The Internet culture is in crisis. Jewish blogs are stuck. A dignified livelihood is a challenge. Why? In one sentence, when a culture becomes derivative, it mines and depletes its own legacy. I started thinking about this topic when I read this paragraph in Jaron Lanier’s new book:
“It is astonishing how much of the chatter online is driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media and that is now being destroyed by the net. Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
Marshall McLuhan declared that “medium is the message”. What he meant was that a new form of expression, i.e. alphabet, writing, print, TV, etc., changes our brain wiring, tastes and values so radically that medium itself is the central cultural event. Inevitably at a dawn of every novel form of expression, a new medium is awkwardly used to reprocess the old, the bleak task comparable to translating poetry into a foreign language. This is the DJ stage where the Internet finds itself at the current moment. The old tunes are remixed, republished, relinked to a new beat, literally and figuratively no new music is created. Occasionally a new app is written for the legacy proprietary code instead of a new OS.
On to the Jews cursed with the satirical task of amplifying a culture. Every potential convert to Judaism needs to be aware of these axioms:
- Marshall McLuhan spoke about the “rear view mirror” phenomena or the propensity of any culture to live in a utopia about its past. Jews amplify this tendency in the worst possible way. Most traditional Jewish communities are consumed with intense utopia and the deliberate subterfuge of history.
- A Rabbi is a DJ, never singing in its own voice and forever spinning someone else’s tracks. There is a derivative throwback tendency in every culture but again amplified by the Jews. The tribe castigated to the two thousand years of the survivalist epic. With the rare exceptions (i.e. kabbalah) the innovation is shut down, conformism is bred and encouraged. People who can’t contain or control their creative impulses are eventually expelled from the traditional Jewish communities.
- Every group on the face of the earth is defined by what this group is not. Jaron Lanier calls this the “mob switch”. Once again this is most sensitive component of the traditional Jewish culture. Although the potential converts are not specifically instructed about the importance of the boundary defining hate, eventually to successfully integrate in the communities they would have to internalize the intense feeling of hatred towards other Jewish groups and denominations, towards the declared heretics, goyim, real and imaginary antisemites, etc.
Now let’s compare the three “Jewish problems” to the Internet. The Internet is definitely not a utopian vision of the past. There is strong revolutionary current, especially in the communal rhetoric of the Open Source movement and the Web 2.0 social. Alas, after a decade, a new server side oligarchy emerged to control the scalable bits. Instead of empowering creativity, no longer under a centralized command, there is a deliberate and impoverishing push for the “free”, the collapse of the copyright boundaries, devaluation of the original unpaid authorship under the assault the ad supported aggregators. The DJ culture is absolutely the internet as we know it today. The disastrous anonymous comments culture and the combustible flame wars take the group/mob hate to the unprecedented levels on the Internet.
And what about the Wall St.? The financial services industry dominated by the derivative contracts became the most important part of the American GDP. There is an easy analogy to the Internet (or any derivatives dominated culture). People often complain that the stocks are the trading instruments removed from the real value of a company. An options contract or a credit default swap contract is like a tweet about a comment on a blog post that links to a different newspaper web site. Derivatives are comments removed from a productive culture, they don’t innovate, don’t create value and eventually pop. To slap a Dell label on a product engineered and fabricated in China is like linking to someone else’s content on a popular web site. Our religions, our ability to make a living and our “internet economy”, the trifecta, is overrun by the derivative thinking. We can no longer extract value from comments about the dried up wells and we can no longer destroy the remaining functioning artisan wells. We can no longer condemn people to the indignity of being replaced by the machines or the outsourced slaves. We can’t DJ, quote, link, mashup or re-aggregate our way from this crisis. You can quote me on that.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Google – The meaning of open. Worth reading closely.
I am jumping into the fray of the “free for all” debate. Seth Godin linked the most pertinent articles on Squidoo.
It seems that everyone takes the side and the virtual direction of his own shingle. Seth Godin in Malcolm is wrong speaks like a marketer, the internet allowed focused marketing (permission) campaigns and lubricated the display of a product, free samples and branding.
