vox

Consuming Responsibly

Not food, although I do try and do that as well, especially since moving to the ur-hippyfest that is San Francisco.

I'm talking about media.

I consume media and I have in my possession a serious of devastating tools - some generic, some lovingly handcrafted and breathtakingly personalised - that allow me to consume my media as I wish.The problem is that I've optimised for convenience. I watch various TV shows whenever I want and without unskippable adverts for stuff I'll never buy.

Because it's not like this image has done the rounds a bunch recently

I surf the web with an ad blocker on. My music purchasing is irregular and unpredictable.That said - it's not like a don't try. I go to gigs and try and buy music at the venue. The last (mentally counts) 20 or so albums I've bought have been via that, via the artists website (either digitally or physically) or direct from small indie labels.

I don't read pirated ebooks or scanned comics and I buy my comics from small, indie book stores.

If a program is on Hulu I watch it that way.

I've started disabling my ad-blocker for sites I really like. Mostly because of articles like this at Ars Technica and The Guardian.

Concerned that niche and genre programs I like (such as Dollhouse) were getting canceled because, as I understood it, the demographic who watches them is largely uncountable and unmeasurable by the large media corporations and their accounts, I've started looking into how to get money back to the creators in the most efficient way.

The problem is that, having spent a nomadic few years and then shipped my life 5500 miles, I've come to the conclusion that I'd rather not buy more physical media (except books, I love books) and so buying the series box sets is off the table. I'm pondering buying various series on iTunes and then simply deleting the files in favour of versions un-encumbered DRM.

....

And this sort of meanders into the twin cruxes of my problem.

First off - I don't want any DRM. I understand the reasoning behind it and am even sympathetic but, having thought about it long and hard, I reject it.

I disagree with the moral precept behind it for a start - the companies are not "loaning" this media to me. I bought it. I get to keep it or, if I choose, resell it. It's mine I can do what the hell I want.

In Soviet Russian, joke Godwin's YOU

But even if I didn't feel that way then the cack handed handling of DRM by various companies would dissuade me - from Microsoft shutting down the MSN Music servers to Apple mysteriously deleting half (and only half) of the apps from my phone, from Amazon's 1984-gate to the latest debacle with Ubisoft's DRM servers - I think DRM is untenable anyway but its fail-shut mentality means that I (who legitimately bought the media) am punished when the company I bought it off fucks up.

Hell, I run component everywhere at home because it got embarrassing that I would have to cycle the inputs of the AV receiver a couple of times during a DVD in front of guests because somewhere along the chain the setup had lost HDCP sync.

Of course the MPAA wants to ban HD component in the next couple of years. Because they're arseholes.

Which leads me into my second point - I think the media companies have an entrenched yet inherently wrong position on this.

They treat their customers like crap and have reached a point in their life cycle where they expect us to consume whatever they tell us to consume.

I'm not getting my media how I want. The artists I enjoy (notable examples being Amanda Palmer and NiN) are being failed by the system which is set up to produce a certain flavour of product.

Capitalism is supposed to be a trade off. A dance between the producer and the consumer in which a fair price and method for doing business are reached. The way this equilibrium is achieved is by either the producer refusing to sell or the consumer refusing to buy.

By buying DRMd files from Apple or wherever I'm implicitly condoning the status quo which means it won't change and I lose. However if I don't I don't know to morally justify consuming some of the media I do.

If you didn't want people to parody it, should shouldn't have made it so iconic

Epilogue

Recently I've been wondering if my ideal situation would be more content produced in the style of Free Software - anybody gets to work on what they want as long as they can find time to produce it and persuade as many other that are needed to join in. In return they get their media for free and can parlay their burgeoning reputation into more tangible rewards ... somehow  [waves HANDS vaguely].

90s Music Monday

There are a few songs where the cover, or the remix, transcends the original to the point where most people are unaware of the original. "Born Slippy" by Underworld is one for example. I suppose you could argue that maybe "All Along The Watchtower" is another. Probably Marc Almond and Softcell's version of "Tainted Love" is a third.

