whybother.org

In the interest of full disclosure, we thought we ought to say something upfront about whybother.org principles and practices, especially for those many, but not all, first-time visitors who seem so genuinely distressed by the "rude," "unrealistic," and fundamentally "non-commercial" browser and download requirements of our site, not to mention the come and go glitches as we constantly change the thing, or the pervasive anti-information, rambling prose style that almost invariably "buries the lead."

Admittedly, we’re tempted just to say, "Hey! Wake up, folks. What did you expect when you typed ‘whybother.org’ in your browser’s address bar?" It’s not exactly a promising name if you’re looking for just another generic, corporate MacInternet site, over 10 billion fleeced and served. But then, who admits to be looking for that? That, nevertheless, it’s come to be the near universal expectation of Internet users today, shaped by the forces that have dominated and commercialized Web, is very much a factor in our "bad attitude." Why do so many otherwise reasonable people seem to throw tantrums when those expectations, surely not consciously their own, are even the least frustrated? Isn’t it bad enough that your word processor knows how to spell MacDonald’s but not Gramsci?"

If you’re not tempted to follow the cryptic Gramsci link, or know well enough who Gramsci was, consider instead that the "vision" — a suspect word if ever there were one — driving this site, affecting both its anti-corporate media stance and aggressive technology usage, is in some sense "cyberpunk." Or at least it’s closely related to that long line of Sci-Fi literature and film to which belong the stories and novels of Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, and the string of hit Sci-Fi Noir films with which everyone is familiar, from "Blade Runner" to "The Matrix."

Cyberpunk means a great many things to a great many people, and there’s been a lot of discussion over the years about what it really means. But it’s the common ground that concerns us here. Cyberpunk distinguishes itself from other science fiction by offering a clear, compelling vision of a future in which high-tech corporations rule the earth, using the information and bio technologies they create to generate enormous wealth and privilege for their owners, managers, and the relatively small class of the most essential "knowledge workers," be they human or machine or a bit of both; and using the very same technologies to dazzle, distract, and dominate the rest of humanity, relegated to living in relatively or absolutely lo-tech, impoverished ghettos. In other words, the cyberpunk vision of the future is pretty much a dark representation of the world as it is today, dressed up with a few more menacing toys.

Consider that, for nearly half a century, the average American has been going to work or school and coming home to consume the the rest of his or her waking hours watching TV, averaging over six hours a day. Now, increasing numbers spend those hours and more, at home and at work, plugged in to the commercialized Internet, in many cases via the same AOL/Time Warner cable that delivers their TV feed. There, online, most are herded through portals and search engines owned, controlled or dominated by pretty much the same corporate-financial-entertainment entities providing much of the Web’s most "popular" content, as well as almost all TV entertainment and news, in short, nearly everything America and increasingly the entire globe sees and hears. And if, for a "change," we decide to "go out for the evening," it’s typically to consume more mass media entertainment, movies or rock concerts, produced, owned, distributed, and controlled by the same corporate financial networks from whose TV and Internet fare we’re supposedly taking a break.

Cyberpunk is not simply science fiction. From a certain, very real point of view, we Americans, at least, already pretty much live and die plugged into the illusory reality of The Matrix, our labor energy crudely harvested to drive the system that keeps us asleep in the comfortable belief that it’s not really happening or is simply inevitable, natural, the way of the world, and perhaps relatively worth it. Not surprisingly, the same apparatus for which we work away our lives vainly trying to "improve ourselves" and "our position" in the face of inescapable human mortality, daily inundates us with happy-face consumer images. Everywhere media figures intimate or outright declare "unhappiness," "negativity," "stress" — all things you get if you "think too much" — to be serious long-term physical health risks. As if the saying "In the long run, we’ll all be dead" only applied to dissenters and doubters.

What is to be done? If the real Matrix is indeed already everywhere, where’s the escape, where’s the "outside"?

