The Blog From Hell

Cory Doctorow has built a lot of his arguments in favor of less restrictive copyright on stating that youtube's massive content output is so much bigger than that of Hollywood. Mostly the argument against him is based on the statement that he is rating quantity over quality.

I want to address that by saying that while Hollywood films are certainly more expensive (even low budget films) the suggestion that they are higher (or even high) quality is ridiculous. Some Hollywood movies are high quality, are great films, classics of their genre's and they get cinema's packed – despite the age of home theater systems and digital downloads.

Good quality Hollywood films do not seem to have lost out much on their traditional income – though perhaps their DVD sales are a little lower (this is by no means proven as there is no evidence to suggest that if downloads didn't exist people would buy instead – quite frankly with the recession as it stands, the evidence suggest that most downloaders would, if they couldn't download, simply have gone without-  the sale would not be made either way). 

Now granted a lot of what is on youtube may be considered "worse" and certainly less mainstream – but is that true ? When a proud mother posts a video of her 3-year old dancing, it may only be of value to his father working in another country – but surely that value to him alone is worth having the option for  ? This is what the internet is best at, putting the creators of content (even those with very tiny niche markets) directly in touch with the consumers of that content.

Now usually we hear that this "only works for bands like radiohead and nine inch nails who were already well established by the record industry before they went indy". The claim being something like "indy bands that never sign, never make money" – which is just not true. On the contrary as the Diesel Whores sing in a song aimed mostly at other bands: "5FM is NOT YOUR FRIEND". 

In fact the traditional publishing industry has a truly pathetic rate of recognition for true quality and most truly great works from the pre-internet age had to go through massive hoops just to get out there. In the world of books – Gone with the Wind was rejected by 14 publishers before a small little publishing house in New York that mostly served a couple of pulp authors dared to take a chance on it, it became one of the greatest selling (and simply greatest) works of literature of all time – and spun of one of the best-selling movies of all time as well.

And the argument that "going indy" and refusing to sign only works for established artists ? The argument that new (but good) artists cannot make it big without signing ? A prime example here comes from 1983. Some 4 years after the Runaways split up, their lead guitarist and backup vocalist finished the debut album with her new band. She was all but forgotten in the industry. 23 major labels rejected their recording. So in desperation she self-published. It became the biggest album of the year and established Joan Jett as the undisputed queen of Rock 'n Roll to this day (and she is still unsigned). 

"I love rock'nroll" is an anthem that every rock lover knows, even if they were from a later generation and got to know it as a Britney Spears cover – the reality is that Joan Jett was a brilliant musician, one of the best rockers of all time -and she could not get signed. If she hadn't gone indy, we would never have had her music.

She proved that new talent, good talent, can go indy and become multiplatinum successes – and she did this BEFORE the internet. Now this doesn't mean every indy band will become multiplatinum if they put their stuff online. Most of them may get a few more people at their next show, it may pay for them to keep playing, most will never become mainstream famous. 

Is that so bad ? Most bands that are mainstream famous are not very good. But by putting musicians directly in contact with listeners, what the internet can do is keep niche markets for non-mainstream genres alive. Rock outside the small mainstream, modern classical  composers (let's ignore the oxymoron in the concept), and yes – little girls dancing.

In this we get a true cultural tapestry of all that is our culture, a record of our way of life like no previous society has had, or could have created, and that alone is truly valuable. But we also get to have more art, in more genre's and more styles – artists who could never have survived before can have a better survival now. Artists who can't get signed now because the old model is so costly and their niche market too small (not because they are not brilliant artists but because not many people like the kind of art they create) can reach those small niche markets – afordably. A small niche market is still a lot of people when you can go global.  

Sure a lot of it will be junk, but a lot of it is junk now – and so is a lot of the big media conglomerate's product. The new Pirates of the Carribean movie and the new Lady Gaga outfit …er… album – that's junk. It's crap – and it's getting more airplay and marketing than they are giving the good stuff they have signed.

The thing is that what youtube videos are now would have been impossible with the technology of just a decade ago, in another decade they will be able to match the current big budget blockbusters in special effects, storytelling and acting will follow. And Hollywood will probably survive too – their big budgets will be doing things that are impossible for them now, and will be impossible for home filmmakers in a decade, and both will coexist – and as citizens and consumers we will have the benefit of more. Hollywood doesn't like that, no corporation ever liked competition – but it's not them we should worry about.

