whybother.org

The most recent attempts to measure the Web’s dimensions (May 2000) have produced not so much interesting results as a new wave of metaphors to “naturalize” the predictable effects of mass media advertising, specifically the last two seasons of site-pumping TV ad campaigns.

Of course, the number of web sites continues to grow exponentially. So does the number of “pages,” although with so much custom and even ordinary HTML output now created on-the-fly by n-tier database systems, the concept of “pages” is outmoded and “total pages” is a purely speculative measure. Search engines don’t even index this massive on-the-fly content, and they don’t yet read XML. But even omitting this kind of content, the Web is booming. No surprise to anyone.

Neither should it surprise anyone that present growth in web traffic is increasingly confined to fewer and fewer sites. That’s what advertising and PR are supposed to accomplish. And the professionals who are very well paid to do it know their business. They’ve known it since the birth of mass media marketing in the early decades of the last century, when the science or art — whatever it is — was still called by its proper and more descriptive name, propaganda.

That early twentieth-century discovery is elegantly simple: If you have the right media tools and a sufficiently fragmented, disoriented population, fearful, anxious and confused by modern life, you can discover, by hook or by crook, effective techniques of propagating an idea, a symbol, an icon, a value, whatever, such that it enters mass culture and takes on a life of its own, reverberating in the vast emptiness of the popular psyche, its presence growing, amplifying beyond anything in your power to communicate directly. How many of us can still hum and sing the jingles of our childhood? “It’s Ellis Brooks, today, for your Chevrolet, corner of Christian Bush and Van Ness….” That one cut so deep in the San Francisco Bay Area, that, last time I looked, Ellis Brooks sprawled for blocks, and if it weren’t for the original sign still hanging, you’d be hard pressed to find the Chevy showroom among all the Ellis Brooks imports.

Propaganda works. No surprise, especially since it contributes to the further growth of the underlying conditions upon which it depends: cultural fragmentation, disorientation, fear, anxiety, confusion. I’ve never bought a Chevy — never would, never will — but that junk is still rattling around in my brain as if it were important, essential to my life experience; as if it were a treasured piece of accumulated wisdom I would wish to pass down to future generations.

No surprise. So why all the buzzing excitement over the recent web surveys and academic and think-tank analyses that only rehearse what we all know so well, that with mass media ad campaigns a few sites can dominate an exponentially growing field of competitors? In part, the excitement, no doubt, stems from relief. Thank God, it still works! Thank God, the principles remain fundamentally unchanged despite this new medium’s relatively low barriers to entry. The alternative — everyone can enter, and there’s no way to achieve dominance — is just too scary, too populist, too… well… democratic.

To understand the role played by relief in the excitement, you have to take note that the major marketing executives and strategists dedicated to pulling off this stunt of rendering most of the Web effectively invisible to inexperienced users have worked most of their lives in a media economy of scarcity. They have worked and planned around technological and legislative limits on the number of media outlets: there have always been relatively few radio stations, even fewer TV broadcast licenses, and only a handful of networks controlling them all. You need a knowledge of history, to go back to Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler’s early experiences with leaflet and other print materials, to have confidence that well-designed propaganda’s effectiveness does not utterly depend upon having a media monopoly — not that Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler each didn’t know how to use a media monopoly when they finally got one. The glee of relief can only come to those who have no sense of history; to those who forget the past; to those who, for obvious reasons, probably cannot acknowledge even to themselves the path-breaking experience and truly creative genius — call it “evil genius” if it makes you feel better — of the founding, grandmasters of their discipline.

“Naturally,” the new wave of academic metaphors to conceptualize the Web phenomenon also serves to conceal the obvious, that the shape of the Web we now see results from very particular and deliberate human planning and effort. “The more pages a site has, the more likely it is that more pages will be added to it,” one of these academics says, “It’s just like the growth of a tree.” Neither of the studies being cited around the Web, (e.g., MSNBC’s “Measuring the Web’s Diameter”), takes the least note of the phenomenal boom in dot.com advertising on radio, TV, billboards, magazines, newspapers, books, etc. It’s as if Notre Dame physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and his colleagues, Reka Albert and Hawoong Jeong, authors of one of the cited studies, and Bernardo Huberman and Lada Adamic of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, authors of the other most frequently cited study, were all living on another planet where the only medium available were the Internet. They evidently did not watch either of the last two Superbowls, when millions per minute were dropped to influence web traffic patterns, to say nothing of what every major player has been spending on a weekly basis ever since. Perhaps they are so dedicated to their studies that they don’t even own TVs.

