Say No to PIPA & SOPA

Wikipedia, like many sites, is offline today to protest PIPA & SOPA

The US Congress is considering two bills, the Senate's Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the House of Representatives' Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), that would censor the Web and Internet, constrain everyday users' access to online materials, and place additional, unnecessary regulations on businesses. 

Millions of people on the Internet have already opposed SOPA and PIPA.

The Senate begins voting next week, on January 24, 2011, so please let your two senators know how you feel. Sign the petition at the link below, and urge Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it's too late.

Stop SOPA and PIPA!

Via the Wayback Machine

c. 1997

When I first started blogging in 2005 I had no idea who my blog visitors were outside of very rough statistics or posts in my comment section.  I still don't know exactly, apart from commenters or people who tell me in person, but it's quite easy now to view the weekly, monthly or yearly stats and get an idea. To give an example, this week my top 5 most visited posts have been 2007 Rugby World Cup (always high on the list since it first appeared, and I have a strong idea why), Poem: Julia de Burgos's "To Julia de Burgos" (also usually quite high, and it makes me especially proud that my blogpost about one of Puerto Rico's most important poets, an Afrolatina, tends to be regularly sought out), Poem/Translation: Claudia Roquette-Pinto (my translation of one of her many exquisite poems), Review: Homme au bain (Man at Bath) (my review of Christophe Honoré's film, which features a discussion of M. François Sagat, whose name I suppose generates the searches), and The High Line (my 2009 photos from a visit to one of New York City's contemporary treasures).

This week the top referring sites are all Google (US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, India), no surprise there, but the top key searchwords bringing people to the site are a surprise: "a julia de burgos translation," "homme au bain," "roberto bolano," "mamuka gorgodze" [მამუკა გორგოძე] (? - yes, I had to look him up; he's a star of Georgia's 2011 Rugby World Cup team), "a julia de burgos," and "martin puryear."  Again, how wonderful that people are searching out films, writers and visual artists and coming across this site. J's Theater readers are overwhelmingly from the US, but the next highest groups of page viewers this week come from the UK, France, Canada, Australia, Germany, New Zealand, and Brazil. Hello to all of you! Most viewers (40%) are using Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows (66%), but Firefox (23%) and Safari (17%), once in the single digits, have crept up, as have the number of Macintosh (25%) and Linux (4%) viewers. iPhone, Android and iPad readers together make up about 3% of readers, which is 3% more than existed a few years ago.

My old web page banner

Before the blog, which I began in 2005, I did have an earlier Web presence, and the main way I knew who visited--beyond the Stat counter --was through the emails I would receive from time to time letting me know that a reader had taken interest in some aspect of my site.  I wantonly gave that out, and never received a single nastly post. Instead, I heard from people who shared my interests in architecture, who wondered what it was like to peer down through the glass floor in Toronto's CN Tower, and who wanted to offer thoughts on who'd win the Cy Young Award in each league. Via the Wayback Machine, the Internet archive, I came across my old page, which I started in 1997 while still in school, and which is archived, with selected posts and updates in 23 "captures," from 1998 through 2001.  Alma mater NYU's servers hosted it, and after I departed their urban groves they shut it down, though by that point it had already been preserved in Net amber. Interestingly enough, one of the first students I taught at the university knew about me and my work via that old website. She mentioned one my animated gifs, a poem I'd created in that format (another remains), and I was amazed that she'd come across it. This was pre-Google, so it might have been Yahoo! or one of the older search engines that summoned it up.

In my personal preamble, I included the following:

One truly scary sign is when one company owns a publishing house, newspapers, a movie studio, TV and radio stations, and on and on! And several companies (Rupert Murdoch's behemoth empire, Sony, Time Warner, etc.) now fit this description. We have to be vigilant as consu mers, as citizens, and one small step is keeping informed through organs such as Media Watchdog, reading everything you can, and resisting the increasing industrialization of our consciousness(es). So PLEASE READ a good book, magazines, newspapers, and buy them if you can from your local INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE, and articles and pieces on the Web. Whatever you do, don't surrender without a fight! RESIST! 

