Opening Comments for the In The City P2P Panel, Manchester, on Sunday 18 October:

Although Rik [Falkvinge]’s in front of us in flesh and blood, he wouldn’t exist – the Pirate Party wouldn’t exist – without enforcement policies being the primary goal of the music business. The programme bills this as “two sides of a debate”, but as a journalist I get incredibly suspicious when I hear there are just two sides, because usually there are two, three or four more we don’t hear about. Let’s put this into context.

The Pirate Party exists because of a political vacuum. Politicians don’t do politics anymore. Compare them to Lenin and Thatcher, for example, who had ambitious programmes of what society should look like, that cut across social, economic and personal ideas of their time. If you look at what a politician does now, it’s focus groups.

So into this political vacuum you’ll have lots of fringe, single issue groups. The Pirate Party is the first and most successful.

Now Rik specifically evoked some Enlightenment values in his presentation – [individual rights against the church and state]. But I see this as a very conservative and reactionary movement in two quite specific ways. First it’s a techno-utopian movement that’s all about replacing politics. It presents itself as a political party, but it isn’t in politics at all. Politics is about people sitting down and working something out, a consensus.

It’s also reactionary in another way.

Because ever since the invention of machines that copy culture, we’ve had this political and social settlement called copyright. Contrary to what Rik says, all those technologies have flourished and each and every technology has made artists more autonomous and better off. What’s Rik’s saying is quite simple. He’s saying here’s a copying machine – and I agree, it’s just a bigger copying machine than the others – for the first time in three or four hundred years this copying machine will make artists less autonomous and worse off. Now I think that’s a reactionary and discriminatory point of view.
So this is a techno utopian view is a very deterministic view of history – get out of the way. That’s a rejection of politics. I’ll give you another example of techno utopianism, and this is a common mistake people make – and we all know it’s wrong as soon as you think about it.

Is that an accumulation of information transforms itself into power. This is one of the great myths of our time – information isn’t knowledge, knowledge isn’t wisdom. Gathering up a load of information doesn’t make you successful. This is a fantasy nerds have in particular.

Finally I have a view that makes me incredibly popular with the music business – which is that any technology that can copy should be legal. The business has caused all kinds of problems by fighting it. Person to person file sharing, things like near field communications – where we can share music by shaking hands. These should all be brought to market – but they should be on the market for the enrichment of artists themselves, and people who invest in music.

So to summarise – we’ll get lots of single issue groups in the next few years. It’s deeply reactionary point of view, it’s quite discriminatory – but it’s the results of the music business’ lack of courage and innovation. Thanks.

(I’m often invited – usually it’s because they think I’ll oblige them by saying something stupid, like “The Internets is Evil”. It isn’t hard to decline.)

But apart from the inanity and groupthink, these New Media sessions proudly define their irrelevance by focusing purely on the Web. Pipes and politics are boring to this crowd – so deeper structural, technical and economic issues about the “internet” are ignored. Yet the parameters of what the “Web” can or cannot do are defined by its infrastructure. The Twitterers wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for the pipes.

So Spiked is to be congratulated for stepping into the battlefield with its “Traffic Jam” the other night. I was a late addition to the panel. You can skip my brief contribution – and I’ve raised most of these points before – by turning the page to see how the discussion unfolded.

Given seven minutes I opted to make four brief points. Firstly, I noted with dismay the tendancy to focus on the Web. The terms “Net” and “Web” had become interchangeable – but this is more than a semantic discussion. Pinching a phrase from our (first) Adam Curtis interview, I reckoned this was because the media preferred to fantasise about the world rather than report. And the politicians (and bogo-academics who advise them) simply followed suit.

Secondly, it was really important to look at where money was being generated. It sure wasn’t being generated in abundance on the web by anyone except Google, which now has 85 per cent of the web advertising business. Profitable sites like the one you’re reading are exceptions, not the norm. And while “data doesn’t pay” is an oversimplification, it’s generally true – and we should face up to it. Which means that network operators needed to think about new services we actually want to pay for – or face up to a future where net services cross-subsidised by something (like TV or voice minutes) that is reliable.

I noted two forms of escapism in this debate that I thought were just plain weird.

