South by Southwest 2003 V

David Weinberger: Why the Web Matters

Weinberger is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a contributor to World of Ends, and author of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. Here is a rough transcript of Weinberger's remarks:

The Web does matter. Every time you hear somebody say, "The bubble is over," what they're really saying is that the Internet doesn't matter. They're just wrong. I want to go through seven or eight ways in which the Web really matters.

The first is that I have 10 times as many friends than I used to have. There are 100 times as many people than I knew before. There are 1,000 times as many people that I can call. Every imaginable interest has its spot on the Web. Anybody can find a set of people who are interested in the same sorts of things.

We take for granted that we can get more information about anything. If you don't like Cheerios and their marketing messages, there's a world out there online that can give you a perspective and the information that you're looking for. Truth doesn't have to have the voice stripped out of it. That link is gone. It's not just happening in Web logs. It's happening in the adult journalism world, too.

Every day I get a link to stuff that matters to me. And it comes from young people who are 18 steps removed from me. When I was growing up, to learn meant to be on a one-to-one relationship with a book. When my kids are on a computer using a word processor, they have nine IM sessions going, and they're working together. The teachers probably think it's cheating. It's not. It's learning.

The Web matters because if you're a 13 year old in Hong Kong or a 12 year old in Florence, you take it for granted that you can speak and the world will listen. I grew up believing that the world consisted of countries separated by borders.

The Web matters. I don't know why people dismiss it. They want to take something that's impressive and make it dull.

The Web is like Michael Jackson. The more you see and the more you know, it gets weirder and weirder. The weirdest thing about the Web is its success. What is the Web for? 600 million people don't know what it's for. Something big is happening. It's weird because we're looking at a 2-D screen, yet we talk about it as though it's spatial.

The Web is also familiar. But what does the Web remind of us? The spoiler here is that there's a default philosophy. What does it mean to be a human among other humans? We live in an age of deep alienation. Our ideas of what it means to be a human are deeply out of whack with the way we live our lives. Your understanding of what you are determines who you are.

My motto for today is: Our attraction to the Web is proportional to the depth of our alienation. I'm going to look at this in two ways. The first has to do with Ray Kurzweil's "Age of the Spiritual Machine." If we can move ourselves into silicon, we can escape our bodies. There's nothing magical about silicon. It's just fast and cheap. What if we didn't do it with computers. What if we did it with beer cans?

I was in a wheat field last summer. Take the motions of the wind and the movement of animals. If you kept track of left-leaning stalks as off and right-leaning as on, there's Ray again.

It's an odd idea that we can take brain states, model them in another material, and have something that resembles human consciousness. Why spend so much time knocking the highly intelligent doer of good deeds Raymond Kurzweil? We're really alienated in our beliefs if we think this makes any amount of sense.

Has anyone worked for an organization whose tag line was "We deliver the right information to the right people at the right time"? The idea that good input leads to good outcomes is fine if you're a robot. What does making a decision consist of? It consists of making a decision which inputs to make sense of. We had the causality backwards. We're not software. We've got time backwards.

What I want to suggest is that that's not the way information appears on the Web, and that that's extremely appealing to us. How does information look on the Web? Most commercial Web sites are valueless marketing crap. When I was looking for a washer and a drier, I googled Kenmore, Maytag, and discussion, and I got this site, which is extremely ugly. But I found exactly the model I was looking for. I posted a question, and within a couple of hours, a guy named Jim replied. Jim wouldn't lie to me. If I went into Sears to look at a Kenmore, the salespeople wouldn't tell me about the buzzer being too lous. On the Web, it's contextual. There's a physicist of lint hanging out on the Web waiting to answer someone's questions.

What do we get out of this knowledge? Smarter customers? That's not really the goal here. Knowledge used to be fat and chewy. Over time, that evolved into a quest for certainty. We started looking for the certain and knowable based on the statements themselves. That's the skinniest approach to knowledge. We've become anorexic in our knowledge. We've also become a cult of precision. That helps explain our obsession with bits. What's really important is that atoms and the analog world are messy and sloppy, and bits and the digital world are extremely sharp and precise. We're missing ambiguity. The world is not precise. The Web is the counter to the overly precise world of bits.

