Obviously it is wise to wait until late in the night when I am exhausted to write so that I can be completely incoherent in my rage.  So let’s just go through them all. Or at least a bunch of them.

I find myself hating the choices and justifications of the makers of Magic. I am deeply enraged by the justification of Wizards of the Coast for their lawsuit of one rancored elf. Rather than experessing some deeper reason, some better justification that would make the whole situation actually make sense, they express the same old same old idea that we hear over and over again all over the place. “We have a right to protect our intellectual property.”

Now I might argue against the “right” and I might argue against the idea of “intellectual property” and I might even thread the needle and question the implicit assumptions built into the “we” and  the “our” but the irony of this argument is that it is so bad that I don’t even have to argue about any of those things.

I have a right to protect my life. I have a right to protect the people I love. Yes I do. But that doesn’t mean I have a right to walk over to someone who is perputed to be a ex-fellon and murder them in their sleep. Doing so, if I can get away with it without effecting anyone else, might well end up protecting me and my family, but that doesn’t make it right and it doesn’t mean I have a right to do it. If I am a government, I have a right, no a duty to protect my citizens, but that doesn’t mean I have a right to shoot nuclear missles into a nation  that happens to have terrorist camps within its borders.

People sometimes think notions of “proportionality” are only adopted by those who are trying to make conclusive moral judgements. “relativism” they call it. Such talk ignores the very fact that “proportionality” is essential to the very notion of morality at its essence. If you respond to an insult with an insult, perhaps you have not done the most just act but if you respond to an insult by tearing the the perpetrator limb from limb for assuredy you have done something very very wrong.

So, when the RIA says “We have a right to protect our IP”. Fine. But that doesn’t make it a good thing to sue people out of their livelihoods. The degree of the response exceeds the parameters of what could possibly be justified even if you accept all of their claims as true. So too with WotC.  One picture of three cards that no one believed were real that were not going to be released for another entire year probably would not have caused any tangible provable harm to WotC at all, and yet they see it as ok to file a law suit against someone they  damn well know probably doesn’t have the means to defend himself. Nevermind whether the claim is defensible or reasonable or just or even coherent. The act is wrong even if it is all of these things.

People complain about “law suits” being out of control. That there are “two many” of them and their quantity causes harm. I don’t believe that exactly. I think that suits are becoming a problem in our society because they are unfair, because there is an unfair playing field. Those with money and power and connections have an advantage both in filing suits and defending claims over those who do not. The law system perpetuates the power of those who have power and rarely serves as an instrument to transfer power from the strong to the weak. Though it is principal has that capacity, in execution in recent years it has failed to serve that role more and more.  Everone should need to exercise a reasonable degree of caution before bringing a suit. Whether you are a big company or one individual you should feel reasonably confident that you will have a chance to win or lose based on the truth or falsity or your claim and you should be hesitant to bring up any claim that you can’t prove because the consequences need to be reasonably equally potentially negative for both parties. What we need is a system where the only battles fought out in courts are those where both parties fully believe the truth of their claims and are willing to face the consequences and accept the results should they be proven wrong. If one party can shrug off a loss and another would find their very way of life devastated by it. That’s not a just situation.

I have more complaints about the specifics of this particular case but I don’t feel like it right now. Suffice it to say I despise their response in all of its aspects and I wish I’d never known that this was  a thing the people who make my favorite game are capable of choosing and believing in.

Onwards to other topics.  I am also disturbed, no angered, by the recent stir up over myspace. I’m rather ambivalent about what myspace does or does not do to protect children on the internet. My real concern is what this means for the internet overall. Had the internet evolved in the manner than many of its founders imagined there would really be no centralized body like myspace to be to blame for the harms that befall a net denizen. Rather everyone would be able to communicate freely and easily with anyone else without the need of an intervening server that makes the task ‘easier’. But unfortunately the technical challenge of sharing information on a personal level created a space for these ‘aid’ services like this one I’m writing this on. Places that make it easier for people to communicate without having to worry about the nitty gritty details. Unfortunaly in so existing, these services become a convenient target for those who are caught up with fear and anger and want someone to blame when something tragic happens. Ideally in the future we’d see our own “space” on the internet as something like an extension of our own home/store/personal gallery/home theatre/etc. A space that you own, is yours and you can share as you please. But you don’t have anyone to blame if someone breaks into your home and causes you harm other than the person who does the breaking in. 

