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I'm at Gnomedex this week. 300 geeks in a big room, 50 geeks in a smaller room, and untold numbers of geeks listening to the audio feed. I'm in heaven.

Dave Winer is leading off with a keynote address in an "unconference" style. The idea is that the conference participants actually participate in the address. Not sure it's entirely successful at all moments (does it have to be?) but I do really like the interactive nature of the talk.

Dave's new product - an OPML outliner - is exactly what I've been thinking about and hoping for: it's an almost-live interface with the web. Instant publishing, and a copy of your data both on your computer and your website. Open source, Mac version in the works. Very cool.

Here's my big observation so far: In any other room, I'm the über-geek. Here, I'm just a guy. Three guys next to me at the reception last night pulled out their Treo 650s and I was almost embarrassed to admit that I only had the 600. This is the only room where I really get tech envy.

Another observation: Since leaving the theatre, this is the first community in which I've felt completely comfortable. I love computers, and everyone around me loves computers. I love gadgets, everyone around me loves gadgets.

Another (okay, now I'm on a roll): The number of Macs here is amazing. Probably half the folks in the Bay Auditorium have little white glowing apple logos in front of them.

I'm truly home.

Quote of the 'dex so far:
Dave Winer: "I don't know what my exact words were, but I don't want to be held to them."

Net connection is spotty. Hopefully it'll get better.

Stay tuned...

My wife and I went to see Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy last night. Some impressions:

• We went to the 7:00 showing at Cinerama. The house was packed with a hardcore geek crowd. I remember thinking that half of these guys -- overweight and pony-tailed -- could be models for the comic book store owner in The Simpsons. Personally, I love this. It was nice to watch a movie like H2G2 with a truly appreciative crowd. When "For Douglas" flashed on the screen at the end of the movie, the audience let out a heartfelt cheer.
• I thought I was the only one pissed at George Lucas. Guess not. When the trailer for Episode III came on, there were equal parts cheering and booing, and one very loud, "You suck, George Lucas!" from the gentleman in front of us. Hope you sell a lot of toys, George.
• My wife has not read the books and enjoyed the film. And why not? Who wouldn't love Sam Rockwell and Alan Rickman?
• As a long-time Douglas Adams fan, I found lots to enjoy, but also many filmmaking decisions that puzzled and frustrated me. It's no wonder that the film took so long to get produced, because Hitchhikers is in no way the stuff of standard Hollywood fare. It's meandering, philosophical, and a bit wistful. And damn funny. It's not a love story, and I think that by trying to make it one, the story lost its center.
• If you're a real fan, I'm not sure what you'll gain by seeing the movie. The radio and tv series were much better adaptations. In fact, I'm not even sure what the big deal is about making any great book into a movie. The two media are completely different, and so much has to be lost in the translation from the page to the screen. It's kind of like saying, "Hey, you like pizza? Well you're going to love this pizza-flavored corn chip." I might, but it's not the same thing.

There was a lovely tribute to Douglas Adams from the folks at IGN FilmForce. It's worth a read, even if you're not a fan. The way the folks who knew him talk about him... well, I'd be proud to leave such a legacy.

Friday Catblogging...

George, dreaming of furry women.[/caption]

George, dreaming of furry women.

George, a sweet Ragdoll with a purr that'll keep you up at night, will be 17 in March. He's been with me all the way from North Carolina to Florida, and across the country to Seattle. Despite surgery to remove a diseased colon in September, he's still going strong. His sister, Gracie, died at 12. I expect George, like his namesake, to live a long, full life. In fact, if you know of anyone who's interested in remaking Oh, God! with a cat in the title role, tell 'em to get in touch.

I drafted a post a while ago on this topic, but I've never quite finished it. I think the impulse behind it is good, so I submit the idea for your consideration:

Bush has been fond of talking about the "soft bigotry of low expectations." (You know, in a bad way; he's against it.) But of course, he takes every opportunity to shed criticism or be held to any standard of accountability.

It's too late now, alas, but at some point during the debates I wish John Kerry had kind of explicitly called Bush out on this. Like, "I know that you were handed a recession and then 9/11 happened so you lost a million jobs on your watch, but I expect my Presidents to overcome such difficulties and implement effective plans to meet these unexpected challenges. To accept that you shouldn't have handled the economy any differently would be to engage in the soft bigotry of low expectations."

Or, "You told us that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which there weren't. You told us that Osama bin Ladena and Sadaam Hussein were in cahoots; they weren't. You told us that this war would cost $30 billion; it is projected to cost upwards of $200 billion. You told us that Osama bin Laden can run but he can't hide, yet he is still on the loose. To accept that we shouldn't have to trust the word of our President would be to engage in the soft bigotry of low expectations."

You get the idea. I wish Kerry had used that line. I wish he'd reminded us more explicitly that we hold our Presidents to a higher standard. That's all.