We also seem to have the idea that the world is perfectly precise and that's it's just our measuring devices are lacking. If I ask you what's real, you're going to give me a rock. A rock doesn't change. It changes very, very slowly. If I were to say to you that three rocks make up a triangle, you would say the rocks were more real. If you move the rocks, the triangle goes away, but the rocks remain. The triangle is dependent, and dependence is weak. Our default philosophy is individualism, but without groups, we cannot be individuals. Individuals don't come first. We only become individuals because of gifts from groups.

Relationships among humans are not obvious, but they are on the Web because relationships are links. Here's Doc Searls. Here's his blogroll. To be on the Web means to be linked. The Web is made up of links. Would you rather be well linked or well read?

You often hear about the abundance of the Web. 20 billion pages, 100 billion links. I can't find an attribution for the 20 billion pages, and I made up the 100 billion. But it's not about the abundance, it's about the generosity. The people who made the Web, and the people who make the pages. The Web's architecture is about links. Every time I put a link on my page, I'm telling people to go somewhere else. Every link is an expression of selflessness. The Web is an architecture of generosity.

When are humans at our best? We're at our best when we're out of ourselves and involved with others. When we're being generous. That's reflected inevitably in the Web. Every time we're on the Web, we're engaged in that.

What does the Web remind us of? It reminds us of our selves, and of ourselves at our best.

South by Southwest 2003 IV

Richard Stallman: Copyright Vs. Community in the Age of the Computer Networks

Stallman was introduced in part by SXSW Interactive Event Director Hugh Forrest, who said that this was the first-ever programming event scheduled on the opening Friday night of SXSW Interactive. In the spirit of Stallman's work with the Free Software Foundation, the event was also SXSW Interactive's first free event. (The audience applauded at this point.) As former editor of The Austin Challenger, Forrest also introduced Doug Barnes, formerly of The Spark, The Hot Spot, and The Austin Weekly, and now on the board of EFF Austin. Barnes, then, introduced Stallman.

Even though Stallman is a brilliant and prolific programmer who launched a movement exploring the future of software and copyright, Barnes said Stallman is also a "pain in the ass." "Programmers are often honest to a fault," Barnes says. "If they weren't the world would collapse around us. According to Richard, it's the people that need to change, not the visions." Here is a rough transcript of Stallman's remarks:

Putting the Free in Freedom
This talk is not about free software. In 1983, I reached the conclusion that for people to use computers freely, they needed to have access to free software and be able to use it freely. You should have the freedom to use software once you've got a copy. There are three freedoms. Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program. Freedom 1 is the freedom to help yourself by studying the program and changing it to suit your needs. Freedom 2 is the freedom to help your neighbor by giving them a copy of the software. Freedom 3 is the freedom to help build your community by working together to build that software.

Cooks use recipes and have the same freedoms in using recipes. If you tell a cook that they can't change a recipe, they would probably be outraged. Some people say: Can these ideas extend to anything? What about tables and microphones and cars? That's a silly question. There are no copiers for tables and microphones and cars. It's a moot point. The only way to make more physical objects is to build more. But what about the freedom to modify? If you buy this microphone, you are free to modify it. If you buy a chair, you're free to modify it. You can weld on more legs, saw them off.

Our freedoms are restricted by copyright law. Should people feel a reason to obey? The history of copyright is connected with the history of copying technology. The basic principles of ethics can't be reached by changes in technology. But when we consider ethical questions, we judge alternatives based on their consequences. Change the context, and the same alternatives may have different consequences.

The History of Reproduction
Back in the '70s, it was fashionable to say that computers were causing problems for copyright. I would rather say that copyright causes problems for computers. In the ancient world, the copying of books was done with a pen. This technology had certain consequences. Any reader could do it. If you could read and write, you could copy a book just about as well as anybody else. There was no economy of scale. Making 10 copies of the same book took 10 times as long.

Books were copied wherever there were copies. There was no centralization. There was also no need for all copies to be identical. There was no gulf between writing a book and copying one. Writing a commentary was a useful thing to do. Writing a compendium was also appreciated and considered worthy.

