the Pirate Revolution

echoes of the real world

2007-03-20T20:52:00.000-07:00

In 1991, Umberto Eco wrote a short essay entitled "How Not to Use the Cellular Phone". In it, he outlines five categories of cellular phone users: those like the handicapped that cannot live without it, those like doctors whose career depends on it, adulterers (for obvious reasons), those like some family members and certain friends that equate it with a real relationship, and finally those that use it as a testament to some false sense of power.

Fast forward 16 years and one realizes the five categories still exist... except now, they are no longer confined to cellular phones, and Eco's tongue-in-cheek comments about the cultural baggage we attach to our devices has acquired additional acuity. Case in point: the loss of a USD38 million client account in Alaska when a technician reformatted a hard drive as part of a regular maintenance program. More than USD300,000 was subsequently spent by the company on reconstituting the lost information. And that, folks, is real money.

Lots of people think that the world will end in a ball of fire. They're wrong. It will end in an unobtrusive blip -- the sound of someone pulling the RJ-45 out of the router.

satur-ical notions

2007-03-19T09:51:00.000-07:00

Forget the streets. Forget graffiti on concrete. Forget newspapers. When Bayan Muna leader Satur Ocampo spoke to accuse the present administration of complicity in the spate of extra-judicial killings that has even the US Senate in a doozy, he went to YouTube.

In joining the ranks of stand up comedians, wannabe Steven Spielbergs, and a horde of other people with handycams and too much time on their hands, Ocampo did something that I thought was pretty nifty: he brought the level of political debate back into the bedrooms, living rooms, and chatrooms of the one group of voters that actually have the power to do something real this coming May, if only they could get off of their bums long enough to realize it.

Like it or not, technology has changed both the rebellion and the manner by which it is done. When we trekked to EDSA in 2003 and raised our fists in indignation, we did it with cell phones and e-mail. So perhaps its time to take a look at the impact of technology on democracy and mobocracy, and see if we can use it not only to carve out spaces resistance in the world wide web, but to translate as well our real-world political revolutions into platforms that can be read and written onto by the generation of the 21st century.

tdm 2 rtp

2007-01-17T07:45:00.000-08:00

A cursory reading of material on Voice over Internet Protocols (VoIP) is an astounding mishmash of words that lend and relend themselves to analogy. So in this equally cursory comment on how VoIP should -- or rather, should not -- be regulated, allow me to begin by saying that legislators dealing with VoIP issues might want to take a few cues from the technology itself. After all, the universal telecommunications infrastructure deemed integral to national development is nothing if not the Internet in all its open glory.

Just as media gateway controllers act as the intelligent endpoints for packets on the go, regulation should position itself not as a guardian of either the sender or the receiver, but as the facilitator of the exchange. Regulation should allow both packets and sound waves to go to their respective, user-determined destinations. In other words, regulation, if indeed it wants to promote broader access, should not already be making a choice between a router or a PBX. If the PBX goes the way of the telegram, then that should be a choice for the users, i.e. the market, to make.

VoIP itself makes a distinction between the transmission of packets and the transmission of voice (aka, IP telephony). VoIP technology is not a mimicry of the PSTN, but rather a different species altogether of information transmission. This is why while VoIP can approach the quality and "5 9's" reliability of PSTNs, the approach is merely asymptotic: no matter how quickly or accurately the codec, it will only be (to borrow from the rules on electronic evidence) the functional equivalent of sound waves. Regulation cannot seek to perform a role that is already being performed by the structure of IP itself. Pricing controls, competition, and permissable use are all already governed by the nature of IP as a phenomenon inextricably bound to physical hardware and algorithms. What regulation should therefore focus on is not the monitoring of players per se, but the protection of each user from unwanted interference by other users. Which means that legal causes of action should be personal, and governed by the already lengthy provisions on delicts and torts. The only difference will lie in the nature of the evidence submitted.