But more likely their studious silence on the obvious intent and impact of mass media propagandizing of the Web results from the inconvenient fact that noticing it would spoil the neatness of their theoretical model, which depends upon the Web being a “Self-Organizing System,” or “SOS” for short-“just like a tree” or, more correctly and encompassing, just like a rain forest ecosystem.

According to USENET’s SOS FAQ, “Many natural systems show organization (e.g. galaxies, planets, chemical compounds, cells, organisms and societies)” of the self-organizing variety. Investigation of self-organizing systems is particularly hot right now in ecological studies, applied to the rise, evolution and extinction of species that cohabitate within local and global ecosystems, and in astrophysics, applied, among many other things, to the theoretical distribution of planetary solar systems like our own in the universe as a whole: “The forms we identify around us are only a small sub-set of those theoretically possible. So why don’t we see more variety?” So, of course, it’s tempting to take the metaphors seriously and apply the same model and mathematics to the “ecology” of the Web “universe.”

But here’s the kicker, the definition of SOS and the premise upon which the currently cited studies of the Web are based: “The essence of self-organization is that system structure often appears without explicit pressure or involvement from outside the system”; evidence of self-organization is “the evolution of a system into an organized form in the absence of external constraints.” In terms of the field’s own definitions, the idea that the Web is a self-organizing system, especially that Web traffic patterns are self-organizing, “without explicit pressure or involvement from outside the system,” is monstrously absurd.

But nowhere in the recently publicized studies nor in any of the collateral web documents I have searched is there even a hint that there might be a problem, or at least one worth considering. Instead, we are told that “the Web has taken on an organic life of its own,” “follows natural laws and can be studied as ‘an ecology of knowledge,'” because, as a self-organizing system, the Web “exhibits the type of physical order found in, say, magnetic fields, galaxies and plant growth.”

Of course, there’s nothing new about the use of nature metaphors to terminate social and political inquiry into historical phenomena. The notion of the unquestionable rightness of “the survival of the fittest,” as an apology for inequitable distributions of wealth, health and happiness under capitalism, predates Darwin’s borrowing of the metaphor to explain the planless patterns of natural selection, but Darwin’s theories were quickly reimported into social and political discourse to perpetuate, with greater scientistic glory, the same aggressive anti-poor campaign on behalf of burgeoning corporate and financial power during the peak of the industrial revolution. Now, on behalf of the primary beneficiaries of the information-media revolution, the science of self-organizing systems provides a convenient “natural” rationale for not sending up an SOS over the virtual extinction of traffic to Internet sites that cannot afford major media advertising.

As if that weren’t bad enough, these recent studies have been taken, in a leap of logic I cannot fathom for the life of me, to justify new “intelligence search techniques that can adroitly skip from site to site, seeking out the most relevant or most popular sites within the Web behemoth.”

Search-engine companies already are relying increasingly on such techniques, said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch. He said that’s the rationale behind search sites such as Google, which ranks its results by link “importance” … DirectHit, which bases its analysis on “what people are clicking on” … and Inktomi, which is “looking at what people are actually viewing.”

Note that in the preceding quotations, as throughout professional discussion of these matters, it’s hard to tell what “relevance” or “importance” mean, aside from serving as synonyms for “popular.” Perhaps “relevance” and “important,” if different at all, are the special categories reserved for soon-to-be-popular content owned by the media giants that, increasingly, are buying up established search engines to create vast integrated marketing (a.k.a., progaganda) apparatuses, spanning print, radio, TV, film, video, DVD, and the Net.

In any event, it’s not hard to discern the self-fulfilling prophecy here. Mass media ad campaigns produce the concentrated traffic patterns that allow “scientific” studies of the Net to declare the operation of an entirely “natural power law distribution” in an independent “self-organizing system,” which in turn calls for search engine traffic direction concentrating user attention upon what is already popular, that is, upon what has been or is being marketed by the traditional mass media. There may be signs of a self-organizing system here — one well worth studying — but it is the media apparatus as a whole, to which the Web appears to be growing increasingly subservient, less and less self-organizing.

But we may confidently expect no publicized studies of the overall media apparatus as a self-organizing system, because that wouldn’t be “scientific.” It would be radical politics. For such a study couldn’t help but send up an SOS potentially calling forth “external forces” — those of us now passive consumers of mass media culture — who might very well object to the “power law” the media have achieved over American and global individual and collective consciousness if we saw it too starkly and directly in its “ecological” totality.