Fred Wilson speaks like a VC in Freemium and Freeconomics. As a banker Fred’s goal is to maximize the investment and while the cost of the delivery of the content is near zero, it would be most useful if the content itself is also zero. After all Google, Facebook and Twitter are not in the content creation business, they collate, sort, annotate and store what people give them for free. In Fred’s recent post about his vision for a newspaper he speaks more directly about the subject of the debate – Aggregate, Curate, Publish To Create Local Media:
“If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I’d go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them. I’d do a bit of original reporting on the big stories but most of what I’d do would be smart curation, with a voice, and an opinion.”
Notice that nowhere in the business plan is there even a concern about how the creators of the original content get paid. The idiots just post it on Flickr and YouTube so the “editors” can start curating… It’s all deposited for free and distributed almost for free so that the bankers can scale, kill the remaining competition and maximize the return on the investment in the aggregator. This is when the “freemium” thingy kicks in. After all competition is demolished, the writers will come and beg to be published for free. And the mighty curators will rescue the lowly content creators from the abyss of obscurity. The “editors” will set fees for the writers on par with the sneaker makers in Bangladesh to make sure the adverse conditions spur the creative juices. I mean who needs Christiane Amanpour when CNN does such a good job live narrating YouTube videos during the Iran revolution? That makeup the announcers use on air has to be the most expensive part of the report. Literally no skin in that game, somebody gets bloody and you just run it on CNN freely with the ads in-between.
There is a post by Mark Cuban – Free vs Freely Distributed. Amongst his numerous business achievements Mark is an investor in Television. So I wasn’t surprised when Mark essentially articulated a TV business model. The content is distributed for free but where and how the content is displayed and monetized is tightly controlled by the content creators. Again, this is your TV model, Mark Cuban writes:
“They should distribute their content for Free where they believe it maximizes return, but should do everything possible to keep it from being distributed Freely.”
And now the idea that has been circling in my head. Permission Marketing means that you need my permission to send me an email about a product. Why don’t you need my explicit permission to use my content? You can use my photos, my text, etc, but you have to ask and agree on the terms, even if it’s free.
Ban all “embeds” and “cut & pastes”. I mean it! Redefine the internet share culture. An example, suppose Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is using a Flickr photo to illustrate his post with a credit to the photographer, naturally. Next this photo will get indexed and tagged with Guy’s text. The photo will be archived in the Google image library with Guy’s URL and will bring traffic to his blog, but rarely anything back to the original photographer. This doesn’t seem right? If you let the bird out of the cage there has to be some compensation for the person who fed and raised that bird. I remember circa 1998? Jim Cramer couldn’t get over the fact that financial Reuters feeds that previously cost thousands of dollars on the Bloomberg Terminals suddenly became free on Yahoo! This is where the trouble started!
Solution as I said is straightforward – no republishing of content without the explicit permission from a creator. No “cut & paste” and no “embeds” (brief quotes to make a point are OK). If there is one thing we did learn from Twitter is that you don’t need to republish to share. Links are perfectly fine for sharing and links should be encouraged. But free “share alike” reposts (or the widespread outright content theft) without permission are at the root of this malice.
There is already a model in the newspaper industry, the traditional opinion syndication. You want to publish editorials by Charles Krauthammer, go to Washington Post and negotiated the weekly fee (I did just that when I run a news web site). The copyright law never caught up with the internet reality and the Creative Commons license is unresponsive to the changing reality. RSS culture created the impression that content is permanently detached from the source. The remedy is to to banish the “embed” mentality! The internet sharing culture must be tweaked and reconsidered to allow people to get paid for their creative efforts.
The entire interview is enlightening but few quotes are really illuminating: Beyond Life Inc: Talking with Douglas Rushkoff:
6. Home Sweet Home Depot
“From the 1920s to the 1970s an iconography was developed that turned corporations into our heroes [BA: note the rise of the corporate ethos mirrors the ideological era of fascism and communism]. Instead of me buying stuff from people I know, I actually trust the Quaker Oat Man more than you. This is the result of public relations campaigns, and the development of public relations as a profession.”
