Participation: the most important, underlying theme

In the first half of the semester we were introduced to Susan Delagrange’s “Wunderkammer,” – and more importantly, her essay about the revision process for that piece. 

Her essay, “When Revision is Redesign,” taught us about a heuristic process – Enabling us to discover or learn something for ourselves.

She said, “...a key to innovative thinking and problem-solving is maintaining ambiguity for as long as possible. Designers must preserve ambiguity so as not to exclude avenues of thought or experiment that might later prove productive. Learners too must preserve ambiguity, as premature certainty shuts down the process of inquiry and exploration that often leads to more sophisticated, more interesting, more generative knowledge." 

She used the visual effect of the Wunderkammer as a physical place, creating what she called a “richly furnished imaginative space” – something that would get us to wander and explore. 

And that was something I carried into my midterm. 

-----> For the midterm project, I posted a series of images laid together with quotes from our readings. And when I wrote about them, it kind of came out as slam poetry. I wrote it as I spoke it, and practiced it out loud – hoping that when someone read it, they would be able to hear my voice, or that they’d be inclined to read it out loud to feel the words. 

TO PARTICIPATE. 

I was learning by doing the project –– and the revision process – rewording and editing – helped me fine-tune not just my words on the page, but all of my thoughts around the pieces we’d read so far this semester. Finishing the midterm gave me a product I could be proud of, and helped me really digest what we’d been learning.

***

The theme I’m getting at concerns internalizing in our memories. To embed our personal knowledge into culture to have some effect – it requires participation. 

Nowhere did that seem more important to me as in the legal issues surrounding copyright infringement and information, which we touched on with John Barlow’s “The Economy of Ideas.” 

He taught us the difference between INFORMATION and DATA:

-----> “Even when it has been encapsulated in some static form like a book or a hard disk, information is still something that happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its storage code. But, whether it's running at gigabits per second or words per minute, the actual decoding is a process that must be performed by and upon a mind, a process that must take place in time.”

We are the ones who give life to data, turning it into information. And we are the ones who must carry that burden into culture if we want to see change. 

So for my final project, I am creating a website that will become an action center – a hub for a collection of organizations that fight with and against lawmakers and lobbyists who are addressing Internet Freedom and cyber security. 

-----> Organizations like:

The American Civil Liberties Union

Electric Frontier Foundation

The Internet Defense League

Demand Progress 

As Barlow said, “Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks......real-world conditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind... This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome.”

But is my hope that by creating this website, where people can learn to participate, I will be able to provide a useful tool for those like myself who want to be part of the movement to help the law catch up to real world technology and culture.

AMA (ask-me-anything) chat about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act happening on Reddit NOW!

Check it out!

AMAs are "Ask me anything"s where people field questions from Redditors. 
The panel includes Demand Progress, Aaron Swartz's partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Free Press, Orin Kerr, Jennifer Granick, Lawrence Lessig, Marvin Ammori, Tim Berners Lee.

Jay Cox of the EFF said this is what they're ultimately trying to accomplish by raising awareness about the CFAA reform

"We want to reform a vague, overly-expansive law that was originally intended to only deal with malicious computer trespass of a very small subset of computers. The law has been used in an aggressive manner by the DOJ, which believes that violating a terms of service should be punishable under the CFAA. For a great example of why reform is needed check out our blog post on the terms of service on news sites--some of which say if you're under 18 you can't access their website. The law was recently used in the aggressive prosecution of Aaron Swartz. Even before Aaron's death, we were fighting in the courts to narrow, and curtail, the law.

Common sense reform to the CFAA is needed to curtail aggressive prosecution by the DOJ and to ensure that companies can thrive. Large companies have all used the CFAA as a way to stop startups and innovators from creating innovative new products and services. That's why we're asking people to tell their Congressmen to reform the CFAA.

