Occasionally an article catches one’s eye that genuinely opens a raft of interesting new thoughts. That happened to the other day when I read this Guardian piece about a new area of Pirate Bay that offers templates for 3D printers to clone figures for Games Workshop’s Warhammer and Lord of the Rings table-top games.

Up until now, media piracy – as opposed to nautical banditry – has been concerned with freeing up access to information. In the 17th Century, with characters such as Henry Hill the Book Pirate (see this excellent short history of book piracy here), this was about giving the poor equal access to textual information by way of cheap editions of books and illicit pamphlets that were uncensored by the church or crown.

In the digital age this pirate spirit of free access to information was made orders of magnitude more easy as so much – words, music, images, videos, programs – was now no more than a package of 1′s and 0′s. That has wreaked havoc with the industries concerned with protecting their products and trying to make money out of them, but up until now the physical world has remained somewhat immune.

Sure, you could always buy a knock-off Rolex if you wanted to, but that still required some manufacturing work – even if it was substandard. That protection from digitised sharing afforded by the physical is now beginning to crumble. As Pirate Bay spokesman Winston Q2038 put it:

One of the things that we really know is that we as a society will always share. Digital communication has made that a lot easier and will continue to do so. We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour.

This is still some way off, as 3D printers are still prohibitively expensive, but it wasn’t that long ago that the same could be said for DVD burners. What we are looking at in the near future is a world where many physical objects will be able to be pirated and copied right in the home. Like the design of that lampshade? Go to Pirate Bay and download the code for it. Lost a Scrabble tile? Just print one off. Found out where Paris Hilton lives? Print off a key to her house. Everyone will have one.

Of course, there will be symbiotic reaction from the physical world too. We will no long have keys – they’ll just not be safe. And true craftsmen will return to materials that will be more difficult to pirate. But others will embrace this world, and deliver extraordinary things to customers… bespoke will become ordinary; there will be no more original.

This dissolution of the physical into the digital has interesting implications for all art and craft… something I blogged about from a different angle way back in 2005 (ouch!):

“A work of video art is simply a video signal on a tape. Early analog video technology is termed ‘lossy’ – meaning that with every successive copy there is a noticable degradation in quality. Analog technologies still had some claim to the construction of an ‘original’ – the photograph had the negative, and the video has the master copy, from which further copies are struck. The negative and master thus have more value than their offspring.

“Digital video formats released by Sony in the 1990′s changed this condition completely, as they allowed for perfect reproduction. Video is now simply a piece of code – a string of ones and zeros that, unlike its analog parent, is wholly duplicable. Enabling the production of infinite clones with no discernable value hierarchy thus renders ‘original’ a meaningless term.”

That ‘perfect reproduction’ may well be heading out of the hard-drive, and onto the (physical) desktop. And, as ever, pirates will be there to chase down those who want to profiteer. Going to be interesting times.

In the most high-profile action against the US Senate’s ‘Protect Intellectual Property’ Bill (PIPA) and the House of Representatives’ ‘Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Wikipedia has begun an English language black-out of its main site.

As you’ll know if you read here often, I’m in the depths of a book-length piece on piracy. The aim is to look at the multiple forms of piracy – from Somalia to the internet to music to books to historic figures, fictional heroes and children’s fascination with everything pirate – and formulate some general principles that link all of them together.

It’s an ambitious project, but it’s going well, and I do believe that the thesis is not only a good one, but a timely one too. Piracy, and interest in it, is exploding in all areas of culture and commerce. So it seems high time to think intelligently not just about what piratic activity is going on, but why it is happening.

What I find interesting about these cases is that the US have become the world leaders in trying to battle piracy – and protecting their own intellectual property… and yet this is a country which was founded on pirate principles of minimal copyright. Why? Because the founding fathers understood that progress was only possible if the poorest had free access to knowledge – which at the time meant books. For decades the US refused to sign up to international book copyright agreements.

It seems that PIPA and SOPA are laws designed to protect the wealthy. These are people who have enclosed things that many consider should be part of the ‘commons’ – knowledge, code, biology, songs – and are unwilling to allow access that doesn’t go via their paywall. That may be good for their share price, but is no good for, as Henry Hill the book pirate of 1680 put it, ‘the benefit of the poor.’

The key question that has to be asked is this: why is piracy proliferating? Is it because people are naturally tight, and don’t want to pay? I don’t think so. I think it’s becoming so common because people are so fed up with the narrowed and capitalised world that demands taxation and profit at every turn.

If you’re reading this blog post, you are almost certainly doing so on a digital device made in China. And that means you’re almost certainly doing so on a device made in Shenzhen.