One possible answer is an updated version of the 17th century Luddite response to the dawn of machine production: turn it off, drop out, smash it, avoid all technological participation, and hide yourself, your life, and all your activities and thoughts as far away from the Net and general media as possible. But the impediments to this response are at least as many today as in the 17th century. And the central impediment is, still, that it’s impossible to achieve purity: Luddism is always some degree of compromise with technology and the culture it propagates.

Few of today’s many neo-Luddites pretend to be purists. The largest, most significant group includes, according the recent estimates, nearly half the American public, who believe they can "take it or leave it"; that is, use the Net without getting caught in it or by it, provided they stick, with grim determination, to antiquated machines and software, and religiously avoid downloading or installing anything new.

But if Bill Gates is the Great Satan in the neo-Luddite cosmogony, theirs is a peculiar kind of "half-way covenant" with the Devil, since there’s almost no escaping some generation of Microsoft software. Among neo-Luddite PC Windows users, surely by definition in league with the Devil from the get-go, this half-way covenant gives rise to perhaps the most curious of contemporary retrograde delusions: "Windows 98 is safer than Windows 2000, Windows95 even better than that, and Windows 3.1 was wonderful. If only we weren’t forced to do without DOS….."

Take it from someone who’s been around that long: any notion that DOS, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, at least, weren’t every bit as buggy and awful as Macheads said they were at the time is simply ludicrous. The only thing buggier than new Microsoft software is old Microsoft software. Better a real Luddite purist, retiring completely to paper and pencil, than this sort who defend their imaginary distance, immunity, and indifference to the Evil of the Net on a moving treadmill of inevitable technological purchases, gifts, and even finds on the scrap heap.

There is simply no such thing as sticking to old technology. "Old technology" is a purely relative term. And the pace of development is such that what counts as little more than a desk anchor today was a server node driving the Net only five years ago. Come the day after tomorrow, the antiquated safeguards of the half-way covenant crowd will be more powerful and capable than anything on the market today.

It’s not that cyberpunk science fiction doesn’t occasionally dream of a Luddite "Return to the Garden of Eden" solution, but that its basic vision of the future precludes this possibility. There is nowhere to hide; or, more complicated, "hiding" depends on using rather than refusing technology. And it is here that the general cyberpunk vision gets interesting, because "hiding" as a form of resistance becomes more than a matter of disguising yourself in the conventional sense of a fake identity. The act of "hiding" becomes a political and cultural agenda. Of necessity, "hiding" becomes an effort, individual and collective, to reopen a noisy and confusing public "free zone" within which it might again be possible to stand without concealment, because the cost/benefit ratio of tracking so many individuals in the chaos is too great even for the technological powers that be.

This effort is necessarily a continuous one, for the same reason that the neo-Luddite half-way covenant is delusory: the technological capabilities available to "the system" continue to increase, exponentially, through time. The effort to endlessly recreate a public "free zone" may seem daunting in this light, but no more so than the individual and collective effort always required, since the beginning of human history, to gain or regain any other basic human right or freedom. Only the toys have changed; the essential game of domination, submission or resistance remains the same.

So whybother.org? Why the heavy download requirements? Why the pervasive and almost exclusive use of "Evil Empire" technologies? Why not a "more democratic" site accessible to old browsers and older machines?

In the game, as we are forced to play it today, there are no easy choices, and many strategies have at least plausible validity. Particularly respectable is the vast, varied Linux/Apache/Mozilla/Open Source movement, although that movement, at the moment, is largely crippled by the media-fanned belief that Microsoft is "The Great Satan," the exclusive source of evil in the digital world. Related and equally crippling are various rationalizations of convenience that disparage web-based multimedia in favor of almost pure textual information delivery, at root because the work to develop truly fast, capable multimedia subsystems, drivers, graphical interfaces, etc. is very difficult and never done. The two, combined, tend to bubble up a truly weird ideological brew of elitist neo-Luddites, who look down on Windows and MAC slaves, while proving their anarchistic independence from the digital corporate world by plugging their archaic Linux boxes into AOL/TimeWarner cable feed. In other words, their radicalism extends only as far that special wall of their homebuilt cubicles, the one the mega-media giant’s cable comes in.

