Category Archives: Culture

These posts will deal with Copyright and other cultural topics

Book Review: The People’s Platform: Taking back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

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I just finished reading “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age” by Astra Taylor  I really found this book to be interesting. I believe it offered a very different critique on the digital age than Evegny Morozov’s “Click here to Save everything” where he focused on the arrogance of the algorithm and total solutionism of the movement, Taylor focused on the cultural cost of our digital economy. I think combined the philosophizing of Morozov with Taylor’s discussion of the value of culture and the economic forces behind these changes is an extremely powerful argument. Alone they are both excellent, but I think they offer balancing points that compliment each other well.

First of all, I don’t think everyone will like this book. I don’t think a lot of my readers will like large portions of the book. However, even the most libertarian will agree with some portions of it. I think that’s the power of this book. It’s not really fair to one side or the other, although is really obvious she has a bias – which she wears pretty proudly. Knowing this bias is there allows the reader to decide which portion is Occupy Wall street dreaming or which is really a problem (of course one can go too far either direction).

Taylor’s cultural argument is powerful because we are all part of that economy. We all consume cultural artifacts or perhaps, like myself, make them. The fact that these have been commoditzed to a cost of nothing while still valuable is something we deal with daily. The choice between pirating a movie, renting, streaming it on Netflix, or buying it all are choices we decide on a regular basis. I think that even the most hardcore pirate buys a lot of cultural goods.

Many of us, even if we don’t produce cultural goods, know someone that does. You might watch a video game streamer, you might have a friend or two that are in various bands, you might read my blog or another friend’s blog. All of these people want to use these artifacts to either live on or perhaps enhance their career in some fashion.

However, in the digital space most of the companies that share or distribute cultural activities are funded by ads. Twitch makes most of it money from ads, Google makes $50 billion/year on ads, Facebook makes the most money on an ad whenever a friend “Sponsors” that ad with or without our active agreement to “sponsor” the ad.

Taylor argues that we need to help develop a cultural public space that helps create value for other cultural goods that you may not actually consume (which is why I wrote this blog).

Many of the ideas in the book are anti-corporation, but not because they make money. Instead, it’s because they make money in ways that aren’t obviously ads and that control our cultural destiny. She is pro-net neutrality, she supports companies making profits from ads, but she argues for more transparency that an article is actually sponsored.

Her argument isn’t that we should tear down companies, but instead that we pull back some of the power that these companies have simply taken without any real conversation. We need to look at the ethics behind the algorithms they are using and understand their biases. We need to enable true conversations about these topics. Ad driven content leads to self-censorship and lower quality products.

Is this book perfect? Not by a long shot, but it really made me think about some topics and I think that we need to have more conversations about not just ads, but also about why companies behave the way they do. We need to find a better balance than we currently have.

I rate the book 5/5 for making me really think about topics

A retrospective, 250 posts and counting

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I’m on my 250th post. Quite the milestone, I haven’t done a retrospective post in a while about the history of my writing. I’ve tried a few different tact from the beginning and I’m happy to say that I’ve managed to gather a bit of a following on twitter, largely driven by my association with KBMOD, but I’ve found a decent number of my own through tweets and retweets.

My initial goal with this blog was to write about a lot of different highly technical topics that I felt that would have some sort of impact on people I know that might not really understand what’s going on. I’ve gotten a bit farther away from that as I’ve changed life situations. When I first started blogging I was in my master’s degree in the Netherlands, which really lent my writing a bit more of a scientific perspective. During the first year or so of my blogging (I’m on year 3 now), I frequently sited the scientific articles that I was reading for class. The important piece wasn’t that I was citing these writings, which I did at the time feel lent some weight to my writing, but was that I was actively and continually applying my education to real world situations.

I was hoping that this blog, along with my education, would help me find a policy position either in the Netherlands or in the US. This turned out not to have happened, which after about 6 months of looking for a job, while still living in the Netherlands, I quickly realized I needed to switch to looking for a job in my field of Business Process Improvement and/or Lean Six Sigma. This impacted my writing, because I got a job at AMD, where I tried to applied what I had learned from the University to a corporate position. I believe my writing reflected this to some extent. It was a frustrating year. My writing suffered, I reduced my blogging and tended to focus on writing more about how internet things rather than some of the other things I used to write.