I am also pretty annoyed by a documentary I saw today debunking the Da’Vinci Code. It’s almost certainly all true and all very reasonable, but I hated the presentation. It made it out as if the writer was some kind of a devlish evil being conspiring to destroy all of Christiantiy with his sacrilegious, and mostly false novel. Give me a break. Fiction is fiction. The only shred of evidence of this never quite stated but heavily suggested motive in the writing of the book is one line prior to the book’s start and is at best somewhat unclear in its interpretation. I also hate that this documentary probably only makes this already waaay overhyped and overpopular novel more popular.  But most of all I hate the fact that people can suit the writer for using ‘ideas’ that they used in a previous novel written many years before.  This is why we need a public domain. So that someone take someone’s ideas and incorporate them into a better story later on. This isn’t a ‘bad’ thing. It’s a good thing for the world. We get better art by building on each others thoughts and ideas. Why is it so important who “wins” and ends up rich?

I saw a senate debate on television. By God it was repuslive. So many false statements and simple uninteresting reiterations of the same words and ideas we’ve heard over and over again. Is this what works in modern politics? Stick with an explicit set of phrases and words and say them over and over again and have every single entity in your party say them in exactly the same words with exactly the same inflections so that it reverbates throughout the people and no one has to ever bother to think about any of their beliefs at all? In any argument you can just pull upon your vast repertoire of ready made catch phrases that you’ve got memorized because they are told to you by every leader in your party again and again and again. Where is the reason? Why don’t the candidates ever think and wonder  and respond honestly not with catch phrases but a real analaysis complete with their uncertainties and their sureties and the facts that go into their positions? Politicians seem like they are more and more becoming appendages of a bigger monstrous body called the “party” which has one rather unimpressive mind.

I hated listening to the radio today and hearing yet again a story about the truth of New Orleans, how it completely didn’t have to be the extreme disaster that it was and how we are completely not preparing ot prevent such a horrible disaster from happening again though we have the means. It was disturbing to hear about how people died in their beds and their atics unable to be rescued because no one warned them while they were awake and alert that things weren’t ok and that they needed to get out.  It’s tragic and so very disturbing that these truths are plastered across the news every every day on all networks until change becomes effected. Why don’t we say ‘Never Again’ to this as well?

Every day it seems I run into words and phrases that I ‘know’ or at least use or recognize when spoken and completely comprehend the context in which they are used and the overall idea being expressed but actually when I think deeply about the actual words themselves I have no idea what they mean. I hate that. Why  is my knowledge so incomplete? It makes me wonder how much more I think I know that I really don’t. How mcuh am I really hiding from myself? Is my understanding of language and words really just a matter of guessing the meaning by context and not of careful consideration of the exact meanings of the concepts being discussed? How many misunderstandings could derivce just from that?  This is particular disturbing for the writer in me who would rather not write at all then risk deceiving people with untruths unwittingly passed along because they have seeped into my writing as phrases taken out of context.

I hate that reason and philosophy can make a person totally insensitive. A person who spends their time wondering about the fundamental truths of the world finds it hard to feel sorrow on behalf of someone else who they do not see before them. And certainly it is harder to know how to react to sorrow if you don’t fundamentally believe in the means of response that are considered ‘normal’ and you don’t see the value in a rote response or a standard reaction. Indeed it can grate on a person when everyone reacts identically or at least within a limited range of accepted reactions to a dark piece of news. It seems ingenious. It seems unjust. You should only act as you feel. Thus the foolish and callous philosopher believes. I hate that.