Andrew Cline at Rhetorica writes:

Last week I began to notice the assertion "everything changed on 9/11"--especially as preceded by the ad populum fallacy "everyone knows." I say "began to notice" because up until last week I have not encountered many situations in which someone actually spoke this assertion to me. I was certainly aware of it otherwise.

I noticed it because in each case my interlocutor wished to frame his/her remarks in a new reality that supposedly proved his/her conclusions, e.g. "Everyone knows that everything changed on 9/11, so we had to invade Iraq to fight terrorism."

This has been much on my mind lately, too. As Nels wrote in the comments to Dr. Cline's post, 9/11 gave us a glimpse of our vulnerability in one sudden, shocking, collective experience. The events of that day shifted our understanding of the world in certain fundamental ways, but 9/11 most certainly did not "change everything."

Here are a few things 9/11 didn't change, just off the top of my head: it didn't change our Constitution, our laws, our history, or our traditions. It didn't change our need for access to healthcare, good jobs, and a strong economy. It didn't change the meaning of fairness, honesty, or truth. It didn't change our essential impulse to be good to each other. It didn't change our need to educate our children, nor did it diminish in any way the importance of a free press. 9/11 didn't make us any less obsessed with pop culture or with shopping or gossip. 9/11 didn't make us any less dependent on foreign oil. Our freedom to travel has been subject to small inconveniences, but not curtailed in the least. 9/11 didn't even change the fundamental safety record of airlines, for crying out loud; flying is still the safest way to travel.

(My wife makes a good point here: It is in times of greatest danger when our essential values are most called upon. We are not a free society only when it's easy. Our freedoms and our "American character" are supposed to be what carry us through when the going gets rough.)

9/11 didn't change everything, but our response to 9/11 changed a lot. We are less safe, less respected, less liked, and less powerful. I, for one, am tired of hearing people repeat this worn phrase as prelude to shirking their responsibility or abusing their power. 9/11 did not change the essential character of American society or make us any less a democratic republic. If any of that happens, we will have done it to ourselves.

I was inspired by this discussion over at 2blowhards.com to leave a very long comment, which I'll repost here:

Michael B., I think that it will be a while before the mainstream press truly understands what's going on in a way that they can write coherently about it. It's one thing to notice that technology is creating a revolution. It's another thing entirely to really embrace it, understand it, and use it to the fullest. Just in the last few weeks, my understanding of how to use technology has shifted dramatically. RSS, Gmail, Flickr, del.icio.us, and desktop Wikis have all caused me to rethink my options for collecting and managing information. I've said for years that we're still in the dark ages when it comes to computers. I think we're a long way from living in a mature world of computer and network technology, much less really understanding it. I'm not sure many people really can see where this is going.

For instance, I'm working on a new project. I'm attempting to create a new kind of online history book. I'm developing a wiki where the narrative and encyclopedic entries about characters and events will be developed simultaneously. I'm doing this on my own right now, but will soon open it up for others to contribute, much as Wikipedia has been built by the efforts of a large community. As I develop this project, I realize that there's really no limit to what can be included in or linked to from this wiki. My long-term goal would be to have original source material for every aspect of the period I'm studying available online - a one-stop-shop, if you will, for people interested in this historical event.

Now, I'm not way out there on this. Others (like Michael Brooke, it seems) are working on similar "deep resource" projects. How will this impact culture? We're going to move from the idea that knowledge is something filtered and parsed by individuals to something that is created and managed by the group. I think this core idea has always been true, yet the methods we've had to deliver content - books, radio, television, and so on - have mostly been filtered through the narrow perspective of one person or one organization. It hasn't been practical in the past to develop and disseminate group-think. Once a book is printed, that's it until the next edition, if there is one. Any mistakes remain; ideas aren't reconsidered in the light of new evidence. Moreover, sources remain unavailable to the media consumer in many cases, so independent evaluation of an author's conclusions are impossible.

However, group-reviewed, dynamically updatable resources are available now, the tools to create these are starting to mature, and more of these resources will come online when people start to see how powerful and useful they are. Libraries are starting to digitize content like Shakespeare's quartos and Lewis Carroll's scrapbook. The balance of power in cultural filtering is shifting. It's as if gold went from being something only prospectors could locate in far-off locations to something anyone could create with their own personal alchemy machine.

(I'm also seeing a shift in the way we perceive top-down hierarchies in general. In business, for example, there are some who suggest that the wisdom of the group is more valuable and "right" in many cases than the wisdom of the manager or the CEO.)

Culture will change - back, perhaps - from something you consume to something you participate in. I've already seen a couple of wikis that attempt to facilitate group-created stories. More will follow.

Technologically speaking, we are in the midst of a mini-revolution in which computers move from being separate machines with discreet installations of data and programs (analogs of our personal experience) to "network appliances" connecting us to a world where applications data, and experience reside on the network and are easily shared. Everything will interconnect, and we will develop tools (like RSS readers) to help us manage the torrent of information. Experiences, expertise, and ideas will be shared freely.

