Category Archives: Culture

These posts will deal with Copyright and other cultural topics

Culture wars: the battle we didn’t know we’re losing for access to our culture

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Our culture is being held hostage

Humans are a collection of story tellers. When we hang out with our friends, new and old, we spend a great deal of time telling stories. These stories define who we are. In cases where we first meet we try to find common ground through current events, current cultural experiences, like the Olympics – TV shows, books, and movies. When you know nothing about another person, these are the only basis you have for building an understanding of what they stand for and who they are. To be honest, in many ways they are terrible indicators of what type of person they are, but they can help you identify if that person is someone with a similar world view to your own. Once you move past those conversations you move on to personal stories. The things that made you laugh and, conscious or not , enter into a game of one upmanship. Now most of the time you’re just trying to find a similar experience to relate to theirs, but it can be misconstrued.

In many cases the only context you’ll ever have with the person is through a shared experience, access to our communal culture. Regardless of our awareness or how willing to admit it we are, we have cultural gate keepers. To access any of our current culture we have to pay to access it. That’s fine, the people that produced it should definitely get paid for the work that they did. However, the people we’re paying are necessarily the people that produced the work. We’re paying for internet access at least twice (if you have home internet and a mobile data plan). In some cases that means you’re paying the same company twice for access to the same thing (verizon wireless and verizon FiOS).

Additionally, these companies have no incentive to provide better access to the content that you want o see. It’s actually in their best interest to make it more difficult and have worse service, so that the services that you want to access will pay them again for you to access the service that you are paying to access. Furthermore, these same companies think that if you use the internet a lot you should pay a higher rate!

This isn’t really anything new. I’ve been saying this for a few years. But what drives this is rent seeking behavior, investors that don’t really know what’s going on, and arrogance.

Shrinking Public Domain

The public domain is the area of our culture that no one owns any more. It’s been published for so long that it’s free to be consumed by everyone. Disney hates this. The main reason is that Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain, or would be based on the laws at the time of his creation. However, Disney is not above using the public domain to make a lot of money. Here’s a list of movies they’ve created based on public domain (over 50). FIFTY movies based on the public domain – it’s great for a corporation to exploit the public domain, but if you try to do something you’re going to get sued.

I’ve written about Lawrence Lessig a lot, he’s a bit of a hero of mine. He’s got a lot of integrity and really pushes for what he believes. He recently was sued (he’s a copyright lawyer) and forced a settlement with the company. He’s one of the few people that can do this, he has the knowledge, the money, and the desire to do this. In many other cases, it’s up to pro bono lawyers to fight these cases because the person in the wrong cannot fight. It’s literally David vs. Goliath. However, if David is provided the right resources most of the time Goliath goes down.

This is the case we’re dealing with in the propose Comcast Time Warner merger. Where the people most impacted have little voices. Companies are pushing to turn more of our activities into opportunities to make money. Gamers that stream on Twitch are going to be pushed to pay more, Twitch is going to be pushed to pay more for high quality access for uploads and downloads, and the people watching those streams are going to be forced to pay for quality streams. This is our culture. We are people that don’t want to be controlled by cable companies. We don’t want to be forced to deal with this. Our needs are not being met by the market.

Because we’re disparate, companies and incumbents are winning the culture war. Most people aren’t aware that we’re in a battle over affordable access to our culture. Memes, TV shows, Movies, and whatever retarded shit we watch on the internet is our culture. Making it inaccessible is a battle our gate keepers are winning. We need to figure out how to fight back. I plan on switching from Comcast when I move and never going back. I plan on switching to T-mobile and never going back to Verizon. It’s time to put our money where our mouth is. It’s going to be painful, but without our support those companies can’t oust the incumbents and cannot force change.

We need to force change with our wallets.

Russia and the prisoner’s dilemma

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For the past few years we’ve been playing a prisoner’s dilemma with Russia. In fact, I’d argue that this goes back farther than just a few years, it might even go back to our two wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan. The US essentially was able to convince through a mixture of sympathy, arm twisting, and out right lies as we know now.

Since then at every turn Russia has been a balancing force or antagonizing force depending on your perspective, to US goals in different parts of the world; specifically in places like Liberia, Syria, and Turkey. In none of these cases was Russia in a position to really push back against the US and definitely could not have pushed for Sanctions against the US.