I hate envy because I don’t even know what it is or how to recognize it or what it means or where it comes from. I read in a book a character who would remark to himself that he found himself evying a character often a friend and it seemed a mark of shame for him but did not diminish his friendship. I always thought envy would be a thing accompanied with anger and disgust and dislike, all often irrational. Like the character named “envy” in full metal alchemist. But is possible to envy someone for whom you feel nothing but the utmost respect?  Maybe I’m just confusing envy and jealousy. But isn’t envy worse? I really don’t get it.

I hate striving without knowing why. I hate stasis without a goal. I hate believing without a means to effect your belief. I hate knowing without the capcity to convince others. I hate opportunities lost and friends vanished into the night. I hate oaths unkept and promises never made. I hate being wrong and knowing it again and again and again. I hate being tired. I hate staying up late working on pointless projects for pointless people caught up in their completely pointless world.  I hate not finishing. I hate it.

I am probably going to switch this blog to an encrypted anonymous blogging site I found a while back because I think it is better to support the technologies I believe in.  It does have a word limit per post though so it might be a little annoying to work with. I hate that too.

I hate hating too. That’s why I wait until late into the night when all reason leaves me to bother…

I read this that was quite disturbing:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0607.boehlert.html

People think obtaining power is a kind of triumph. They think getting power is “winning” the game of life. They are stuck in one of many poor analogies that don’t really capture the complexities of life. The reality is that ‘obtaining power’ really isn’t all that hard. The world functions on the presumption that most people aren’t even going to try. As a result its imperative that those who do obtain power see it as a responsibility. If they see it as a fun game that they are getting away with winning against the odds, then they’re inclined to be arrogant, stubborn, and worst of all not very contemplative. Why would you try to understand something deeper if you’ve already won? Why would you care what other people think? The only thing that would matter to you is of course continuing to win for as long as possible.

Shadows of the past recommend:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=6430
Judging solely from the description I am not at all surprised. I’ve been looking for a non-shounen anime to watch that is good for a while now. There’s really only so much Bleach and Naruto one can take before going insane. Wait, who am I kidding? I could watch Bleach and Naruto every waking hour of every day for the rest of my life and probably be content, provided it’s not fillers. Still, variety can be good sometimes too.

One thing I’ve always hated is people taking responsibility for things that have nothing to do with them. Agency is fundamentally important in this life. When you claim to have helped someone or hurt someone in a fundamental way you are in effect taking away their agency in their own outcome. It’s like you are saying unto them: “your choices didn’t matter because my choices governed your life”. It’s absurd. We can certainly influence each other, but it’s really important to keep perspective. If I  do X it is usually because I chose to do X, regardless of whether or not someone else created the conditions under which it was more likely for me to do X. I am not a slave. My choices are my own. Even the really foolish screwed up ones. Or rather, especially those.

I was sent one of those standard ‘interesting’ emails that go around today. Well I was sent two, but one I didn’t care about. The other was actually interesting though. It presented the argument that you can become a genius in one short year guaranteed. The trick? Write something every day. Lol. The email argued for it by saying studies of most of the brightest people to ever live were compulsive journal keepers and some other evidence as well. The cause and effect here is all screwed up, I’d say.  But still, no doubt writing frequently can help to clarify your thoughts and sharpen your mind. Best of all, according to the email you don’t even have to make any sense! That’s great for me as I’m pretty sure nothing I write ever makes any sense.

Yosh! That’s it! Starting today I’m going to write something every day. Maybe even mutiple times a day. Gotta force my anime style determination working toward something. Let’s see how long it lasts.

I’m really behind in work. Time’s up in one lousy day. Oh well. It all will work out because I’m a great programmer.

I learned the other day that the word “opportunity” in business means “screw-up”. As in, “We’ve identified certain opportunities and certain successes in our business over the last quarter.”  Last time I checked the opposite of a success was….
I think I learned that in the past but I had forgotten it. I can’t get that business lingo down for the life of me.

However, one thing I always remember is that people in power always seem to be pretty good at yelling at people. But the people with a LOT of power are skilled in the art of condemnation without yelling, known to the unsophisticated as tattling.  I love business.