I'm proud to say I was calling out media consolidation and Rupert Murdoch quo ante. I admit to having not visited Media Watchdog (update: which no longer exists) in many years, though. In subsequent updates I removed most of the polemics and offered readers a less combative welcome. The final accessible main page is from 2001, just before I headed to the university for the first time. From it as from the earlier pages, you could reach my distinct pages set aside for books, sports, art (fascinating to me that some of the drawings have vanished, but one of Charles Bernstein remains), and poetry. Hmm, doesn't this all sound familiar?  Also, because I'd finally figured out how to create frames and tables (remember when those were the hot new thing?) in Html, I'd set up an "Notable African Americans" page, with those frames. This was pre-Wikipedia, so such pages weren't so easy to come by. I did update it a few times. Most of the links appear to have disappeared. Checking Wikipedia today, I note that there are pages for all the people I wrote entries for, including fairly obscure folks like composer Robert Nathaniel Dett, whose music my friend Byron M. turned me onto.

One of the drawings from my MIT days, c. 1989

Many of the files stored on NYU's server(s) are no longer accessible, so my 5 pages of photos from my first trip to Brazil (we went to Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in 2000, and ran into Sonia Sanchez and her son twice, once in each city!), are mere ghost traces. Though the captions remain I had to think for a minute about what they may have looked like, though in no time I recalled one of them featuring some of the enthrallingly grotesque statuary in Salvador da Bahia's Ordem Terceira de São Francisco, the monastery just off the Terreiro de Jesus, in Salvador's upper city.  Think ropes--velvet--of blood emanating from Jesus Christ's hands, stigmated palms, horror-film grimaces on the faces of Saint Francis and his life-size peers lining the room, and you start to get the picture.  C couldn't bear to spend more than a few minutes anywhere near these marvelously horrible creations, nor in the ossuary downstairs, but having grown up Roman Catholic and had more than a little exposure to the gory tales of numerous saints' martyrdoms, I found these fascinating. Other photos featured capoeristas, Rio tourist sites (the Rio page is riddled with grammatical and factual errors--Oscar Niemeyer did not design the city's new cathedral, though our guide told us this), and at some point I will have to scour my desk in NJ for the original prints--since I think this might have been just before I got ahold of a digital camera--to find them and scan them in. They also feature my dreadlocks, now a year gone, at their earliest stages. The memories!

One of the old poems, "Super Matrix," that appeared on old website, c. 1998

As Wayback Machine searches make clear, there's more of our earlier web presence than we might imagine, and things persist on the Net perhaps not eternally, but for a much longer time than they once did when they appeared only in print form or when they were passed along in the form of spoken or whispered tales and gossip. I do miss the informality, freedom and directness of that earlier pre-Google, pre-social networking site world, though. I also wonder what has happened to some of the people I used to correspond with, that is, the ones I wasn't fortunate enough to befriend and stay in contact with, no matter how far away they physically were.

"The Lanier Effect" + Authors Sue HathiTrust Over Digitization

J's Theater is not turning into the Jaron Lanier blog, but I came across the text and video link below (I've posted a screen grab but I cannot embed it) of a conversation--a monologue, really--he engages in with Douglas Rushkoff at Edge, the online tech site.  Entitled "The Local-Global Flip, or the 'Lanier Effect'," Lanier touches upon and goes far beyond some of the issues I previously mentioned in my review of his last book, as well as in my Labor Day post, while also offering one of the more idiosyncratic and intriguing readings of the global economic crisis. I'm not sure I fully grasp, let alone buy, his account of it, but some of his comments, like his reading of the dangerous effects of global networking on magnifying and engulfing the banks involved in it offer a different insight than I've usually read, though as the 1930s Global Economic Collapse and prior ones demonstrated, global financial networking and interdependence aren't new.

His thoughts about what will happen to people who cannot fit into the economic scenario he suggests will arise seems especially bleak, and has a strange, biological-eugenic edge. There's also a bit about automated cars, and another about electronic bread and circuses to anesthetize the masses who will be cut off from the possibility to earn a living.  Ultimately he returns to Ted Nelson's original plan to monetize Net transactions to preserve a middle class, or at the very least, generate liveable earnings for everyone who won't control the digital levers of power, be directly serving them, or be fortunately to live in a society in which other options--like natural commodities--underwrite more widely distributed wealth.  But do listen for yourself!