Raymond: What can digital do? It can make all this possible. People won't simply consume. Portability and interconnectivity will open humans up to a level of collaboration that was previously impossible. Wikis and social bookmark sites like del.icio.us are the tip of the iceberg. This isn't a subtle shift. Once people start to grasp what's possible in an interconnected world, the sky's the limit. It's no small thing, for instance, to consider digitizing the Library of Congress so that the information contained therein is available instantly and everywhere.

Perhaps I wax rhapsodic. I tend to believe that people will use new tools in the best, most culturally enhancing way possible. It's just as likely, I suppose, that people won't. However, I am optimistic that once the infrastructure and tools are built, creative people will be called upon to use them. Culture will grow, as it always has, in the proper medium and conditions, and I like to imagine that this new medium is fertile indeed.

I was living in North Bend, Washington, a tiny town nestled in the foothills of the Cascades about 45 minutes east of Seattle. My friend Danielle was visiting. She lived in Queens. She was out here to reconnect with me and to see a part of the country she hadn't seen before. We were driving in to Bellevue, where she was going to drop me at work and take my car. We turned on NPR, kind of randomly, clueless. That's when we heard the news.

What strikes me is how long it took for my understanding of the situation to develop. I was at work, in a small office, in a small office building. The news came in drips and drabs. There was little sense of danger or threat at first, and I didn't see the pictures of the planes hitting the World Trade Center, or see the smoking wreckage at the Pentagon until I got home that evening.

For a couple of days we sat glued to the television set – as, I gather, did most everyone else. We spoke on the phone with friends from all over the country. Danielle tried to find out if her friends in New York City were safe and sound (all accounted for, all unharmed, thank God). I spoke with friends and family about what this all meant. I recall how sharply life had changed on that day. My friends were all from the comedy world, and all of a sudden comedy seemed a very hard thing to contemplate or achieve. We didn't know when, or if, anything would be funny again.

I visited the World Trade Center site last Christmas. It simply looked like a construction site, except for the tributes lining the fence. I don't have any personal memory of the towers except for a glimpse of them in passing when I visited New York in 1989. It's hard for me to fully understand what happened on that day. Life ended then, and life goes on. It goes on and we pause and remember and honor the victims and the heroes of that day and the remembering makes life more precious. My life has changed in so many ways since that day. I'm married now, and I'm going to go back to bed and lie next to my sleeping wife and hold her tight and thank God for the time we have together, and pray for the victims once more.

Wow. This line from gapingvoid hit me like a ton of bricks:

bq. The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur.

Yeah. You know, I don't think this is something that is just true today. Rather, I think this is always true, has always been true, and the successful people are those who understand and accept this fact. Maybe in part this is because the people who think the world is changing and surround themselves with people who think the world is changing... these people change the world.

Hugh continues:

bq. That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you're already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. It doesn't matter what industry we're talking about- architecture, advertising, petrochemicals- they're around, they're easy enough to find if you make the effort, if you've got something worthwhile to offer in return. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can't help you any more. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction.

Yeah. Wow. Good stuff. Remember this.

Damn. I just caught Barack Obama's speech from yesterday (you can watch it here Windows Real Media seems to be a more reliable feed). I teared up. Seriously. Let's hope this guy is the future of the Democratic party, 'cause he's damn good.

First black President? Mmmmm.... maybe...

Okay, so commenter Robotech_Master made a fair point about Salon.com's ad policy and prompted me to go back and read the Alan Moore interview I mentioned yesterday. I was a little annoyed by the distracting ads flashing and jumping while I was reading the article, but it was worth the effort, and I'm looking forward to picking up some of Moore's work.

Here are just a couple of random things that jumped out at me:

And I do tend to think that, given the upsurge of the religious right over the last couple of decades, these are the last spasms of those dinosaur organisms.

Why do you think that?

Because they are standing in the way of history, trying to turn everything, politically and spiritually, back to a medieval vision of the world. Whereas they're perfectly entitled to have whatever worldview they like, I would suggest that humanity is moving in a forward direction. And that any attempt to turn the clock back to a mythical, simpler, or better age would probably be about as effective as Britain's ancient King Canute, who famously sat on his throne along the tide line and ordered the waves to go back.

I'd like to believe this, but I'm not sure I buy it. I do think it's weird that, on the one hand, technology is moving society into an unprecedented level of connectivity and collaboration, of a type that will probably make the religious right increasingly foolish. However, on the other hand, the power base in this country is moving further to the right, and in al Qaeda and other groups we see the global rise of radical fundamentalism, so there's a rather complex fault line forming and it's anyone's guess as to what the landscape will look like after the earthquake.

