Kelley of Fremont’s Washington Hospital told Wired’s Lauren Goode: “We can do less and less work on equipment. We’re getting less and less documentation. Training is getting harder, and parts are getting scarcer.”
Predictably, the medtech lobbyists at Medical Imaging and Technology Alliance is warning that this will put people in danger - I suppose their answer is that if an authorized technician isn’t available, we should ensure patient safety by letting them die.
Home Computers is a new book tracing the industrial design of PCs in the 1970s and 1980s, AKA, the Cambrian explosion era, with some of the 1990s’ best designs as well.
Thanks to Scott Smith from @changeist for his talk for the #ArtScienceAtHome online conference, Feeling The Future. In it he introduced practical tools for mapping possible futures in a crisis.
two months of direct, viral instruction in the illusory unreality of the autonomous, self-contained, independent western individual. no wonder americans are losing their minds.
hey ‘being open to uncertainty’ is not a motivational quote or a meme but an actual rigorous, and quite exhausting practice that requires holding multiple possibilities simultaneously and being able to see connections between these possibilities and not retreating from the ache
Flying Fortress:“When eko asked me to write an article for him & ekosystem.org on the topic “
Self-Isolation - Tips From An Artist“ I mused a bit like: OK I have already jumped on all these „regular activities/projects“ - we put up our „Juke Box Coloring Book“ for free download (still up here ), I also sent in some more black’n’white drawings for similar projects and we released an „art puzzle“ with Affenfaust gallery to help people’s pastime.
So it was time to write something unusual and share a special view on one of my other hobbies…”
How To: Mushroom In Your Room
Since we moved with family into a little town-house last year I am just happy now to have a little garden to do all this spring planting and gardening to kill some of the extra time at home while quarantine lockdown. But even before I started to do some gardening during wintertime inside.
I started to grow mushrooms. The legal ones. Oyster mushrooms and suchlike.
Why? It’s just amazing! Everything about it!
It’s easy. It’s tasty homegrown food. They grow fast, like you can look twice a day and you gonna see significant growing happening! You can up-cycle your used coffee-grounds as substrate (or use dead wood or straw). So your organic waste turns into some new groceries! Brilliant!
Search online for a dealer (e.g. Germany: pilzpaket.de ) who is providing different starter-sets of mycelium (the „real mushroom; not the „fruits“ we colloquially generalize as „mushrooms“). It’s not even expansive.
When you start planting the mycelium on your “coffee soil“ in a pot it’s just important to work sterile - like washing your hands properly or using disposable gloves (ah come on, you should be trained on this already due to „the situation”, right?).
I am not taking this to deep in details. You should get an instruction sheet with all details together in any starter-kit (or go online).
Just again: it’s really easy. And it’s fun.
Within 3 weeks you should get your first harvest from your mushroom. Ready to cook.
See my documentary photos from my personal first experience in growing oyster mushrooms in my kitchen on top of the wall units (not in sunlight on the windowsill!).
And now comes the extra clue: after 1-2 waves of harvest you can split the „worn out“ mushroom into 2 pieces and start the whole thing over again in two bowls with new soil. So you basically double your mycelium/mushrom. And double… quadruple…and so on. It’s a bit the same as like kefir (just a mushroom in milk) or sourdough (for baking bread). You can share a bowl of mycelium with your friends so they can also start growing their own mushrooms.
Hoping this little article might has caught your interest!
Start growing. Take care & stay safe!
FÖRTRESS
I suppose one of the things this makes obvious is a collective inability to conceptualise, or narrate, the reality of a chronic, durational, massively distributed and avoidable catastrophic death event.
You know what would be worse. A weird anticorona virus that forced us to always be in tight huddles always with 6 people less than 6 feet away. In crowds of minimum 50. Except to go to the bathroom. Social closening. That sounds horrifying.
Neoclassical economics claims that “greed is good”—by following one’s own self-interest, “all boats rise.” Unfortunately, we have evidence—from biology to anthropology to sociology to economics—that it simply isn’t true. Only through pro-social, cooperative behavior can we all thrive. It’s time to put these principles into practice as we collectively tackle Coronavirus.
Allison starts by drawing the crucical distinction between “open source” (you can see the inner workings of the code) and “software freedom” (you can exercise technological self-determination), and explores the many ways that the former has eclipsed the latter.
From “tivoization” (where a vendor uses DRM to prevent users from modifying the code on the products they own) to moving everything to the cloud, where the underlying source code can’t be modified except by the cloud’s owners.
He describes how “open source” was a technocratic proposition, concerned with giving hackers technological self-determination while leaving users behind to take whatever they’re given - and how the failure of software licensing takes away self-determination even for hackers.
