Andrew Keen recently asked me to sit down and chat with him as part of a new series of video interviews he is conducting for Arts + Labs called “Keen on Media.” You can find the discussions with me here (or on Vimeo here). Keen asked me to talk about a wide variety of issues, but this first video features some thoughts about the tensions between the free culture movement and those that continue to favor property rights and proprietary business models as the foundation of the economy. Consistent with what I have argued in the past, I advocated a mushy middle-ground position of preserving the best of both worlds. I believe that free and open source software has produced enormous social & economic benefits, but I do not believe that it will or should replace all proprietary business models or methods. Each model or mode of production has its place and purpose and they should continue to co-exist going forward, albeit in serious tension at times.
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10260819&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
Adam Thierer (part 1) from andrewkeen on Vimeo.
NPR notes that we’re approaching a major milestone in the history of man’s relationship with machines:
Nearly 200 years ago, workers in England took up arms against technology. Weavers protested the advent of mechanized looms with violence. Named for weaver Ned Lud, the Luddites feared machines would make hand weaving extinct. The people of Huddersfield are rising up again, but this time to commemorate the city’s 19th century weavers.
According to this history of the Luddite movement, the 199th anniversary of the movement’s beginnings passed just last week:
The first incident during the years of the most intense Luddite activity, 1811-13, was the 11 March 1811 attack upon wide knitting frames in a shop in the Nottinghamshire village of Arnold, following a peaceful gathering of framework knitters near the Exchange Hall at Nottingham. In the preceding month, framework knitters, also called stockingers, had broken into shops and removed jack wires from wide knitting frames, rendering them useless without inflicting great violence upon the owners or incurring risk to the stockingers themselves; the 11 March attack was the first in which frames were actually smashed and the name “Ludd” was used. The grievances consisted, first, of the use of wide stocking frames to produce large amounts of cheap, shoddy stocking material that was cut and sewn into stockings rather than completely fashioned (knit in one piece without seams) and, second, of the employment of “colts,” workers who had not completed the seven-year apprenticeship required by law.
In other words, a bunch of hooligans—the ancestors of today’s stereotypically rude, drunk and violent English soccer fans, no doubt—started smashing machines because—horror of horrors!—the machines were producing less expensive textiles and could be operated by cheaper, less-skilled workers outside the hooligans’ guild. That, in essence, is the history of technology and its discontents: Innovation produces gains in productivity that raise the overall standard of living by bringing down prices for consumers, but workers in outmoded industries try to obstruct progress because it renders their unproductive jobs obsolete. Tim Lee noted this back in 2006 regarding the supposed need for tech workers to unionize. Continue reading →
Great op/ed in The Washington Post today:
BY THE Federal Communications Commission’s own account, broadband use in the United States has exploded over the past decade: “Fueled primarily by private sector investment and innovation, the American broadband ecosystem has evolved rapidly. The number of Americans who have broadband at home has grown from eight million in 2000 to nearly 200 million last year.”
So it is curious that the FCC’s newly released National Broadband Plan faults the market for failing to “bring the power and promise of broadband to us all” — in reality, some 7 million households unable to get broadband because it is not offered in their areas. Such an assessment — and the call for government intervention to subsidize service for rural or poor communities — is premature, at best
Read the rest here or check out Adam’s appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal or on the Diane Rehm Show.
—all one paragraph of it—on the Cato@Liberty blog.
The upshot: Their promise not to have a national ID database is almost certainly wrong. Sold as a simple quick-fix, it would take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build, encountering untold complexities beyond what we already know.
Michiko Kakutani has a very interesting essay in the New York Times entitled, “Texts Without Contexts,” which does a nice job running through the differences between Internet optimists and pessimists, a topic I’ve spent a great deal of time writing about here. (See: “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.”) She surveys many of the books I’ve reviewed and discussed here before by authors such as Neil Postman, Nick Carr, Cass Sunstein, Andrew Keen, Mark Helprin, Jaron Lanier, and others. She notes:
These new books share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.
At the same time it’s clear that technology and the mechanisms of the Web have been accelerating certain trends already percolating through our culture — including the blurring of news and entertainment, a growing polarization in national politics, a deconstructionist view of literature (which emphasizes a critic’s or reader’s interpretation of a text, rather than the text’s actual content), the prominence of postmodernism in the form of mash-ups and bricolage, and a growing cultural relativism that has been advanced on the left by multiculturalists and radical feminists, who argue that history is an adjunct of identity politics, and on the right by creationists and climate-change denialists, who suggest that science is an instrument of leftist ideologues.
