misanthropy

Kick me again, RIAA!

by

“ The anti-copyright gaggle has an insatiable need to feel victimized. Injustice burns deep, and is triggered by the merest hint that “The Man” might be tampering with one’s “bits”. Another example of technology utopians trying to bypass politics and claim victimhood – the Net Neutrality” campaign – shows very similar characteristics.” A while ago … Read more

Why animals shouldn’t be able to sue you

by

Mr Ed, the talking attorney

Obama’s “regulation czar” Professor Cass Sunstein wants animals to be able to sue.

Animals can’t reason or express themselves, naturally, so the litigation would be handled by human lawyers, acting as ventriloquists on behalf of the animal kingdom. Think Mister Ed the talking horse, crossed with Eliot Spitzer.

“Any animals that are entitled to bring suit would be represented by (human) counsel, who would owe guardian-like obligations and make decisions, subject to those obligations, on their clients’ behalf,” according to Sunstein. The Harvard legal scholar first proposed the argument in 2002.

“This doesn’t look good for hunters, ranchers, restaurateurs, biomedical researchers, or ordinary pet owners,” says the food industry lobby group The Center for Consumer Freedom, which raised Sunstein’s radical “rights” agenda. In Spain, activists have already proposed that apes be granted human rights.

Read more

The hitman, the Pirate Bay and the Freetard professor

by

REG: What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?!
FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression!
REG: It’s symbolic of his struggle against reality
– Monty Python’s Life of Brian

Everyone’s a prankster these days – it’s all in the name of art.

On Monday a former Irish loyalist hitman was sentenced to 16 years in prison for the attempted murder of senior Sinn Fein leaders. Michael Stone had burst into the Belfast Assembly with nail bombs, a garotte, an axe and knives, but was quickly wrestled to the ground. In court, Stone claimed the event had been a piece of “performance art”.

Stone’s paintings had exhibited at Belfast Engine Room Gallery. In court, Stone was defiant: “Make art, not war,” he told an unimpressed judge.

But Stone’s not alone. Last week two art school students in the Netherlands released a software prank. They developed a Firefox brower plug-in that redirected Amazon.com surfers to unlicensed versions of the same material on P2P site Pirate Bay. The Pirates of the Amazon (geddit?) plug-in was quickly withdrawn after Amazon.com lawyers got in touch with the students’ ISP.

Read more

Flush away the Eco Slums

by

Who would have guessed that in 2008, a pledge to give British people flushing toilets would be a shock vote winner? The Conservatives this week promised to scrap the Government’s plans for 15 “eco towns” which will potentially house 100,000 people. These have been heralded as a new era in design, but you need to … Read more

TV tells CO2-emitting children to die early

by

ABC's Planet Slayer

Carbon Cult sickos are under fire for an interactive website that tells children they should die because they emit CO2.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Planet Slayer” site invites young children to take a “greenhouse gas quiz”, asking them “how big a pig are you?”. At the end of the quiz, the pig explodes, and ABC tells children at “what age you should die at so you don’t use more than your fair share of Earth’s resources!”

It’s one of a number of interactive features that “Get the dirt on greenhouse without the guilt trips. No lectures. No multinational-bashing (well, maybe a little…). Just fun and games and the answers to all your enviro-dilemas,” ABC claims.

The site is aimed at 9-year olds. However even a “virtuous” rating (e.g. not owning a car and recycling) is outweighed by eating meat, or spending an average Aussie income – with the result that many 9-year olds are being told they’ve already outstayed their environmentally-compliant stay on the planet.

“Do you think it’s appropriate that the ABC … depict people who are average Australians as massive overweight ugly pigs, oozing slime from their mouths, and then to have these pigs blow up in a mass of blood and guts?” asked Senator Mitch Fifield in the Herald-Sun.

The state-sponsored broadcaster (why is that not a surprise?) defended the morbid quiz, with ABC managing director Mark Scott insisting “the site was not designed to offend certain quarters of the community but to engage children in environmental issues.”

Which is eco-speak for frighten them witless. However, as the excellent science blog Watts Up With That points out, the site clearly breaches Australian broadcasting guidelines on “harmful or disturbing” content.

Meanwhile, the site’s designers are revelling in the controversy:

“Thank God for outraged senators – you can’t buy publicity like that,” PlanetSlayer’s “creative director” Bernie Hobbs crowed to the New York Post.

So how, according to ABC, does one appease the vengeful Death God, Gaia?

Read more

Radiohead backs WW2-style austerity program

by

Radiohead on tour?

Misery will be compulsory, if top rockers Radiohead have their way. The band have thrown their weight behind a “World War 2”-style programme of austerity measures: including restrictions on behaviour, and higher taxes.

