Blog – Page 107 – Hannah Nicklin

Last Wednesday I went to the Broadway in Nottingham to take part in Hide&Seek’s Sandpit Tour. The tour was part of a bigger, week long video games festival, a lot of which I wish I’d had the time and train fares to attend. It was a real celebration of the digital form, past and present, and was a real boon (yeah I’ve not heard that word for a while either) for the city. The event was free, and you could book ahead, or just show up, and was made up of pervasive and playful games. I did my big academic analysis on the pervasive side of it last week, so here’s a more straightforward record of the actual experience.

Thursday

50+ participants

Thursday was a pretty simple game, and was thrust upon us as soon as we arrived. It (rather cleverly) encouraged people to chat to each other straight away, and also readied you a little for letting go of your inhibitions, as half the time you were asking people just at the Broadway to see a film, and with no clue about what you were talking about. You were given a card with a day on, there were many of all the days, apart from Thursday, the aim being to become Thursday by 10pm. You shifted days by asking “Are you Thursday?” If they were a day that was adjacent to yours (if you were Sunday, that would be Monday and Saturday) then you exchanged cards (advantageously or not). I got to Friday. Frustratingly close!

Dadaist pursuit.

6 players

This was a simple ‘pick up and play’ game, used to fill in the time between games, and offered in a booklet for people to take away with them. Subverting Trivial Pursuit cards, a player would read out a question card, and the task of the other players is to reply with the funniest answer on the reverse of their cards. Whoever the questioner deems the funniest then receives a prize in the question card. Often a lot to do with delivery, I reckon with a few more drinks, an awesome little pick up and play. If I was going to be facetious and analyse it, I could say something about subverting the value in trading on information and education. It was also a lot more fun than trivial pursuit. Less stressful anyway (this may or may not have something to do with the way I approach it).

Vampires

Continue reading Sandpit

Hannah Nicklin
@hannahnicklin
hannahnicklin.com

28^th October 2009

Dear Peter Mandelson,

I am writing to you regarding the #3strikes internet piracy legislation that you have recently confirmed.

I am involved in both the sectors of which you are taking such a damaging interest in, and although I don’t have the money to lobby on the same level as the music industry, I speak to you now as an investor. As an investor in the online world.

The analogue world is fleshy, simultaneously both tactile and ineffable. This is why we can invent concepts like money – you can hold on to it, and it can also be represented on pieces of paper, can change in value without changing in essence. The online world, on the other hand, is built on definite points, and logic. Oh it can contain the ineffable, just as infinity can be expressed as a value, but it’s built on single points, on values. If there is an online economy, its currency is information. And if we participate in online worlds, we are investing our information, our content in that world.

So I speak to you now, as an investor. I am a member of both the arts industry, and the online world. I work with arts companies on their online involvement, I blog opinion pieces and engage with politics and ethics, I write plays, and I am also researching art and digital technology. I may not be a big player, but I have a vested interest in online spaces that I participate in. I have a right to talk about how my share in these worlds is treated.

Despite the fact that your very own in depth Digital Britain report released in June 09 ruled out cutting off P2P sharers (“The most draconian penalty considered at the time was to slow down a persistent filesharer’s broadband connection”. Source) You continue to attempt to enforce a strategy that is at best foolish, and at worst illegal.

If, as you maintain, there are 7 million illegal files sharers in the UK, you must consider that you cannot cut off 7 million people’s internet connections without due process of law. It’s perfectly easy to piggy back on unsecured wireless connections, just as it is possible that a connection is shared by a building, a family, a business. Furthermore, are you proposing to process each illegal filesharer through the justice system? (And at the cost of the taxpayer – “Her Majesty’s Court System currently holds 200,000 criminal cases per year” source – how is it going to deal with millions)? Or are advocating a form of marshal law, where ISPs are sheriffs, and users are guilty until proven innocent?

Disconnecting people from the internet does not fully comply with EU legislation. In fact it directly contravenes EU legislation. I am referring to amendment 138/46 which […] declared that access to the internet was a fundamental human right. source

You seem to be so eager for the Royal Mail to modernise, I wonder why you don’t see it equally as important for the music industry to do so?

I’d like to believe that the U-turn after the digital Britain report had nothing to do with your meeting meeting with one of the most powerful figures in the British music business, Lucian Grainge, the chairman of Universal Music – Source, soon after which you announced your resurrection of the draconian #3strikes, but it’s hard to understand why else you have decided to make this fallacious decision. And fallacious it is, the figures bandied about are bolstered by false accounting for losses to the creative industries, and even aside from the exaggerated and erroneous figures involved in the headlines (see Ben Goldacre’s excellent blog post for more) their maths is flawed at the point they assume every download is a lost sale.

Copyright was originally brought about in 1709 to “encourage the creation of artistic works by granting a right to copy for 14 years.” It now stands between 50 and 95 years Source. Its aim was to encourage a profession. I am not arguing for an artistic community that consists solely of amateurs, I understand, boy do I understand that artists need to be paid. But being paid is not the ends for which art is made, it is the encouragement. The leveller. Not the stick with which to beat the consumer. Continue reading An Open Letter to Peter Mandelson