We're trying to: *) Make sure the CFAA doesn't criminalize simple terms of service violations *) Make sure that security, researchers, engineers, and innovators can create addons, new products, and new services without the threat of a criminal prosecution *) Decrease some of the penalties in the law so that low-level offenses aren't punished by an overbearing heavy-handed regime."

David Segal of Demand Progress on why the CFAA is bad (in its current state and with the potential new amendments):

"The biggest issue: Law enforcement asserts that it's a crime for you to violate a terms of service agreement on a website. Meaning that if Facebook says don't share your password with your friend, but you do anyway, then you're a federal criminal.

If Stephen Colbert starts a Twitter account for Bill Clinton, he's a federal criminal:https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130409/08525322632/did-stephen-colbert-president-bill-clinton-violate-cfaa.shtml?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

This means almost all of us are criminals, which is a hallmark of an authoritarian society and means that we're all susceptible to prosecution if we do something that steps on the wrong persons toes. It also creates a chilling effect on innovation, because if you're trying to build a device or platform that's inter-operable with other devices/platforms, it's easy to violate terms of use agreements."

CFAA "Reforms" Discussed in Congress Fail to Improve

As early as April 10, Congress may vote on amendments to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – basically, the legislation used to punish cyber "criminals." Not that they don't already, but the reforms may make criminals out of almost every Internet user in the country.

"Over the weekend, they (Congress) began circulating a "draft" of a "cyber-security" bill that is so bad that it almost feels like the Judiciary Committee is doing it on purpose as a dig at online activists who have fought back against things like SOPA, CISPA and the CFAA. Rather than fix the CFAA, it expands it. Rather than rein in the worst parts of the bill, it makes them worse. And, from what we've heard, the goal is to try to push this through quickly, with a big effort underway for a "cyberweek" in the middle of April that will force through a bunch of related bills." –Mike Masnick, "Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse... Way Worse."

[[Check out Congress' discussion draft of the cyber security bill (primary source).]]

Reform is crucial, as the letter of the law so heinously does not reflect the spirit of the "crimes" defined in the policy. There is a huge disconnect between what is socially acceptable and legally acceptable when it comes to online activities.

All websites and online services require users to agree to a "terms and conditions" agreement. The CFAA (with its new amendments) would state that a violation of said agreements are punishable by law.

• Making a Facebook account for your pet? Violation.
• Checking your family airline miles on your husband or wife's account? Violation. 
• "Exceeding authorized access," one of the new amendments, means even if you are allowed to obtain information from the site, you can be violating the agreement if you misuse it. Felony.

The CFAA originally passed in 1984, before the Dot Com Boom and the advances in digital technologies which are now so imbedded in our culture. Though it has been amended several times – most recently in 2008 – Congress is now taking backward steps to make the CFAA worse.
______

Fix the CFAA: get involved by telling Congress that their expansions of the CFAA are not acceptable and demand better reform.

Demand Progress, the organization Aaron Swartz worked for before he committed suicide earlier this year, is also trying to amend the CFAA and pass "Aaron's Law."

Johnson vs. Morozov: Internet-Centrism and Cyber-Utopianism

Johnson (Future Perfect) and Morozov (The New Republic)

Morozov also against the ideas of what he calls 

cyber-utopianism: the inability to see the Internet's 'darker' side, that is, the capabilities for information control and manipulation of new media space 

and 

Internet-centrism: the growing propensity ["quasi religion"] to view all political and social change through the prism of the Internet   (from Wiki)

Morozov claims Johnson (and Clay Shirky, author of "Here Comes Everybody") are Internet-Centrists, while Johnson claims not to be an Internet-Centrist; he calls IC "naive techno-determinism."

To this, Morozov counters: "The kind of naive determinism that views the “Internet” as a "positive force" and that Johnson seeks to distance himself from has nothing to do with Internet-centrism; it's a feature more commonly attributed to cyber-utopianism, as I clearly state at the very beginning of the review. That Johnson is not a starry-eyed techno-determinist doesn't make him less of an Internet-centrist."