I bought a Tomtom as a gift. I got ripped off on it too. What was I thinking? Anyway, GPS  had better be cool and easy to use.  I also began my campaign to buy Compact Flourescent Light Bulbs for all of my family members.

I’ve gotta move money around now so I don’t have problems (I use the one account with no money to use and numerous other accounts to save with philosophy of money management) .

That’s enough for now.

I used to think that by creating freedom of exchange of ideas on the internet you could pretty much have the most substantive effect on the future of humanity. The idea was simple, I trusted that people generally know what is right, that the collective can do more good than harm and that with absolutely free access everyone’s ideas could be heard equally. One person can’t “shout louder” online than anyone else. In a massive pool of competing opinions, people would be drawn more to the facts and the truth as a way out of the chaos. People would grow smarter and wiser for having experiences more differing opinions, for having expressed themselves sometimes wrongly and sometimes rightly and learning from their mistakes. Access to ideas and media online would drive everyone to different view of the world.They would see more and find it ever more increasingly impossible to ignore the plight of others. In the end, by stressing freedom through a globally equal network you create a new kind of democracy that trascends anything we’ve seen before. Suddenly, your worth isn’t determined by where you live or where you were born or how much money you have or your skin color, or your gender, or you sexual orientation. It’s your ideas that matter. Your ability to express yourself in what could be a completely neutral arena of debate. The real world ultimately driven by the lightspeed transfer and spread of ideas and the infinitely fast growth of creative potential.

So of course, thinking that, I advocated always policies stressing a free internet, completely unfettered by the shackles of the physical world. I believed in arguing to build a different kind of political and media world online, one in which everyone can contribute from the poorest to the most wealthy. I’ve always believed in things like network neutrality and never believed in allowing the hindrances of excessive copyright law and crazy patent laws weaken the potential of humanity to grow in this new world medium. I thought this was the fight that mattered. I thought this was what people needed to care about right now.

Now I see there’s one glaring problem with my logic here that is now so obvious I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.  The one thing I am assuming above all else, is that humanity will *inevitably* be able to figure things out, that we’ll *eventually* be able to get it right provided we focus on the right things.  But what if… just what if…. we just don’t have that much time?

I’m not a conspiracy theorest though I sometimes come up with some crazy cospiracy theories. I’m not a doomsayer though many things seem pretty darn dark to me. I don’t generally spend much time attacking people for their views or their actions, instead I try to understand them. I don’t generally assume that people are evil, I just think that this human existence is far too complex to be boiled down to such simplistic terms. But above all, even if I believed that there were many many actually evil people in the world doing truly evil things, I have always tended to assume that humanity is capable of figuring things out, that we are capable of getting it right, “over time”, “eventually”.

But what if time is running out? What if the clock is ticking not just for our families or our nation or our way of life, but for our entire civilization? What if we are on the verge of extinction and what if it may already be too late?

Surely then whether our internet is more commercially driven or more individually driven is an irrelevancy. Surely then whether you can copy a CD to your hard drive or not doesn’t even register microscopally on a scale of what is important right now.  Surely then what job I choose to have, how much money I am making and what kind of computer I have running are absolutely trivial indeed. Surely then maybe it isn’t that important whether the situation in Iraq is actually a civil war or just a pretty bad situation where lots of people are dying every day is a distinction that doesn’t really need for us to waste our time on. Maybe whether we allow homosexuals to be “married” or simply have “civil unions” isn’t all that important. Maybe whether we heavily tax the wealthy in order to expand social aid or leave them untaxed in favor of hoping that they will reinvest their money in the economy isn’t so overwhelmingly essential a question as we thought it was. Maybe violence in video games and television and malpractice law suits and joblessness and whether or not it is legal to share music online aren’t the things we should be seriously focusing on.

I’m not saying these things aren’t important. Many of them clearly are. I’m saying that concerns of the present might just have to be put on hold for now, there might be a very good reason to stop all of our focus on building toward our own personal ideal of what the perfect future will be and open our eyes to the very real fact that there might not BE any such future. For any of us.