Now I’m at yet another company and I’m struggling to figure out what I want to consistently write about. I’ve bounced around a bit – I tried a consistent schedule but quickly fell off the wagon. I’ve tried keeping up with current events, but I’ve found my interest in many of the topics to have waned. This has made writing much more difficult and caused me to bounce back and forth between topics and to be focusing more on cultural aspects rather than other technology, innovation, or science topics.

I’m not sure what that means for me or for the future of my writing. I’d love to have my readers to contribute suggestions or topics that they’d like me to write about. I think that’s a lot of fun and really helps direct my writing to topics my readers enjoy and are hoping to understand better.

I plan on writing about some topics related to two books I’m in the process of reading, People’s Platform and then Capital in the 21st Century. I’m hoping to help people understand the impact of the internet more and an economics book that a lot of policy makers are talking about. If you have any book recommendations shoot those at me too!

Kickstarter to end Government Corruption

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In my blog yesterday I talked about the value of culture, we know that it intrinsically has value because all participate in it – we just don’t want to pay for that culture. Serious problems. One of the biggest conflicts we have right now is within the internet users relates to content and other cultural icons. A lot of people want it to be easily accessible and other people want it tightly controlled. This of course has been playing out in our courts over the past decade or so.

One of the first people that’s influenced me in regard to culture and sharing and so on, has been Lawrence Lessig. He’s written a few really accessible books about copy right. However, he’s since moved on from fighting copyright extremism to fighting corruption in the US government. I wrote a review about his first book in this arena, he’s written two other since. He’s a big fan of how the internet works and truly believes in platforms like kickstarter (Which could help address some of my concerns from yesterday over keeping a vibrant market place of cultures).

To this end, he’s decided to create a super pac in the spirit of a Kickstarter campaign. He’s calling it MayOne in honor of “May Day” admitting that he’s using it as a call for help. A call to help fix the US government.

I think that this platform offers an interesting opportunity for all of those folks out there that hate our current political system. The initial campaign is to influence 5 congressional seats as well as push for 5 specific acts that will create real reform. Here’s a link to the reform bills they’d want to push form.

I’ve pledged money for this. Why? Because I think that we need to create change in the US government and I believe that Lessig’s plan has the best chance to work. He’s taking the long view and has a real plan for driving change. It’s not going to be an immediate fix it’s going to take several years for real change to happen. This is also a way to influence change with only a few dollars. The goal is to raise $1 million and Lessig will match that million. Their next goal is 5 million, which he will then also match setting up the war chest for 2016. His goal is to help get multiple reform candidates elected to effect change.

I think that this is a way forward and that most of the candidates that MayOne will support will also support things like Net Neutrality, Copyright reform, and similar topics that most of my readers are concerned with.

The Value of Culture

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A friend of mine sent me a link about the variety of dialects found in Pennsylvania, it’s a pretty cool read. The article basically argues that because of the number of dialects, 5 in total, Pennsylvania is one of the most interesting states in the US for linguists. It reminded me of whenever I first moved to the Netherlands. I made a few friends and they were always making fun of the Limburgians because Limburgese sounds really funny. It’s has a mixture of Dutch, German, Spanish, and other stuff, plus they say the Dutch words really funny. So I decided to play them a PIttsburghese song, they couldn’t understand a word in the song. They actually asked me if it was English.

Which brings me to my next point, the Netherlands, which is roughly half the size of PA, has 2 languages at least 5 dialects (Limburgese is on it’s way to being a third language). Sure the country has a lot more people 18 million vs. 12 million, but there’s a lot more diversity in their language than in PA. Which is pretty interesting – especially considering that they’ve kept this variety whenever they also know somewhere between 3-5 languages (Dutch, English, German, Spanish, French for example). One of the concerns of the Slate article about PA is that the folks that leave decide to lose their accents which isn’t the case in the Netherlands.

These are all part of the local culture and language is one of the best representations of a culture. The words that people use to describe things really influences the way they want to live. For example the Dutch word “Gezellig” (link explains how to say the word) doesn’t really have an English translation the closest being “warm and cozy” for a room, but can be used in many different contexts (most beyond my understanding of the application). This word kind of represents a goal of a gathering, house, or anything. I think it strongly influences who the Dutch are and who they want to be their friends. It’s embedded in their culture.

I’m currently reading a book called “People’s Platform” which has a huge emphasis on culture and the cultural enablers of the internet. The internet is both the best thing and worst thing that has ever happened to our culture. It’s fantastic because I can still find out about awesome bands from friends all over the world, but it’s also extremely isolating because of algorithms that shape how we find content from 3rd parties. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve heard people express the thoughts that people are the best at recommending a new band compared to Pandora.