If we look back a few generations to perhaps our great-grandparents, we've got a very different world in terms of its information content. You have a world where the people's heads were more than likely filled with the details of their own lives. I know that sounds completely unlikely from our cultural standpoint, where our heads are filled with the doings of Joey, Chandler, Ross, Fabian, whoever the other ones are, I can't remember.

Sacrilege!

How quickly we forget! [Laughs.] But, yeah, people's heads are stuffed with a fantastic amount of information, and I think all too often they cannot assimilate, digest or connect up that incredible amount of data into a coherent worldview.

Yeah. This is something Joseph Campbell pointed to; our culture has developed so rapidly that our the old mythology doesn't apply and the new myth hasn't been created yet that will help us assimilate. It'll happen, but we have to go through this unsettling flux first.

I feel that we may be approaching a cultural boiling point. I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; I really don't know because I can't imagine it, quite frankly. But I think we may be approaching the point at which the amount of information we are taking becomes exponential, and I'm not entirely certain what kind of human culture will exist beyond that point. Except it will happen sooner than we expect, and the difference between us and the kind of people that will exist after such an event will be vastly different than the difference between us and the hunter-gatherer society we've evolved from.

You're saying we might not be able to recognize human beings of the future that well.

Yeah, it could be a quantum leap, a sudden, massive and unprecedented leap. Boiling point is a good analogy, because what you have before that stage is water. What you have after it is something that does not behave at all like water; it's a completely different substance altogether. And that's what I see looming for society -- and it's probably necessary, probably inevitable, probably scary.

This is the concept of the Singularity that I've been hearing so much about lately. I think we're already in the midst of this, we just haven't quite reached that boiling point yet.

Really interesting, stimulating article. Thanks for nudging me back over there.

As much as I love Seattle, I do enjoy being back on the East Coast. I'll have landed in or passed through some of the greatest cities in the country on this trip - Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, DC - even Mystic, Connecticut!

I'm really settling into the trip now. I feel I'm in my element on a train, a welcome break from the off-balance way I've existed for the past few days. Providence is lovely, but the conference folks were definitely from a different world.

The Acela Express trains are not quite up to the standard of their European counterparts - France's TGV and others - but they are respectably appointed, comfortable, and fairly quiet. Zipping along at speeds of up to 150 mph, the usual clickety-clack of the wheels turns into something resembling the reassuring whirr of a piston engine.

It's an interesting way to see the world, on board a train. In Europe, I was disappointed in my wish to see the countryside, as the high-speed trains there travel - quite understandably - between view-obscuring berms. There's some of that to be experienced onboard the Acela, and there are the usual gritty industrial zones and gray, run-down residential areas that coagulate around the rail lines. However, there are also significant stretches of waterside villages with their marinas and harbors and houses for the wealthy. I was even able to glimpse a fog-shrouded Manhattan skyline at twilight, just as the lights of the Chrysler building came on.

Twenty minutes later, the train left Penn Station and emerged from the subterranean rail lines into the tunnel of darkness. Now, with the cabin lights dimmed, the lights tend to be only occasional pinpricks or glowing orange pockets of the odd settlement. At high speeds, the WHUMP of a passing train rattles the windows and cures us of our hiccups.

The one tiresome aspect of the voyage - only partly alleviated by the new iPod - is the cell phone conversations. For my part, I'm terribly embarrassed to have my one-way conversations full-volume even in an empty car, much less with other passengers surrounding me. Heck, I didn't even want to sit in the Quiet Car -where cell phones and loud conversations are banned - for fear that the light typing I planned to do might disturb someone. But I must have a disease or a syndrome of some kind because others seem perfectly capable of carrying on all sorts of inane gab fests without the slightest hint of regret.

At the risk of sounding sanctimonious, I worry that these folks aren't taking advantage of the great benefit that travel offers - perspective. Seeing the world at 100+ mph, at the slightly elevated height of the tracks, is to my mind one of the great opportunities of our modern life. When much of our lives are lived in the canyons of city blocks or the caves of our various dwellings, it's essential to occasionally see the world differently. Look here and see where our old cars are piled up. Look there and see people in rags sitting on the stoop of their ramshackle cottage, next to the burned out husk of a brick apartment building. Watch a bird hang motionless over the mast of a sailboat. Watch grand cities turn into graffiti-covered suburbs, turn into lush forests, turn into beaches and quaint little downtowns, and back again. Put the phone down. Does your wife really need to know for the third time that you'll be in at 10:30?

Thanks to a recommendation from my good friend Jodi Chase, I had my first Del's today. Del's is a delicious frozen lemonade concoction, and it just so happens that I lo-o-ove frozen lemonade concoctions (or frolemcocs, as I call 'em). The fella at the store showed me how to drink like a native Rhode Islander (hint: throw away the straw and squeeze the cup). When he claimed that a true native also dunks the SuperPretzels, I got a little suspicious, but he kept a straight face so I tried it and... well, it's not too bad, actually.

