Politics – Page 36 – Hannah Nicklin

This is a blog post about a new social-campaigning tool. It is also a blog about apathy.

I am fed up of being told that my generation is apathetic.

My generation is absolutely and wholly not apathetic.

Disengaged perhaps, but that speaks of the end of a political era which is simply waiting to be reformed in a hyper-connected age. All of the demonstrations, meetings and online activism I am involved in are full of people my own age, I know many people my own age and younger who blog about global politics, about feminism, about the environment, about party politics.

What has disappeared is person-on-the-street working class union-led activism. There are far fewer people talking to and about the working classes anymore because they have been written off: that horrible phrase ‘Chav’. The 80s broke down traditional working class communities and then told them that the way to prove themselves was to consume – labels, gold, cars. The Loadsamoney generation, whom the middle classes look down upon as somehow gauche. The lesson taught by Thatcherism was that it was immediate proof of consumption that matters, not slow burn, drag yourself socially-mobile through education, which used to be the way to go.

My generation is the generation of the celebrity machine, which began in earnest with the advent of the manufactured pop band. ‘Don’t worry’ celebrity promises, if you are pretty enough, if you can sing, if you can kick a ball, you have a golden ticket to celebrity. Boys! Become footballers, Girls! Marry them! It was all about the golden ticket, not how you earned it, or how realistic the acquisition of it might be.

That’s the kind of hope that our modern brand of capitalism needs to keep us buying, to keep us racking up the debt. This is the age of the empty spectacle. The big show.

If society is organized around consumption, one participates in social life as a consumer; the spectacle produces spectators, and thus protects itself from questioning. It induces passivity rather than action, contemplation rather than thinking, and a degradation of life into materialism. […] Desires are degraded or displaced into needs and maintained as needs. P.8 source

But this big show, this spectacle, the media circus, unites us, it has “made almost everyone a member of a new proletariat, and thus a potential revolutionary” p.10 ibid

Traditional areas of radicalisation have been reigned in – monetised: universities are a prime example, you are indoctrinated into the debt system from the off, and the transaction becomes about what you’re due, rather than what you seek. But people are finding their political feet in new arenas. Online ones specifically. There’s a reformation coming. Because this is also the era of the global village, of hyper-connectivity.

I believe in an open-source wiki-ethic driven political system. This is not as silly as it sounds. I believe a lot that is wrong about our political system (not the people in it) is how closed down and archaic it is. It needs new forms, and new methods of communication. And I mean communication – that is listening as well as speaking. Too much policy is driven by the media acting as a self-appointed intermediary – they don’t speak for us, yet they affect change more than we ever could. I believe social media and the internet are key to unlocking the relationship between people and policy, and developing politics which are people driven, not media-told.

My thoughts on it all are still formulating, and someday soon I’ll publish them in a #wikipolitics manifesto. Until then I and my generation shall continue to be loud-mouthed.

Enter Louder.

Louder is a new socially-networked hub for campaigns which aims to;

…help make your campaign louder you will be able to connect up with other campaigns and those running them. Providing a much needed online space for campaigners, from international NGOs to grass roots activists, to link up collaborate and share experiences.

You can follow Louder on Twitter @louderdevelop.

This is the beginning. I know I’m prone to fits of passionate hyperbole, but I really believe that there is a reformation coming in the way our political system operates – a necessary return to grass roots, but now with the ability to be amplified, to produce genuine discussion and truly informed policy/politicians. Imagine if the debates for the next election didn’t happen in the mainstream media, but on youtube, recorded on the flip cameras of doorstep debate, with genuine worries being listened to and tackled by street-level activists. Imagine if you genuinely got to pose questions, engage. Who says the press is necessary? (Apart from the press, obviously). They (including the BBC) need to earn their keep, prove their worth. At the moment they’re too lazy. (NB – we also need to remember 30% of the UK have no access to the internet, and 10% of those who do only have dial-up – source – something else which needs tackling).

I have been testing the beta of Louder over the past couple of days, and it promises to be really really exciting. Louder allows the easy creation of a home page for a campaign, events, and the plugging in and aggregation of key social media platforms, currently including images, video, youtube, twitter feeds, blog feeds and more. Here’s a quick screenshot of what I’d done in about half an hour of playing:

It’s clean, it’s simple, and it’s powerful, almost like the Posterous of online campaigns.