We have the opportunity to expand our culture a little bit if we put forth the effort. However, that’s a lot of effort. It’s hard to find people you have things in common with on some platforms and it’s easier to just find the popular people and follow them. I’ve made the effort to keep Dutch connects on my twitter feed because I loved living there. I have intentionally followed many women because I want to see their opinions as well as a few minorities. However, for the most part they are fairly under represented. It’s tough, because you want things that interest you on your twitter feed and a lot of people are into very different things than I am.

Which begs the question, how do we ensure a robust culture in an environment where we and our algorithms are actively trying to homogenize the cultural goods we interact with? This isn’t an easy problem to answer especially since we like free goods on the internet. I stream Pandora for free (ads on my phone), I haven’t bought an actual song or album in years. I want to support bands, but I know so little goes to the actual band these days. For Twitch I support 2 people (kbmod and nipnops) because I know the money goes to them to help produce the content I love. However, even with all the people paying, it’s not enough to allow nipnops to live solely on this income.

I think that we should seriously consider a living wage for artists and entertainers. I believe there is a need to support content I don’t like because we need to make sure that people see it. If the Dutch don’t understand all aspects of Americans (they’d never heard of Pittsburghese) how can we ever hope to understand other cultures if we don’t help enable them to reach us?

 

What are your thoughts?

Lack of Net Neutrality will be a competitive liability in the future for the US

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Net Neutrality could be dead in the US and I think that this creates problems for companies that do business in other parts of the world. Or rather, it creates incentives for companies based in the US to focus on non-US markets for conducting business. There are several reasons for this. Let’s take this from a Netflix perspective, assuming they were able to get the same catalog they currently have in the US and took it into Europe (this has been difficult for US companies while it’s been easier for EU companies to come into the US – see Pandora and Spotify as references). Let’s assume that can happen and they have they opportunity to continue to work in one region or the other.

The EU has recently enacted end-to-end Net Neutrality as the law of the land. So, Netflix traffic cannot be slowed down because of the volume. It cannot be slowed down because it is Netflix traffic, all traffic if it needs to be groomed happens at the same time (likely random or everything gets slowed down). Netflix cannot be charged by the ISP to ensure specific speed to guarantee quality of product, if Netflix wants to control this, it’s up to them (they could manage this through increased buffering before the video starts, for example). The average internet speed is significantly higher than in the US, so the quality will be higher and the need for buffering lower, because the speed can account for dropped packets much more effectively. This means if they charge 8 Euros a month, they are able to keep more of that.These conditions would also apply in Argentina.

In the US, Netflix traffic is now subject to the whims of the ISP. the ISP can slow down traffic based on the time of the day, based on the source of the traffic (using deep packet inspection). They can and have charged Netflix for equal access as, for example, Comcast Xfinity’s streaming service. The US has some of the lowest average internet speeds in the industrialized world. Netflix charges $8/month they have to pay Comcast to ensure that their service meets their end users requirements.

As a company that makes money based on the fact that they are able to deliver high quality content (where the price of said content is continually rising), I would prefer to operate in the EU rather than the US. I will have significantly less issues with the ISPs because they can’t discriminate my traffic and I won’t have to pay to make sure that they do not discriminate my traffic. This means that my quality will increase and my cost per user will not increase as it will in the US. I would begin focusing on providing local language content as well as the best content I can provide from the highest quality sources in the world.

As we start moving towards higher speed requirements in our applications, this will become a larger problem. I know of people online that have issue streaming up to Twitch and Mixify as well as streaming the content to their computer. This is a problem now. We will be moving into significantly higher quality video and games (PS4 streaming a game to your console, that will require a lot of bandwidth and low latency $$$$$). Furthermore, if we start having more tele-medicine we’ll need higher quality video feeds to ensure best results.

These are all examples of applications we know of that will suffer from a lack of net neutrality. As we get people that develop applications for gigabit connections, we’ll start to see net neutrality as paramount. These companies will not be able to afford the required costs for the internet speeds required for effective applications.

This means that the EU and other net neutral countries may become the source of innovation for these applications or companies that create them in the US will need to move to markets like the EU for a user base that can fully exploit their application.

We’ll effectively be playing on an Xbox 360, when high quality PCs are out there. We’ll be at a serious disadvantage.