It's never the technology, but the wielder of it.

the new steel

2006-12-03T00:36:00.000-08:00

Eben Moglen is the founder of the Software Freedom Center. On leave this year from his teaching post at the Columbia Law School, Moglen has been going around the United States as a salesman. And what he sells is the idea of free software.

the lucid comments that my classmates have so generously taken the time to post on this blog has gotten me thinking about things like space and infrastructure. in particular, the space and infrastructure that comes with a world of ideas. in one of his lectures, Moglen talks about steel and how that single commodity shaped the social relationships of the 20th century. By contrast, he says, the commodity of the 21st century is no longer steel, but the formulas and ciphers of software: you know, those bits of otherwise unintelligible gobbledygook that somehow come together and make otherwise uninteresting bits of silicon and copper wires do things for our otherwise technologically impaired lifestyles. The broadbandit is correct in talking about alternatives, that the internet in and of itself is only one of many ways in which we humans choose to communicate. but if Moglen is correct, then all the ways in which we communicate are all, in truth, linked to software. i mean, when was the last time you actually wrote someone a letter on a piece of paper? and if its all about software, then the only space to be is cyberspace. In the drops of electric rain that are continually falling about our heads are our text messages, voice calls, email, flickr photos, friendster accounts,SSS numbers, medical record databases, flight plans, resource management systems: all the things that make life in the 21st century what it is as we know it to be.

this is why i believe the battle (and yes, it is a battle) for control of the spaces and infrastructure that are needed to make ideas heard and seen -- to make ideas move from one's brain into one's world -- is so crucial. in order to maximize participate in a society that is the way ours is now, the tools to express creation must be shared and open source. software may be the new steel, but we need not be the new capitalists when it comes to allocating profit.

the possibility of impossible

2006-11-23T01:12:00.000-08:00

"Everything is impossible. Until it ain't." -- Ben, in Carnivale
"Life was an almost utterly improbable event with almost infinite opportunities of happening. So it did." -- James Lovelock, in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUNAhzwZkdU

This is a link to a short intro to an infotech class currently being conducted by Harvard Law professor Charles Nassen and his daughter, Rebecca, a computer scientist in the same university. The class is part of Harvard's extension program, and as you will see if you click on the link, uses information technology to teach and talk about it. It's a scaled up version of what our class on Cyberlaw seeks to do: conduct conversations in a space that doesn't physically exist.

If nothing else, those last nine words are exactly what makes infotech issues so unique. A space that doesn't exist was only heretofore possible as an analogy, a figure of speech. Because, at least from the point of view of physics and euclidean geometry, a space that doesn't physically exist is impossible. And yet here we are trading comments, making links, and getting to know each other through avatars, HTML, and pixels: things that don't physically exist either.

Information technology has made the impossible possible. The only limit is access to bandwidth. We have shrunken the world to the size of a microchip, and now anything that is in our minds can be translated into code and uploaded to digital reality. They will be intangible and ephemeral, and yet very very powerful simply because they will be able to change the we think.

Rather belatedly, as with all legislation (whether formal or informal), we are trying to come up with rules -- ways of containing the power of information. It's no longer a question of freedom of speech or equal protection (although these concepts do provide starting points). It's a question of who gets to dictate how we know and what we know. Which is why if we are going to come up with rules, we have to be very careful and very mindful of the fact that for something as fluid and dynamic as information and memetic exchange, nothing can be written in stone.

Because really: stone as a medium for mass communication was so five thousand years ago.

dots: the story of bits and bytes

2006-11-20T00:56:00.000-08:00

The thing with ideas is that great ones do not come into the world wholly formed. They do not fall like manna from heaven, or arrive in swaddling clothes immaculately conceived. Rather, great ideas are only the picture you get after connecting dots: smaller ideas that heretofore existed in isolation from one another and didn't mean much that way, but now, joined by the forces of massive contingency, are changing the world. This is how planets and stars come into being, and this is how the past makes the future. This is also how computers were born.

