William Deresiewicz just published a long essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education that’s worth spending some time with: “Faux Friendship,” in which he traces how the concept of friendship has changed since classical times — it used to be an intense and serious matter; these days, not so much — and worries that social networking in general, and Facebook in particular, is accelerating a trend he perceives in our culture towards shallower friendships. More “friends” on Facebook, less engagement with friends in life. Or so the argument would seem to run.
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My interview with Brett Gaylor about filesharing and remix culture, the fourth installment of the Conversations About The Internet series, is up at the Rumpus. Excerpt:
Brett Gaylor is a filmmaker who argues that [the reaction to filesharing and the threat to remix culture] are directly related, and he has made a film, largely based on the work of Lawrence Lessig, that calls for reform in intellectual property law: RiP: A Remix Manifesto. The Manifesto of the title consists of four points: 1. Culture always builds on the past; 2. The past always tries to control the future; 3. Our future is becoming less free; 4. To build free societies, you must limit the control of the past.
As those four points imply, the film moves from the special case of music into much wider issues raised by existing intellectual property law, touching “foreign trade, the kind of democracy we want to create,” and so forth. Since this interview was a conversation about the Internet, we minimized discussion of these wider issues — for example, Gaylor makes a compelling case that patent law is stifling medical innovation — in favor of discussing those issues that relate directly to the Internet.
But we discuss one other thing too: the way the film itself actually embodies these ideas about copyright and remix culture. Not only is the film released under a Creative Commons license; it was created alongside his innovative Open Source Cinema project — a website where documentary filmmakers can post the raw footage from their projects, and invite an audience to remix the footage and contribute it to the site. Gaylor found this collaborative process so successful with RiP that he has included dozens of viewer-contributed sequences in his many intermediate “final” cuts of the film. Infected with the remix spirit, Gaylor can’t seem to resist tweaking his own film with ever more contributions as time goes on.
Curtis White’s essay in the new Tin House, “A Good Without Light,” contemplates the dark side of sustainability. In a word, he argues that sustainability, as a philosophy, is a desperate and perhaps futile attempt to figure out how the status quo can be preserved without significantly altering our society.
White argues that our capitalist industrial technocracy, underpinned by an arrogant scientism, has led us into this mess and is incapable of leading us out; that we must look beyond this economic system, and draw from other “systems of value” (religion, the arts, even social science, and I’d add secular philosophy to his list) to find a way out; and that we can do this without necessarily discarding all of capitalism, industry, technology, or science. (more…)
Synth Britannia is a documentary about the emergence of British synth pop (trailer here), from the “sinister” 1971 Moog score for A Clockwork Orange to Depeche Mode, and the Telegraph has published an interesting review of the film.
First key quote: ” ‘We thought we were avant-garde,’ says Andy McCluskey of OMD, ‘but we were the future of pop.’ ”
Second key quote: “Today, electronic sounds dominate the charts. But we’ve domesticated the electricity that once sounded so exciting and packed it into little white computers. As Human League founder Martyn Ware says, the element of risk has gone and watching even the pioneering Kraftwerk on their last tour ‘was like watching four old guys checking their email’.”
For the next three days you can watch it over on the BBC4 website.
Last week Alexis Madrigal wrote a fascinating article on Wired.com about terrestrial astrophotography; that is to say, photos of the night sky taken from the ground.
Most such photos that you can find online are vividly colored, as if they were photos of nebulae. But they weren’t like that to begin with: most of them started out as black and white exposures, and the colors were assigned to different layers during digital processing. Does this mean the photos are falsified?
No, writes Madrigal: the sky really does look like that, “just not to your eyes, which are pretty poor sensors, compared with purpose-built astrophotographic equipment. [...] Most astrophotographers have an ethic: They won’t add color or lasso just a part of an image for editing. They can only bring things out of the data, not add them. The photos are often processed in Photoshop, but what they do is the opposite of falsifying the visual record. Astrophotographers are using digital-editing tools to find the truth in the noisy data that are the heavens.”