Did the rise of PR just happen, or did they have to do that in order to prevent things from getting out of control?
“They had to do that in order to prevent things from getting out of control. The significant points in the development of public relations were all at crisis moments. For example, labor movements; it’s not just that labor was revolting but that people were seeing that labor was revolting. There was a need to re-fashion the stories so that people would think that labor activists were bad scary people, so that people would think they should move to the suburbs and insulate themselves from these throngs of laborers, from “the masses.” Or to return to the Quaker Oats example, people used to look at long-distance-shipped factory products with distrust. Here’s a plain brown box, it’s being shipped from far away, why am I supposed to buy this instead of something from a person I’ve known all my life? A mass media is necessary to make you distrust your neighbor and transfer your trust to an abstract entity, the corporation, and believe it will usher in a better tomorrow and all that.
It got the most crafty after WWII when all the soldiers were coming home. FDR was in cahoots with the PR people. Traumatized vets were coming back from WWII, and everyone knew these guys were freaked out and fucked up. We had enough psychology and psychiatry by then to know that these guys were badly off, they knew how to use weapons, and — this was bad! If the vets came back into the same labor movement that they left before WWII, it would have been all over. So the idea was that we should provide houses for these guys, make them feel good, and we get the creation of Levittown and other carefully planned developments designed with psychologists and social scientists. Let’s put these vets in a house, let’s celebrate the nuclear family.”
So home becomes a thing, rather than a series of relationships?
“The definition of home as people use the word now means “my house,” rather than what it had been previously, which was “where I’m from.’” My home’s New York, what’s your home?”
Right, your town.
“Where are you from? Not that “structure.” But they had to redefine home, and they used a lot of government money to do it. They created houses in neighborhoods specifically designed to isolate people from one another, and prevent men in particular from congregating and organizing — there are no social halls, no beer halls in these developments. They wanted men to be busy with their front lawns, with three fruit trees in every garden, with home fix-it-up projects; for the women, the kitchen will be in the back where they can see the kids playing in the back yard.”
So you don’t see the neighbors going by. No front porch.
“Everything’s got to be individual, this was all planned! Any man that has a mortgage to pay is not going to be a revolutionary. With that amount to pay back, he’s got a stake in the system. True, he’s on the short end of the stick of the interest economy, but in 30 years he could own his own home.”
Didn’t I write it in Suburbia versus Urbanity or a Round Trip from New York to Newton, MA. There are people who live in Newton who got upset at that post. My guess it not only they dont know better but there are desensitized, unable to imagine the word differently from what the history cast at them.
Two prominent articles signal the coming rhetorical and perhaps practical wave. David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative opposition in London, writes in The Guardian – A new politics: We need a massive, radical redistribution of power:
“…reverse the collapse in personal responsibility that inevitably follows this leeching of control away from the individual and the community into the hands of political and bureaucratic elites. We can reverse our social atomisation by giving people the power to work collectively with their peers to solve common problems. We can reverse our society’s infantilisation by inviting people to look to themselves, their communities and wider society for answers, instead of just the state. Above all, we can encourage people to behave responsibly if they know that doing the right thing and taking responsibility will be recognised and will make a difference.
So I believe the central objective of the new politics we need should be a massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power: from the state to citizens; from the government to parliament; from Whitehall to communities; from the EU to Britain; from judges to the people; from bureaucracy to democracy. Through decentralisation, transparency and accountability we must take power from the elite and hand it to the man and woman in the street. Yes, as many Guardian commentators in their contributions to A New Politics have argued, that means reforming parliament. But it means much more besides. The reform that’s now required – this radical redistribution of power – must go through every public institution, not just parliament.”
Who is writing for Cameron? I mean “central objective” is “decentralization”- for real! But you get the drift. Kevin Kelly chimes in – Wired – The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online:
“I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there’s rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.