Best line of the day on Reagan, overheard on the "O'Franken Factor":www.ofrankenfactor.com (this is not a direct quote, but pretty close)...

Al Franken: Rush Limbaugh once said that this country owes Ronald Reagan a debt we will never be able to repay. For once, I agree with him.

I haven't talked about the Stanley Cup Playoffs yet, 'cause I don't want to jinx anything. John will know what I'm talking about. But I gotta say something about the Flames and Red Wings. Watching this game, it's tied at 0-0 in the third period, going into overtime, and it's been one of the most exciting games of the playoffs so far. Anyone who complains that there isn't enough scoring in hockey just hasn't watched a game like this. This is what it's all about - the little battles for the puck, for position, for an edge, the outstanding goaltending, the speed, the missed chances and the lucky breaks. I love football, but I'd take a nothing-nothing playoff hockey game over a 35-34 football game any day of the week.

The Recording Industry Association of America's shrill crusade to end music piracy is making in-roads in Congress. But is the industry's war of lawsuits and intimidation destined to become a quagmire?

Despite Wired magazine's "report":[www.wired.com/news/digi...](http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,63026,00.html) that CD and album sales were up 10% in the first three months of 2004, and in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, the recording industry continues to call file sharing the biggest extant threat to its existence. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) makes war on its customers and pushes for legislation that would make swappers into jailbirds. And, like the wars in Iraq and in Vietnam, it's hard to see a way out that's going to be anything but bloody and demoralizing for everyone involved.

On March 31, 2004, "CNET News reported":[news.com.com/2100-1028...](http://news.com.com/2100-1028-5182898.html) that a House sub-committee has approved a bill that would make sharing copyrighted files a criminal offense. The Piracy Deterrence and Education Act ("PDEA":dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fi.i.com.com%2Fcnwk.1d%2Fpdf%2Fne%2F2004%2Fpdea2004.pdf&siteId=3&oId=2100-1028-5182898&ontId=1023&lop=nl_ex) --

bq. "[...] the result of intense lobbying from large copyright holders over the past six months--has emerged as a kind of grab-bag that combines other proposals introduced in the past but not approved. One section that first surfaced last year punishes an Internet user who makes available $1,000 in copyrighted materials with prison terms of up to three years and fines of up to $250,000. If the PDEA became law, prosecutors would not have to prove that $1,000 in copyrighted materials were downloaded--they would need only to show that those files had been publicly accessible in a shared folder."

In other words, if you owned a computer that was found to contain approximately 65 CDs worth of copyrighted music in a shared folder -- whether you put it there or not and regardless of whether the music was actually downloaded by anyone -- you could go to prison for three years.

According to the "Washington State Adult Sentencing Manual":[www.sgc.wa.gov](http://www.sgc.wa.gov/) for 2003. here are some other things you could do to buy yourself a trey in the Big House for your first offense: Assault of a Child, Controlled Substance Homicide, Hit and Run resulting in death, Homicide by Watercraft/Vehicular Homicide by being Under the Influence of Intoxicating Liquor or any Drug, Malicious Placement of an Explosive, Robbery in the First Degree, or Sexual Exploitation.

On the other hand, Arson, Delivering Methamphetamines, Manslaughter, Vehicular Homicide by operating a vehicle in a reckless manner, Burglary in the First Degree, Child Molestation in the Second Degree, dealing in child pornography, Drive-by Shooting, Unlawful Possession of a Firearm, Use of a Machine Gun in Commission of a Felony, Intimidating a Judge/Juror/Witness, Third Degree Rape of a Child, Extortion, Second Degree Kidnapping, Third Degree Rape, Sexually Violating Human Remains, Counterfeiting, Threats to Bomb -- each of these offenses carry mandatory sentences of 27 months or less in the State of Washington.

Of course, this is just a partial list, but you can see my point. If the PDEA were enacted in its current form, the punishment for file sharing would be greater than the punishments for necrophilia or molesting a child. Heck, by my count you could steal a firearm (14 months), commit sexual misconduct with a minor (12 months), print your own money (9 months), and forge a prescription for codeine (2 months) and you'd only be in prison a month longer than a file swapper.

Or, you could kill someone with your car or boat while under the influence and receive a sentence equal to the proposed sentence for making 65 CDs worth of music available for downloading on your computer.

Aside from putting the kibosh on KaZaA, the PDEA would create a huge new category of criminals. How huge? According to the bill's authors, "the most popular peer-to-peer file trading software programs have been downloaded by computer users over 200,000,000 times. At any one time there are over 3,000,000 users simultaneously using just one of these services. Each month, on average, over 2,300,000,000 digital-media files are transferred among users of peer-to-peer systems." Holy crap. Think of that - 3,000,000 potential new criminal cases to bring against the users of just one P2P service! Looks like now's the time to start investing in prison construction companies and FBI futures.