What is a crisis? Surely if the word means anything it means a situation that forcefully pushes aside other concerns and demands an immediate and overwhelming dedicated response.  If Katrina and 9/11 were Crisis such that they demanded the concern of our entire national infrastructure, how much more substantive is a crisis that threatens to result in human extinction?  What on earth possibly couldn’t be put aside in favor of a focus on that? What on earth wouldn’t be more important? IF we have to simply cease all electral consumption? Who really cares. If we have to simply stop driving, tomorrow, simply give it up and not do it any more, wouldn’t it be worth it? What if we can’t have as many children? What if we are required to recycle? Who cares if we are thrown back into a technological stone age compared to our current level? Isn’t that better than ceasing to exist? Isn’t it more important than letting our civilization vanish as if it never was?

As I said, I’ve never been a doomsayer. I don’t usually spread despair and fear, but in this one case I am myself quite a bit afraid. I remember hearing a story about a group of people who were too afraid to fight for their lives in a situation that was very dire, a group of people who didn’t know what they should do and weren’t sure what was their best course of action and so chose to do nothing except hope and pray.Comes to turn out that had they simply fought, had they simply tried they might have survived but by doing nothing they doomed themselves to certain death. We know that looking back in hindsight. But how, could they have known for sure though? They couldn’t predict the future. They didn’t know what was going to happen. It’s quite possible that not doing anything might have been their only way to survive. People told me that and I tell myself that everytime I think about the story, but I just can’t help feeling extremely angry at them. I rage at them as I replay the story in my mind. Why didn’t they just try? Why didn’t they take a chance? Isn’t it better to struggle with life than mearly sit and wait and hope? I think I was angry because I see myself in them. I could see myself just waiting, not striving, telling myself that the chances of survival are equally good either way but in truth not striving because I’m lazy and afraid, more afraid of trying and failing then of dying through inaction. My natural inclinations are in favor of when I don’t know something for certain, doing nothing at all, and I hate that aspect of myself.

And that’s the way we are with climate change. We’d rather wait and see than do. It’s like we’re more terrified of fighting are hardest to stop this global threat and failing or worse finding out we were deceived and our actions did more harm than good than we are of sitting back and doing nothing until we are destroyed by our hesitation. Certainty would break us of our lethargy. If you see the gunman, you’re more likely to run for it or take cover or try to stop the gunner than you are if you don’t know if what you are hearing is really gunfire. But unfortunately our society has mastered obfuscation, we’ve turned it into the greatest art of the modern era.  Now it’s unclear what if any body of evidence would be enough to convince us that something is real. And so we will wait and see quite content in our self knowledge that we’d rather die unknowing and unacting than act under even the slightest probability of deception and fail to do any good. We’ll wait until it becomes ‘obvious’. We’ll wait until we know for ‘sure’. And who knows how many countless lives will be lost because we hesitated. This time it might well be all of us.

Not more than a few months ago I was contemplating our nation’s recent reputation problem. The United States varies from being mildly tolerated as an arrogant bully but sometimes well meaning big brother, to being despised as a miltant totalitarian outsider with no moral character whatsoever.  How do you fight that? The reputation has grown and grown over the years and now is at a point where it’s unclear whether anything we do in any of these countries will ever be seen in a good light. Our actions to help will be seen as a P.R. campaign. Anything that goes wrong anywhere we are present and many places we are not will be assumed to be some sinister C.I.A. plot whether or not there is any conceivable motive. Many Americans have come to just assume that we’ll always be hated around the rest of the world no matter what we do so we should just not worry about what others think at all and do what we believe or know to be right.