I would argue against Morozov's claim about Shirky being an Internet-Centrist, who has obviously focused his lens through the idea that the Internet is effecting change in social and political developments but does not attribute those changes exclusively to the Internet. In "Here Comes Everybody," (which is the only work of his I've read) Shirky explains that the degree to which information is now spreading on the Internet is so different that we can call it a difference in type. And that the breakdown of barriers like time and distance reduce the gap between action and intention when it comes to political and social moves. But I did not get the impression that he was giving exclusive credit for these changes to the Internet. Still, I have only read a small portion of Shirky's body of work. 

Morozov: "Perhaps it was a mistake to treat the Internet as a deterministic one-directional force for either global liberation or oppression, for cosmopolitanism or xenophobia. The reality is that the Internet will enable all of these forces—as well as many others—simultaneously. But as far as laws of the Internet go, this is all we know. Which of the numerous forces unleashed by the Web will prevail in a particular social and political context is impossible to tell without first getting a thorough theoretical understanding of that context."

Johnson: "The point I tried to make explicit in Future Perfect is one that I’ve been implicitly making for more than a decade now: that peer collaboration is an ancient tradition, with a history as rich and illustrious as the more commonly celebrated histories of states or markets. The Internet happens to be the most visible recent achievement in that tradition, but it is hardly the basis of my worldview. And there is nothing in Future Perfect (or any of these other works) that claims that decentralized, peer-network approaches will always outperform top-down approaches. It’s simply a question of emphasis."

"Liberals can still believe in the power and utility of markets, even if they tend to emphasize big government solutions; all but the most radical libertarians think that there are some important roles for government in our lives. Peer progressives are no different. We don’t think that everything in modern life should be re-engineered to follow the “logic of the Internet.” We just think that society has long benefited from non-market forms of open collaboration, and that they’re aren’t enough voices in the current political conversation reminding us of those benefits. For peer progressives, the Internet is a case-study and a role model, yes, but hardly a deity. We would be making the same argument had the Internet never been invented."

Morozov: "An Internet-centrist asks the question: “What does the Internet want?” as if that question made sense. An Internet-utopian doesn't even ask that question, assuming that the Internet wants democracy and freedom. I don't know if Johnson is an Internet utopian but he is certainly an Internet-centrist.... It it might be useful to step back and ask whether the very fact of bringing “the Internet” in our explanatory accounts is enhancing or impoverishing our understanding of the technological world that we inhabit. Are we gaining anything by lumping thealgorithms used in high-frequency trading with a very different set of algorithms that Twitter uses to decide on its “popular trends” while using the sexy but highly elusive label of “the Internet” to do all that lumping? I don't think so—which is why I've been calling for a highly particularized approach to studying digital technologies—one that would treat each of them on their own terms without having to smuggle in some abstract, macro-level concept such as “the Internet” to smooth over the rough empirical and theoretical edges"

Johnson promotes the ideology of “peer progressivism.” 

Morozov: "What, one might ask, is new about this political ideology? According to Johnson, at least two things. First, its adherents believe that there are some areas of expertise where the public—or the crowd—are more knowledgeable than the experts. Second, “peer progressives”— unlike all those pre-peer progressives—don't have to choose between the state and the market; the two can co-exist, tapping into networks of crowd expertise along the way....
>>>Johnson, comfortably ensconced in his Internetcentric bubble, seems to sincerely believe that no one had ever thought about ways to make democratic politics more participatory before the onset of blogs, chats, and social networks. This, of course, is nonsense. The most unfortunate consequence of Johnson's project might be that, in his half-baked efforts to make a case for “peer progressivism,” he might undermine public support for more serious government reforms that are not as excited about “the Internet” but have developed sophisticated theories about involving crowds and networks in both deliberative and participatory processes."

It seems like Morozov is simply trying to direct the attention of people he perceives to be Internet-Centrists back to the subtleties of the real world which require more context-sensitive thinking. He is reminding us that there are other forces at work besides the Internet in current affairs, and that lumping together complicated phenomena under the umbrella of "the Internet" is actually hindering critical thinking.