It reminds me powerfully of Mako Hill’s absolutely crucial 2018 Libreplanet keynote on the way that corporations have figured out how to use open source to hoard all the software freedom, while taking it away from the rest of us.
Allison excoriates software freedom orgs - like FSF and The Software Freedom Conservancy - for their focus on licenses, saying that licenses only really work for business-to-business negotiations, and are all but useless to individuals who lack wherewithal to sue big companies.
Instead, Allison calls for a focus on protocol documentation, saying that in a cloud-based era, real software freedom comes from being able to make compatible clients for existing servers, and compatible servers for existing clients.
I’m not entirely convinced; I think protocol documentation is incredibly imporant and agree with the analysis of the limitations of licenses and the rapacious hoarding of software freedom through DRM and cloud computing.
Protocol documentation will do something to address these, but not enough. There’s a legal side to this, and while Allison explicitly says that he’s more interested in engineering approaches than legal ones, there are limits to the engineering-only approach.
The reason that companies are able to resist license enforcement, and the reason that their enclosure of software commons is so effective, is that tech has become monopolized by a handful of firms, and they attained that monopoly through anticompetitive acts.
The traditional antitrust world did not permit firms to attain dominance through mergers with major competitors, catch-and-kill buyouts of nascent startups, or vertical monopolies where companies that owned platforms competed with the companies that used them.
These rules were heavily nerfed by Reagan, then further eroded by every administration since. Now, we have the an internet made of five giant services filled with screenshots of the other four.
The reason that companies adopted software freedom even before open source came along was their terror of competitors who might take away their customers by offering more freedom to them. Today, that terror has been eliminated, thanks to monopolization.
Facebook is losing millions of users every year…to Instagram.
The incredible profits created by monopolies allow Big Tech firms to create new legal weapons - new laws and new interpretations of existing law - that allow them to punish people who make interoperable products without permission.
This legal power to block Adversarial Interoperability is one of the critical ways that Big Tech maintains its monopolies. I think Allison’s analysis of the practical limitations of licenses is spot on.
But interop isn’t just a matter of documentation, there’s a crucial legal dimension to it as well.
“In an attempt to better understand their colonial subjects in those years, officials in the British empire undertook a curious and little-known research project: to collect dreams from the people of South Asia, Africa and the Pacific. The results were not what they expected.”
“Seligman struggled to impose meaning on his unusual archive. When he tried to establish universalities, exceptions and contradictions proliferated. And when he tried to draw sharp distinctions between the minds of Britons on the one hand, and colonial subjects on the other, commonalities asserted themselves. Even in a situation where researchers held all the power – with the authority of the imperial state behind them, and an elaborate theoretical structure setting the terms of the encounter – their subjects did not always follow the script.”
“Did colonial officials get what they wanted from these growing collections of Freudian data? Some results, to be sure, ended up in tendentious arguments portraying anticolonial politics as the product of mental illness. The language of ‘frustration-aggression’ reactions and ‘deculturation’ disorders allowed some British officials to suggest that calls for independence derived from inchoate expressions of anger and immaturity. Once again, however, a clear-cut vindication of empire through expert knowledge proved elusive. The same studies that furnished evidence of indigenous pathology could not avoid pointing to the damage inflicted by British rule: the crushing racial hierarchies, the lack of economic opportunities, the weirdly Anglocentric schooling. Some researchers even suggested that imperialism, not anticolonial nationalism, was the real mental disorder; they explained the behaviour of British colonialists in terms of status anxieties, sexual hang-ups, and feelings of insecurity.”
Good time to be a futurist. Since all old futures have been trashed there’s demand for building up a whole new set of futures. Most futurists will fail though since they were trained in adjacent possible variational futures, not blank-modes futures.
— Venkatesh “sergeant mode” Rao (@vgr) May 2, 2020
One of the best conferences I’ve attended is Re:publica in Berlin, which manages to both attract and criticize the tech industry. This year’s conference is (obviously) online only, and I was honored to be asked to record a keynote for it.
My talk is called “The Collapse: How institutions, trust and truth are annihilated by monopoly and corruption.” It’s on May 7 at 8:25 Berlin time.
“The pandemic isn’t the only disease that’s annihilating our society: alongside of it, there is an epidemic of mistrust in institutions and a growth in conspiricism, a panic to save yourself and let everyone else fend on their own.”
“Blaming Big Tech for the collapse in trust and commonly held truth is backwards: Big Tech’s bigness is en effect, not a cause, of the corruption that made our institutions so untrustworthy.”