There’s Net Neutrality, which is an issue that’s been described as “Intelligent Design for the Left”, for one. It’s basically legislation based on technical ignorance that requires people to be nice. But Net Neut legislation tabled before Congress two years ago would have outlawed entire classes of applications, such as real-time video, and forbidden operators offering you a QoS service – something quite a few of our readers want and are happy to pay for. The Neutralists don’t understand how the internet works – and would effectively freeze innovation at the 1993 state. Not a very smart thing to do. They’re Luddites, really, and it’s a static (and even nostalgic) view of the world.

Finally, I noted how angry Reg readers are with the whole broadband business here. But bashing the ISPs – while understandable – was really a misdirection. It simply avoided laying the blame where it should be laid: on the cosy backroom deal between the regulator and BT Wholesale, a decision which created a “market” that was designed to fail.

What intrigues me is that this anger is a consequence of the Web 2.0-topians idea of what a consumer should be able to do. How many times have you heard a web evangelist say that because we’re venting on the web – we “were in control”? (The BBC and New Labour seem particularly keen on this, for some reason, perhaps because they both spend more on web consultants than anyone else.)

But this view makes caricatures of us, and leaves us powerless. We should be able to look at where power is really exercised, and be able to change it. The idea we’re changing anything by getting angry and punching the first thing we see is a notion that turns democratic engagement into therapy – and leaves things as they are. That point always seems to go down well, and did here.

Now onto the debate.

Rob Killick had written a provocative piece trailing the debate, where he described all the moaning about British broadband as an example of Digital Malthusianism. Science could invent its way out of our troubles. Look closer, he said, and you saw special-interest pleading:

“What seems to be driving today’s panic about an internet crunch is the needs of ISPs and media competitors, who have an interest in stoking up fear about the BBC and others causing an internet collapse, and also a general sense of cultural pessimism.”

Legal academic Chris Marsden, a policy advisor on regulation, had some thoughtful points on the nuances between British and European regulation. He also had one suggestion that may make Reg readers choke: we should think about Phorm as an evil necessity that helped pay for better network infrastructure.

(Ahem.)

Journalist David Crow said that more pricing flexibility was needed, and thought it was absurd that heavy users, such as “Pete” who downloaded video and music all day, should pay the same as light users. Pete was to haunt the debate to the very end.

David added that he didn’t think most people were Petes – and most people on the internet paid for their content. Now the very fact that there’s a pejorative word for David – “Paytard” – tells you that a few people will disagree.

Write to him, not me.

The questions reflected the diffuse nature of the debate – the topic is so broad that we could barely skim the surface (or even mention many things). One questioner wanted government intervention in the market – while most people opposed government regulation. There was also some concern about “private networks”, but as Keith McMahon pointed out from the floor – the intertubes is almost all private networks. There’s Google’s, there’s Akamai’s… even the BBC is up for it.

While I admire the Spiked crew’s optimism and faith that we can invent our way out of almost any problem, we’re not in a broadband pickle because of a lack of optimism or invention. How long has IPv6 been embedded in routers, and supported by the clients? Ten and five years, I reckon. Getting innovations from the lab to the market, so they’re actually useful to us, is what characterises this business. Most of the players have no incentive to invest in better infrastructure, something the regulator hadn’t bargained for when it “designed” the British broadband market.

So a few more shoes had to drop – I mentioned legal P2P services as an example of something that may increase demand and investment. But to be honest, I can’t think of many more.

Only after the discussion closed did I realise that no one had mentioned municipal fibre. Unlike Muni WiFi, which has crashed and burned because there’s no business case for it, Muni fibre projects are commercially justifiable – if they follow a cross-subsidy model. Maybe that’s another debate?

My presentation to the Westminster eForum on Net Neutrality. I’ll turn this into an embeddable slide show eventually, honest.

For now, see The Register for transcript and slides.

To London, where the web utopianism has a name (“Web 2.0″) and is a rage amongst marketing and media people. I reiterated a point I had raised two years earlier:

&ldquo”Let’s acknowledge what the Web has been successful at: as a presentation layer. But the Web 2.0 kids desperately want to write system apps on their “global operating system” – only they don’t have the cojones to do system level thinking. Real engineers look at where systems (and humans) fail – their priority isn’t a cool demo. They’re pessimistic. And there’s no place for pessimism at a Web 2.0 conference.”

