Society reborn, and/or why I love the Internet
A couple of days ago, it was asked of me to hold a short little seminar for some new employees in the economy department about what we actually work with as an ISP, a sort of introduction to us as a company, what we sell and what we do. Their job is not to know this, their job is to crunch the numbers and thanks to that they do not often possess any greater knowledge of the whole technical part. I got the e-mail asking me to do this at 9am and they were supposed to come down into the mountain where i work already after lunch the same day. To cut it short I jotted down some words on a piece of paper and just decided to wing it since i’ve never ever done anything like it before, i hate talking to a group of people, and did i mention i hate talking to a group of people?
The first line on said piece of paper was “What IS The Internet, really?“.
Since i wanted to keep everything brief i decided to explain The Internet by simply stating that it is the sum of all individual networks belonging to ISP’s throughout the world, connected to act as one. Ever changing, never static. This seemed to be simple to grasp and it had to suffice. The seminar went very well and everyone was happy.
Yesterday evening however, i watched a 55 minute long YouTube-video about YouTube itself watched through an anthropologists eyes, and since then my mind has been racing with new ways to look at the actual Internet and what we are doing with it. Anyone and everyone should set aside 55 minutes of their lives at some point and watch the video since it – even though focusing on YouTube alone – actually is applicable to The Internet as a whole. Seriously, i’m telling you, watch it. Yes. Seriously. Do it. Thank you.
What that video did to me in its full extent is yet to be discovered, but so far i can say that it moved me, forcifully, on a deep level.
The Internet opened up a completely new chapter in human history by itself. The mere concept of instant global connectivity was unthinkable only 50 years ago, and here we are now, the year is 2009, and last night – with the click of a button – i got connected to a 19 year old chinese filmstudent and talked with him about anything and everything. The Internet is society reborn. It is the most beautiful collaboration ever created by human kind and provides endless possibilities for regular people to achieve whatever they want to achieve.
Do you play in a band with your friends?
- Share your music with the world by the click of a button and watch as hundreds, thousands, or maybe millions of human beings all around the entire planet Earth download it and listens to it. Some like it, some hate it, some will ask you for more, some will tell you to never touch an instrument ever again, some will cherish you, some will call you a cockfag, some will buy an eventual cd, some will not.
You are your own producer, you produce yourself. Anyone, ANYONE, can build a solid fanbase through The Internet alone, with absolutely no money or a miniscule amount of such. This was completely unpossible before the P2P-technology was developed and spread across the globe through The Internet.
Do you have a cool idea for a new software or webservice but lack the means to develop it by yourself?
- Throw out a request on The Internet for programmers and developers that might have time and the will to collaborate with you. Watch as true decentralization and human collaboration explodes right in front of your eyes. If you have a good idea, you will have a team of experts working with you in a matter of days, people you perhaps will never meet in real life and would never have spoken to otherwise.
The possibilities are truly endless.
The human race has through the invention of The Internet and P2P-sharing been thrown into a completely new world where decentralized collaboration and interaction above the confines of geographical boundaries spurs the developing of a new society where we all can step up and produce content for others to consume, be it art, music, games, films, humour, blogs or whatever other content you may have to share.
However, this whole idea of us regular people becoming producers aswell as consumers is very troubling for the old businessmodels which we have been relying on for so long, where there is a very distinct regulation of who is allowed to produce and who is allowed to consume. It has proven to be very hard to reinvent commercial businessmodels in the same speed as we have reinvented communication between human beings.
This is the reason why we all have been – and will continue to be – forced to watch the spectrial against the creators of The Pirate Bay. They acted as true entrepenaurs do(except the fact that they didn’t charge anyone money), identify a need expressed by the public and facilitate that need, and thus created The Pirate Bays torrent tracker to allow people all over the world to share whatever they want with whoever wants it. They have now been convicted in the first court instance of the Swedish hierarchial lawsystem to serve 1 year in prison and pay 30 million SEK (~$3.6 million) for the fact that some of Earths inhabitants decided to use their service for unlawful acts in form of sharing content breaching the protection provided by the – now hopelessly outdated – copyright laws.