“Another problematic aspect of Western figure of the tool-making animal is the confounding of media with technology. Machines that process texts, images, and sounds, I contend, are significantly distinct from machines that act on materials like wood and iron. However important these mechanical machines are, they are very different and have very different implications from information machines. Media machines act on the components of culture, not nature (if that distinction may still be employed), affecting human beings in a way very different from the mechanical machines. One might say that information machines are closer to humans than mechanical machines and establish relations with them that are more profound.”
— Flusser, Vilém.Into the Universe of Technical Images 1985. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
This is almost as bad as the class I ran a decade ago when one student wrote a custom particle filter from scratch and another one submitted a HASKELL COMPILER. How the hell am I supposed to assign numbers to these things?
The Creation of the Humanoids and the Sins of the Fleshapoids in a Still Life avec le péché dans la riviere For Whom Mind is Outer Space and Eternity is a Long Time. pic.twitter.com/RAdycIcdFB
What’s more, they’ve got an advanced suite of tools for searching and downloading these images. It’s a really impressive technical and cultural achievement.
But there’s a fly in the ointment (more than one).
First, the museum takes the position that these public domain works acquire a new copyright once someone makes a high-quality photo of them. They have chosen a very restrictive CC license (CC BY-NC-SA).
This is wrong as a matter of UK law, as the UK Intellectual Property Office has stated:
“Copyright can only subsist in subject matter that is original in the sense that it is the author’s own ‘intellectual creation’. Given this criterion, it seems unlikely that what is merely a retouched, digitised image of an older work can be considered as ‘original’.”
Beyond that, the museum’s claim to be the sole commercial exploiter of these works is a bad look, given how much of its collection was stolen - looted - from colonized lands.
“When we stole these artifacts, it was culture. When you sell our pictures, that’s theft.”
I’m very sympathetic to the museum’s imperatives. They are struggling through both a decade of Tory austerity and a once-in-a-century economic apocalypse, so obviously they want to hold onto any revenue-generating possibilities they can find.
But the museum’s long-term survival can’t depend on philanthropists - plutes are dilettantes and most of the time they’re not actually “giving,” they’re just laundering their reputations.
Nor can it rely on monopolizing the sale of t-shirts and postcards with photos of looted artifacts on them. That’ll bring in pennies, while they need millions.
The future of museums - of the public sector overall - is public support. It’s only through broad public recognition of the social value of museums and other cultural institutions that they can once again attain stable, long-term financing.
And one way to do that is to make the museum a daily part of Britons’ lives - say, by allowing crafters and artists to make and sell works derived from the collection, by not placing restrictions on the high-quality reproductions the museum commissions.
“Friends will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no friends” goes double for museums and other cultural institutions.
Without the political will that comes from being treasured by the public, the trajectory of these institutions is to eventually become entirely dependent on rich donors, who have no reason to fund or maintain them as public bodies.
Not when those treasures will look ever so much nicer in their summer homes.
How could administration become a site for action and intervention, radical histories, dark arts, wild experiments, new collectivities and meaningful work?
Everybody is sure their predicted future has arrived.
So you now live in a socialist libertarian authoritarian statist ancap monarchist democracy with high-tech Stone Age apocalyptic dysto-utopian Chinese characteristics.
All you need to do is create a polar coordinate system that places 1 pole in say palembang. Then project that to Cartesian and voila. I don’t know why cartographers chose north and south poles to base their maps.
Great Britain has ~60 million inhabitants and four native languages (English, Gàidhlig, Scots, and Welsh).
Sumatra’s muuuuuch bigger in area, has almost as many people (~58 million), and somewhere around 50 native languages (Malay, Minang, Acehnese, Gayo, Lampung, Rejang…).
The other day someone told me about a program that will generate scenes to match a text description. I’m always excited to test out algorithms like this because the task of “draw anything a human asks for” is so hard that even state-of-the-art results are hilariously bad.
I tried a few test prompts.
“Nicest alien wants to say hi”
“The end of the world”
“A planetarium full of marbles”
Depending on what you ask for, it can seem for a while like maybe the neural net is doing well. But then you get to results like this:
“Horse riding a bicycle”
“Tyrannosaurus eating pizza”
Why does it sometimes generate something that’s a halfway recognizable attempt at completely the wrong thing?
I think I figured it out. Look at this series of images.
Triceratops, Tree frog, Hourglass, Fireplace… It’s matching every prompt with a vaguely similar word.