Don’t know where Shenzhen is? Neither did I. It’s here:

View Larger Map

It’s a city bigger than New York or London, yet it was built only in the last 30 years. It’s one of China’s largest manufacturing hubs, and thus where ‘all our shit’ gets made. By hand. In 15 hour shifts. By workers as young as 12.

Conditions are poor. Really poor. You would not want to do this, and you would not want your children to do this. No one is allowed to speak while on shift.

If you use these products, which we all do, and if they’ve helped save you hours of labour time by speeding up communication, then you can damn well afford the 40 mins it will take to sit and listen to this piece on This American Life about a reporter who went to the factories of Shenzhen, and what he found. Let me put it more clearly: if you are reading this, you have a duty to listen to this.

Do it now.

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Having listened, I’ve been thinking about the workers there, and it seems that things are coming to a head in terms of protest. Here’s a Reuters report from yesterday:

Thousands of Chinese workers protesting over compensation and job security at a Sanyo Electric Co Ltd plant clashed with police in southern Shenzhen, media said on Monday, the latest outbreak of labor unrest in China’s manufacturing hub.

In case that leaves you panicked – don’t be. The article continues: ‘No impact was expected on clients from the stoppage at the factory…’ Phew. All your devices will still get made.

The FoxConn plant, which makes pretty much all of Apple’s products, as well as things for other major brands, was also in the news as a ‘mass suicide’ was planned a few days ago by 150 workers protesting at appalling conditions there.

I’ve blogged about this here before (Expensive Machines Made by Cheap People), but I do think it’s high time that people began to take more notice, and put pressure on Apple and others to demand that conditions are improved. Yes, that’ll mean we pay more for products… but do you not kind of think that that’s worth it?

With the writing I’m doing on piracy I have been mulling whether conditions in these factories are in any way analogous to the oppressive regimes sailors found themselves in in the early 1700′s. In both cases they were doing semi-skilled hard labour that made other people incredibly rich, but left them injured and impoverished. The question is, what would a Chinese manufacturing piracy look like? Hijacking of containers of new iPhones ready for export? Now THAT would get the Hipsters in a twist to do something…

It seems extraordinary that in a Communist country workers are having to battle for fair access to the wealth that is being created… but as Western capitalism finds a new host with cheaper labour, it’s perhaps not surprising at all. I’m really not sure what the best step forward is here, and how it might best be possible to put pressure on Apple and others… any ideas or links, do share please.

Something Pete Rollins tweeted this morning got me thinking a bit:

“Often the problem we face is not a lack of enjoyment, but an inability to enjoy our enjoyment.”

I think this is a particular concern in a world where so much of our lives is now mediated. Rather than attend a party, we attend and tweet about it, and update our Facebook, and take photos of ourselves enjoying ourselves… It’s not a uniquely digital problem: we all know that the moment is punctured as soon as someone makes everyone aware of it by saying something like ‘this is the best fun I’ve had in ages!’ It was…until everyone thought about it. But with social media the problem is so much worse.

I think we are spending too much time concerned about convincing ourselves – and the invisible ‘others’ that we have in mind – that we are having a good time. So what becomes important is not having a good time, but recording the fact that we had a good time, in order for others to be sure that we did.

In a way, the urge to record something, to commit it to digital memory, suggests a fear that we will forget. But the recording is it’s own forgetting: because we are not ‘in’ the moment when we are mediating it to others, but thinking about recording it, we loose the memory and truth of it.

Without wanting to be too base, it’s analogous to having a mirrored ceiling in the bedroom, or feeling the need to record the act. It’s not enough to be there in the moment, to lose oneself with another person – there has to be some evidence, some external observation – even if that is yourself looking at yourself as in the mirror.

One might say that true pleasure has no reflection. To ramp this up and use a quantum parallel, true pleasure is mysterious and rich… as soon as it is observed, photographed, or reflected on ‘wow, we are having fun aren’t we!’ it is collapsed into something more narrow; more physically real, perhaps, but actually lessened by its reduction to three dimensions.

Unreported pleasure is perhaps a dying art. To simply enjoy, and not have to tell anyone… to be happy enough that it happened, and that memories will form and fail…

There are so many technology stories every week it can be hard to know what’s significant or not. But this piece on the BBC about a new sort of camera has kept me thinking all day, so I thought I’d blog something about it.

Put simply, the ‘Lytro’ camera – available for pre-order, but not yet out and user-tested – captures the entire ‘light field’ of a scene – all of the light travelling in every direction – meaning that the point of focus and depth of field can be changed any time after the shot has been taken. The video on the BBC site I think is the best explanation of it, but here is a CNET review too:

So why might this be interesting? I’ve lived through an extraordinary period where we’ve moved from totally analogue film to pure digital. You’ll know if you’ve read here at all that I’m keen to explore how our tools reshape us, as well as us shaping them – and the move to digital has had a profound effect. People expect to see images now, rather than waiting for them to be developed. But with this new development, are people going to have an expectation of being able to post-produce photographs too?