In contrast, our whybother assumption is there is no purity to be had in the digital world. We, the people, will forever be cobbling together hardware, software and networking capabilities in the wake of a corporate created and dominated cutting edge. And Microsoft’s leavings, the debris it scatters far and wide in its drive toward world domination, including, very importantly, its unmatched level of online developer documentation and resource kits, are as good if not better pickings as any other. Never mind that it doesn’t do what it claims to do. It’s simply good gomi for digital dumpster divers, almost as good as it gets.

And the fact is we’ve all paid for it already. Microsoft R & D and its worlds within worlds of "freely" available online materials are not driven by venture and IPO capitalization but by money we’ve spent over the years on operating and office systems. Where’s the virtue in not using it all to other ends than picking up the pace of "productivity growth," a.k.a., firing people no longer needed to produce a profit at a given sales volume? And why not use the "free stuff" before we’re charged for it, again, in the next new computer or software upgrade we purchase? Why wait? All it takes is a bit of downloading, and a bit of machine maintenance…. Dive right in.

As Hamlet says, "Ay, there’s the rub." Both the Open Source movement and the whybother Imperial-parasite approach, which seem so antithetical, actually share a common cyberpunk premise, which in the end is much more important than any difference. Users must be active users.

More specifically, the line between users and developers must be blurred, again in the future as it was once upon a time during the Internet’s early years. Independent users, like independent developers, must be aggressive deployers of whatever technology is freely or cheaply available. If not, if the general user population remains what it has become through the commercial hype of the Net as a finished thing, a ready-for-use "information superhighway" or, worse, "supermall", if users remain in their allotted role of passive consumers of point-and-click digital "experiences," then there is no hope the Net will ever rise to be anything other than yet another media of mass population pacification and control. The Net will remain The Matrix, the means by which the mass media of the early twentieth century are ever more accurately and effectively targeted, refined, and falsely "individualized" in the twenty-first century.

The difference between an active and a passive user is the difference between being a user and simply being used, fodder for the global high-tech, mass media-whipped production-consumption machine that’s literally eating our planet alive. In the technology game we’re all forced to play today, there is not much middle ground.

That, and nothing more, is our "Bad Attitude."

Thanks for embracing our aggressive technology requirements at least this far. Keep going. Learn to maintain your machine, with and without spending more money. Help others to do the same. And above all take the time to search out other sites like this one, outside the corporate media mainstream, that will enable you to exploit further and in other ways the truly marvelous potential of the powerful machine, however old, that is even now at your finger tips.

A CPU is a terrible thing to waste….

A few years ago, back in ancient times when the Internet was still talked about in excited tones as "The New Media" soon to render all others obsolete, Disney CEO Michael Eisner was interviewed about Disney’s prospects in a "Max Headroom" kind of future in which the technology to produce and distribute quality film and TV is both universally available and universally affordable. Eisner’s confident answer, which cut to the heart of the entire entertainment industry, not just film and TV, was that Disney’s business was not creating media products–films, television shows, music, magazines–but "killer copyrights."

No matter how easy it becomes to produce entertainment, no matter how inexpensive it becomes to make that entertainment product accessible world wide, audiences still have to care, still have to want to watch, listen, read, and, before that, to believe an entertainment product worth their time and imaginative investment. The Disney brand will still count. In short, Eisner expressed confidence that Disney could never be fundamentally threatened by the technological revolution, because its business, the business of the entertainment industry as a whole, turns upon people, not things. The industry’s bottomline is making, sustaining, cultivating vast audiences from which enormous profits periodically may be reaped–not with every film, every broadcast, every CD release–when some among the many copyrights it acquires turn out to be or can be turned "killer."