I'm fond of the saying that goes "Just because a million people do a stupid thing, it doesn't mean it's not a stupid thing." Yet as lobbyists for the recording industry and representatives in the House continue to hammer out laws for extreme protection of copyrights, millions of users currently engaging in file sharing will have to make a choice: pay the vig to the RIAA's musical extortion racket or face jail time and stiff fines.

I'm safe. I haven't shared files for some time now. I admit it: I have used Napster in the past (the original, mind you, not the namesake). I also used AudioGalaxy, iMesh, and Morpheus. I downloaded music, and I made my shared folder available to other users of those programs. I did it not because I wanted to fill up my hard drive with free music, though that was certainly nice. No, I used file sharing services because they offered me a way to discover and research artists that I could not find as easily or at all through traditional means. I found I could no longer turn on a radio and hear music that appealed to me, and I had been burned more than once by buying an album based on the one song I knew about only to find that the rest of the album was completely different. So the choice offered by P2P programs was a vast improvement to my ability to make informed decisions about music buying.

More than that, P2P offered a way to research artists whose work didn't always show up in a record store, and to - yes, I admit - avoid spending thousands of dollars building a personal library of music that I was only interested in for the historical perspective it offered. Did that hurt the artists whose music I downloaded? I would argue that it didn't, mainly because I wouldn't have bought their albums in the first place just on spec. On the contrary, many artists were directly helped by my P2P browsing because I did end up buying their albums based on what I heard. For once, I was excited about discovering new music.

But then along came the RIAA with their campaign of tyranny, waving the flag of artists rights, crying financial hardship, and suing music consumers for doing what music consumers have always done - sharing the music of their favorite artists with like-minded fans. So I stopped. I stopped sharing, I stopped buying, I just got out of the game entirely. And you know what? I don't really miss it. I'd rather listen to my current collection of CDs and tapes in an endless loop than pay one more dime into a system that rapes artists, sues consumers, and generally stifles creative expression.

Look, I'll be the first to admit that there are some problems with the file sharing model. For instance, sticking a piece of music on your hard drive when you haven't paid for a copy of that piece of music is, well, probably not cool. (Sorry to equivocate, but I can imagine a society that actually encouraged that behavior to the economic benefit of all, so I can't bring myself to say that it's just flat out wrong.) I don't really have a need to own music I haven't paid for. I'm an artist myself, and I get the economics and ethics of this problem on a very deep, personal level. However, as a consumer, what I want is to find and experience music free of the linear, controlled output of the radio station. I don't want someone else telling me what I should listen to. I want to be able to experience music in the same way that the Internet has taught me to experience words and images - at my whim, at a moment's notice, and with some anonymity. P2P let me, in essence, program my own radio station based on whatever I was interested in at the moment, the way the Internet lets me program my own news and entertainment experience. Ideally, I want to be able to browse and select from the vast catalog of recorded music, listening to as much or as little as I want, with some way to compensate the artists fairly for what I consume.

This is not what the recording industry wants for me, however. The recording industry wants to maintain its exclusive control over the channels of production and distribution of popular artists. The record companies want to maintain their position as the gatekeepers to musical culture, both for artists and consumers. The recording industry wants to continue to pay artists pennies and half-pennies on the dollar for their creations while reaping maximum profits for itself. It wants to maintain control of the media through which we consume music - e.g. CDs, albums, tapes. The industry wants to be able to keep certain artists out of the game by denying them contracts. The RIAA wants to maintain control, because control to them is about dollars.

The "RIAA website":[www.riaa.com/issues/pi...](http://www.riaa.com/issues/piracy/default.asp) lays out the industry's case. Music piracy hurts consumers, music pirates, and honest retailers, as well as record companies and the creative artists themselves. According to the site, "Eighty-five percent of recordings released don’t even generate enough revenue to cover their costs. Record companies depend heavily on the profitable fifteen percent of recordings to subsidize the less profitable types of music, to cover the costs of developing new artists, and to keep their businesses operational. The thieves often don’t focus on the eighty-five percent; they go straight to the top and steal the gold." Presumably, the file sharers, then, can have the dreck from the bottom 85; just don't steal the good stuff.

The RIAA site goes on to say, " Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the creative artists lose [because of piracy]. Musicians, singers, songwriters and producers don’t get the royalties and fees they’ve earned. Virtually all artists (95%) depend on these fees to make a living." Indeed. Yet industry record contracts are notoriously onerous, as Nirvana's producer Steve Albini outlines in vivid detail in "this essay":[www.negativland.com/albini.ht...](http://www.negativland.com/albini.html) posted at "Negativland.com":www.negativland.com.