Ironically, it is only the academic and scientific community, out of which these legitimations of de facto media marketing power over the Web have arisen, that has complained about its obvious consequences: “importance” and “popularity” too rarely coincide. The new “intelligence search techniques” are inevitably skipping over academic and scientific sites as of no “relevance” to anyone.

Naturally, they’re asking for government funding to remedy the injustice of this “natural” omission.

See MSNBC: “Measuring the Web’s Diameter” and MSNBC: “Web Growth Outpaces Search Engines” for source of quotations and background information used above.

It’s tiny. It’s fast. It’s easy to find, download, install, and operate. It’s free. And unlike most software these days, it does everything its maker claims. For the moment, it holds the heavyweight title of the world, The Hottest Illegal Program on the Planet, for threatening to bring Hollywood to its knees. It’s DeCSS.

If you haven’t heard the by now old news, DeCSS is a ripper program, a DVD ripper. If you have a DVD drive in your computer, all you have to do is pop in a DVD, start DeCSS, and it automatically offers to copy any or all of the files on the DVD to your hard disk, in the process removing the copy protection that would otherwise prevent you from playing these files with any MPEG2-capable player. There’s no shortage of MPEG2-capable players.

Of course, once you have decrypted movie files on you hard disk, you’re capable of doing just about anything you and your software and hardware please with them: cut, excerpt and re-edit them; delete the annoying previews of coming attractions and language and subtitle files you don’t need; add bogus scenes and title credits of your own or from another film; dub in your own abusive soundtrack (a la Woody Allen’s first and perhaps most creatively funny film, “What’s Up Tiger Lilly”), recompress the movie with other codecs, including more efficient ones like MPEG4 (video) and MP3 or, better yet, MSAudio (sound), and you can top it all off by recording the results to another disk.

At present, DVD writers are scarce and expensive. Panasonic’s is the only well-publicized product on the market, and it’s priced at around $5000. Blank DVD disks are also pricey, more expensive than buying a pre-recorded DVD off the rack. So it’s not likely that an underground bootleg network is going to spring up, doing to DVD sales what MP3 is starting to do to audio CD sales…at least not this week. But Hollywood is looking ahead. Who can’t remember when CD burners were priced at $5000, even $10,000, and blank CDs cost more than pressed ones? No prices have ever fallen further faster.

What you can already do, and many are starting to do, is “backup,” as the euphemism goes, your store-bought DVD to VideoCD format, which uses the older MPEG1 “whitebook” standard and lower VHS-quality resolution to record video to cheap, inexpensive CDs readable by computer CD-ROM drives and most current DVD players. Documented in English or not, the capacity to read VideoCDs comes built into most DVD players because VideoCDs are an established alternative to VCRs throughout Asia. A VideoCD, or VCD for short, holds about 60 minutes of MPEG1-encoded material, so the average Hollywood-formula film will fit on two CDs.

Or, if you’re willing to abandon your antiquated boobtube entirely, and for entertainment plug yourself into the global corporate-media propaganda matrix on your 17, 19, 20, 21 inch computer monitor, you can use the hybrid “miniDVD” format, a creative patchwork of Microsoft’s MPEG4 and MSAudio. Redmond’s codecs are intended for streaming video, but you can crank up the quality and get excellent results off a CD. In fact, Microsoft compression is so good, that most Hollywood-formula films will fit on one miniDVD-encoded standard CD disk. Not what Gates & company intended, but there it is. And there’s more. If you still hunger for all the original DVD menus, options, languages, subtitles, director’s tracks, etc., some creative folks out there in netspace have developed a simple, text-based information file format and reader to make all the extras work with miniDVDs.

No wonder Hollywood is up in arms, and suddenly calling for what can’t help sounding like a global police state.

Take note: The issue is NOT piracy. Piracy, the theft and wholesale remarketing of trademarked and copyrighted property, is well established, the basis of a large part of the high-tech economy of countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong/China, and other places here and there around the “third world.” Pirated digital and audio CDs, and endless knockoffs of every other kind of brand-name consumer good have been black-marketed in America and elsewhere for decades. There have been pirate DVD’s from the start. The current uproar is fundamentally not about this kind of piracy, because what now threatens Hollywood profits also and equally threatens the large-scale, established pirate businesses throughout the world: the prospect of a global grassroots network of theft and distribution, with no centers of production or points of sale to target, where materials pass friend to friend, acquaintance to acquaintance, on and off the Internet, no money, no records changing hands. Consider that laptops are starting to appear with built-in CD burners: you can bootleg a CD over coffee with a stranger. With this kind of decentered, grassroots theft, the “enemy” rapidly disappears into and becomes synonymous with “the people”–thus the police-state overtones of the cries of anguish emanating from Hollywood these days.