To show how these images are created, Madrigal takes a beautiful finished photo by Rogelio Bernal Andreo, and has the photographer walk him through the process of creating it. Here’s the link.
The Rumpus just published my interview with Scott Rosenberg, where we talk mostly about blogging and its relationship with journalism. Excerpt:
Rosenberg has written a history of [blogging] called Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. In the course of it he observes that, although blogs have only been around for ten to fifteen years, they have already become “the dominant media form online.” In fact, blogs have become such an ordinary and seemingly unremarkable part of our daily lives, it can be difficult to remember the single most important fact about them: they are among the most revolutionary and disruptive technologies that have so far emerged from the Internet and the World Wide Web. In principle, they have made an extraordinary power available to everybody: the power to widely publish one’s thoughts at little to no cost. And that ability, extended by the social media that grew out of blogging, has been steadily reshaping our world ever since.
The Independent has an interview with Philip Glass that makes for pretty good reading despite a lame lede joking that the reporter nearly constructed an interview out of one question, asked repeatedly. Knee slap!
But what piqued my interest — as a writer currently in need of a side job — was this fact: until Philip Glass was forty-two yeas old, he didn’t earn a living from his music; up to that point, he drove a cab, moved furniture, and worked as a plumber.
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Remember Dr. Strangelove? The Doomsday Machine? It turns out that something very like it, called the Dead Hand, was actually operational, in the USSR, from 1984 at latest, and its pieces may still be around today.
PD Smith, author of the book Doomsday Men, writes that the way it worked was “strikingly similar” to way the fictional one worked. “At its heart was a computer,” he writes. “As soon as the Soviet leadership detected possible incoming missiles, it activated the system… Part of the secret codes needed to launch a Soviet nuclear strike were released and the computerized process [was] set in motion. Then, like a spider at the centre of its web, the computer would watch and wait for evidence of an attack.”
But then he writes something truly scary, (as if we need more things to worry about): “As far as anyone knows, the Dead Hand remains operational… Former Soviet era officials will still not discuss it.”
Its name referred to its function of providing the USSR with second-strike capability in case the entire leadership was wiped out in a surprise attack; hence, a hand from the grave. But what I think of is the clichéd expression “the dead hand of the past” — the oppressive influence of the past on the present.
“We tend to view history in terms of one age succeeding another, the greater vanquishing the lesser, or the tawdry always winning out over the elevated.
“The reality, Striphas demonstrates, is that we’re a populist capitalist democracy, a world where people are trying to get ahead, and the information contained in books, and the social status books have occasionally offered, are tools for getting ahead.
“Books not only are part and parcel of consumer capitalism; they virtually began it, they are part of the fuel that drives it, and they are key for understanding ways in which consumer capitalism is changing and evolving, in some respects into a whole other beast.
That is book culture. Books are not apart from commerce.”
Richard Nash, from the beginning of a comprehensive review of Ted Striphas’s monograph The Late Age of Print, a very significant study that examines the ways in which books have functioned as a commodity throughout the 20th century, and the many ways in which bookselling actually pioneered mass consumer culture. (more…)
There’s an editorial on New Scientist reacting to a recently-published paper by a philosopher named Adam Shriver, in which he calls for the genetic modification of livestock animals so that they feel no pain. “I’m offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering,” Shriver says.
Does this seem a little nutty to you too? (Incidentally, I’m not a vegetarian.)
Philosopher Peter Singer, as usual, swoops in with a reasonable point: Sure, pain-free animals would remove that particular objection, but “this on its own would not make intensive livestock farming OK: cruelty, he points out, is hardly the industry’s only flaw.” The industry is an environmental disaster too. Besides which, and I admit I might be missing something here, but the animals still get killed at some point, right?
This gets me imagining a world where people buy “pain-free” meat, thinking they’re doing the right thing and feeling less guilty about eating meat, all the while continuing to support an industry that is ruinous in every other way. It’s like the notion that it’s okay to use a ton of plastic, so long as you recycle it. [via @alexismadrigal]
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