These are regular Joes, they saw a need, facilitated it through inventive programming, and released their service to the entire world for us to use and abuse. They are now held responsible for other peoples use of said service. This is something utterly appauling to anyone that holds real justice close to heart.
I do not want to speculate as to how much of the traffic passing through The Pirate Bay was directed to or from sources containing copyrightprotected content, beacuse it is utterly and irrevocably irrelevant. The reason is that you have to see the fact of global breaching of old copyright laws is the direct voice from the inhabitants of this planet. We as the human race have said “this law is not worth following anymore, we will breach it”. Since we have the ultimate power in our hands to do what we will with anything in this world as long as the majority of everyone else agrees that it is OK, this must be considered the ultimate evidence of the discrepancy between the laws and the will of the people.
History says that government and lawmakers are to be replaced when they do not longer represent the people, this is what is happening now and they need to be overthrown and replaced to make room for the new society that is growing throughout the world. If this means that there won’t be any more $500 million movieproductions from gigantic corporate producers, then so be it, it is the will of the people living on this planet.
I do not believe that P2P-sharing is killing the entertainment-industry at all, but if I – for the sake of argument – presume that it is, I am completely fine with seeing no more superhuge-budget movies, albums, musicvideos and such and instead consume completely usergenerated content from people and groups around the world. I welcome such a world with warmth in my heart since i know that it would be the decentralized, collaborative opinion of the entire world combined.
I wish to make this clear, therefore i will repeat this statement with more clarity:
If the future that we as a human race have chosen by deciding that the copyright laws of old are not longer something we wish to follow holds no more huge multimillion dollar productions in forms of movies, albums and videos etc. I for one welcome it with open arms. I truly hope that these corporations are dismantled and reutilized in the wake of the new society that has been born, because we are now not only nations apart, but a collective together, collaborating and communicating through the means of The Internet, where one voice is many, and many are one. Our will must be heard and made true, since it is the will of the planet. If that means the disassembly of old structure and practice then so be it, to make room for a new world, where we all are the producers of our collective reality.
We are Legion.
Relevant Swedish newsarticles: SvD1, SvD2, DN1, DN2, DN3, DN4, DN5, AB1, AB2, AB3, AB4, AB5, AB6, EX1, EX2, EX3
Relevant Swedish Blogs: Rick Falkvinge(pp), Christian Engström(pp), Deepedition, Drottningsylt, HAX, Opassande, Svensk Myndighetskontroll, Ett hus liv och lustar och andra livsaktiviteter, PromeMorian, The cautionary revelation of the apocalypse and everyone else.
Relevant english articles/blogs: Wired, TheLocal, Mikael Palmstedt, Guardian.co.uk, Arstechnica, Slashdot, Torrentfreak, The Inquisitr
Sunday 19 Apr 2009 @ 02:25
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My english is prolly not as good as yours, but anyway, here comes a long comment.. Yes, if it where that black and white, then let them die, rot on the dump of history. But of course it is not that simple, unfortunately.. That is both good and bad news, of course.
The Internet has basicly done the same as the printing press did, lowered the barrier to spreading information drasticly. For about 20 years ago some really powerful people with influence thought about how to make money when the west no longer could compete with countries just starting to climb the industrial ladder. They thought about knowledge and information, but they did it with the kognitives of the industrial society. Supply and demand. Most powerful people of today still thinks in those terms. But we have allready lived in a society where information was very scarse, and thus its price very high. That was the time before the printing press, when the only things worth spread was words from the kings and the church. That was not a knowledge or information society, that was a society with a high price on information. The lowered barrier of spreding information that the printing press offered also gave birth of the scientifical method, to bublish findings and let others scrutinise it and build upon it.