Imogen Heap the Musical Cyborg

Heap demonstrates the technology of her musical suit in the first 13 minutes and then begins her song, "Me and the Machine." Absolutely amazing.

Shapiro and Varain vs. Barlow: Economy+Information

John Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas" and Carl Shapiro and Hal Varain "The Information Economy"

Shapiro & Varian talk about information goods the way most talk about data, as a commodity to be turned into profit. Selling information in the Age of Information creates an entirely different economy, where the market price of "goods" does not depend on the production cost any longer; sellers set prices based on the value information has to its market (Shapiro & Varian 3). Their approach to information is purely business-like. Cold, and nothing like Barlow.

Barlow describes Information as a living thing, a relationship, an activity. He says on page 7, "Information is an action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space, as is the case with hard goods... Even when it has been encapsulated in some static form like a book or a hard disk, information is still something that happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its storage code. But, whether it's running at gigabits per second or words per minute, the actual decoding is a process that must be performed by and upon a mind, a process that must take place in time."

Eventually, Shapiro and Varian hit a point that agrees with Barlow – marketing one's intellectual property involves establishing authority: building a reputation to convince the market to buy one's product without knowing whether the product is good yet. Shapiro and Varian call this building brand name, and Barlow calls it point of view. Barlow, on page 10, writes "Familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be true that the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away... In aesthetic information, whether poetry or rock 'n' roll, people are willing to buy the new product of an artist, sight-unseen, based on their having been delivered a pleasurable experience by previous work." 

On page 8, Shapiro & Varian make a huge mistake. They argue that the Web "isn't all that impressive as an information resource. The static, publicly accessible HTML text on the Wen is roughly equivalent in size to 1.5 million books. The UC Berkeley Library has 8 million volumes, and the average quality of the Berkeley library content is much, much higher! If 10 percent of the material on the Web is 'useful,' there are about 150,000 useful book-equivalents on it, which is about the size of a Borders superstore. But the actual figure for 'useful' is probably more like 1 percent, which is 15,000 books, or half the size of an average mall bookstore."

Shapiro & Varian could not have underestimated the Web more in 1999, when their book was published. 

I have no way to confirm whether their statistics were true 14 years ago, but saying only 10% of the information on the Web is useful is an incredible oversight. They continue on page 9 to describe the usefulness of the Web's immediate access factor, but even there they lack a complete picture. 

The Web, whether a majority of its content is "useful" or not, is much more impressive than Shapiro & Varian give it credit for – even as a marketing tool, which they seem to be limited to in their focus here. The Web is not just immediate and widely accessible – it has cracked the code, broken the barriers, for information to cross time and space. Their library metaphor shows just how diminutive their take is. With information on the Web, there is no longer a need to physically go where information is to access it, and people no longer have to be on synchronized schedules to share information. 

They say the Web enhances the value of information (9), but it also enhances the scope of its audience, enabling those with an idea or product to share to reach people who they never could have in physical space or time. Shapiro & Varian seriously overlooked that characteristic of networking technology, which has made commerce explode online.

When it comes to law and technology meshing, the two sets of authors hold strongly contrasting ideals. Shapiro & Varian write, "The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed in the 1890s to control monopolies. Technology has changed radically since then. As we have stressed, the underlying economic principles have not. As a new century arrives, the Sherman Act is flexible enough to prevent the heavy hand of monopoly from stifling innovation, while keeping markets competitive enough to stay the even heavier hand of government regulation intruding in our dynamic hardware and software markets" (17-18). 
Barlow writes, "Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks, like the punctuation of biological evolution grotesquely accelerated. Real-world conditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind, more profoundly confused. This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome" (6)

In my view, Barlow was closer to the truth here. If anything has become apparent in the struggle between technology growth and the stagnation of the law, it is the latter's inability to keep up with the former. 