As far as I can tell, there was no such thing as copyright in the ancient world. Then there was an advance in copying technology. The printing press made copying more efficient but not uniformly so. It takes a lot of work to set the type and comparatively little work to make many copies from that type. There was far more economy of scale. Another change was that you needed to have a printing press and type, which was fairly expensive and unusual material. Not everybody could make copies. This centralized the copies of any given book. Printing did not entirely replace hand copying. Very rich people and very poor people continued making copies by hand.

The Advent of Copyright
Most of the copies, however, were made by printing. Copyright came along with the printing press. Italy in the 1500s was apparently the first place there was copyright. You could go to the ruler and ask for a monopoly on printing a work. Rulers liked giving our monopolies. The nature of printing press technology had certain consequences for copyright. It was understood to only affect publication. Not copying. It was an industrial regulation. It restricted something only specialized businesses could do. It didn't restrict readers. It was painless, relatively easy to enforce, and arguably beneficial.

Copyright in England started out as a sort of a monopoly system for publishers that was relatively harmful. Then it was reformed and rewarded to authors. In the Constitution, there was thought given to copyright being an entitlement for authors. But what came out was a very different idea. It doesn't say that authors are entitled to exclusive use. It doesn't even say that there would be exclusive use. It just says that Congress should benefit progress. Any benefit for the authors is just a means to that end.

The Price That You Trade
The theory of this is that the public pays a price. The public trades away its natural right to copy things and in exchange gets the benefit of getting more things written. The thing we traded away wasn't a right we could use easily. Then printing press technology got more efficient. Printing presses around 1900 got cheaper. Even poor people stopped copying things by hand. People started forgetting that copies could be made by hand. Things went along more or less OK. But the age of the printing press is going away for the age of the computer. Not everybody wants this to be easy for you.

Digital information technology brings us back to a situation more like the ancient world. It's true that mass producing CD's is less expensive than making a one-off CD, but the difference isn't that great. Any computer user can make copies. There's no inherent reason for copies of things to be made centrally. Copyright law now affects every citizen. It no longer affects companies. It takes away freedoms from you and me. Copyright law is no longer painless, easy to enforce, or arguably beneficial. To stop you from sharing something with a friend, the police state needs to intrude into your house. We're no longer trading away something we don't have anyway. We need to renegotiate the deal.

That's the rational thing for the public to do. We need to hold onto the parts of the freedom we want to use and give up freedoms we can't use. That's what our federal government would do if it were democratic and representative of our interests. We have government of the people by the flunkies for the corporations. Our freedoms are being taken away to empower corporations.

What's Going Wrong
Copyright used to last 14 years. It's been extended over and over in the last century. The publishers have figured out a way to disregard what the Constitution says. If they keep on extending it, it's in effect perpetual copyright on the installment plan. Any given work is supposed to enter the public domain on a certain date. But their plan is for no work to enter the public domain ever again. They pay Congress to give it to them 20 years at a time.

In 1998, they passed the Mickey Mouse copyright act. It was basically to keep Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain, and it was basically bought by Disney. It's actually called the Sonny Bono copyright act. Sonny Bono was a member of the Church of Scientology and a member of Congress. The Church of Scientology actively sues people based on infringement of copyright laws. The movie companies were saying that 75 years wasn't long enough. This is just something paid legislators can use to do what they're getting paid to do.

Another dimension of copyright is how much it covers. There are freedoms we have as readers. But they're freedoms publishers want to take away from us. You may have bought a used book. You may have lent a book to a friend. You may have bought a book anonymously using cash. You may have borrowed a book from the library. Or you may have owned a book for many years, reading it several times.

All of this adds up to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. It's why the people who make DVD's want to insert ads that you have to watch. They don't want you to know how DVD's work. Linux programmers wrote a program so you can play these encoded DVD's. The right to play the DVD is lawful in this country, but using this software -- even linking to the software -- is illegal. They're doing the same thing with e-books. And the record companies are doing the same thing with their fake CD's. They look like CD's, but they can't be played on your computer. In one European country, they can't call them CD's because they don't meet the minimum standards.

Companies like this -- like EMI -- deserve to go broke. I hope you will help to make the record companies go out of business. There's nothing wrong with making records per se, but this infringement on our rights needs to be punished. Companies as arrogant as this do not deserve to exist.