Last week, two newspaper columnists called for a return to the kind of social coercion only ever seen before in wartime. It’s all for the sake of “the environment”, but as we’ll see – it’s a very peculiar and selective version of environmentalism.

Singer Thom Yorke told The Observer:

Unless you have laws in place, nothing’s going to happen…

Nothing of this is going to be voluntary. [sic] It’s a bizarre form of rationing that we’re all going to have to accept, just like people did in the Second World War.”

It’s the War On CO2, of course, and Radiohead will be doing “their bit”.

Read more

One-Click™ colonialism

by

The music industry has a long and shameful history of robbing black artists of their rights. Now along comes some new software that will help speed up the job. Think of it as a sort of 1-Click “non-payment” system.

Liblicense is a project that Creative Commons hopes to integrate with MIT Media Lab’s OLPC, or One Laptop Per Child initiative. That’s the rubbishy sub-notebook designed for developing countries, that developing countries don’t seem to want very much. (Shockingly, the ungrateful recipients seem to prefer real computers).

The genius of the move is that instead of needing to hire shifty lawyers to bamboozle artists out of the right to be paid, Creative Commons makes the process not only voluntary, but automated, too. Liblicense will greatly ease the process of assigning a Creative Commons license to creative material straight from the desktop.

Read more

Whatever happened to… The Wisdom of Crowds?

by

Future social historians looking back at the web cult – which met in San Francisco this week for a $3,000-a-head “summit” – may wonder what made them tick. Scholars could do worse than examine their superstitions. We’ll bet that lurking on the bookshelf of almost every “delegate” was a copy of James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. It’s as ubiquitous as Erik Von Daniken books were in the 1970s.

In Silicon Valley this year, “collective intelligence” is the mandatory piece of psycho-babble necessary to open a Venture Capitalist’s cheque book. Surowiecki’s faith in prediction markets appears unshakeable. Writing in Slate three years ago, in an attempt to save Admiral Poindexter’s “Terror Casino” – punters were invited to bet on the probability of state leaders being assassinated, for example – Mystic Jim begged for understanding:

“Even when traders are not necessarily experts, their collective judgment is often remarkably accurate because markets are efficient at uncovering and aggregating diverse pieces of information. And it doesn’t seem to matter much what markets are being used to predict.”

“Whether the outcome depends on irrational actors (box-office results), animal behavior (horse races), a blend of irrational and rational motives (elections), or a seemingly random interaction between weather and soil (orange-juice crops), market predictions often outperform those of even the best-informed expert. Given that, it’s reasonable to think a prediction market might add something to our understanding of the future of the Middle East.”

A heart-warming fable, then, for a population robbed of their pensions, and beset by uncertainty after the dot.com bubble. Suroweicki failed to mention however that experts are regularly outperformed by chimps, or dartboards – but no one talks about “The Wisdom of Chimps”.

This week however the people spoke – and the markets failed.

Read more

Neurosis as a lifestyle: remixing revisited

by

“We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible ? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed”
– Fillippo Marinetti, 1909

When a year ago I looked at some of the strange attitudes to copyright and creativity that abound on the internet, vilification followed swiftly. I wondered what was behind odd assertions that “the power of creativity has been granted to a much wider range of creators because of a change in technology”, which grew, without pausing for punctuation, into even odder and grander claims, such as “the law of yesterday no longer makes sense.” ‘Remix Culture’ as defined by the technology utopians wasn’t so much a celebration of culture as it is of the machines that make it possible, we noted. But many people simply find such thinking quite alien. So it’s heartening to see writers like Nick Carr and, today, the Wall Street Journal‘s columnist Lee Gomes join the debate that so animates Reg readers, and question these silly assumptions too.

Gomes hears a dot com executive sell his movie editing service with the claim that, “until now, watching a movie has been an entirely passive experience.”

(We heard a similar, silly claim from Kevin Kelly recently, only about reading.)

Passive? Not at all, Gomes explains today:

“Watching a good movie is ‘passive’ in the same way that looking at a great painting is ‘passive’ – which is, not very. You’re quite actively lost in thought. For my friend, though, the only activity that seemed ‘active’, and thus worthwhile, was when a person sitting at a PC engaged in digital busy work of some kind.”

Which is the world view in a nutshell. The future in which the scribbles of the digerati adorn every book or movie is a nightmare, he agrees. It’s also rather presumptious. Who does this self-selecting group claim to represent?

We’ve had a glimpse into this “future” with Google for the past three years, where to reach some original source material, one must wade through thickets of drivel, some of it generated by bloggers, the rest by machines pretending to be bloggers. It’s hardly anyone’s idea of enhancement, and Gomes calls it “dismally inferior”, and has a lovely simile.

“Reading some stray person’s comment on the text I happen to be reading is about as appealing as hearing what the people in the row behind me are saying about the movie I’m watching.”

Read more