I’ll admit to being a little uneasy about aspects of this, or just a little sad. It feels as if the photograph as object is under threat – that photography is becoming entirely subjective – alterable by each viewer as they choose, rather than presented as a final exposed, controlled piece by the artist. Rather than me approaching a photograph – a finalised object, a slice of time frozen and preserved – and responding to it, it’s almost that the lytro-style photograph has to respond to me, which, forgive the pun, is a huge change of focus.

Perhaps there are general themes here beyond photography too. Is objectivity in final retreat? Must everything bow to the subjective? In the world of Facebook and other social media, is it becoming more problematic to make ‘real’ statements, or must we offer everything in a format that can then be manipulated and modified by others.

I’m not against interactivity, and not against it in art in any way. But I would still want to be able to hold on to the ability of an artist or writer to be able to make statements or produce objects that demand that the viewer or reader change in response to them, rather than the object or text having itself to morph to fit those who view them.

I’m aware of the cult of mac dangers of sychophancy today… but also wanted to mark the passing of someone who did have a big impact on who are and how we live today, both positive and negative. This speech, given to Stanford graduates in 2005, is moving and prescient, but what I want to focus on this section:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

There’s something powerful about this, but also troubling. Yes, we need to see our own finitude as a motivation to make the most of the life we’ve been given, and to be the best person we can. But the troubling flip-side in Jobs’ philosophy is the culture of constant upgrade – and it’s ironic that his death comes so soon after the hyped announcement of Apple’s latest product. The iPhone4 is SO last year. I’ve heard so many people discussing whether they will get rid of their 4 in order to get their hands on a 4S in a couple of weeks…

This is absurd. Yes, we must see death as a healthy change-agent, and the old must be cleared to make way for the new. But also, and this is where Apple has been at the vanguard of the sickness of consumer capitalism, we need to re-learn how to make the most of what we have, rather than obsessively get rid of things in order to upgrade to the latest and ‘best.’

Jobs fought valiantly against cancer, against uncontrolled growth and multiplication of something healthy into something tumorous and dangerous. So as we celebrate his life and legacy, and think of his family grieving after a horrible illness, I think it’s appropriate to take a moment to think about appropriate consumption, and the gadget footprint we may be leaving in discarded phones, laptops and other devices… RIP.

(HT Barry for the great image)

As part of the book I’m writing at the moment I’ve been reading and thinking quite a lot about the idea of what ‘property’ is, and how this relates to the arts – and music in particular.

Just the other day a new legal ruling was passed that ensured that ageing crooners like Sir Cliff Richard can still claim royalties for songs they recorded (not actually wrote) for 70 years. Cliff and others have been campaigning for this for some time, though some of their responses ring a little hollow for those of us who’ve done a little more work than Mick Jagger:

“Obviously the record business is not what it was, so people don’t earn as much as they used to. [The royalties] can extend their lives and the lives of their families who inherit their songs.”

Others have been far more skeptical, arguing that the ruling will only benefit the very few – like Jagger and Richards – and could serve to stifle freedom of expression, with older works remaining in copyright for so much longer.

Here’s my question – which I mean very genuinely, and would love to hear opinions from people who know better than I: to what extent should musicians get paid?

The historical stuff I’m reading paints perhaps very different picture of musicianship from that we see in Jagger and Richards. In the pre-recording era, it was impossible to ‘own’ a song in the way it is now. A song was not your property. Indeed, most musicians, from what I can gather, played variations on standards that they had inherited from other musicians – and thus existed by very much drawing on the open pool of song knowledge that existed in communities.

That pool has been enclosed and privatised, and musicians – from what Jagger is saying – should now expect to have their careers in music pay well into old age. Clearly, without investment so much musical innovation would not have been possible. But is it really right for songs to remain ‘owned’ by song-writers in perpetuity?

My hunch is that what the digital music revolution may have precipitated is a partial return towards the historic pattern: musicians making money through performance. I personally think they – and other artists – should have a right to be paid for their work, but that very long copyrights are, in the end, unhelpful. But I’d be really interested to know what others who may be in the business think about it, because I’m really not sure I’m right.

(PS – congrats to Iain Archer for having one of his songs as the opening track on the current UK number 1 album! He should be paid. Forever )

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the 10 year anniversary of 9/11, and in the last few days how it might relate to the discussion of whether ‘newness’ is possible.