I don’t believe that. If we shut ourselves off from the opinions of others we lose the good as well as the bad. We only have our own insulated self judgement to guide our decisions and no moral agent can be perfectly moral by themselves. With out reflecting on the insight and observation of those outside of ourselves we’ll never grow. What’s more I don’t believe our being liked an respected by those outside agents is anywhere near a lost cause. People’s opinions change, sometimes at a drop of a hat sometimes gradually over time. But there is no doubt that prevailing sentiment can shift and the other nation’s citizens of the world can start to see us with eyes of respect rather than hate and fear.

To start this process, I thought that what we really needed was a symbol of some sort. Symbols have driven the greatest changes in human society. We need some way of showing our commitment to being moral responsible world citizens. We need some way of showing people that look we know we’ve done things that you don’t like in the past but that doesn’t mean we aren’t well meaning and that doesn’t mean we don’t care about you or what you think. It matters to us what the rest of the world thinks. It matters to us the conditions of people’s throughout the world. We WANT to make life better for everyone, we’re not just about profit we’re about right.

Toppling dictators and building infrastructures clearly isn’t enough of a symbol. Spreading our media content throughout the world and facing down potential nuclear powers clearly isn’t as symbolically impressive as we wish it was. Don’t get me started on how collassally bad a symbol closing our borders, sending marines and building a wall on our southern border is from the perspective of the rest of the world. It’s clear that the things we are doing now aren’t enough and it isn’t clear that anything we’ve done in the past if we were to do it again will have any kind of meaningful impact on our global image as a nation.

And so for a long time I’ve been trying to think of something that would be big enough and undeniable enough for us to do to show our commitment to the world community. Would we have to solve world hunger? Would we need to stop every humanitarian crisis in the world all on one foul swoop? Would we have to be above board in our response to the spread of the Avian flu and stop it from having a devastating impact on the world’s population? Would we need to completely disarm our nuclear arsenal and allow inspecters from every major power to verify it? I wondered for a while.

Now I’m convinced that what we should do, right now is become immediately the one single nation utterly and totally devoted to doing everything within our power to completely eliminating global warning as a threat to the species. This is the perfect symbol because it effects everyone but most of all because the sacrifices that would have to be made would be mostly ours, because the tough choices we’d have to make would be harder than any other nation in the world would have to make. We’d have to do more than anyone and faster than anyone and better than ayone else AND we’d have to do everything in our power to help every other country in the world do as much or more than we are. And everyone in the entire world would reap the very real benefits not just us. And in response to this people can’t argue that we only did it for ourselves because it is inherently obvious that we did it for ourselves and we wouldn’t be denying it. Sometimes doing the right thing for everyone IS doing the right thing for yourself. But in this case it would be such an extreme turn about from our previous behavior and such a vastly important improvement for the world as a whole that perhaps people would see it as a symbol of the start of a new era of global coorperation wherein the United States is one of many good citizens of a broader global community.

http://www.swaptree.com/  is an idea worth watching.

There are many interesting things to keep your eye on as this and similar systems evolve. Most of all there is the question of if or when the media giant companies will take note of the evolution of such services and how they will react to them. Now on the surface you might say that there is nothing here that could possibly concern them but there are a number of reasons why this is not so cut and dry.

The movie industry was repulsed originally by the idea that people might be able to watch movies in their own homes because they wouldn’t be able to control the number of people who could come over to your house and watch it for free. Media industries have been similarly disturbed with the inventions of television, radio, cable, video casette recorders, dvd recording, and of course peer to peer networks and surely many other technologies as well.  In many ways a free swap service is much the same as letting large numbers of strangers over to your house to experience your media content free of charge. In the end, it has precisely the same theoretical potential to decrease the bottom line of the copyright  holders as any of these other technologies.  Fewer people *have* to pay in order to get access to a piece of media, if they need only wait and someone will lend it to them at no particular cost. Ultimately that would lead to less of a need for items to be purchased.