Have a listen to the MP3, or click below the fold to read the transcript:

Tim O’Reilly had snootily replied that he was unable to respond to “innuendo”-

“… this is yellow journalismi: find the outliers, and attack them to make a point.”

For O’Reilly, infrastructure is an “outlier”.

London, 3 February 2006

Good evening, how nice it is to address an English audience. At every
panel I’ve addressed for the past six years – I’ve been living in San
Francisco – I’ve seen the tops of everyone heads, their noses are in
the laptop, and no one’s paying any attention at all!

I was looking for a snappy quote to introduce this subject, “The Next
Bubble?” The best one was supplied about 9 months ago by a friend of
mine who did very well out of the first internet boom, and has about
100 million dollars to spend, and he’s only spending about 1 million of
it in new web start-ups. So I asked him “Why are you sitting this one
out?” He replied, “the big ROIs are going to come from solving the
really big problems that haven’t fixed yet, and Web 2.0 doesn’t solve
any of them”.

OK, tonight I’ll ask if this is bubble, what’s going to make it burst
if it is a bubble, and then conclude with some very optimistic
technology scenarios that once we stop focusing completely on the web
and think more broadly about technology, there’s actually quite an
interesting picture out there for all of you.

Firstly, then, “Is this a bubble?”

I’d agree with Mike and Dave, earlier, in this isn’t a bubble on the
scale of five or six years ago. That was the biggest loss of wealth in
human history.

This time around I believe the figure is something like $500m that’s
been invested in web companies. And people aren’t losing their houses
or their investments; there isn’t the IPO market, so I think those
earlier points were really well made. So there isn’t an economic bubble
of any particular significance.

But there is a rhetorical bubble.

I think we’re at the crest of a wave of utopian rhetoric which we
haven’t seen since the Artifical Intelligence hype 30 years ago, when
people confidently predicted chess playing computers would beat humans
in a couple of years, and five years down from that we’d be enslaved to
robots, who would nevertheless tuck us in at bed time..

This is the real problem with the Web. I’ve been trying to figure it
out with our readers – why this is? Let me give you an example of how
there’s a very different view of the world when you’re inside this One-
Web kind-of-thinking than to when you’re outside it.

About 18 months ago I did a little satirical, throwaway piece about Tim
O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 because the poor bloke had just made
his 45th attempt to try and define it. He’d come up with this very
blobby chart full of nebulous concepts, so I suggested five definitions
of my own. And invited readers to supply their own.

When I looked at my computer three hours laterm I saw 600 incoming
emails in response. Within 24 hours later there were about a thousand.
Just one of them defended the idea.

“Boy,” I thought, “do people really not like Web 2.0.”

A lot of these came from infrastructure people. You could see this
great wave of opprobrium going round the world. It started with people
who runs systems for companies in the city, who were getting in at 6am.

They don’t like it for I think two reasons. One is that – and web
designers please don’t take this the wrong way, because it’s a real
skill – Web 2.0 is presentation layer people trying to solve
infrastructure level problems.

The internet has real big problems with spam and security, but a
utopian approach to building computer systems doesn’t solve them. Tim
O’Reilly had this phrase on his Web 2.0 chart: “Radical Trust”That
really got them annoyed! Anyone who has to maintain a firewall or a
corporate data system isn’t going to depend on “Radical Trust”. People
really hated that one.

The other reason is that they see this very woolly Californian New Age
rhetoric – which actually has its roots in some of the cults that
started on the West Coast – as the wooly cover for the next wave of
Management Consultants.

Now why does this utopian rhetoric appeal to people so much?

I think because it is a genuinely seductive world. Things are really
broken now – the media is owned by the same people who own the
government; it’s very hard to get a political consensus even on
something like global warming; but Web 2.0 is seductive because it
offers a kind off-the-shelf belief system. You can walk into a store
and get an suit to measure, well look at the Web offers you.

You have an alternative media – the Blogosphere – you never have to
leave that. You have an alternative epistemology – Wikipedia – where
nothing has to be true. And you have an alternative economics – The
Long Tail, that never has to add up. None of this has to add up!

So it’s very seductive, and I can see how it appeals to be people, who
start to project their fantasies onto it.