Of course, all variety of technical schemes–encodings, encryptions, keys, hardware and software tracking ids, digital licenses–are already available to stop or, more truthfully, slow the emergence of this kind of grassroots network of theft and distribution. More will be developed. All will be tried. And you can argue until you’re blue in the face about how effective any will be and how dire the consequences if they don’t work. It’s hard to find anyone who can’t get quite worked up about the complications and implications. But behind the excitement, anger and anxiety, and driving the frenzy of discussion of this issue is a little fact no one wants to face, that the only real, debatable issue is “how long?” For any given scheme, how long before another little program like DeCSS gets out of the bag and can’t be put back? Because there will always be another DeCSS, and it will always be easier and cheaper to crack a protection or tracking scheme than to develop and implement one. There’s a general law operating here. Let’s call it the First Law of Digital Information:

First Law: Outlaw programming cannot be stopped.

Technical issues aside, there’s a another general law at work here that ought to receive serious consideration, because it overturns the basis upon which many have bet hopes and dreams and billions on the outcome of the “technology revolution.” It ought to be considered seriously, because the inevitable frustration of these hopes and dreams and billions is likely to lead, like the present cries from Hollywood, to pressure for poorly thought out, undesirable political/police solutions to what technology simply can’t in the long-run fix. That general law is a corollary of basic economic laws of supply and demand as they specifically apply to this Age of Information, where information of all sorts becomes ever easier to produce, distribute and consume. Let’s call it the Second Law of Digital Information:

Second Law: In any Age of Information, the market value of information rapidly approaches zero.

Evermore, everyone will be writing yesterday’s headlines. They may be good and profitable for a day, but after that you may as well kiss them goodbye and move on to the next. No royalties or residuals for creators. But, more devastating for corporate media, no “killer copyrights” that can be rolled on and on for years and decades off a single, original contract appropriating the work of content creators. Of course, the present media empires, Hollywood included, will not disappear, but it will be interesting to see how their game changes, for change it must.

It will also be interesting to see whether, as a consequence of the First and Second Laws of Digital Information, the much heralded “Age of Information” doesn’t turn out to be the shortest age on record; whether, as a consequence of our technology revolution, we don’t find ourselves instead embarked upon an “Age of Performance,” where only acts directly performed and reproducible by human beings, and only by human beings, retain any value.

In such an Age of Performance, for example, you may have to give up your rock star dreams of landing that multi-million dollar contract and, essentially, retiring to studio production and release tours every other year. But there may yet be a good living as a working and touring musician, pressing CDs as bootleggable advertisements for yourself and playing whatever you damn well please. The Grateful Dead did the equivalent for decades–no poor boys there. In such an Age of Performance, the need (if not the pay) for actors, directors, cinematographers will be as great if not greater than ever, but if you make it to Hollywood, just make sure that, like any of today’s digital porn stars, you get paid in full for your actual, on-the-job performance, upfront! Who knows, we may soon be able to look forward to an actual, rather than mythical revival of live theater….

I keep misplacing the decimal point and make conclusions about quantities such that the fantastic to me is mundane and, the mundane to me is fantastic. I suppose this is best called decimal dyslexia.

For example, I had a hard time sleeping tonight, and I woke up, read a bit from a book titled "The Victorian Internet" about the history of the telegraph, let my mind wander, and felt compelled to rise up from my bed and check the financials on Yahoo!. First thing I noticed as I checked their 1998 10k is that the aggregate market value of their outstanding shares is 15 billion dollars. I counted all the places very carefully as I slid my finger across the screen under the number. After quickly scanning the description of their business, internet media thing, I scrolled down to the end where I found their financial statements (audited by Price Waterhouse who testify to the opinion that the statements are fair representations of the financial condition of the company) and noticed the following. Annual sales were 200 million, net income (they actually had a net income for the year) was 20 or 70 million dollars, Total assets valued at 600 million dollars.

Now the crazy thing is that Yahoo!’s biggest asset is the cash it holds in "investments" (about 500 million), that it’s contributed capital is about 500 million, and that it makes money from investment income. So, Yahoo appears to be more of a market fund account with high overhead, low returns (14 million) and is worth to the investing society as shown by the freely determined market to be worth 15 billion dollars.

I’m trying to scale this down so I can comprehend this. People are paying 15 thousand dollars for every 20 dollars Yahoo earns. People are willing to pay $750 to get one dollar of yahoo earnings.

See, my decimals are way off.