Now, with the Ukraine crisis it’s not longer through proxies. This is a head to head game against some of the most corrupt politicians on earth. These politicians make our “corrupt” politicians look like kittens. They are not afraid to lock up someone for political dissent, like Pussy Riot or many others. Furthermore, there are a lot of accusations of out right poisoning or murder as well. In the US, there might be calls for sending someone to prison, but truthfully, I don’t think that anyone would be happy if it was incredibly easy to send a duly elected official in the US to prison. We might like it to be easier or whatever, but it’s not and it’s even better that it’s hard for dissenters to be sent to prison.

Obama likely has gained some experience with the brinkmanship that’s happened in the US in the past few months, but that’s really nothing compared to Putin’s experience as a KGB agent and running Russia for the past 15 years. For the Crimea (where Russia has “invaded or not”) this has some serious implications. At this point the US can do a few things, commit militarily, push for sanctions – likely including removing Russia from UN and other international bodies, and little else. To preempt any discussion on sanctions Russia has already said that happens they will simply shift away from the Dollar and stop repaying any US banks.

This is what we have to look forward to with this Crimea Crisis. Russia and the US are both in a no-blink position over this. The US believes that Russia is in the wrong with their actions in Crimea and Ukraine, while Russia believes it is doing nothing wrong.

We’re entering a pretty terrifying time with these stand offs. At this point we don’t know how the people are playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Are they all playing the game as if we’re going to have another turn? In all the other cases I’d say that yes, we’ve played as if there will be more turns. However, people are arguing we’re on the brink of another cold-war. I can’t make a claim either way for that – I look back at movies from the 80’s and at times have difficulty remembering the context that movie was filmed in. However, thinking about the tension in this situation and the fear that the other guy is only planning on one interaction that it’s this and never another move, that’s pretty terrifying – especially since I want to keep playing.

Science, evidence, and paradigms

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Last night was a big debate between Bill Nye the Science Guy and Creationist Ken Ham. This was to help inform people that the science supporting evolution and how that refutes the “science” behind creationism. One of the key questions during the debate was around what would be required to convince Bill Nye that creationism was true and evolution was false. He said “Evidence” essentially. While, this is the ideal answer for a scientist, I find it unlikely. This, of course, isn’t a popular oppinion. It’s not that Bill Nye doesn’t believe that he would change his mind or that he would change his mind quickly, but it’s unlikely. People aren’t purely rational, in a purely rational world, yes that’s exactly what would happen. Even scientists have a serious problem with this. Scientists still suffer from the same sort of denial that global warming denialist, however, this impact is the largest inside of their field rather than outside.

Why do we know that this is true? According to Karl Popper whenever theories are incommensurate it’s unlikely that a leading theoriest in that field will switch to the new theory or paradigm. What does this mean? Well, if we think about scientific theories in terms of technology it will become easier to understand. Let’s look at jets and propellors for airplanes. It was clear in the early 50’s that jet engines were the way to go, but not all companies decided to pursue that type of engine. Instead these companies decided to continually tweak the capabilities of props instead. A similar reaction happened with sail technology and steam engines in this case sail techology was still more effective than steam, it took years before steam would catch up let alone surpass sail.

This similarly happens with scientific theories. What happens is that flaws start to appear that the theory cannot easily explain. For example, in the Geocentric theory planets would seem to track backwards over time and then begin to move forward. Theories about how these planets had small circles that would regularly appear through the course of their normal revolution around earth. The mathematics for this theory became increasingly complex and seemingly less realistic. The heliocentric approach reduced the complexity and eliminated the small circles and allowed for the eventual creation of Newtonian physics. However, whenever this started to break down and Einstein proposed relativity, it was largely ignored for decades. Essentially, it took until that generation retired for relativity to finally get accepted by the broader scientific community. This happens to scientific theories on a regular basis.

In fact, there are some pretty serious debates going on about the full mechanics of evolution. The original basis of the theory are still true, heredity, competition/pressure, and variety, however the nuances are being debated. For instance Richard Dawkin’s theories have started to fall a bit out of favor, while we’re learning that there are some things that we do in our lives that impact our genes. Those changed genes could be inhereted, which could change the next generation – this was Lamarcain to the core. However, Dawkins will likely not accept a different theory than the one he’s devoted to his life to. So, while to some extent it’s true that scientists will and do change their mind, it’s more likely that Science will change while individual scientist will take significantly longer if they ever do.

Saving video games from publishers

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There’s big money in video games. No one can deny that, especially now that the definition of casual gaming has changed from Wii type games, to games on your phone that mimic some really old school type flash games (bejeweled for example). One of the largest game publisher is EA, they have been notorious for making both amazing games (BF4), amazingly bad games, amazing games with poor execution (SimCity), and amazing cash grabs (Dungeon Keeper iPhone). However, it’s not alone in trying to destroy gaming.