One interesting aspect of the swap-model though is that it does not obviously reduce down as fully as peer to peer networks. Media giants had a stronger theoretical argument for p2p networks because they could say that all it would take was one release of a piece of media and because copying was effectively completely free, soon everyone would have it. That’s never been a good argument when placed against the real world as no network is currently anywhere near that efficient. But with digital advancements we could imagine a world where it was possible. Everyone could have storage enough on their personal devices to hold all of the media content ever created in human history, and bandwidth would be such that someone could have a program that could instantaneously push all of the media data copied to their hard drive to every single person on the network in a blink of an eye. We’re no where near that yet, but nor are we so far away that we couldn’t see it become the case.

Right now, however, the difference between a physical swap system and a p2p copy system in terms of the bottom line of media companies boils down to just the difference between the number of media copies that have to be purchased before no one else has to buy into a new piece of media because everyone will get it. As physical swap systems because more efficient and our physical transportation system improves, the lines can begin to blur a great deal between the two.

One thing in particular that intrigues me about a swap system is the way in which it interacts with media monopolies versus independents.  Smaller, independent producers benefit considerably more from a swap system than a media giant does. You see, people need to buy into the swap network in order to gain advantage from it. A person could buy 1 dvd from a company or another different dvd from that same company and either way they can swap it for the one they didn’t buy and thus experience both. They don’t have to pay for both in order to experience both or hope that they have a friend who happened to buy the other dvd.  (As an aside, I’ve seen so many situations where people have come together and wanted to find something to watch together, say a group is hosting and wants to show a movie from their collection to the group they are hosting. Only they come to find that most of their guests pretty much own much of the same collection, leading them to have to go out and rent)    In contrast, with a swap system, it is actually in your interest to diversify your collection. You may well be able to barter a lesser known work for a chance to watch each of the more popular works. The more popular works being more popular will have LOTS of copies on the network meaning you don’t have to worry about not being able to eventually see them. So why waste your money on them? People will feel a push to experiment with their purchases more and as a result independents will be able to sell more. The media awareness of people should become more diverse as a consequence and competition will become more fierce as the marketshare of all content will tend to converge.

Of course the big thing that will bother media the most is the possiblity of people ‘swapping’ the physical item and at the same time ripping its content to their hard drives resulting in people actually keeping their content in some form. I would argue that the ‘virtual copy’ is not quite the same as the physical copy as there are very different risks involved, and in terms of how most people experience most content most of the time, the act of copying the content is really just people being packrats because they are really unlikely to actually experience the content again very often. And if they did want to experience it again, with a swap system, what is to stop them from just swapping for the item back again? The act of ripping something seems to add on a little value for the person doing the ripping if you have a big and powerful enough swap system in place. It  will be interesting to see how prevalent the behavior is. Of course, there’s also the excessive copy protection the media companies are creating and putting into all of their creations so maybe they won’t feel too worried about that after all.

Another question is how will the collectors market react to this invention? Many items today are advertised on the basis of their collectors appeal. The idea being to encourage buying and holding in the hopes that one day your item will be worth more than you paid.  A swapping system of course encourages the opposite. You want to buy, experience as soon as possible, and swap as soon as possible and as frequently as possible in order to gain the most out of your purchase. That means you might tend away from purchasing more expensive items that have ‘collectors features’  in favor of cheaper items that you can swap for more goods. On the other hand people like to collect and if a swapping system were to become a trademark of our society then that would mean more items in frequent circulation that results in more wear and tear and a greater probability of items becoming unusable. That on top of the fact that there is less incentive to buy as many copies of a popular work might in turn result in collectors items being considerably more valuable in a swap filled future.

Lastly, the question that intrigues me the most is the question of how, if at all, a swap filled world might influence people’s opinions of the existing p2p networks. One possibility is that people will become more critical of those who make use of p2p networks. People will think: “how dare you take that for fee? It’s not like you have to. All you have to do is swap something you already have and have a little patience. Don’t be so lazy.”  On the other hand, people might instead start to become more lenient to p2p users. They might say “What’s the difference? What’s the difference between it taking 1 hour to download a movie I want to see or it taking a 1 day to have it shipped to me, or 5 minutes to walk down the street to someone in my neighborhood’s house who has it available for swap?” If the swap system becomes really easy to use and really efficient and delivery systems become really fast and efficient as well, maybe people will just start to say “who really cares? Downloading a CD really isn’t appreciable different from checking it out from the library.” 