The original version of "Brimful of Asha" reached, according to Wikipedia, #60 in the UK chart but the Fatboy Slim remix got to #1 preceded by Celine Dion and "My Heart Will Go On"  and succeeded by "Frozen" by Madonna.

That said, in the US the original apparently reached #16 in the BIllboard charts and the remix didn't chart at all. Two countries, as they say, separated by a common language.

Cornershop - Brimful Of Asha (original)

Cornershop - Brimful Of Asha (Fatboy Slim Remix)

The day the music died

10 years ago, on this Friday in March of 2000, the Dot.Com bubble burst in the UK.

Ok, maybe not precisely today - when a speculation bubble bursts isn't a singular quantum event but, for me, that was the day it all started going Pete Tong as we call it in the sceptered isle.

The reason why I can fix it to such a particular date is NTK. Specifically this item, reproduced in their trademark 72 monospaced character style

Tip to Lastminute: the trick with these flotations is to
give a chance for your original investors to sell out before      
the hoi-polloi take a look at the long-term prospects, then         
run out of the market screaming. Indeed, the biggest problem        
with lastminute's punt was that just how obviously they were     
putting the boat out too early (obvious, except for maybe         
hacks blinded by the instant human interest appeal of Martha         
Lane Fox). For one thing, it was painted all over the         
prospectus. As NTK subscriber Alex Balfour writes: "from the         
prospectus details, and my calculations, at a minimal budget         
of 5.5 million, Lastminute needs to make around 403,500         
sales a year to make ends meet. Judging by their current
subscriber/purchase ratio, that requires 207,000 paying      
users - or 15.8 million subscribers overall. If they carry     
on spending 25 million a year, they need to sell 2 million items.   
Which requires 78 million subscribers - or more than the         
entire population of the UK." Actually, we're not too         
worried about Lastminute surviving: but it's hardly the         
ideal poster child for the British Net boom. And what makes         
that scary is that it's the only UK floated Website that         
we remember any of us actually *visiting*.

- NTK, March 17th, 2000

NTK (short for Need To Know) was a somehow quintessentially British weekly mail out consisting of unpredicatably unequal parts of canny insight, news, rumours, happenings, reviews and snark. Lots of snark. Started by two ex Wired UK writers - Danny O'Brien (now the EFF's International Outreach CoordinatorInternet advocacy coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists ) and Dave Green (who appears to have disappeared from the face of the earth - rumours are that he sublimed into some sort of pop culture based subspace, possibly as a precursor to immanentizing a snack based eschaton) it was, in its own words an

"interesting UK digest of things that happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent."

I remember very clearly reading the issue that Friday and thinking "This is it, the jig's up, it's all downhill from here". That month the NASDAQ peaked and started its vertiginous descent and within two months Boo.com went bust having burnt through £125 million in funding. Shortly afterwards I'd finished my finals at University, jacked in my job and was backpacking round South East Asia wondering how the hell I'd managed to already get burnt out in my (very) early 20s.

The Dot.Com scene in London was very different from the one in San Francisco not least because instead of starting new business 'paradigms' it was mostly Digital Agencies doing site design and advertising and "digital strategies" for existing Bricks and Mortars companies. In 1998, still in College, I'd started work for a vanishingly small company doing promotional games and websites and had been terrified of being uncovered as a fraud until, quite quickly, I realised that everyone was blagging it. None of us knew, really, what were doing. In fact, and I may be projecting here, largely we were waiting for the other shoe to drop - for that moment when the adults came in and took all our toys away but, until that moment came we should blow as much of this ridiculous amounts of money that people just keep throwing at us on razor scooters, and vintage Defender cabs and giant parties at The Old Truman Brewery