It’s a great debate, but a very controversial one, of course. Anyway, go read her entire essay.
My central lament in everything I have said so far about the Federal Communications Commission’s ambitious new National Broadband Plan is that, well, it’s just too ambitious! The agency has taken an everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink approach to the issue and the sheer scope of their imperial ambitions is breathtaking. I’ve likened it to an industrial policy for the Internet because the agency is essentially trying to centrally plan and engineer from above virtually every aspect of America’s broadband future despite its proclamation that, “Technologies, costs and consumer preferences are changing too quickly in this dynamic part of the economy to make accurate predictions.” But very little humility seems to be on display throughout the 376-page blueprint, which includes dissertations on everything from privacy to child safety issues to set-top box regulation.
And then there’s Chapter 15 on “civic engagement,” which calls for a wide variety of things to “strengthen the citizenry and its government,” and to “build a robust digital media ecosystem.” Although some of the ideas floated in the chapter are harmless enough–and some, like the call for more open and transparent government, would actually be beneficial–for the life of me I don’t understand why any of this needs to be in a plan about broadband deployment and diffusion. Particularly bizarre is the call here for Congress to create “a trust fund for digital public media,” which would fund the “production, distribution, and archiving of digital public media.” It would apparently be funded by “the revenues from a voluntary auction of spectrum licensed to public television.” (see pgs. 303-4)
Look, if the FCC wants Congress to create the equivalent of the PBS on Steroids, fine. Let’s have that debate. (In fact, I thought it was a debate that the FCC was already considering as part of its “Future of Media” effort). But why, again, is this in broadband plan? It’s a serious stretch to claim that this is somehow crucial to the task of getting more broadband out to the masses. Moreover, should our government really be in charge of “building a robust digital media ecosystem”? Here are a few reasons we might want to avoid having the government in the driver’s seat when it comes to charting the future course of America’s media sector.
In the mix of yesterday’s FCC Broadband report release and today’s FTC Privacy Roundtable and Senate hearing on expanding FTC rulemaking authority, there’s a lot going on in Washington that impacts online commerce. And we heard particularly pointed comments about the future of .com at yesterday’s 25 Years of .Com Policy Impact Forum.
A panel about the Internet and privacy that highlighted how the the future of .com may be less about commerce and more about commissions – particularly the Federal Trade Commission.
Kara Swisher (D: All Things Digital) and Fred Wilson (a VC at Union Square Ventures) dug deep into online privacy issues. They decried the supposed privacy abuses of online companies, particularly by Google and Facebook. And while Kara is smart and well-informed, Fred Wilson was flippant, scattered, and skin-deep with many of his assertions—including when he accused Facebook of pulling off “the greatest privacy heist in history, and they got away with it!”
He’s referring to the changes Facebook made last December to the way users control their privacy settings (NetChoice defended Facebook’s actions on our blog). Facebook made some recommended changes based on where it sees its service going. Users (like me) could change these if they wanted. Some people complained that Facebook changed the default settings, which modified how users previously set some of their preferences.
But does changing the recommended defaults when giving users a choice constitute a “heist?” Only based on whether a user
likes it or not. There certainly wasn’t any fraud or misappropriation. Or measurable consumer harm. Still, we heard from pro-regulatory privacy groups that filed a complaint urging that the FTC unleash it’s enforcement hammer.
There are legitimate debates on whether Facebook’s switch in privacy settings was clear and easy enough to understand for most users. But overblown rhetoric on privacy harm is hard to square with other concerns about breaches, ID theft, and other abuses of data. Continue reading →
Here’s my favorite line in the FCC’s National Broadband Plan:
”
Technologies, costs and consumer preferences are changing too quickly in this dynamic part of the economy to make accurate predictions.” (P. 42)
I wholeheartedly agree! But does the agency really believe what it says? Because as I am reading through this tome, all I see is one prediction and prognostication after another. Indeed, in the very next paragraph that follows that one the agency starts making predictions about how many homes will be served by DSL vs. cable vs. fiber years from now. And the section about set-top box regulation is chock-full of techno-crystal ball gazing regarding what the future video marketplace should look like.
Apparently the FCC thinks that it’s impossible to predict the future… except when they are the ones doing the predicting. Oh, the hubris of it all!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.