Albini describes the typical experience of a band producing material that would fit in the record industry's bottom 85% of recordings. After laying out a balance sheet that shows just where the money goes, Albini concludes, "The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month." I challenge you to read Albini's full article and then tell me that the RIAA is really worried about how much money the artists might lose to file sharing.

By the way, I love this quote at the bottom of the RIAA's anti-piracy page. "As recording artist "Tool" noted, "Basically, it's about music -- if you didn't create it, why should you exploit it?" Tool, of course, was talking about fans. I'm sure the recording industry didn't intend the irony.

Look, I'm not against the record companies making money. I can even see their point that it's probably better for almost everyone if there's a healthy industry investing in R&D, discovering artists and consolidating the costs of distribution and delivery of product. But the industry's knee-jerk reaction to online file sharing has been so convulsive that I'm afraid they're missing a grand opportunity to make the production and consumption of music better and more profitable for everyone.

Here's the thing: according to a "recent study":www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf (PDF), it seems that file sharing statistically has zero effect on music consumption. Another "study":[www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/...](http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000573.html) even suggests that people who use the Internet buy more CDs. And "this article":[www.sfbg.com/38/22/lit...](http://www.sfbg.com/38/22/lit_copyright.html) suggests that publishing work under less-restrictive licenses hasn't hurt the authors who've tried it. And "this author":[www.extremetech.com/article2/...](http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1563818,00.asp,) like me, has stopped buying CDs in protest.

And what has been the RIAA's response? Well, their website contains no response to these studies and lists no evidence of their own to support their fervent pursuit of legal protection. On its site, at least, the RIAA only admits that calculating the cost of file sharing is "difficult."

It seems to me that the RIAA is missing a golden moment to use the new technology to benefit artists, producers and consumers. Indeed, the industry already quietly uses certain services which piggyback on P2P software to measure consumer interest in current music offerings. By fully and openly embracing file sharing, the industry could profit handsomely.

What if record companies offered their entire catalogs of music online on their own servers? By charging reasonable access fees, the industry could make a low-cost music library available to everyone, a cultural contribution which would rival the creation of the great libraries of the world. By reducing prices, the industry could drive sales ever higher, while realizing greater profit through lower manufacturing and distribution costs. The RIAA has access to a brand new method of promotion and distribution that they didn't have to spend one dime to manufacture, yet they are killing the Golden Goose. Record companies are willing to leave a gift of immense magnitude on the table in order to maintain a few more years of life as they know it.

And a few more years is likely all they'll have if they can't learn to change with the times. Countless other industries have met a similar fate during periods of technological revolution, and this revolution will be even faster and more sweeping than ever before. With tens of millions of users in this country searching for new ways to experience music, P2P as we know it will go the way of the Dodo and some new method of sharing music will spring to the forefront, making the current fuss irrelevant.

In fact one "such method":[www.downhillbattle.org/itmsscrip...](http://www.downhillbattle.org/itmsscript/index.html) with the potential to give the music consumer greater power is currently under development. It's a service that could offer highly detailed song information, including whether the distribution company for a song is a member of the RIAA. With better access to information, perhaps people will actively choose to "intentionally withhold money":[www.riaaradar.com](http://www.riaaradar.com/) from the recording industry in a much more effective way than they currently do, adding injury to insult by routing their dollars to more friendly organizations.

The RIAA has also been dealt a series of legal setbacks, which should raise a red flag in the organization that maybe they're on the wrong side of this issue. A Canadian judge, in a "case involving":[www.boingboing.net/2004/03/3...](http://www.boingboing.net/2004/03/31/canadas_riaa_cant_pr.html) the RIAA's sister organization in that country, denied a motion to reveal the names of alleged file swappers, noting that the existence of P2P programs is no different than putting a copy machine in the middle of a library of copyrighted material. And just today the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals "ruled that":[www.corante.com/copyfight...](http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/003214.html) fair use applies even to material that has originally been obtained illegally.

The struggle for control, the fight to maintain an old system of power, is one that the recording industry simply cannot win. Prohibitions have never worked. Suing your customers and creating a criminal class out of your biggest pool of consumers can only breed more virulent forms of protest. So great is the desire for free choice and free access -- ie. "free as in freedom":www.gnu.org, not +free as in beer+ -- that the people will not give it up. The only question is how many casualties we'll see before the bloody war is over.

I've been getting lost in research for "The Louverture Project":www.stumax.com/tlp for a lot of the past couple of weeks. I think 'lost' is the appropriate word. Not having attempted anything like a historical study before, I'm feeling a bit swamped by the task. In the past I've written sketches, plays, that kind of thing, where it's all come out of my own imagination. Or I've written corporate events, where my job was to research and synthesize material of a relatively limited scope and create a unique work. Often I've had stock characters to write for, but this job is completely different. Here, I've got a vast amount of data, an endless array of characters, far-reaching implications, and the only constraint I have to work around is a historical, verifiable time line. How do I boil this down so that it makes sense? How do I know what to capture from my research and what to leave out?