Information has a value, and the value for the society grows as information gets cheaper and easier to spread. Science thrives on it, it demands it. Just think if Newtons knowledge had remained secret, i he had remained a military contractor – No, i wont tell you my secrets, but i calibrate you guns for a fee – Thats not science, that would be absurd to call sciense. If that had been the thinking of smart people those days, their secrecy would have kept science from developing at all. So, what the Internet has ment, is the same as the printing press. But unfortunately, the “power and the church” of today is reacting the same way today as it did in the times of Gutenberg.
The biggest problem is that of balance of power. Internet has put the publishing ability in the hands of everyday people, but not (yet?) the power. The power lies still among those that had it before. Today we have multinational gigants against private persons, the balance of power is as skewed it ever can be, very sick indeed. This is also the base of recent legislation, all lobbying is just as out of balance, there is no counterbalance.
Some voices advocates a drastic shortening of the copyright monopoly of publishing. Does that alter the balance of power? For old works yes. But say we decide it for 5 years, that means 5 years of people beeing hurt by gigants for every new work there is. Look at the Spectrial and think of Google and filetype:torrent or the google-cache. Imagine there was a counter power just as powerful as Google in every case, and in lobbying of politicians.. I bet Warner et al would think twise before going nuts over something they hardly even can proof beeing a loss. The problem is an infrastructure problem, not the law. Well, today there are some bits and pieces of the law that needs to be rolled back, but most of this is just a consequence of the same things beeing out of balance. When there are no incentives for anyone to assume the counter-balancing position, the infrastructure is out of balance.
I know of at least two that has thought about it in these lines, one is called Lessig and the other one i just learned about, his name is Dan Heller. Imagine some organisations just as powerful as any multinational giant, representing the little guy, and having every business incentive there is to do so, no matter on what site the little guy has published something. But also, if the little guy just share a file, then he is not infringing anything, then he is just helping the copyright holder. Possible? Yes it is. It is not that complicated either. All it needs is automatic, easy and zeero cost registration of works. Something that is very easy to do with the technology of today, registering data is what computers are really good at. How, you may ask. I was also baffled by the thought first, i did not get how 1+1 could be 2 in this case. Dan Heller explains it quite good in a blog-post. It is not easy to explain, i guess that is a psycological effect of the reality we live in today, most people do have a hard time grasping things coming from outside the Plato-cave. Dans post is quite lenghty, but he do explain it very well.
We, or the giants, do not have to be afraid of some kids using material from the net and doing all kinds of things with it, like sharing their experiments or deriative works with their friends. But most of would have something to say if a company tries to monetize it without our consent. Ordinary people communicating in private or collecting data in private should not have to fear copyright, usually they do not even care, but companies do. Markets do not grow by punishing or educating individuals about copyright, compliance is achieved-and business grows by creating convenient and automated mechanisms that make both access to and use of content easier.
Now how about those countries climbing the ladder of industry? Well, there is a solution to that and it is also conveniently the same solution as to overpopulation. It consists of a “medicine” they more than gladly will take, and especially we in sweden have taken that medicine and showed how brutaly effective it is. The medicine is called high standard of living and education. Without our immigration under the last 40 years, there would not have been many swedes around. When they quickly come up to our standard, they will also be our equals in most other aspects too, including wages, then the “problem” is gone. So help them, one way is by not locking in information and knowledge. Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a day. Educate him how to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime.
Sunday 19 Apr 2009 @ 09:44
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gnhh…tufft att läsa detta en söndagsmorgn. återkommer när min engelska och jag är i sync
Stefan’s senaste bloggpost.. Copycut bloggarn´
Saturday 02 May 2009 @ 03:15
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Fumlan:
I read this a long time ago, but for some reason i forgot to comment on it. I cannot say much more than “I agree completely with the whole of my heart.”.
Some wonderful piece of lecture, right there. Wishing many read your comment and think about it.
drf’s senaste bloggpost.. S.K.Y.N.E.T