Zynga made a pretty big run at the title and likely helped shape the current state of our gaming industry. They were the original most successful company in facebook for gaming coming up with Mobwars and Farmville. They’ve been replaced with King.com (Candy Crush) now though and have nearly gone out of business. At one point they had a higher valuation than Facebook.

The point of these games is similar to a casino. Keep you coming back and keep you putting money into the machine. They design games to be addicting and put frustrating blockers in your way to entice you to pay money to overcome those obstacles. They technically are “Free-to-play” but they certainly aren’t “free-to-have-fun”. For example, about a year ago Real Racing 3 came out and to unlock everything with cash, it would cost $503!

The article that got me thinking about this topic highlights a 1997 game called Dungeon Keeper which has been released on mobile platforms. In the game you build a dungeon and try to kill heroes that come through and kill your monsters. One of the things you do is dig out spaces for your dungeon, this used to just take a minute or two in game time. Well, EA did it’s little cash grab option with it and now that same space will take roughly 30 hours to mine out unless you pay them money to speed that up! Here’s a video with a nice little summary of the topic.

Now, we know that this hasn’t been limited to mobile games for some time. It’d hit the hardcore gamers in the form of Downloadable content (DLC) and in many cases would be a $15 or so charge to make the game functional on top of the $50-$60 you already paid for the game. In some cases they’ll also charge you for other visual upgrades and stuff like that.

In some cases the companies are doing it because it’s a beloved franchise and they know people will fork over the money for it even if they’ve vowed to never buy from that company again (BF4 after SimCity debacle for instance). This is because they are able to charge monopoly prices being the only game in town.

In other cases, they are able to charge this behavior because of the addictiveness of the game and the pressure of your peers playing the same game. It’s a casino mixed with keeping up with the Joneses mentality. The worst of the worst and company are pulling in as much money as they can on it. In many cases those games are straight up copies from other companies – or at least the game mechanics are the same.

This has made some people discouraged over the future of the gaming business model. I believe that we have some of the most generous people in the world in gaming. You have the Extra-Life fund raising event, HumbleBundle, and a ton of other things like that. There are also really honest folks out there trying to break into the industry, just look at Steam Green Light, Kickstarter Games (check out KBMOD’s Crowdsourced corner), and just the sheer number of new games and apps that have a single price and are honest about their pricing (this link will take you to a list of games that are pay upfront or honest free to play).

Which makes me think that we have two different type of people running gaming companies. We clearly have psychopaths at the head of the company and normal regular people trying to do right by their customers. I think the hardest thing is, we have honest people working for those psychopaths, which is unfortunate.

What can we do as gamers and employees? Well, if you think your CEO is a psychopath leave; it’s going to be an unhealthy work environment in general. Secondly, if we want to see those business models die, educate your friends on how horrible this movement is for gaming in general and point them to cheaper alternatives that aren’t cash grabs. Help inform your friends that aren’t savvy about this. Send them links to games that are better, more fun, and less vile in their pricing schemes.

If you have any recommendations for honest, safe gaming, let me know in the comments!

Risk of downloading apps

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The NSA has been collecting information through our emails, our “metadata”, our cell phone calls, and now we can add to the list “Leaky Apps.” In a recently released article on The Guardian, it’s been revealed that the NSA was using Angry Birds, on both iOS and Android, to collect information directly from the cell phone of a user. This completely changes the type of information the NSA knows about you. It’s not just who you recently talked to (in the past five years) but for many smart phones it could be significantly longer than that. For example, if the App is leaky enough to allow access to other applications on the phone, then it’s possible for the NSA to access the full all of their email, my Gmail account has emails from 2005 or earlier on it still. I archive things – probably going to go delete all of these emails.

According to the NSA, access to the full collection of social networks is even more valuable than access to phone records. With apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/Vine, Google+ and SnapChat, we are uploading and sending real time pictures and video of our lives. For a group of people interested in knowing everything about everyone, seeing real pictures is really valuable – especially since those same pictures will likely be associated with a GPS signal and at least one or two cell towers. In the case of an ongoing criminal investigation that will be invaluable.

This is infinitely more intrusive than only collecting the bulk information that we knew of before. In cases of snapchat and Vine it’s likely that the government is capturing our very private, personal, and nude images. There’s no reason the NSA needs to be capturing this data on everyone that has downloaded Angry Birds. The App has been downloaded approximately 1.7billion times – that’s a lot of phones and tablets that are effectively compromised. If the NSA figured out that these apps are leaky, it’s likely someone else did too.