Louder is launched this Friday at the ICA in London (at Tuttle), and needs as much feedback and participation as possible so they can hone the tool so it’s genuinely useful. Louder will open up and consolidate the process that’s been happening via the closed down world of facebook, and the disparate world of the blogosphere, bringing people together in a global grass-roots manner much more suited to our global village era.

Anyone following #guardiangag /#trafigura injunction outrage on Twitter over the past day, cannot deny that the internet is going to prove one of the main battlegrounds of future politics.

So get on there on Friday, if you have a cause, set up a campaign, if you don’t, have a play and provide feedback, it all helps, and it’s important.

Image by Stéfan, shared via a Creative Commons licence

Cards on the table, music means a lot to me. It’s scored many critical moments of my life so far, and papered over the cracks in the boring bits. Music has brought me back from the edge, when I felt like my brain was going to leap out of my head, music has set me far freer than alcohol ever has, whisky helps, but give me a dirty rock club, heat, smoke, lights and I will dance until I can’t breathe, until I feel like I could disappear.

For every heart break, there’s a song that goes with it, for every break up, an album you have to reclaim, for every beautiful moment, a piece of music. Music is reciprocal, it’s shared, it brings people together, it makes moments, and it is inspired by them. It is an essential form that talks to us of the universal; rhythm scores our lives, all life.

(here’s a Spotify playlist of all those songs)

I like music, you get that. But I would have heard none of the tracks above had it not been for file-sharing. I am not poor, not in real terms, I have a roof over my head, food in the fridge, an education. But my food budget for the past two years was something between £7.50 and £10 a week, I have roughly zero disposable income. I download files. Illegally. So does almost everyone I know. If you took that music away from me, you’d be taking away the thickness of experience. You’d be halving the substance of my memories.

This is a blog in reaction to Peter Mandleson’s threat to cut off internet access to persistent file-sharers. There are two questions here; one is it legal, two, is it useful?

Despite the fact that the 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) Peter Mandleson has since announced a new plan that

Calls for the secretary of state to be given the power to direct the communications regulator Ofcom to implement technical measures against illegal peer-to-peer filesharing. Source

So, is it legal? There’s quite a strong argument against these measures in terms of them being unenforceable – you cannot cut off 7 million people’s internet connections without due process of law. (I shouldn’t have to say this but) you cannot assume guilt; 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. Is Mandleson 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 is he advocating a form of marshal law, where ISPs are sheriffs, and users are guilty until proven innocent?

The second argument against the idea is that it actually directly contravenes our human rights under EU legislation:

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

The action also contravenes what was pretty much the whole conclusion of the Digital Britain report: that broadband internet access was a right, not a privilege.

These actions 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.

It’s all beginning to sound a bit desperate isn’t it?

Whitehall insiders believe the U-turn is more likely to have been caused by a prior meeting with one of the most powerful figures in the British music business, Lucian Grainge, the chairman of Universal Music – Source

Do you know what might save you a lot of money Universal? How about pulling out of all of those lawsuits, cutting down on those very finely paid lawyers of yours. A shiny penny to anyone who can set Universal Music Group’s legal costs against their projected losses to file sharing.

What we are seeing here, is the end of one type of business: the physical distribution of digital products. Source

These movements against progress are nothing less than the death throes of a nasty, parasitic part of a very worthy industry. They are not useful.

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.

Culture is not only enjoyable, it is vital to us as a species, culture frames our existence; it helps us reflect of our selves, it asks big questions. Culture was also vital to our evolution, the ability to tell stories- to imagine differing outcomes was key to our growth– we teach out young using stories, cautionary tales and nursery rhymes. Our cultural heritage is open source, peer to peer, shared. See ballads, fairy tales, myths, legends, and performance like commedia dell’arte (its latter day incarnation is pantomime, but it used to be free to view political satire, kind of like a Spitting Image road show). The ownership of stories (told visually, actively, aurally) have changed since then, with the advent of a market economy, came patronage, and then a global capitalist system decided that not only did it want to own our stories, it wanted to sell them to us too. Distribution. But now the system is changing again.

