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Inspired by Guitar Hero and South Park s11e13, here is what a guitar solo sounds like on a Sunday Morning in 2008: silent sundays
Neighbors across the world are eternally grateful.
The Autodigest Analogue Piracy Orchestra is ready. 7+1 members, the “1″ being either the maestro or the one being videocast onto the ensemble´s premiere. CdM, April 12. Bring your audio recorders, we want to be bootlegged!
There is a second analogue front being dug up – a heritage of transcriptions that will be brought here, rescued from times astray. Before they physically perish, before their code is irreversibly obsolete.
A student freaks out in the classroom because the teacher confiscated her mobile phone. What people seem to have failed to comment on was how desperate the student looked. She was gasping for air, panicking at the prospect of remaining shut out of the digital allure until the end of the class. Cute technology is the new oxygen indeed.
By the way, why did so many news services say “the video has in the meantime been taken off youtube”. Is it some kind of smear campaign, an attempt to keep Joe Average at bay? They must know that once online, forever online.
A good day today. Ensured the best location ever for the DM festival coming up in October. Then cleared my way through about 100 late emails. A few ones still left behind, but a significant pressure relief nevertheless. The problem is, of course, the more one answers emails, the more one gets back, but hey, as they say – one day at a time.
And we managed to nail down the concept behind Casa da Musica´s upcoming gig. It will most likely be called Autodigest Analogue Piracy Orchestra presents an evening of Desert Island Bootlegs. And it will most likely be good. Invites for the impromptu orchestra to be sent out soon. The subsequent release will bleed through unexpected channels – no, not necessarily Cronica or Ash or….
Stay tuned.
The music industry has been slowly coming to terms with the fact that it cannot win the battle against piracy (or, as some may prefer to call it, free distribution). Faced with the current overabundance of musical content, another dramatically different scenario for music consumption might not be far away.
After the era of music as provider of escapism, after the era of music as provider of content (counter-cultural and otherwise), and after the era of music as the fabric of online networking, we could be witnessing the early days of “ethical listening” or “fair listening”. In this nascent era, the arm wrestle between the music industry and music sharing communities may simply dissolve, as music could be consumed according to the fairness in distribution revealed by the artist and/or label. The fact that one was authorised to freely share the musical product would then become the key factor in the actual appreciation of its content. Or maybe it´s already beyond all this, and we are simply getting uncompromisingly used to the idea that it is all out there for the taking.
A worthy question: why do you listen to what you listen to?
See Chris Anderson´s March 2008 WIRED article FREE! Why $0,00 Is The Future of Business. It encapsulates why, in many ways, we will never get there as a nation. The article is forward-looking, savvy, daring, uncompromising… and it flows. The almost-absolute opposite of our count-the-cents national (P) culture. Essential reading, really. Whether it is uncompromisED, that´s another story, but we don´t mind – more urgent points press on.
I remember Artur telling me his story of attempting to charge his laptop at an electrical plug in a Portuguese coffee house. He was told by the waiter he could not do it. “Electricity costs money, you know?”. Yet when A. offered to pay, the waiter said double-no.
Contrast that with the ultra-trendy, ultra-expensive cappuccinos you drink on the other side of the world. Come on, it´s not the goddamn drink you´re paying for, and you know it – you obviously buy the whole experience: the sights, the calculated friendliness (nothing against it, honest to God), the cleanliness, the musical selection, the cool of it all, the right to occupy a table for five hours, the right to charge your thirsty laptop battery… the right to not worry. Really, just bar culture under the sunshine.
Not that Anderson´s article sets any everlasting paradigm on everlasting freedom. It is simply a snapshot of “now” directed at the unaware. Yet we need to begin foreseeing beyond the current state of overabundance, even as the generative, viral-like, gorgeous slow-motion catastrophe entrances us all. Yes, we need to go through this, but yes, we need to prepare for what will be. And what might be is, IMNSHO, a need for restriction. Voluntary restriction. Who knows, maybe even paying in order not to access. The first signs are already out there. Rapidshare, anyone?
By the way: Anderson is hot right now. His “Long Tail” is the buzzword of the moment – run for it if you must. SXSW Interactive was full of people quoting it, left, right and centre. Interestingly, they were not quoting him, just quoting it. That, and the inevitable Twitter. Oh, I´m shopping, how about that? But I digress…
The Long Tail. Portuguese translation urgently needed, so we can stay afloat.
If it´s already out there, could someone kindly inform me?
If not… any takers?
P.S. (if you want to call it such): it is remarkable how fiction TV shows are struggling to catch up with real life. The writer´s strike has affected the pace, essence and structure of what would otherwise be deemed total fantasy. Stranger than fiction? Faster than light? (Blaine, those were prophetic words waaaay back then.)
The already sky-high stakes of LOST´s season three finale will obviously have to be upgraded for season four, and yet we were almost left with a circumstantial anti-climax instead. All is well now, and all thirteen episodes promise some sort of coherence – but for how long? Two more years means another two hundred years in contemporary media terms. LOST may just disintegrate before it comes full circle. The geek in me says “please don´t”.
Yours truly signs off and boards the next plane,
(Here is the keynote speech from the March 10 SXSW panel, also available at our new blog, Virtual Sacrilege.)
The subject of this session is transgression in digital environments, transgressive acts that have been considered wrong in our social and cultural environment. We are speaking of piracy, trolling, copyright infringement, civil disobedience, theft, griefing, fake authenticity, malicious rumors. The list goes on and on,
We will argue that transgression is now an integral part of our daily lives.
