thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

As many readers know there has been a internet blackout on a number of very large websites like wikipedia and WordPress.com and .org on 18th of Jan.

As Clay Shirky sees it – SOPA & PIPA are designed to “raise the cost of copyright compliance” for amateurs by changing the burden of proof so that pretty much all content not owned by “Big Media” is blocked.

The method – use the domain name system to block access – even though technically this is unlikely to work at all. Unfortunately there are other issues better explained elsewhere where the sides-effects and consequences will cause much confusion and collateral damage.

We are used to producing as well as consuming and digital technology allows us to do this when we share content that we originate, that we find and sometime what we change on the way through. (Creative commons licensing is an intelligent attempt to manage content rights.)

My summary – whatever the merits of copyright protection (and clearly that system is very broken) SOPA is not the way to fix it.

Also once a piece of legislation like this is passed it becomes much easier to foist it on smaller countries like NZ especially with the present government (via ACTA).  Remember the debate over the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011. Sadly many of the politicians in NZ had no real clues at the time but these issues need much smarter thinking as they are part of a much wider agenda.

John C. Dvorak on SOPA: Don’t Get Suckered by What Comes Next
John says SOPA is a sideshow for another bill

“This is so that the real bill, Senate S.968. The Patrick Leahy “Protect IP Act of 2011? will pass — while all the nuts argue about and then celebrate victory over SOPA.

The House will quickly agree and rubber-stamp the Senate bill which, according to those fighting these bills, is about 96 percent as terrible.

This is a disaster waiting to happen.

Nobody is focusing attention on this parallel bill. Watch this scam get executed like clockwork.”

One of the most fascinating chapters in Daniel Levitin’s book “This is Your Brain on Music” is about how musical tastes are often set early in life and become quite hard to change later on.

It has been a while since I read the book but Levitin goes into much more detail on why we like what we like. The question I was looking to answer though was “Is there a Way to flip people back into music Explorer mode?

It turns out that short answer is “no- not really”. The music that we like is very much connected to our own culture and identity and often from a particular time like our teenage years. I’m over simplifying here but we develop our own schemas which are like a musical map or filter that becomes part of our music processing brain.

Levitin also has this idea that we might be able to tune our music systems like tuning to a new radio station. In real life though many people go with what they are comfortable with and this extends to our expectations about new music from our favourite bands.

I’d say that Elvis Costello fans will be on the high adventure end of the scale since Elvis is clearly an explorer and new styles, sounds, ideas and reinvention is part of his brief.

OTH many bands almost get trapped into a particular “sound signature” where new songs often reference their earlier work. The art is to make new music but take your listeners with you on that journey.

I was struck by this when local faves ELEMNO P released a new song “Slow Down” which sounds very much like an old song (not a bad thing at all), much more like their 1st and second albums than their 3rd album. Listen for yourself as you can download it for a tweet from http://weareelemenop.tumblr.com/ But I digress

In the same chapter about musical likes Daniel muses about the possibility of an

“adventuresomeness knob …that will control the mix of old and new etc.”

In this time of sharing and socialising our likes and activities it is no surprise that Spotify is launching in NZ soonish. Spotify socialises the sharing of musical playlists with your friends. It is very closely tied to facebook as there are some common shareholders.

For more background read – Spotify’s Daniel Ek: The Most Important Man In Music – Forbes

For a alternative service check out LetsListen and their site is http://letslisten.com/

However I tend to think that most people know someone in their extended group who is a tastemaker of sorts and for those who like to explore new music there are many that are very well established now.

The Hype Machine is one of the better ones and as the PBS video below shows there are many other great “tastemaker” sites out there. Maybe this is the real “adventuresome” music button?

Off Book: The Evolution of Music Online from PBS Arts on Vimeo.

As in many countries, New Zealand has had several prime city locations occupied in recent weeks as part of the Occupy Wall St OWS movement.

OWS is an ongoing movement which aims to reset the economic agendas and local debates about equality of citizens and to try and re-balance some of the competing corporate and government agendas towards more balanced outcomes.

As in many protest movements there are other opportunists who seek to tilt the activities in a certain way but on the whole OWS is a consciousness raising exercise that everyone (especially corporates and government) would do well to take note of.

Like many I have been intrigued as to what this is all about in the local context and what (if any) connections there are to the Arab Spring protests and other consciousness raising movements around the world.

In my view there are definite connections between these movements and the rise of the NGO sector globally. Since the anti-globalisation protests in 1999 at the Seattle WTO conference there has been growing disquiet at the very far reaching implications of economic and political change around the world being driven by small elites at the expence of local and humanitarian interests.

The Canadian documentary The Corporation from 2003 captures some of the debate from many perspectives. Apparently there were 33 hours of video made and so the main documentary is a relative snapshot of expert views.

I was most impressed by CEO  Ray Anderson (from the Interface carpet & fabric company) who had his own wake up call towards developing his company along more sustainable lines. Ray mentioned an author called Paul Hawken and an earlier book by Paul called The Ecology of Commerce. Even more interesting to me is a more recent book by Hawken called

“Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming published by Viking Press (New York) in May 2007, argues that a vast world-changing “movement with no name” is now forming, which Hawken believes will prevail. He conceives of this “movement” as developing not by ideology but rather through the identification of what is and is not humane, like an immune system. ”

I haven’t been able to get a copy of the book to read yet but the hypothesis sounds very plausible and it does fit in what we see around us in the politics and economic debates of many nations.

Last year I saw the documentary Inside Job which among many arguments makes the depressing point that President Obama has not fixed any of the broken financial systems and structures in the U.S. In fact he has re-appointed the very people responsible for causing many of the financial meltdowns back into new roles where they can continue abusing the trust of voters despite having blood on their hands.

And so we know for sure now that US politics is completely corrupt and broken to the point that a reforming president elect has been so completely dominated by the commercial interests he said he wanted to fix.

The other key point in the that documentary was an observation that many of the high profile economists and academics had their viewpoints deeply compromised by their own commercial conflicts. That is – they were part of the problem where financial sector lobbyists have / had around 5 lobbyists for every single congress person. Never mind the lobbyists for other sectors.

How and Where does this Affect Us?

New Zealand like many other countries is being pressured by huge corporate interests mostly from the US to accept commercially driven laws designed to protect globalisation and to undermine local sovereignty.

One example of this is that the debate over Pharmac and US TPP negotiations or should that be stand-over tactics.

Back in May this year the PM said of TPP and Pharmac

“Let’s wait and see – there are a lot of component parts here. We’re talking about access, through a free trade agreement, to arguably the largest economy in the world. That’s the prize if you can complete a US FTA, which is what TPP is,” he said.

More obviously though when the US sneezes we still tend to catch the cold. The US despite its downward spiral still dominates world trade thinking and any changes to such rules impacts greatly on smaller nations like New Zealand.

I’m with Kennedy Graham of the Greens on this issue.

“Graham said the Greens rejected the assertion a free trade deal was a massive prize for New Zealand, saying the massive prize would be the predation of New Zealand’s iconic agencies by American corporations.

If the US walked away from the negotiations because Pharmac was taken off the table “so be it”, he said.”

While looking for the Paul Hawken book  mentioned above I found and bought a copy of The Price of Civilization, Economics and Ethics after the Fall by Jeffrey Sachs. That is my holdiday reading. More on that next post when I finish it for now here is a video clip from him.

As Jeffrey says “The US is in a structural crisis”…