The Edge: The Local-Global Flip, or, "The Lanier Effect": A Conversation with Jaron Lanier [8.29.11] 

A snippet:

Ted's idea was that there would be a universal market place where people could buy and sell bits from each other, where information would be paid for, and then you'd have a future where people could make a living and earn money from what they did with their hearts and heads in an information system, the Internet, thereby solving this problem of how to have a middle class, and how to have liberty. To expect liberty from democracy without a middle class is hopeless because without a middle class you can't have democracy. The whole thing falls a part.

I remember when I first met Ted as a teenager, we talked about how you need to have some system like this where people are making a living with their hearts and heads, and trading online, and this was before the word "online" even existed in the way we know it today. It's the only way to have a future of liberty.

Silicon Valley totally screwed up on this. We were doing a great job through the turn of the century. In the '80s and '90s, one of the things I liked about being in the Silicon Valley community was that we were growing the middle class. The personal computer revolution could have easily been mostly about enterprises. It could have been about just fighting IBM and getting computers on desks in big corporations or something, instead of this notion of the consumer, ordinary person having access to a computer, of a little mom and pop shop having a computer, and owning their own information. When you own information, you have power. Information is power. The personal computer gave people their own information, and it enabled a lot of lives.

***

Related to what Lanier says here and to my Labor Day post is a link Reggie H. sent today: Jennifer Howard's Chronicle of Higher Education article, "In Authors' Suit Against Libraries, an Attempt to Wrest Back Some Control Over Digitized Works." Boiling it down, a group of eight individual authors, including the prominent Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, have joined with the Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, and the Quebec writers' union to file a copyright-infringement lawsuit against the HathiTrust digital repository and a consortium of over 50 university libraries with which it is working. These libraries include Cornell University, Indiana University, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Michigan. The suit, which the guild and its co-litigants filed in US District Court, aims to stop the HathiTrust and library consortium from digitizing and releasing what are called "orphan" books, or works under copyright whose authors cannot be identified or located, until the US Congress passes guidelines to clarify the use of digital libraries and orphan works.

As things stand, HathiTrust can digitize the works and distribute them via participating libraries; anyone affiliated with those institutions will have access to them, at whatever cost they deem appropriate.  Indeed, the lawsuit states that the defendants, as well as Google, which produced most of the digital scans, have participated in "the systematic, concerted, widespread, and unauthorized reproduction and distribution" of about 7 million copyrighted works, of which the brief mentions only a few, without permission to do so.  It asks the court to impound and withdraw from circulation "all unauthorized copies" of copyright-protected works the defendants possess until Congress issues a law, and to stop them from working with Google to scan in more works. The suit asks that the University of Michigan's Orphan Works Project also be halted.

A major concern of the plaintiffs is an issue I discussed in the Labor Day post, the security of the digital copies. They fear that these versions of the books could distributed freely and without controls via the Internet. Should copyrighted works enter the filesharing mainstream, the authors could lose all control over their work, and apparently the state institutions could not be sued because they enjoy "sovereign-immunity" protection. I assume private institutions like my employer do not. (Cornell is both public and private, so I wonder where it stands legally in this regard.) The Authors Guild also believes that authors should have a say in what happens to the books in the HathiTrust's repository. For their part, HathiTrust and the libraries, which all participate both in the repository and the Orphan Works project, say they have done nothing wrong, and see themselves as engaging in the vital work of preservation and dissemination of knowledge, which certainly are the purview of libraries and universities, and a central aspect of the case will determine how far libraries can go in making materials available across non-print/codex platforms. HathiTrust and the libraries say they know of no security breaches thus far, and feel blindsided by the lawsuit, given that they have recently been in discussions with the Authors Guild over the digitization project. They nevertheless are planning to release the first run of 26 titles in the Orphan Works series on October 13, 2011. That is, if the court doesn't enjoin them before then.


The list of HathiTrust books is here.

A final note, Geoffrey James states in the article's comment section: "It took the Author's Guild exactly 2 minutes to find a living author, with an agent, who is currently making e-distribution deals, whose work is supposedly 'orphaned' and will be distributed for free by the thieves at HathiTrust." X. The author? J. R. Salamanca. The book? The Lost Country, which was made into a 1961 film, Wild in the Country, adapted into a screenplay by Clifford Odets and starring Elvis Presley! Salamanca, whose novel Lilith also became a major film (starring the young Warren Beatty, Jean Seberg, and Peter Fonda, in 1964), even has his own imdb.com page.