The First Dot
It is 1945 and Vannevar Bush, former vice president of MIT and director of the United States' Office of Scientific Research and Development, is writing an essay. During the war, he had been in charge of coordinating the efforts of thousands of scientists across the fifty states towards the development of more efficient ways of waging war, the atom bomb included. But the war was over, and in the essay, he asked "What are scientists to do next?" In answer to his own question, he took the position that the next generation of science in America should be devoted to finding more efficient ways of processing information. In particular, he outlined his idea of a memex that was a machine that worked like a desk, but could store volumes and volumes of material. The memex would have a mechanism that would allow the user to not only place material into files, but facilitate the retrieval of any one file within a blink of an eye.

The Second Dot
Bush's essay was published in the Atlantic in the same year that it was written. A copy of the magazine found its way to a small nipa hut that had been converted into a library on the shores of Leyte where an American soldier by the name of Douglas Engelbert was waiting for a boat to take him home. Five years later, Englebert began a crusade that would take the rest of his life developing a machine that could retrieve stored data and simultaneously display different files on a monitor that could partition itself into windows. He also spent a good deal of time designing a peripheral device to the machine: initially a small block of wood that had buttons and a cord and was set on trackballs.

The Third Dot
A half-Syrian orphan is adopted by a working class couple that barely have the money to send him to college once he comes of age. He ends up dropping out of college, but only so he could attend classes that really interested him. By the time he was in his late twenties, he was a billionaire, and was using his charisma to push a team of talented programmers to design a machine that he called "insanely great". This man was Steve Jobs, and the machine he and his team were obsessing about during the early '80s was the Macintosh. It was the first to use a desktop interface, overlapping windows, and to integrate the notion of WYSIWIG in programs for text, graphics, and numbers.

Connect the dots and you have the single most important thing to change the world since paper and Jesus Christ: computers. McLuhan says the medium is the message. Computers are the medium and the way they were developed not only augmented the way we worked, it revolutionized the way we communicated.

At no point in our history have ideas been so pregnant with other ideas. Which is why when we speak of regulating ideas, or regulating the means by which these are ideas are being expressed, we have to see very clearly that what is at stake isn’t just another net-based protocol or market cost, but the very language the human race is using to talk about itself, to itself.

tortuga

2006-11-16T00:22:00.000-08:00

From the late 17th to the middle part of the 18th century, the Isle of Tortuga was one of three major havens for corsairs, buccaneers, and down-on-their-luck sailors looking for gainful (if not exactly lawful) employment: pirates. These were men and women who, at the time, were reacting to the non-payment of fair wages by legitimate captains of shipping vessels, or escaping from the very real and lucrative slavery trade that targeted not just Africans, but Eastern Europeans and Asians, as well.

Although technically run by the French and the English, the Governors of Tortuga adamantly supported alternative opportunities for livelihood and allowed the culture of dissent to flourish with as little regulation as possible from either state. Tortuga quickly became known as Association Island, precisely because, in contrast to the strong monarchies of the mainland who were busy building wealth based on conquest and strong-arm mercantilism, it allowed individuals to negotiate for the terms of their employment and encouraged sailors to move to ships that offered better wages or better working conditions. A quick glance at the Pirate's Code shows the premium placed on communal sharing of profits, respect for prisoners, and even a liberal attitude towards consensual relationships: the Code did not require that couples be married, permitted openly homosexual unions, and was as close to Free Love as you could get prior to Woodstock.

Four hundred years later, there is a new brand of pirate. And a new Isle of Tortuga. Owners of major industry players in the market of ideas have branded groups that believe in broad applications of fair use and notions of copyleft, and brandish P2P like hooks and swords, as criminals, fighting as hard as possible to retain the semblance of control over a territory that is wider and wilder than the seven seas combined. And yet it is this very territory that provides the pirates with their havens: the architecture of the world wide web is such that fortresses of dissenting opinions can be defended, and clusters of like-minded individuals can accrue voices that demand to be heard.

The Pirate Revolution has begun: the game is on. And oh, is it so on.