A New Copyright Model
There's no reason why copyright should be the same for all kinds of work. If copyright policy is considered uniform, they can pick whichever narrow little area seems to justify copyright restrictions and then apply them uniformly. We also need to look at the various dimensions of copyright such as length of time. Most books are out of print in just a few years. They're remaindered after 18 months. A 10-year copyright would be perfectly adequate. People usually assume that authors love publishers and that copyright benefits them. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Another dimension is what copyright covers. I have three basic categories of works, and they're not distinguished by media: functional works, documentaries and representational works, and artistic and aesthetic works.

Functional works are things that you use. Computer programs and recipes. Manuals and textbooks. Functional works should be free. When people are using this information, they may be able to improve it. If we give up the copyright bargain, would these works be written? We have half a million volunteers working on free software. We're starting to venture into other functional works as well. The Wikipedia is now the largest encyclopedia in the history of the world.

In the second category, works that represent the views of people, to change them is to misrepresent somebody's thoughts. There's no social imperative to publish modified versions of the works. You might envision a modified copyright that allows commercial reproduction of the works verbatim and nothing else.

The third category is aesthetic or artistic works. For these kinds of works, the hard problem is modification. These works have integrity and modification can destroy that integrity. Shakespeare took the plots of his plays from other plays. If copyright law existed then, they would have been illegal. We consider them masterpieces. For novels, maybe you can't make them better.

Another issue is Internet music sharing. We should simply legalize it now. The musicians and the public would be better off. Record labels treat musicians like dirt. The contracts that they impose on musicians are extremely cruel. When you buy a commercial CD, you fail to support the musicians. Concerts are how musicians make money. I want music that's made by artisans, not in factories.

Getting rid of the Hype Industrial Complex and moving toward Internet music sharing is one way to get there. Instead of having a public relations campaign saying that sharing is piracy -- sharing is like attacking a ship, which goes against human nature -- we could have a public relations campaign saying, "Have you sent $1 to your favorite band today?"

South by Southwest 2003 III
Just got back from dinner at Curra's with Ben and Laurie. The chicken mole enchiladas were wonderful, and I topped dinner off with a bottle of Shiner. Shiner Bock is one of my favorite beers, and it's not widely available outside of Texas. Tonight, our waiter tried to discourage me from having a Shiner so I could have a Newcastle of all things. Newcastle, I can get anywhere. Shiner? Austin.



Over dinner, we talked about the small-world and microstar nature of the self-publishing and Web communities, the importance of politics and urban planning, why people think Ben's a jerk, and the future of Ben's So New Media empire. I gave Ben the origami globe that came in the SXSW gear bag, and I decided that I might need to be less dependent on the 15 bus if I want to see everyone I want to see while I'm in town. In 30 minutes, Richard Stallman. I need to go upstairs to find a seat and a power plug. My battery just edged into the red.

Music to My Eyes XII
The fellow who just sold me a large cafe latte for $3.50 has never been further northeast than Chapel Hill, North Carolina. But so far during South by Southwest, he's met people as far away from Austin as Boston (me), Philadelphia, and New Zealand. In October, he'll go to New York City for his honeymoon. Turns out that Mr. Coffee is also in a band, the Austin-based space rock band Spacetruck. I'll have to check out the MP3's later, but it seems that Mr. Coffee plays bass.

And, to add to your small world file, it appears that one of the women my friend Rick works with at Akins High School is the mother of Jordan, drummer for the Boston band Fooled by April. Can't go far enough to escape bands from Boss Town! They're playing SXSW at 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Fox & Hound. Check 'em out if you're here, not there.

South by Southwest 2003 II
For Austinites, a Harry Knowles sighting might be of relatively little import. But being from Boston, not Austin, I just had my first Web celeb fan moment, when I spotted the Ain't It Cool News founder sitting at a table near the registration area. Always a kick, almost more fun than sitting near Lyle Lovett at the Alamo.

South by Southwest 2003
I'm at the Austin Convention Center, with time to kill before South by Southwest Interactive officially begins at 7:30. Escaping the heavy snow in Boston, I was delayed getting out of Boston and finally arrived in town around 9 last night, catching a cab to Rick and Melissa's new house in Highland. I met their dog Dudley, and we stayed up a little catching up.