The great chaotic utopia envisaged by some online evangelists would be culturally impoverished – a world that would create millions of buskers, but no Beatles. Source

I, and many of my peers are not calling for an end to the creative industries, we’re calling for changes to a very specific aspect of them – distribution. I’m not talking about some ‘choatic utopia’, what I am saying is the way that we consume is changing. Myspace, and Spotify have already changed the way that that we access music, and that artist distribute their wares. Youtube allows anyone with a camera and a computer to have their say. The Age of Stupid crowd-sourced the complete £450K production budget and are pioneering a system that allows anyone to buy a licence to screen it whenever and wherever they like – keeping the profits for themselves or their climate campaign.

Here’s a theory:

The world of ideas is changing, the news is becoming mutual, Obama’s politics was mutual- not driven by spin, broadcast control and brand […] It’s all about the pull […] Think pirates. Think mavericks, think renegades. They will re-form our world, they can tell us what the future might look like. It’s critical that artists are engaged with the digital world, not for marketing, but to ask difficult, big questions of it – Charles Leadbeater @wethink at Shift Happens

Here’s an industry perspective:

The majority of my audiences watch my films over the BitTorrent system, a system so revolutionarily brilliant that it means I, an independent film-maker, can distribute a film in full High Definition to hundreds of millions of viewers with absolutely no cost incurred to me – Monaghan Media source

And that of a consumer

Now, I muster all the spare cash I have to pay for an internet connection, and go to gigs as often as possible. I tell my mates (and a bunch of strangers on the interweb) about all the new bands I’ve heard of, and encourage them to see them live. So, I’m paying for the music I like, I’m paying the costs of distributing it, and I’m promoting it source

P2P filesharing is revolutionary, it’s zero cost, close to zero in carbon emissions (servers), it runs on recommendations. It is another shift to the ‘pull’ ethic of the digital world. In a hyper-connected, information heavy existence, you cannot deliver neatly packaged tales of what we should buy and how we should be, because there are a million other voices that will simultaneously disagree. People taped music from CDs and radio before now, that’s been going on for years, what really scares the Powers That Be is the peer – peer review, peer sharing. Theirs is no longer dominant voice, we’re building our own stories.

I believe that cutting off filesharing is fundamentally unfair, fundamentally unjust – and penalises the young, and the less well off.

Yes artists need to make a living, but hierarchical distribution is not the only way to do that. Radiohead released their album In Rainbows allowing people to pay ‘what they thought it was worth’, you could pay as little as 1p for it. The average paid was around $6 (source). They also very recently gave away a song for free. In a world where everyone is vying for your attention a loyal fan base matters more than ever, you cultivate that through trust, interaction and recommendation.

Ben Walker, (the man who did the Twitter song [and much else besides]) suggests that “when it’s so easy to make and share music, you’d be an unpopular person if you charged for music.”

Copyright has evolved, we now have Creative Commons, and likewise we can find new models from which artists can make a living, offering “goods that are infinitely duplicated (music) for free and tying them to scarce goods (vinyl records, t-shirts, collector’s items etc.)” source, is one method, Likewise we are never going to be able to duplicate the singular experience of seeing a performance live, people still pay for that. Artists will still make a living, what digital distribution demolishes is the hierarchy – superstars and massive profit margins.

Johnathan Phan, of Pirate Party UK suggests that

Whereas earlier we had [one] artist making 10 million, we now have a hundred people making 1 million. source

It is not useful for Peter Mandleson to be attempting to tackle file-sharing. What he should be doing, as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, is using the Digital Britain report to offer big business a manual to the digital world, if they want to survive, they have to evolve, Mandleson is doing the country a disservice when he panders to their childish cries to stem the tide of change.

Our world is slowly realising that unrelenting growth is not a sustainable model, in economics, in the environment, in our populace. Unfortunately this message takes the longest to reach the people at the top. What’s the answer? Support artists, not labels. Go to gigs, love music, share your love with others.

And if anyone tries to prosecute you for sharing torrents, show them the Pirate Google, and tell them to fuck off.

NB I know this is also an issue for software and gaming, and I haven’t really addressed them here, I pretty much hold the same line of argument, open-source software is already leading the way, and gaming development needs levelling from the ‘big producing studio’ ethic to allow for greater access for would-be-developers, shifting the focus from the blockbuster to storytelling and innovation. See Psychonauts.

This is where the title of the post came from:

Tag: Politics

Dinosaurs Will Die

Image by Stéfan, shared via a Creative Commons licence