Reading Notes for Barlow "The Economy of Ideas"

Barlow: "The Economy of Ideas"

"The source of this conundrum is as simple as its solution is complex. Digital technology is detaching
information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition.

Thus, the rights of invention and authorship adhered to activities in the physical world. One didn't get paid for ideas, but for the ability to deliver them into reality. For all practical purposes, the value was in the conveyance and not in the thought conveyed." (2)


"While the Internet may never include every CPU on the planet, it is more than doubling every year and can be expected to become the principal medium of information conveyance, and perhaps eventually, the only one.

All of the broadcast-support models are flawed. Support either by advertisers or government has almost
invariably tainted the purity of the goods delivered. Besides, direct marketing is gradually killing the
advertiser-support model anyway.

The greatest constraint on your future liberties may come not from government but from corporate legal departments laboring to protect by force what can no longer be protected by practical efficiency or general social consent." (3)

In the Age of Information, we patent and copyright IDEAS, and not their physical manifestations. "In certain areas, this leaves rights of ownership in such an ambiguous condition that property again
adheres to those who can muster the largest armies. The only difference is that this time the armies
consist of lawyers.

What was previously considered a common human resource, distributed among the minds and libraries of the world, as well as the phenomena of nature herself, is now being fenced and deeded. It is as though a new class of enterprise had arisen that claimed to own the air.

In a more perfect world, we'd be wise to declare a moratorium on litigation, legislation, and international treaties in this area until we had a clearer sense of the terms and conditions of enterprise in cyberspace. Ideally, laws ratify already developed social consensus. They are less the Social Contract itself than a series of memoranda expressing a collective intent that has emerged out of many millions of human interactions. Humans have not inhabited cyberspace long enough or in sufficient diversity to have developed a Social Contract which conforms to the strange new conditions of that world. Laws developed prior to consensus usually favor the already established few who can get them passed and not society as a whole." (5)

"Whenever there is such profound divergence between law and social practice, it is not society that adapts. Against the swift tide of custom, the software publishers' current practice of hanging a few visible scapegoats is so obviously capricious as to only further diminish respect for the law.

Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks, like the punctuation of biological evolution grotesquely accelerated. Real-world conditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind, more profoundly confused. This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome.

But something will happen. After all, people do business. When a currency becomes meaningless, business is done in barter. When societies develop outside the law, they develop their own unwritten codes, practices, and ethical systems. While technology may undo law, technology offers methods for restoring creative rights." (6)


Information is an activity. 

"Gregory Bateson, expanding on the information theory of Claude Shannon, said, "Information is a
difference which makes a difference." Thus, information only really exists in the Delta. The making of that difference is an activity within a relationship. Information is an action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space, as is the case with hard goods.

Even when it has been encapsulated in some static form like a book or a hard disk, information is still
something that happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its storage code. But, whether it's
running at gigabits per second or words per minute, the actual decoding is a process that must be
performed by and upon a mind, a process that must take place in time.

Information must move: Information that isn't moving ceases to exist as anything but potential...at least until it is allowed to move again. For this reason, the practice of information hoarding, common in bureaucracies, is an especially wrong-headed artifact of physically based value systems." (7)


Information is a life form. 
It is a life form, and humans are its host.
"Information Replicates into the Cracks of Possibility: just as the common housefly has insinuated itself into practically every ecosystem on the planet, so has the meme of "life after death" found a niche in most minds, or psycho-ecologies. "

If ideas and other interactive patterns of information are indeed life forms, they can be expected to evolve constantly into forms which will be more perfectly adapted to their surroundings. And, as we see, they are doing this all the time. But for a long time, our static media, whether carvings in stone, ink on paper, or dye on celluloid, have strongly resisted the evolutionary impulse, exalting as a consequence the author's ability to determine the finished product. But, as in an oral tradition, digitized information has no "final cut."(8)

Information is a relationship. 