I decided that I needed some help, and lo and behold, on my bookshelf were a couple of books I had looked at but never really seen before - How to Write and Sell Historical Fiction by Persia Woolley and The Biographer's Craft by Milton Lomask. Aside from the nice surprise of having them in my collection, the books were a comfort in that it seems like most of what I'm doing at this phase is just what the books suggest - research, organize, and write as inspiration strikes. With a few tweaks and some shifts of emphasis, I feel like I'll be back on track.

Here are a few quick hits from today's reading:

• eu·he·mer·ism, n. A theory attributing the origin of the gods to the deification of historical heroes.
• Two major questions to ask when considering a biography are: Who will want to read it? and What makes it unique? (Woolley)
• "Truth... makes bad fiction, but fiction should read like truth. Similarly, fiction makes bad biography, but biography should read like fiction." (Lomask, p. 2)
• The "and" biography links two or more individuals or an individual and an event, institution, or historical period. (Lomask, p. 3)
• "There are no rules for composition," Claude Debussy said, "but every composition makes its own rules." (Lomask, p. 5)
• "Residue" as regards biographical subjects relates to the impact of the individual on present day or the interest which the individual holds for us. (Lomask, p. 10)
• When you send out your biographical manuscript, an editor will want you to list what books on the subject are still in print. Consult Book Review Digest for help in finding these. (Lomask, p. 11)
• "If you can't travel, read." (Lomask, p. 16)
• Don't quote so much. "Good note-taking is précis writing." You're not a file clerk, you're a writer! (Lomask, p. 23)
• Good reference material: Guide to Reference Books; Dictionary of American Biography, Notable American Women (both for dead persons); Current Biography , National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Who's Who in America, Biography Index (for live persons); American Genealogical Index, Who Was Who; and especially Writings on American History and Writings on British History.
• "Man is not what we think he is," André Malraux wrote. "Man is what he hides."

'We ugly! But we here!' - JAMAICAOBSERVER.COM

bq. The so-called new prime minister of Haiti is one monsieur Latortue, who has a lot of chat for someone without a mandate from anyone except the US ambassador and his bosses. He is, he says, going to unite Haiti, so he has begun by boldly leaving out of his 'government' any representative of the people of Haiti. I give him three weeks.

John Maxwell continues to be the most outspoken commentator and the most trenchant observer of the ongoing situation in Haiti. What has happened to that country in the last 10 years is a farce of epic proportions. It would be funny if it wasn't tragic.

bq. The world should know that the United States and France bear the major responsibility for the predicaments in which Haiti now finds itself. It is a savage irony, that two of the three nations founded at the end of the 18th century on the ideals of the Brotherhood of Man should continue to hypocritically dismiss the third on no other visible basis but that Haiti is black.

bq. Racism is Racism is Racism. To describe Haiti as a 'failed state", to say that Aristide misgoverned his country, to allege that the mulatto elite in Haiti are capable of operating a democracy are sick jokes. The mulatto elite and the military have been the junior partners in the franchised predation of Haiti for most of its history.

bq. Aristide was not perfect. Nobody ever claimed that he was. But is George W Bush perfect? or Jacques Chirac? The money misappropriated when Chirac was mayor of Paris could feed a great many Haitians. Does that make Chirac unfit to lead France? Does the fact that Ken Lay of Enron was the largest contributor to President George Bush, or the fact that Vice-President Cheney's company is accused of overcharging the US army for food make either Mr Bush or Cheney unfit to govern the United States and the world??

Well, if it doesn't make them unfit, per se, it sure weakens their authority. Or, it would in a rational world.

bq. The behaviour of Kofi Annan and the UN Security Council was barbaric. They refused to help a UN member in good standing when his country was threatened by the most disreputable, bloodthirsty assassins. Yet, two days later, when Aristide had been overthrown, kidnapped or whatever, the same group felt impelled to send a 'peace-keeping' force to Haiti. And a few days ago, the World Bank held a donors meeting to consider aid for Haiti. The hypocrisy runs like blood in an abattoir.

I think the abattoir is an appropriate metaphor. We've turned Haiti into as effective a place of misery as a slaughterhouse, one we can turn our backs on and ignore as long as the meat keeps showing up on our plate.

I have now created a separate blog for the Haiti- Toussaint-related posts and discussion. I feel that this will give me the opportunity to open up the Toussaint discussion to others, and at the same time give me a chance to broaden the discussion on my own Stumax site. I would like the freedom to explore ideas from the mundane to the silly, and I would like to preserve the integrity and seriousness of the Toussaint project.

You can see the new site, The Louverture Project, at http://www.stumax.com/tlp/.

I'm making plans to promote the site to the Haiti List. I'd like to invite historians, formal and otherwise, to comment and add to my discoveries. Hopefully, this will accelerate the pace of my learning.