Let’s easier to be realistic about the internet, we can see what makes
money now and some of the fog’s cleared. But only once we’ve got past
the utopian rhetoric will we be able to see the much more realistic
opportunities for growth in the future.

Why do I think if this is a bubble why will it burst?

Fundamentally it’s the same as last time, There’s a rhetorical bubble
because people expect too much from technology. It can’t solve problems
that don’t exist. A lot of the uses that people are expecting to
generate downstream benefits from the internet aren’t going to work
even if you have a laptop strapped to your head the whole time.

Now for the positives I promised. Where do I see the growth coming
from?

I see two waves once we’ve got some of the crazy rhetoric about the web
behind us, and the web is distracting us from both of these.

One is going to come from what’s called near field electronics and
RFIDs in particular – I’m not altogether sure this is going to be a
good thing, though. Now, most of you have experienced the self-checkout
at Tesco, where you spend far longer trying to wave things over a
scanner than you otherwise would.

Well, the good news is you’re going to have to do that fairly soon,
you’ll just walk out with your basket. And you card will be
automatically debited.

The downside, as I’m sure you can begin imagine, is that there’s no
human contact at all. Tesco’s will simply be a warehouse and you walk
in and walkout with your basket. A pretty soulless experience.

The other big change I’d like you to think about, which will really
transform things hopefully in a more positive way, is there’s a lot
going on developing new compensation mechanisms for digital media. I
was at the big annual music festival Midem a couple of weeks ago and
there’s such a lot going on behind the scenes to find ways of
compensating artists for what currently is called “piracy”, file
sharing.

We’ve barely begun to think about the consequences for this. I’m
confident it will be the biggest positive boom in our lifetimes.

You’ll be able to walk in hear and your iPod will fill itself with
music from the jukebox. Your iPod will be a personal broadcast station
- for people on the bus.

The only reason we don’t have this in place is because the compensation
mechanism isn’t in place, the blanket or flat fee or all-you-can-eat
license.

As a consequence a lot of the technology utopians have this great big
beef about copyright, “it must go!”, or “artists will have to work for
free – because we deserve it, we’re geeks”.

Obviously this is unsustainable in the long run and it will end fairly
shortly.

I predict this within five years – although France very nearly voted
for it last year from a top-down point of view – it more or less said,
“here’s a 50p fee on your ISP bill, you can swap as much music as you
want, go and do it”. But it’ll be here in five years.

It’s one of the very few technologies I write about that’s truly social
- it gets us out talking to each other. Most technologies put up
barriers, and we use them to avoid each other.

Any questions on either of these, shout them out in Q&A. Thank you!

In the Lion’s Den at the home of techno utopianism – the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School.

A plea to legalise P2P file sharing. I now favour voluntary approach to the same goal. Read the original transcript here.

Transcript at the BBC site, here.

An early look at Googlephilia, for a panel discussion at the Next 5 Minutes festival in Amsterdam, 13 September 2003.

Networked digital media have already transformed the shapes of archives and their social, political, cultural significance. Not only have they brought along increases in access to archives and the tools of archiving, which traditionally were rather located behind the doors of institutions. Archival practices themselves have changed shape with the expansions in collaborative and distributed archiving, real-time archiving, ” raw archiving ” (the storage of unedited recordings), and continuous appropriations among data reservoirs. These shifts in the practices of archiving call for a fresh evaluation of the politics of archiving. As the work of Foucault makes forcefully clear, the archive has traditionally played a big role as part of disciplinary and regulatory regimes. With the spread of extra-institutional practices of archiving, the politics of archiving also comes to be associated with heterogeneous practices of critique (monitoring power and its abuses) and the re-configuration of collective memories (the archive as a site for the enactment of diasporic cultures). Here the activist tradition of relying on archives for investigative purposes, of which the human rights movement is a most well known example, becomes particularly relevant. More generally, as media consumption relies more and more on information technology, archives such as Google’s index of the Net become key hubs of everyday culture. As such archives currently s offer forceful platforms for political contestation. But at the same time the notion of ” the emancipated archive ” remains a very fragile one, as data always remains appropriatable.

and my report for The Register:

Net Time list moderator Ted Byfield had an almost impossible task summing up a panel discussion on the politics of the archive here on Saturday. The panel, at the Next Five Minutes festival featured Danielle Riou, who curates the Milosevic on Trial video archive and artists Julia Meltzger and David Thome, who create haunting works of art based on reconstructed state documents at Speculative Archive for Historical Clarification. And I’d been invited to talk about Google, or more specifically – as Google itself isn’t really the problem – the consequences of Googlephilia. Google is remarkable for many reasons, not least among them being its ability to compel its most fervent admirers to lose their minds.