I don't think anybody looked good in those trousers

It wasn't until a second wave of people, attracted by all the media hype, turned up that I think things really started to go tits up and comatose. These people, and the credulous and grasping press that fueled them, genuinely thought that this time it was all going to be different and that this was a world changing paradigm and not because the internet was a breathtakingly fabulous medium for communication and collaboration and free speech, but because it meant business somehow didn't have to make money any more and that the rag tag bunch of nerds, geeks and dorks who were stringing everything together with hooky copies of Photoshop and Fireworks and spit and unholy brews of PHP and Perl and shell scripts were all going to magically transform into neoprene clad cast of "Hackers"

In the future we'll all look like Matthew Lillard and wear wetsuits all the time

I remember shortly before the crash I was in an issue of Cre@te, the breathtakingly over designed "web" magazine from the same publishers of the similarly styled Edge magazine. A reader had taken objection to something I'd said and responded along the lines of

"Simon Wistow is part of the old generation of the internet and doesn't understand where the web is heading - he's too old to realise that the web is wasted on text"

I was 22 at the time.

In a way it was all reminiscent of this paragraph from Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"

"It is a second-generation Seattle-scene record label; all of its artists are young people who came to Seattle after they graduated from college in search of the legendary Seattle music scene and discovered that it didn't really exist-it was just a couple of dozen guys who sat around playing guitar in one another's basements-and so who were basically forced to choose between going home in ignominy or fabricating the Seattle music scene of their imagination from whole cloth. This led to the establishment of any number of small clubs, and the foundation of many bands, that were not rooted in any kind of authentic reality whatsoever but merely reflected the dreams and aspiration of pan-global young adults who had all flocked to Seattle on the same chimera hunt. This second wave scene came in for a lot of abuse from those of the original two dozen people who had not yet died of drug overdose or suicide. There was something of a backlash; and yet, about thirty-six hours after the backlash reached its maximum intensity, there was an antibacklash backlash from young immigrants who asserted their right to some kind of unique cultural identity as people who had naively come to Seattle and discovered that there was no there there and that they would have to create it themselves. Fueled by that conviction, and by their own youthful libidinous energy, and by a few cultural commentators who found this whole scenario fetchingly post-modern, they started a whole lot of second-generation bands and even a couple of record labels"

except without the flannel shirts. Mostly.

Seriously, people did look like this

The layoffs came with a vengeance in 2001 - every Friday seemed to herald more news about friends being let go. It was usually in phases as if the blood letting could somehow delay the inevitable. Each round bought the odd sensation of not wanting to be unemployed and yet also wanting to be one of the first when the redundancy payouts were at their highest.

Several times in the past, usually whilst drunk, I've urged Danny and Dave to write some sort of history of the time period and the stuff that came out of it - in the lean times that followed some truly fantastic stuff emerged like DorkBot and Strange Attractor and FaxYourMP and NotCon and ORG and the work that the various refugees who sheltered at the BBC and the Guardian did which drove forward online news in the UK by leaps and bounds.

I recently got hold of a copy of the paper Newspaper Club's did a run of 500 1000 of for SxSW

It's like a blog ... in paper form!

and it pleases me that it's the same people from way back then doing actual tangible, physical things. Although perhaps that's a byproduct of me waxing nostalgic.

Further reading

• The adventures of Nathan Barley (very NSFW)
• Danny's account of the rise and fall of Wired UK
• Yoz Grahame's fantastical account of working at Douglas Adam's Digital Village on the H2G2 site

90s Music Monday

It's Oscar season and personally I like what James Wallis said

The Academy is dominated by actors. It’s largely an actors’ club. And what Avatar says in flashing blue letters a mile high is “All you guys can be replaced by CG.”

Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

but also what Anna Pickard said

Greatest missed opportunity: Watching Kathryn Bigelow collect not only the best director but also best picture oscar, shaking ever more by the second, was a powerful experience. If she’s actually shouted “Who’s king of the world NOW, bitch!?” it would have been completely brilliant.

as such you get a twofer. This one which is I'd always though was called "Burn Hollywood, Burn"  but is actually called "Open Up"

Leftfield ft John Lydon - Open Up

and this one which is actually called "Burn Hollywood, Burn" and contains swears

Public Enemy - Burn Hollywood, Burn

90s Music Monday

Finishing this unfortunate bout of continuity I'll give you the daddy of all new laddism football anthems (ignoring the justifiably maligned "World In Motion" from 1990) "Three Lions"

To give you a bit of background - like pretty much every sport that we invented (which include most of the good ones) Britain in general and England in particular suck at football. For the purposes of disambiguation when I refer to football I refer to 'soccer' not the American sport which should, by rights, be called "hand egg".

We suck at many sports. The most annoying thing is that we don't suck just enough that the natural English romanticism means that we believe that maybe, just maybe this time it might all turn out ok. However even when we win (such as in the 2003 Rugby Union World Cup) the even stronger national tendency towards extreme modesty and tall-poppy syndrome means that we feel like we didn't deserve it (such as, for example, using the finest kicker the game has ever seen a lot. I know right! How unsporting is that? Christ, using your best player a lot is practically cheating)

But there is no sport we suck more at than Football.

Despite having one of the best leagues in the world and some of the most talented players we just can't seem to string a team together. Oh sure, they'll probably make it to the quarter finals but then they'll crash out in ignominious defeat.

Much has been written about this phenomenon - some chalk it up to the grueling domestic schedule, some say it's because the clubs are reluctant to release their incredibly expensive players for mere internationals. Others claim it's because the players don't have the heart and passion of players from other countries such as Brazil or Italy and that in fact they're overpaid, lazy prima donnas and that we pick teams based on popularity contests rather than thinking of a coherent overall team effect. Yet more speculate it's because they keep fucking each others' wives and girlfriends.

Personally I think it's expectations - they expect to lose and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. And example being the 2002 World Cup in Japan when, in a match against Brazil in the quarter finals England found themselves 1 up over the stellar Brazilian team and then seemed to collapse into mediocrity despite Brazil's linchpin Ronaldinho being sent off with 30 minutes to go. It almost seemed like, shocked by their own success  they either felt that they had done enough against arguably the best team in the world or felt that they just plain didn't deserve to win. Where other teams might have grasped the opportunity with both hands and used it to roar, England merely whimpered their acquiescence.

And it's this atmosphere, and the Euro 96 tournament, which gave us "Three Lions" by Baddiel and Skinner, two comedians (you can see Baddiel in action here) neither of whom can sing (the musical brains behind it, and third character in the video being Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds).

Baddiel and Skinner - Three Lions

The 30 years referred to being the last time England won the World Cup in 1966 in an iconic game which gave rise to the famous quote "The crowd are on the pitch - they think it's all over. It is now!" (although in the original broadcast the quote was "Some people are on the pitch" but originator Kenneth Wolstenholme re-recorded it inaccurately for the aformentioned "World In Motion").

"Three Lions" (a reference to the emblem of the England Football team)  is somewhat unique in sporting songs in that it (to quote Wikipedia)

"spoke not of unbounded optimism for victory - but instead told of how, ever since 1966 and the one unequivocal success of the English football team, every tournament has ended in dashed hopes and the feeling that England will never again reach those heights [and] [...] pessimism from football commentators"

and as such caught to mood of the time perfectly. And so much so that it was re-released for the World Cup in 98 and then again in 2002 and 2006 (although by now it's more like 44 years of hurt).

England crashed out of Euro 96 in the semi finals against Germany on penalties. It was also the night of my leavers ball from school with the whole of the graduating class clustered round a tiny portable TV.

 

 

Euro 96 Semi Finals

A thought for the bedroom or the dancefloor ...

I was reminded again today that dancing for men is very much like anal sex for women: a few actually enjoy it, most hate it however they'll sometimes do it on special occasions - but only after their partner has pestered them for ages about it and/or they've got sufficiently drunk. Afterward they just feel uncomfortable and slightly self conscious.