Book Review: Jaron Lanier, "You Are Not a Gadget"

Jaron Lanier (Wikipedia)

If I were to summarize Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), in a sentence, it might be: Freedom is more than the freedom to post your current meal on Facebook. To be fair, Lanier's book is a far more complex and nuanced reading of the contemporary digital world and social communications media than my epigram implies, but at the same time, it epitomizes at least part of his argument, which is that as computer hardware and software develop and advance, and social communications media grow ever more omnipresent, we are increasingly surrendering key aspects of our humanity, often without recognizing that we are doing so and far too often without resistance. Or, to put it another way, Lanier, one of the pioneering computer scientists of the late 20th century and a major figure in the field of virtual reality (VR), suggests that an anti-humanist perspective, which he does identifies as integral to the open culture/free internet ethos and cloud computing/hive mind approaches, has increasingly taken hold, to that extent that we are conforming ourselves to the whims of computers and computer software—and anti-humanist designs and perspectives—rather than the other way around.  We do not have to be gadgets or be unduly influenced by them, in other words.  Yet computers and social media are shaping us more so than vice versa, and Lanier, who takes frequent pains to note that he is not only not a Luddite or technophobe, but deeply embedded and implicated in the digital world's development, stresses repeatedly: this is a very serious problem.

One analogy Lanier gives for this is the development of the MIDI technology, which has revolutionized musical production over the last 30 years. It would be hard to imagine the digital music we listen to today without MIDI's foundation, yet Lanier suggests that this program, which developed based on the limitations of the piano keyboard, which is to say, a particular percussive instrument, cannot capture the auditory and sonic shadings of a violin, let alone a human voice, and it is hard to imagine the digital and digitized music that might be possible if MIDI had not become "locked in" as the dominant musical technology when it did.  The dangers of lock-in, not just in technological terms, but in social, political and economic terms, which are all intimately interlinked, underpins Lanier's larger argument. We are told constantly that Net's democratizing power is good thing, as it has opened up possibilities for far more people than ever to express themselves in ways they could not before to audiences they could not reach before. This undoubtedly is true. Lanier returns to the notion of the lock-in, however, in suggesting that as certain technologies—like Facebook, say, or Twitter or Wikipedia—become dominant, the alternative forms die off, standardizing, systematizing and normalizing certain types of expression in favor of others. The announcement earlier this year that blogging was falling off might provide an example, in that some creative bloggers had forsaken the expressive possibilities of that form for the more succinct—and standardized, and also firewall-privatized—spaces provided by Facebook, or even less text-heavy and more image-dominant blogging formats like Tumblr. Lanier, as a hortatory counterweight, presents a short list of recommendations that in one sense might serve to challenge the trends above, but at a more basic level imply a perhaps naïve, but I think necessary, spur towards a humanity that at times appears to be vanishing before our eyes.

The issue is not so much users—which is to say, consumers—as it is the people and corporations behind the cloud/free/open culture approach. Lanier offers series of cautionary thought experiments, beginning with the Turing Test, which I would boil down to our mistaken belief that computers can be human, or that we might not be able to tell the difference between the two—and MIT's Sherry Turkle, a longtime advocate of computer technology, has begun to sound warning bells of late about this very issue—and moves into related areas, invoking Franz Kafka and others, to argue that the cloud approach may appear superior to more individualistic and autonomous approaches, but history and reality suggests the converse. The cloud/hive mind, he points out, despite all its advocates' rhetoric, cannot resolve certain problems better than collective efforts led by skilled and talented individuals. Though he does not cite them, I thought immediately of countless literary works that no hive production could create (see again Kafka's "A Report to the Academy"), as well as triumphs like Andrew Wiles' solution of Fermat's Last Theorem or Grigori Perelman's brilliant proof of the Poincaré conjecture, which is not to say that computers cannot carry out calculations that it would take humans centuries to solve, but that the most powerful computers still cannot equal the human brain or human brains in concerted but structured effort. It also results, he suggests, in the sort of intellectually and philosophically muddled discourse of Wikipedia, which has become the preponderant online encyclopedia resource.