When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that socialism.”
These people are doing great disservice to their idea by calling this “socialism”, as they themselves pointed out, the very brand for the extreme centralized command and control. In truth, as Douglas Rushkoff argued, these ideas predate Renaissance. See the first volley for his upcoming book:
http://www.vimeo.com/4655092
I have an untainted name for the new movement. Let’s brand this Suprematism. The name was invented by Kasimir Malevich for his art, to my knowledge has not etymological meaning and even contains a subliminal reference to the Dark Ages. Malevich said: “I felt only night within me and it was then that I conceived the new art, which I called Suprematism.”
Clay Shirky introduces the term “cognitive surplus” in his remarkable talk at the Web 2.0 conference last year in New York. He claims gin (alcohol) was the coping mechanism to sooth the pain of urbanization and dislocations of the industrial revolution. He then jumps to the era of sitcoms to manage the “cognitive surplus” of time in the 50s and describes new participatory paradigm. One of the best 15 min lectures ever.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.
(via gapingvoid: Dreck Intolerance) Shirky’s own recap: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.
What is the central creed inherited from Judaism by Christianity and Islam? It is not the characters but the reverence to the text, the idea that the world is inanimate, cold hardware and it needs a software code, an operating system, a book to boot.
Our computer driven culture lends some poignant metaphors. Yes indeed Judaism is Microsoft Windows. Just like MSFT it is a Closed Source legacy code. The code is in the hands of a few skilled system engineers, they claim that without the maintenance the world would just reverse to a useless desktop. Few wickedly fast geeks are charged with the kernel, they issue patches regularly, preventing the enormous code from crashing under its own weight, but they never introduce a new functionality. If you used a Windows computer you know that the OS is stale, yet monthly there is another “malicious removal” patch.
So how did Judaic code retained some of it’s vitally? It’s the hacks! Judaism itself, like the original DOS, was a hack at some point. The genius of poetic codifiers is unstoppable, ecstatic visions lurk under the surface, despite the grip of the corner office. A few examples of the famous Judaic hacks now packaged together with the OS are Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Kaballah, Hasidism, etc. And how did the contraband showed up at a bible class near you?
It’s the marketing stupid! Imagine some raving genius who seats in a tiny cubicle, inside a gray suburban office park. Overwhelmed and inspired, he writes an erotic poem a thousands years ahead of its time, he calls it Song of Songs. Like Sufi poets he can’t tell a difference between a woman and a god. His manager discovers the code, speculates that there might be some potential and forwards the file to marketing. The marketers are now faced with a daunting task of mainstreaming the outrageous sexual content. They follow a simple formula; naturally the text is not what it appears to be. They invent attribution and why not the King of Kings himself, His Highness Solomon the Great. Who can say no to King Solomon? Barabum-barabam, next thing you know it ships with the spanking new shrink wrapped OS and a perfect G rating.
And then another broodingly mad and prophetically depressed genius hacker writes Ecclesiastes and the marketing folks already rubbing their hands, they know how to do it, it’s a formula! And Kaballah was of course not a hack by some Spanish dude but was written in a cave by Rabbi Bar Yohay. Perhaps Moses de Leon himself realized that the heroic creative eruption channeled though his poetic imagination had a better chance without an attribution (as Leon de Modena, the original Venetian “blogger”, did later with his shocking and unauthorized “Voice of a Fool”, he said “somebody brought the manuscript from Spain to Italy”).
The repackaging is an important part of the mainstreaming and marketing. The original author is concealed, what he said wasn’t really what he said but what a “rashi” said he or she said. After the OS is out of the hands of the slimy marketers, the most difficult part is maintenance of the darn colossal hodgepodge. A mounting geek comes along whose task it is to make sure that all the lines of code don’t truncate but hobble along and share that drive more or less nicely. Once in while even this genius gives up and calls back the slimy marketers, who promptly create another story…
Not every hack gets uploaded to the approved plugin directory. Christianity was a Judaic hack, Islam was a Judaic hack, Shabbatians were classic hackers. But long after a hack gets rejected, the lines of the code still circulate freely if clandestinely, pulsating and breathing under the surface of every perfectly kosher motherboard. And often it is even above the surface like the division of the Torah portions introduced by a monk.