"The value of what is sent depends entirely on the extent to which each individual receiver has the
receptors - shared terminology, attention, interest, language, paradigm - necessary to render what is
received meaningful.
Data may be any set of facts, useful or not, intelligible or inscrutable, germane or irrelevant... Only a human being can recognize the meaning that separates information from data." (9)

"Familiarity has more value than scarcity: Familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be true that the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.


Point of View and Authority Have Value: In aesthetic information, whether poetry or rock 'n' roll, people are willing to buy the new product of an artist, sight-unseen, based on their having been delivered a pleasurable experience by previous work." (10)



"...point of view is an asset which cannot be stolen or duplicated.
In the hick town I come from, they don't give you much credit for just having ideas. You are judged by
what you can make of them. As things continue to speed up, I think we see that execution is the best
protection for those designs which become physical products.

But, as we become fixated upon information commerce, many of us seem to think that originality alone is sufficient to convey value, deserving, with the right legal assurances, of a steady wage. In fact, the best way to protect intellectual property is to act on it. It's not enough to invent and patent; one has to innovate as well." (11)

"Nevertheless, most of what a middle-class American purchases has little to do with survival. We buy beauty, prestige, experience, education, and all the obscure pleasures of owning. Many of these things can not only be expressed in nonmaterial terms, they can be acquired by nonmaterial means.

It is an economy which consists almost entirely of information. This may become the dominant form of human trade, and if we persist in modeling economics on a strictly monetary basis, we may be gravely misled.

I'm not really so gloomy about our prospects as readers of this jeremiad so far might conclude. Solutions will emerge. Nature abhors a vacuum and so does commerce." (12)

Ethics used to be more important than laws -- and now we have a law for almost everything. There is no way for law to keep up with the new issues technology is presenting. "Uncodified or adaptive "law," while as "fast, loose, and out of control" as other emergent forms, is probably more likely to yield something like justice at this point.

...people seem to eventually buy the software they really use. Once a program becomes central to your work, you want the latest version of it, the best support, the actual manuals, all privileges attached to ownership. Such practical considerations will, in the absence of working law, become more and more important in getting paid for what might easily be obtained for nothing." (13)

"In any case, whether you think of yourself as a service provider or a performer, the future protection of your intellectual property will depend on your ability to control your relationship to the market - a relationship which will most likely live and grow over a period of time. The value of that relationship will reside in the quality of performance, the uniqueness of your point of view, the validity of your expertise, its relevance to your market, and, underlying everything, the ability of that market to access your creative services swiftly, conveniently, and interactively. " (14)

"Crpto-Bottling... Having come from a place where people leave their keys in their cars and don't even have keys to their houses, I remain convinced that the best obstacle to crime is a society with its ethics intact. " (15)

"If the payment process can be automated, as digital cash and signature will make possible, I believe that soft product creators will reap a much higher return from the bread they cast upon the waters of cyberspace.
Moreover, they will be spared much of the overhead presently attached to the marketing, manufacture, sales, and distribution of information products, whether those products are computer programs, books, CDs, or motion pictures. This will reduce prices and further increase the likelihood of noncompulsory payment.
But of course there is a fundamental problem with a system that requires, through technology, payment for every access to a particular expression. It defeats the original Jeffersonian purpose of seeing that ideas were available to everyone regardless of their economic station. I am not comfortable with a model that will restrict inquiry to the wealthy.

An Economy of Verbs:

• In the absence of the old containers, almost everything we think we know about intellectual property is wrong. We're going to have to unlearn it. We're going to have to look at information as though we'd never seen the stuff before.
• The protections that we will develop will rely far more on ethics and technology than on law.
• Encryption will be the technical basis for most intellectual property protection. (And should, for many reasons, be made more widely available.)
• The economy of the future will be based on relationship rather than possession. It will be continuous rather than sequential. 
• And finally, in the years to come, most human exchange will be virtual rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business will be conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns." (16)