“The implications of Google have real implications for mass social procedure, on how we enquire,” said Byfield. “It’s so much bigger than terrifying – it’s Interesting.”

“We’ve noted how Google markets itself, as something light and fluffy,” he added. “But it’s worth us asking how it sees itself. For example Google is not interested in the specifity of the material – it’s interested in patterns rather than the content itself.”

“The most important thing,” said Riou, “is to safeguard the world ‘archive’. Now we have ‘archive’ in every single menubar, in Outlook, we should reserve the severity or authority of what we mean by an ‘archive’ by limiting what we call an archive.”

The panel was introduced by N5M founder David Wagner who described Google as the world’s first pop database. He may be right, although as regular Register readers are aware, there are serious implications of this popular cultural phenomenon which a largely bedazzled press chooses to ignore.
The Web eludes Google

Here are a few.

Firstly, it’s worth remembering that Google only indexes a third of the web’s nine billion pages. That it does so as comprehensively, if not more so, than anyone else, isn’t at issue. Information costs money, and this has taken the sheen off the ‘Internet’ as it was once sold to us. It was supposed to bring all this information to our fingertips. “Information wants to be free,” was a popular mantra at the time. But the most valuable collections limit their access, for very good economic reasons: they can’t afford not to.

The best collections are Web-accessible, after a fashion. For example, San Francisco Library’s public collections are one of the Web’s treasures – and accessible to any visitor who takes time to pick up a Library card – but beyond the crawlers. They represent the tip of the iceberg of the Internet that Google can’t see – but that the rest of us can enjoy.

However this brain drain, this emptying of the commons simply isn’t what we were promised ten years ago, when the Internet was first sold to the public as, amongst other things, an almost infinite source of information. Ten years on, the reality hasn’t lived up to the promise, and as Net Time co-founder Geert Lovink pointed out in a panel on Saturday, and as we’ve noted too, Internet usage in the West is stalling. The public is not stupid, and is now reaching for the off switch.

It isn’t exactly fair to blame Google for this. Google has succeeded in becoming the branding for the Great Internet Project. But obviously, it can’t be responsible for the content, which leaves us all somewhat underwhelmed. But the corporation continues to highlight the mystical properties of its technology with some absurd claims, and at the very least, encourages commentators to describe its collection as something it isn’t.

“I’m a librarian, and I like Google,” said Steve Cisler from the floor. “But I appreciate the point being made that there are different information domains. There is a whole lot of information that’s not on the Internet and may possibly be offline.” [These developments are covered in Gary Price's Resource Shelf pages].

Googlephilia tends to obscure this, and other issues such as data integrity and longevity. Historically, archives were maintained, as Byfield notes, by lots of men in brown tunics copying things out.

As is the norm with techno-utopian narratives, where things are always getting better, there’s no room for bad news. Google is all good things to people who simply need enough faith. And there are plenty who want to believe.

(One of the stranger claims made for Google is that its excellence proves that a surveillance society can never be successful. The opening line in that piece informs us: “How much ass does Google kick? All of it”. Googlephiliacs are effusive with pledges of faith and trust: “We trust the democratic, bottom-up, blog-building, link-loving nature and integrity of Google’s PageRank system” [Morville]. It’s a religious thing. It binds us together, they say. “Collectively we believe in Google, it’s our memory, it’s the way we share.” [Winer]. (Perhaps Internet-ready PCs will soon be sold with sickbags to help us through such twaddle, just like airplanes.)

That anyone wants to believe that Google renders surveillance useless is itself pretty disturbing, not least when the claim comes from a ‘privacy activist’. So Google is not only our doctor, it’s our Supreme Court and our Miss Manners, too!

“There’s a saying that ‘History is Written By The Victor’ but it’s time to ask what writing is, and what history is,” said Byfield. “Is it the infinite generation of real-time noise? It’s not so clear what’s happening to ‘writing’. And it’s very interesting what’s happening to history.”