This isn’t meant as an holistic critique or discussion of the events all those years ago, instead I’ve been drawn to thinking about the extraordinarily physical nature of them.

It’s extraordinary to think that 9/11 was a pre- Web2.0 event. I’m not sure how this plays out exactly, but my sense is that we have become delaminated from the physical world in the past 10 years as we have become increasingly connected via social media and digital mediation. So much of our ‘news’ now seems caught up in this: scandals that deal not in physical realities so much as feelings people have and comments they may have made.

In contrast, 9/11 presents itself in my memory has a highly physical event. One watched things unfold on TV, with no Facebook posts or Tweets or comment-minutiae. Here was something that wasn’t about the emotional pain of financial or material loss, but people in very genuine pain.

I hope that makes sense and doesn’t come across as insensitive to the disasters that have come since then. What we had with 9/11 was something actually happening. Something very very real. In our recycled, retweeted, repeated, cropped and shortened world, here was an event that exploded into reality. It was, perhaps, a very real outbreak of something ‘new’. Horrible and monstrous, but a cut was made there, a global incisison that left the old world behind.

I have little sympathy for President Bush, but some empathy now with him sitting, utterly lost in a class of children, having heard what was unfolding. Financial crashes, wars, natural disasters… all would have some frame of reference. But here were people taking very human tools: planes and skyscrapers, and turning them into weapons.

I don’t mean it as a glib turn to think in parallel about the conversation that’s emerged over the past two posts, but I do think that one of the small lessons of 9/11 is that real things can still rupture, even in our post-modern world which lacks meta-narrative. And though there is a place for discussion and conversation, there also comes a time when action, real action, is required, when paths need to be chosen.

Thanks to the various people who popped me Google+ invite… I’ve really not known whether to jump in, and would appreciate any thoughts people have had who have made the switch or tested the water.

The obvious issue is this: have Google made it worth it? If you are going to switch, do you do so completely – and leave Facebook behind, or do so partially and have another bloody set of pages and messages to check?

I read Emma by Jane Austen recently, and there’s a lovely passage where one Mr Frank Churchill goes to pay a visit on Mr Knightley. Mr Knightley is out, which causes Mr Churchill to be furious as he’d walked there across the fields, and Mr Knightley hadn’t even left a message with his housekeeper as to where he was. Austen was writing in her own time, rather than retrospectively, but she brilliantly captures the experience of the vast majority of humanity over history: our inability to mediate our presence. Without telephones, with a very limited postal service and no immediately convenient form of transport, one simply had to take one’s chances with going to visit.

The problem with social networks is that all of that serendipity is taken away… and the end result is the opposite of serenity: a huge anxiety that we might be missing something or someone. So we keep on checking. Just in case.

If there was a way to integrate these various platforms into one ‘inbox’ (is there – will someone say) – or if there is a killer reason why it would be good to switch to Google+, then I’d love to hear it. Picking up a new technology requires time for inhabitation. The question always is whether it’s worth the time and effort to move house.

Interesting piece in The Independent yesterday, asking why people bother going to festivals when the sound quality is crap, there’s mud everywhere, you can’t sleep, and people push and spill beer all over you.

I visited Glastonbury once, many years ago now, and left utterly mystified. Why, I wondered at the time, did so many people feel, and with such obvious sincerity, that the music they loved would be enhanced by a pervasive smell of excrement and kebabs? Why was it thought to be an advantage to sit on a carpet of compressed garbage and observe one’s heroes from a distance at which they were virtually invisible?

This is a good question. Despite the great TV coverage, there is a part of me that still feels jealous of those who are actually there. And that’s, I think why, despite slightly depressed numbers this year, people will continue to go to festivals, especially in a digital age.

Why? Well, I’ve written more fully about the importance of festive, carnival spaces in Other. Glastonbury is (or can be – outside of the uber-commercial aspects) a TAZ. It is a place ‘penetrated by the marvellous’ – and exists for a short time only, but in that short time it re-frames us. Festivals are also dirty spaces. The fact that you don’t wash much and change your hygiene and sleep boundaries again force us to engage with otherness, and feel restored because of it.

But there’s also the indescribable sense of presence at festivals. You are THERE. And you are there together. And no matter how good your 3D TV and surround sound system, you won’t feel that unless you really are prepared to get down and dirty and be in the crowd. And that’s the sad thing about so much technology – it wants to replicate this sense of ‘togetherness’ but without the dirt. It wants us to be ‘in the action’ – at a football match or festival – but in a sterilised, mediated environment. And that’s just never going to cut it.

Which is why, after much thought, I had to be at Wild Goose. Where I won’t be blogging or tweeting much, just getting filthy and being with people, even if the sound quality is crap.