This morning, I caught the 15 bus downtown, getting off a hair too soon and walking down Trinity from 15th to the convention center. I registered, caught lunch at B.D. Riley's on Sixth, and got organized for the days ahead. The rain here has ended, and it's absolutely beautiful. Sunny, warm. In a couple of hours, I'll meet Ben Brown for dinner in South Austin before coming back here for Richard Stallman's talk.

Hello, Austin. I've missed you.

Event-o-Dex XLI
No. 1 Fun Boston Blog Bash

Wednesday, March 26, 2003

8 p.m.

Cambridgeport Saloon

300 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge

You are invited to the No. 1 Fun Boston Blog Bash, the first in a series of occasional Boston-area blogger get-togethers.

Instead of sitting at our computers for 24 hours blogging about nothing to raise money for charity, instead of buying a plane ticket to Las Vegas for a conference featuring people you don't know and may never see again, and instead of worrying about whether your personal Web work makes you anti-social or depressed, come on out for the No. 1 Fun Boston Blog Bash and meet scads of local bloggers. You've read their words. Now meet them live and in person!

We're inviting hundreds of Boston-area bloggers and Web writers, and you can freely transmit this invitation yourself. Who's invited initially? Readers of Media Diet, the blog run by co-organizer Heath Row; members of Boston Blogs, a project managed by co-organizer Shannon Okey, and participants in the Bostonites Unite! Web ring.

The Cambridgeport Saloon is a wonderful little bar between Central Square and MIT in Cambridge. Within easy walking distance from the Central Square T stop, the saloon sports video games (Golden Tee and Radikal Bikers, last we checked), pinball machines, a great juke box, pool tables, and darts. The bar also has history! Originally called Father's Fore, the bar has been in operation at least since the mid-'70s.

Be a part of history. Get in on the ground floor. Belly up to the bar and come out for the No. 1 Fun Boston Blog Bash. And spread word.

(Apologies for those Boston-area bloggers too young to attend an event at a bar. We'll try to find all-ages venues for future Boston Blog Bashes, and, absolutely anyone and everyone is encouraged to convene their own blog gatherings.)

Music to My Ears XXIX
Knowing that I'm heading to Aus-Town tomorrow, a co-worker brought in a CD by one her friend's bands, Kissinger. I'm listening to their "Charm" CD right now, and it's relatively interesting hard rock. Unfortunately, they're not playing while I'm in the area, but their Web site sports MP3's, music videos, and multimedia slideshows featuring photos taken at shows, including one at the Fort Worth International Raceway -- and the Cabaret Metro in Chicago. Not totally my cup of tea, but well done, and presented with a clear sense of humor. I bet they're fun live.

Conferences and Community III
I leave for SXSW Interactive tomorrow afternoon, and I'm getting excited. It'll be nice to go back to Austin, where I almost moved in 2000. And I'm looking forward to catching up with a lot of friends I haven't seen for awhile.

Depending on the wireless network and other Net access on site and at my host's house, I hope to file frequent SXSW panel and speaker updates while at the conference. If that doesn't happen, Media Diet might be quiet until mid-next week. While I always hope to update Media Diet while traveling, if I don't, that doesn't mean that Media Diet is dead (long live Media Diet!). It just means that it's resting.

Corollary: Technofetishism XXVII
Sigh. Chris' car got hit while it was parked in front of a building. I'm here until 7 and walking to band practice anyway. I learned this via email.

Blogging About Blogging LII
Say what you will about Richards Interactive's Project Blogger and its marketing move into the blogosphere, but I just filled out their application survey. We'll see whether Media Diet's 150 unique visitors a day and content mix passes muster -- and what the experience is like. It's official: Media Diet is selling out. I can always stop participating in the project if I'm chosen, no?

Business Reportage Goes Boom, Now Bust III
According to the New York Post's Keith Kelly, Jungle Media, publisher of MBA Jungle and JD Jungle is experiencing a series of top-level editorial exits. Three editors in almost as many weeks. It's clear that Jungle Media publishes stepping-stone magazines, in terms of staff as well as readers, as once you get your MBA or JD, the magazines are less relevant. The exiting editors have ended up at Popular Science, New York, and Ski. All steps up.

Thanks to I Want Media.