In one way or another, we are all breaking down traditional notions of justice, fair use, morals, property. If we are not actually responsible for transgressive acts, we still live with them and accept them and consume them.
The goal of this panel is to open up debate, in order to better understand the impact of virtual transgressive behavior in the so-called “real world”, and to understand how that real world has been trying to catch up with the pace of the mayhem. We will also propose that an interesting phenomenon may be taking place: transgression may be being used by “official” channels as an ambivalent marketing device.
The universe of transgression is extremely large. It is simply not possible to contain its seemingly endless variations within this next hour. We therefore decided to focus on a series of cases that have had more evident impacts and consequences, and to analyse their social and cultural impact.
I started becoming interested in the subject of virtual transgression as I read Julian Dibbell´s seminal book “My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World”. (Originally, I intended for Julian to join us at this panel, but unfortunately he had prior commitments). “My Tiny Life” is an account of the early days of Multiple User Domains, and Dibbell begins by telling us the story of a virtual rape occurring at the LambdaMOO community in 1993. In Dibbell´s words:
“While certain tension invariably buzzes in the gap between the hard prosaic RL facts and their more fluid dreamy VR counterparts, the dissonance in the bungle case is striking. No hideous clowns or trickster spirits appear in the RL version of the incident, no voodoo dolls or wizard guns, indeed no rape at all as any RL court of law has yet defined it. The actors in the drama were university students for the most part, and they sat rather undramatically before computer screens the entire time, their only actions a spidery slitting of fingers across standard keyboards. No bodies touched. Whatever physical interaction occurred consisted of a mingling of electronic signals sent from sites spread out between New York City and Sydney, Australia.”
“Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that [...] posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face – a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words’ emotional content was no mere playacting.”
And then extrapolates:
“We are witnessing a paradigm shift in which the classic liberal firewall between word and deed is not likely to survive intact. After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the computer, knows that it operates on the principle that states that the commands you type are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as “make things happen,” the same way pulling a trigger does. They are incantations. The logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.”
It is remarkable that these words were written fifteen years ago: they still describe with total accuracy the dilemma in which we are stuck.
Flash-forward to the present. If the paradigm shift Dibbell described still applies, the formal sophistication and pervasiveness have grown exponentially. Assault still happens in Second Life, just as vandalism on John Edwards´campaign headquarters made it to the national news, just as the September 11 attacks were reenacted. In face of this, Philip Rosedale, chief executive of Linden Labs, defends that Second Life activities should be governed by real-life laws for the time being. This “for the time being” is revealing, in that it acknowledges the impermanence and ambiguity of virtual transgression.
But the magnitude of virtual transgression has gone far beyond VR communities, and now includes video games, consumer culture, media events and religion. In June 2007, Insomniac Games released a Playstation game named Resistance: Fall of Man. One of the key locations for this violent game was Manchester Cathedral, in England. The Church of England did what it had to do: condemn the game as sacrilegious, demand an apology, and threaten with a lawsuit.
But the surprising element was the actual outcome for the Cathedral itself: the number of visitors rose, and one may wonder at the financial benefits that may have come out of this. Months later, St. Paul´s Cathedral in London followed suit as a scenario of Hellgate.
In light of all this, the traditional sociological notion that transgression is an act of deviance may no longer mean much. Transgression is now woven onto institutionalised discourse and narrative, it is a factor of cool, it is a sales pun. SL needs griefers as an integral part of its symbolic capital.
Heitor Alvelos, Austin, March 2008
Worthy of sociological extrapolation in due time:
Attending Charlene Li´s lecture on corporate revolutionaries, the subject of “if it´s not on Wikipedia, it does not exist” came up. This reminded me of a fairly recent track of mine, “analogue amnesia“, which attempts to express a similar idea through different means. So out of curiosity, I googled up this expression; to my amazement, every single link pertaining to “analogue amnesia” linked to yours truly. I´ll have to think twice about it – there has to be something wrong with that expression if no one else in the world seems to have used it – at least not in a digital environment. Either that, or I´ve just baptised the power trio without a name (will run the idea through them soon enough – no good being called “needaname” forever).BTW, so as not to be lost in some cryptic haze: the track is called analogue amnesia, as it is made up of analogue tape hiss from cassette tapes, and as it is the opening track to an upcoming autodigest release dealing with the golden age of bootlegs. Ah, the golden days of tape trading to exhaustion, to inaudibility.
Today: hints towards being a cool creature throughout this week, advertising blog disasters (I was late, will have to hunt down the examples on display – but they did include an HP disaster and a fake “real” wal-mart cross-country adventure), religious extremism in blogging and the challenges of the “local” factor in global communities. All topped by a high ritual on the media blur. The key thought has to be “information overload has always been a part of what we are – we just talk about it more now”. So there.
Tomorrow may include social strategies for revolutionaries, online sexual privacy, status in social media, the irrelevance and dangers of logos. And tomorrow may include the brave question: do we still need designers? How refreshing, how liberating, to ask the fundamental questions without the knee-jerk class reaction. Instead of the frozen, severe fundamentalism of small-town metropolises, we witness the underlying, ever-powerful ideology of contemporary media sprouting its own questioning. It may be hyper-real, but maybe it is just citizenship. Maybe it is just the basics of being civilised. I´ll take it any day.