And because I’ve played a lot with image-generating neural nets, I even recognized the categories: they’re all from Fei-Fei Li’s famous ImageNetproject. So if a phrase isn’t already an ImageNet category (like “horse on a bicycle”), this program looks for its closest match - in this case, it seems to have gone for “house finch” so it’s going for similarity in spelling rather than in meaning. “The end of the world” turned into “hen of the woods”, a type of large ruffled mushroom. I’m not sure why “tyrannosaurus eating a pizza” seems to have turned into “measuring cup”. The “nicest alien” is slightly easier to explain, since there are a LOT of dog categories in ImageNet so chances are decent a given phrase will match to a dog.
Here’s an interesting one: “God”
There’s no “God” category in ImageNet, but there is one for “hog”.
As far as I can tell, this demo’s not being used anywhere other than this one weird demo site, so there’s no harm in it being blissfully, weirdly wrong about stuff. But it does give me a small satisfaction to think that I may have figured out HOW it’s being so vividly wrong. Still puzzling about that tyrannosaurus rex, though.
Bonus material: I’ve collected a few more examples of prompts + results, some of which I find really baffling. You can enter your email here, and I’ll send them to you.
You can explore some of the ImageNet categories (and even mix them together, or compute the opposite of guacamole) using Artbreeder.com (the “general” image type). If you figure out what some of these mystery phrases mapped to, please tell me in the comments!
“Plastic words are not new in how they look but in how they are used. They have been fashioned for the purpose of laying down the tracks and outlining the routes of a civilization that is covering the globe with gathering speed. Their origins can no longer be discerned. They resemble one another. It is as though there were a place somewhere in the world where these words were being released at intervals, as though at an unknown place there existed a factory releasing them complete from its assembly line, or as if they were coming into being simultaneously in many different places.”
— Uwe Pörksen, Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”
“Before I propose a more formal analysis of what toys are, I have to admit that I am fascinated by the completeness of procedural toys and how they operate as alterity machines. Procedural toys are mesmerizing because they are frames of the otherness, because they are tiny worlds that operate by their own condition.”
— Sicart, Miguel. Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014.
‘The village [of Kepuh] on Java island has deployed a cast of “ghosts” to patrol the streets, hoping that age-old superstition will keep people indoors and safely away from the coronavirus.’ https://t.co/JHgeDCjTPapic.twitter.com/umP1kn7WbZ
Yes, I know Rome is burning. I feel a coward for ducking away from the topic in public speech, but I find myself still with nothing to say. Is there solidarity in sharing the same, self-evident truths as everyone else, or is it a hollow posture?
NEW: It took four years but I just got some newly declassified CIA reports studying the Soviet Union’s use of “black magic”, telepathic mind control and “psychotronic generators” – devices they said turned people into psychics and let them move objects with their minds. #FOIApic.twitter.com/MU7ogeaCGJ
— Emma Best 🏳️🌈 🏴 (Mx. Yzptlk) (@NatSecGeek) April 13, 2020
#COVID19#RIPConway John Conway was a cross between Archimedes, Jagger and Salvador Dalí. For many years, he worried that his obsession with playing silly games was ruining his career – until he realised that it could lead to extraordinary discoveries.https://t.co/2oPsRIrVompic.twitter.com/lw4521AWqo
“Mechanical toys, as well as autonomous toys, hold a different promise, a different type of fascination. The mechanical toy and its close relative, the procedural toy (understood in a narrow sense as those mechanical toys implemented with computers and focused on simulating systems), are paradoxical objects that put their users in the double role of performer and voyeur. Mechanical and procedural toys are fascinating because they don’t require us; they seem to be playing on their own. We play with them to see how they behave, how they react. Sim City is a magnificent spectacle, a toy that can operate on its own while tempting us to tinker with its parameters to both see and understand what happens — and all the while, creating a feeling of otherness, a playful microcosm that we, as observers and tinkerers, want not to inhabit but to observe.”
— Sicart, Miguel. Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014.
“The difference between technology and magic is that technology works regardless of whether you believe in it or not.”
“So computers are magic?”
“Computers are magic.”
“Not all “toys” are created as toys. One of the most fascinating capacities of humans is being able to toy around with almost any object they can find. From pebbles to tree branches, to more complex technological objects, humans seem to enjoy playing with things, turning them in ways other than those expected, intended, or recommended. We use our hands, our body, to appropriate an object and explore its functionalities and meaning in ways often unexpected.”
— Sicart, Miguel. Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014.
If you own a rice cooker, Taiwan’s FDA made a PSA stating that you can put your disposable PPE or mask in your rice cooker (with no water) and set it to steam for three minutes to sterilize it and re-use.
“Funnily enough, it’s not comforting to be told that you have to go into battle with your disease, like some kind of medieval knight on a romantic quest… The idea that illness is a character test, with recovery as a reward for the valiant, is glib to the point of insult.”