One interesting element of the swap system from my perspective is how much more unequal and unfair it is than a p2p system or a library. I doubt people will take note of that aspect but wouldn’t it be interesting if they did?  You see a swap system requires you to ‘buy into’ it. That means there’s a considerable barrier preventing your ability to experience media content. It’s a lot cheaper than a standard system of buying media, but its no where near as potentially cheap for a new person as a p2p network or a library. If you don’t own any media and don’t have any money to spare for media you just can’t participate in a swap network, but if you even own one movie or cd you can immediately start swapping, and given enough time experience everything. Contrast to a library. You can just sign up for a n often free membership and then you can check out anything noone else is using and given enough time you can experience everything. And of course p2p is best of all as you can just search and download and given enough time you can experience everything. Now equity on a p2p network requires that everyone upload as much as they download. but intriguingly even starting with nothing, on a p2p network you can actually be an equitable transferer by simply sharing the things you’ve downloaded again. You can even end up being altruistic by donating your bandwidth more frequently for upload. A person who started with not a dime to share could end up being a pillar of a p2p community. But if you have no money a swap network doesn’t even let you play and the more content you start with the more value you get out of it. Interestingly, a swap network also rewards those who have already contributed a lot to the media industries  by buying goods more than it rewards those new to the market such as children. p2p networks in contrast will reward you for buying into better hardware and a faster network connection, something right now younger consumers may be more likely to do.

Many p2p networks tending to look more like swap networks over time anyway. p2p networks have to deal with a huge free rider problem which is minimalized for a swap network. Although it is trivial for someone on a p2p network to contribute as much or more than they receive provided they have the bandwidth even if they started with nothing, it is also *possible* to receive content without providing anything in return. In an ideal world no one would have any incentive to do that but unfortunately fear of liability coupled with the tendency of many isp’s to provide a much smaller upload bandwidth than down result in a lot more free riders than some of these networks would like and make them considerably less efficient than they otherwise would be. The result is that many p2p networks implement policies that increase your download speed or make more content available to you when you contribute more to the network. Taken to the logical extreme that pretty much ends up looking like precisely a swap network. You can’t download X bytes until you upload X bytes first.

Anyway, in general I think the spread of these kinds of systems, be they netflix, gamefly,gameznflix,  peerflix, lala, swaptree, barter bee, freecycle, or just plain  ebay are very good for the world. Their spread will erode our resistence to the idea of a large free media commons being available throughout the world  while at the same time giving more people access to a greater amount of interesting content, and at the same time saving people money.We may be going the slow way about providing free access to media to all but we may well be getting there anyway, so long as our laws don’t mess it up.

Let me know if you know of any other services that provide unique twists on this kind of an exchange system.

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One minor issue I have with this swaptree system is that what you can swap for seems to be determined by some kind of ‘algorithm’. This is a little disturbing to me. I sincerely hope that this algorithm is made freely known to the populace so that people can make rational and fair decisions about purchases on a realistic understanding of what they will be able to trade it for. It would really stink if they can buy something and then havet he algorithm mysteriously change on them resuling in the thing they bought not having the value in trade that they expected it to.  It would be far more disturbing if the algorithm contains elements to privledge certain kinds of media to make them seem more popular or even create artificial scarcities in order to encourage people to buy more of a certain kind of media.

One thing that surprises me about swaptree is that they didn’t decide to do a simplified bidding system. You can’t say, here’s my dvd, what dvd’s will you trade me for it, collect a bunch of bids and the user can select the winner. That would be a more interesting system to me, especially if it allowed you to do trades accross media types. It would be intriguing to see how books trade for dvds and in turn for CDs and in turn for video games. Maybe we might be able to discover that certain media types aren’t actually worth nearly as much as they are being sold for to people.  Oh well, swaptree is something different and there are other systems out there that are closer to what I describe. They all have their place.

Thoughts?

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