To be sure there are inspirational instances of the Closed Source, i.e. Apple. Apple controls software and hardware, complete total control of the platform and user experience. But Apple is a one giant poetic hack, an artistic expression by one man who is still conducting his symphony. Yet even Apple recognizes the inevitable need to revitalize and connect its brand to the Open Source, witness iPhone apps, etc.
Abstract textual manipulation is the most persistent Jewish talent and it is this very skill that remains curtailed and prosecuted. Many assume that Judaic ambivalence about visual arts was the obstacle to creativity when in fact it was the aversion to the Open Source, to the collaborative power of poetic imagination. This remains Judaism’s most toxic legacy. The “authoritarian” culture spread like a virus thought-out the world where fundamentalism is now a “code” word for a proprietary scripture.
I have wasted thousands of dollars to understand this and now I will share it with you for free. For 99.7% of webs sites, including sleek corporate web sites, there are tools available for creating professional looking pages and blogs with all interactivity you can eat that are free or virtually free. These tools are scattered and require some trial and error to set up. The tools require no programming or very basic technical skill to manipulate, safe to say that an average person who knows how to use a computer can manage the task.
The problem is that it takes time to find and select proper tools for your site. In comes a “web designer” who is a broker between the tools that are available mostly for free and your need for a web identity. No offense to my web designers friends out there, hey who am I to speak bad about pimping? To be sure I will be offending not only the web designers but perhaps our entire “service economy” whose dubious motto is to take a product that was created for free by some Opens Source geeks or virtually free by a slave labor and then re-package, re-market, re-manipulate and re-sell it to you.
Gone are the days when a web page was just a static image, sort of an uploaded PDF. Today web sites are interactive, they are living organisms that allow people to communicate, search and feel, as a marketing jargon they are often referred to as web 2.0. There are three components to a modern web site:
- Database bottom layer that stores and serves all the data, i.e. MySQL, etc.
- Middle layer is a scripting language that communicates between the database and the top graphics layer. This is the most substantively important engine that differentiates between web sites. It is sometimes referred to as CMS content management system). Most CMSs use PHP (Word Press or Drupal, etc.), some legacy code is written in Perl (Movable Type); there are sites that use Java, etc. This middle layer is a language that translates between the database and the graphics layer that you actually see on a page.
- Top graphics layer is a skin, it can be changed with a switch of button and identical web sites could look drastically different. Changing this layer is like putting on a different coat. It literally uses “hooks” to speak to the database using the scripting language of the middle layer. This layer is a template, styled or “themed” with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This is where a graphic designer comes in. They can draw a page in a Photoshop and use free tools to translate a Photoshop page into CSS. Like a same coat that you can put on different people, same template or a theme could be used on different web sites.
Now that we touched upon the three layers of a web page you will understand that there a very different sets of skills required for each of the layers, so when you meet a “web designer” try to figure out who are you talking to:
- A geek who is only interested in playing around with databases and scripts and who couldn’t care less how your site looks. Trust me, he will f. you up in the end and the site will end up looking like s.
- A graphic designer who knows a lot a about Photoshop but little about the living brain of any web site (the database layer) or the language that the web site speaks (the middle scripting layer).
- Or most likely you are talking to a marketer or a broker. He tells you things he/she thinks you want to hear and generally intentionally makes simple things sound more complicated, taking advantage of you intimidation with things technical (an example of this is the entire SEO industry, a pseudo science that takes a rather basic subject and turns it into a mystery).
I know I am simplifying things and I mean no offense to the hard working professionals who are trying to make a honorable living in the field but I hope this is helpful to people who want a web site or even the designers themselves, especially today when many are using the lull in the economy to rethink their web identity.