Today, the broadband cable and DSL rollout well underway and Hollywood-style 3D special effects demonstrably possible on no more than PCs (see Bruce Branit and Jeremy Hunt’s "405"), there is still a great deal of undeniable truth in Eisner’s view of the business of the entertainment industry. It’s still audience that matters. It is not the product, not the raw "information," but making the product, the information a part of the public’s imagination, making "information" circulate in public discourse that still counts. But today, Eisner’s faith in the profit basis of the "killer copyright" sounds hopelessly naive.

Technology has killed the "killer copyright."

In technologically sophisticated markets around the world, music CD sales have plummeted, as kids raised on computers turn to Napster and its more untraceable successors to stock their music libraries. At the Blockbuster Music outlet in Pacific Beach, California, sales staff report that almost no one is buying anything, "except one guy from mp3.com who came in and bought a thousand." At a recent sale of bulk blank audioCDs at the San Diego Fry’s Electronics, crowds of customers created a pushing and shoving disturbance that almost broke into a fist fight when sales personnel, reduced to playing stock boy, couldn’t rip boxes open fast enough to satisfy all the hands grasping in empty air. How long will it be before this scene is repeated for DVDs? Whatever can and will be done legally and technically to forestall the event, its inevitability cannot be doubted. No law can stop mass, spontaneous law-breaking, especially in a digitally interconnected world of crumbling national boundaries; and no technology cannot be broken and undone by future technology.

The "killer copyright" has lost its teeth. While a great deal of selecting, marketing and publicity expertise and expense is still required to make any entertainment product a part of the public imagination–to make and sustain the audience that alone can give it value–profits beyond initial release sales are well on their way to global extinction. No back catalogue. It’s not just Napster and the Internet: the phenomenon reaches globally, beyond affordable Internet access. In the open-air markets of Moscow, anyone can buy everything ever released or bootlegged live from Led Zeppelin on one mp3CD for three dollars. The same markets, which exist throughout the world, offer the latest by the newest recording artists whose collected works are still a drop in the digital bucket, each CD filled out to full megabyte capacity with music video, selections from related bands, and playing, ripping, decoding, editing, recording and mastering software to further "the revolution." The "back" in "back catalogue" moves rapidly to embrace the present as potential customers have fewer and fewer incentives to purchase any media product in the first place.

What the entertainment industry is confronting in the death of the "killer copyright" is simply the larger fate of "information," that much used and little examined term, in this so called "Age of Information." Information is not and cannot be the key to a "new digital economy," because, as I have written in "Outlaw Programming," information has no intrinsic value and, worse, its market value rapidly and inexorably approaches zero as technology reduces the cost of finding, accessing, duplicating, and storing it. The only hope for the continuance of an entertainment industry in the "Age of Information" is to abandon it: to abandon the whole flawed, unexamined paradigm of information and sell what technology can indeed create and facilitate but not duplicate–Experience, Performance, Event–all those phenomena that flow with the passing of time and which cannot be "had" except by participating, by "being there," physically or virtually.

In practical terms, this means that the entertainment industry has a huge stake in reviving the once-upon-a-time promise of Internet as "The New Media." But this means, specifically, rescuing Internet and the very concept of a "web site" from the data-based, information-bound thing it has become under the onslaught of the last few years of hastily conceived and hastily executed mega-million, get-rich-quick, IPO Ponzi schemes, nearly all of which turn upon making mere "information" more and more available "on demand," and few of which are actually turning a profit or are ever likely to. For Internet to serve entertainment industry profits, the Internet must be made not a conduit for information but a place for entertainment: a place audiences want to be, must be, and are willing to pay to be because if they are not there, they will miss something, not information, because information can always be had "on demand," but the experience of an event like no other. The "web site" must be reconceived and re-engineered as an environment where ever-passing events transpire, where things happen, expected and unexpected, but, above all, once and for all, never to be repeated.