In its worst guises, Lanier argues the hive mind approach can spur or provide the conditions for the sort of anonymous contumely and cyberbullying that many critics have decried. Alongside these problems, the open culture approach taken to its extreme has resulted in the sort of piracy and demonetization of, and thus devastation of certain fields, some of which, like the music industry, have provided vital entertainment for decades, though others, like journalism, are key to our democracy and civic culture. At the same time, nostalgic reappropriation and recycling predominate over original aesthetic invention. In other words, as the open culture approach has negatively affected middle-class employment, we have increasingly rationalized theft and plagiarism, as well as artistic mediocrity, and, as we cede more information and individuality to the cloud and the corporations and wealthy, fortunate individuals who control them, we cede more social, economic and political power as well. The private has become public and privatized.

More than once Lanier describes the hardcore advocates of cloud and open culture approaches as "Maoist," which marked one of the places I most took issue with his argument. This line of argument arises out of his 2006 Edge article, "Digital Maoism," which critiqued the authority of collective wisdom and the erasure of individuality. On the one hand, he argues that a certain kind of Utopianism, though not exclusively leftist, has underpinned the conceptualizations of what we call the Internet and Web. On the other hand, however, he repeatedly discusses the role of corporations and their capacity to concentrate wealth, which is to say, capitalism, in the determining how we ultimately have come to experience the Net and Web. To Lanier the dogmatism of many key open culture advocates resembles Maoism, but as I read the almost continuous merging of the corporate and the individual, the commodification of every aspect of our lives and of our subjectivities, the reduction or transformation of our humanity into bytes geared primarily to be monetized on behalf of a very few, I think of something more along the lines of technofascism. What does it mean when corporations and the government are fused and working in cahoots to extract more and more information from us to convert it into greater powers both of surveillance and capitalization, the latter not to our individual or even collective benefit?

Lanier's fear is the old one of collectivization, whose multiple meanings he unfortunately fails to disarticulate. This leads him to push for political and economic approaches that would counter the trendlines we are now on, but it strikes me that many of these, such as Net neutrality and government support for and regulation of monetization, are progressive, rather than conservative or neoliberal. I wonder sometimes if we have gone too far, if it is ever going to be possible to, say, remonetize the net and regulate net use at a level that would make it truly affordable to everyone, prevent monopolization via cloud control by a few corporations or corporate-government entities, preserve privacy while also ending the worst aspects of anonymity, and champion the range of expressive, and most importantly, aesthetic, social and political possibilities, that the net promises. Lanier's book provides more than a few suggestions and thus marks a crucial starting point which all our government policy makers, as well as corporate net titans, should reference, and from which they should proceed.

Quotes: Nicholas Carr + Richard Holbrooke

"The constant distractedness that the Net encourages--the state of being, to borrow another phrase from Eliot's Four Quartets, "distracted from distraction by distraction"--is very different from the kind of temporary, purposeful diversion  of our mind that refreshes  our thinking when we're weighing a decision. The Net's cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.
     "In a 2005 interview, Michael Mezernich [Emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco] ruminated on the Internet's power to cause not just modest alterations but fundamental changes in our mental makeup. Nothing that 'our brain is modified on a substantial scale, physically and functionally, each time we learn a new skill or develop a new ability,' he described the Net as the latest in a series of 'modern cultural specializations' that 'contemporary humans can spend millions of "practice" events at [and that] the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to.' He concluded that our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure.'"--Nicholas Carr, from The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010, pp. 119-120. (H/t and thanks to Lisa Moore)

+++

Could the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (1941-2010) have put things more simply and candidly as his last words as he was being wheeled into surgery? Is there anything concerning the ongoing foreign policy disasters, warmaking, failed nation-building, and budget busting to fill the coffers of the military-industrial complex that this current president (and any future ones) need pay more attention to? Here's a suggestion: why don't each of us print out this statement, properly quoted and attributed, on a postcard (to save money) or a piece of paper, and send it to our Congresspeople? (We might even consider sending one at least once a week for the month of January, as a wakeup call to them. Perhaps I'll organize this on the other blog, and let's see how this goes...)

""You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan." - Richard Holbrooke