Such "New Media" web sites, grounded in performance and event rather than information, offer the only opportunity to stem the global tide of consumer-level piracy that will otherwise sweep away the information value of all entertainment products. Legitimate digital entertainment, whether sold online or on physical media, must be transformed into tickets to participate in the flowing world of events these new sites can and must offer. This is necessary if for no other reason than that gatekeeping technology has a chance where copy-protection technology has none. It’s not that gatekeeping technology can advance faster than copy-protection technology; hacker assaults will continue apace with each. But gatekeeping technology has a chance of working because the "theft" of "crashing" must always occur where it can quickly and easily be detected, right under one’s digital nose, rather than far, far away, any time, anywhere and everywhere in the world. And the consequences of gatekeeping failure are limited to few individuals’ illegitimate participation now and then, not the permanent loss of a product’s profitability. The door can be closed on the next thief trying to get in, but not on the horse that’s out of the barn.

What myriad forms these New Media, event-based sites, or more likely whole event-based networks, can and must assume remains a creative and engineering challenge. But the predominance of Event over Information makes at least two requirements clear, at least for the entertainment industry. Traditional "insider" or "sneak preview" offerings of any kind fail to qualify as true events. They are pseudo-events, merely marking the arrival of information on the scene and the beginning of its market value decline to zero. Pseudo-events of this kind will no doubt be "in the mix," but they cannot drive an adequate "New Media" site. The driving content must be "live" and non-repeatable, or at least statistically unlikely to be repeated for any visitor if served out of an existing content stock.

The second clear requirement follows from the first. Although "artists" must be required to "perform" on the sites that are saving their sales as never before, no one or group of star performers or stand-in hosts will be able to do enough to sustain the flow of non-repeatable events necessary to make an experience that cannot be missed. The audience must be made to perform for itself. Beyond the crude "interactivity" of forum discussion threads, this means the entertainment industry has to discover ways to retain control while surrendering control of the multimedia spotlight, of its network, of the very product image, to unpredictable fans, some talented, some not, who will emerge time and again, suddenly and randomly from the ticketed audience…with the technology already at their disposal to put on quite a show of their own. This challenge of making an increasingly sophisticated audience perform for itself, without losing overall control (or profit) is not, at root, technological. The technology will take care of itself. Rather this challenge requires re-conceiving the very nature and dynamic relationship of performer and audience in mass media entertainment, and it is no doubt the greatest task that lies ahead.

The large marketing and cultural problem is that the entertainment industry, the music industry in particular, has done little to prepare for this moment, having spent the last twenty years, at least, systematically reducing any potential community of artistic or other interest between performers and audiences to a cold cash connection in which the ever-flattered, anxious whims of the "individual consumer" (read, "prepubescent" and "adolescent") are all passes for principle. Perhaps the truest sign of these times and undoubtedly one of the most uproariously funny was the spectacle of Metalica’s drummer testifying before, of all people, ultra-conservative Senator Orin Hatch during the recent Napster/MP3 hearings. To hear Metalica whine about theft and disrespect of their "intellectual property" is just too much, considering the entirely derivative (read, "stolen") nature of their sound and their long lyrical career of stirring up and catering to adolescent contempt for everything and anything other than the most screamingly selfish urges. It’s just shocking that their global fans are stampeding to rob them blind.

Most current industry attempts to meet the challenge head on in non-legal fashion are similarly uncomprehending. Typical is a Sonymusic funded project, Uville.com. Though rightly pursing interactivity, the site, in concept and in detail, still deliberately panders to the same adolescent self-first anxieties that have been the stock and trade of such bands as Metalica: "Uville is music your way. Designed to adapt to your unique music preferences and lifestyles." The whole industry, it seems, just can’t get it. Faced with catastrophe, the sales pitch is still stuck in the same old groove, as old as the vinyl metaphor itself. So long as the industry continues to seek profits in promoting a kid culture of U-U-U, Me-Me-Me, the answer to the question "How do U want your music?" can never be other than "Napster! And FREE, FREE, FREE!"