It's everybody else. Including all the young filmmakers with niche markets – smaller groups of people whom they can reach, that they couldn't reach before. The ability to create the richest cultural tapestry in human history – is surely worth the odd ketchup stain. 

I can draw this argument through to all the arts (and in fact just in this post I applied it to several – notably film-making and music but many others). Many of the greatest artists of the past starved, their work not truly valued until long after they died. Mozart,  Van Gogh, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas – the list goes on. 

How many of the greatest artists were never recognized because no copies of their work survived for the later generations who would see it's worth ? What youtube can do, among it's collections of everything (including the junk) is store it all, keep it all there, and that means not just the niche-market good artists, but the great art that we now cannot recognize survives – to be recognized by our grandchildren who will. 

If we allow the content corporations to kill that opportunity off – then we have truly learned nothing from history, and we deserve to be culturally deprived. Then we deserve for the archeologists of the future to write us off as a generation that had lost all artistic sense and created nothing more noteworthy than Lady Gaga – a generation where the shock-value was the only value. 

We have so much more to offer… let's make sure we don't choke it.

As most of you know, I spent about half my working life involved in education reform. I wrote software systems to digitally empower impoverished schools, and I did all in my power to ensure that more than that – I empowering the children using them. To ensure that the software in there taught not just skills but thinking, not just how to do, but why to do. To inspire creativity and free thought. 

I am passionate about education. One of the most commonly heard cries from our socially conservative (translation: authoritarian restrictionist) friends is "think of the children", but that is one thing they never truly countenance. Thinking of the children – really doing so requires one thing they hate above all teaching the children to think of and for themselves.

Right now I think the Waldorf school system is probably the best out there, and sadly  - it's still wrong in some of the most crucial ways. Being the best of a horrible thing is not a major achievement and this is why a fundamental piece of almost every piece of science fiction for the past century was foreseeing a radical change in how our children learn. A change most of which is now feasible and none of which has even slightly been realized.

It all begins with that most ubiquitious of school symbols. The uniform. People tend to look at me a bit funny about this. The progressives think I focus to much on a fairly unimportant thing, while the conservatives defend uniforms as a great thing. That alone is a warning sign to any progressives who don't see what a terribly bad thing they are.

By themselves they are bad enough, what they represent makes them utterly unforgivable. There is a reason that I've never met a student who liked their uniform, the myth of the student who felt pride in his straightjacket is just that – a myth. Although I suppose the odd kid that was that brainwashed exists, they are not a statistically useful amount. 

Lets look at the basics first. Uniforms create uniformity. That is, by itself, the worst possible thing we can do to our children. How can we promote critical thinking, innovative problem solving and free thought when we deliberately make an effort to prevent self-expression and send a massively visual message that "everybody is the same" ? Everybody is equal – that is a wonderful ideal. Everybody is the same – that is a scourge. 

Uniformity breeds consent, stifles critical thinking, stifles creativity, stifles expression – destroys the imagination (that most useful and vital of educational tools). Being made to look the same, destroys your ability to find your true self, which destroys your ability to find that unique feature in which you truly do excel, your capacity to be a genius at something. How many of us don't discover our true direction, and our opportunity to excel until adulthood ? When it's too late to reach our true potential at it ? How many of us, with our minds molded along a path by school uniformity ideals make a career choice we regret about two weeks into university ? How many of us never get the chance to do what we truly would have been wonderful at – to the benefit of ourselves and everybody else ? 

How many Mozart's have never touched a piano ? 

School systems like we know them are really not very ancient. Variations on the theme of child education and school like structures are, but they were all fairly limited and most education were based on a concept of apprenticeship useful only for creating new exploited peasants with actual learning limited to the very wealthy upper classes (at no point in human history prior to the enlightenment was literacy levels ever higher than 0.1% – right now there are more living literate people in the world than the total number of people who were ever literate in the entire history of humanity prior to 1900) – when the enlightenment came with their idea of learning as a universal concept, of schooling for all – they took their model from the only such system in existence.

A system that was developed in Germany in the 1800's. That system had two stated goals (as a decidedly industrial age innovation), it was to create factory workers and soldiers. People who followed orders, never the people who gave them (those went through the same elite systems of education as their forebears for thousands of years). People who obeyed authority, never people who would become authority – let alone people who would ever work by themselves or achieve any individual aspirations. Factory workers and soldiers.

Uniforms were a fundamental part of that system, as they are of any industrial factory or military. By removing all individual difference (notice the similarity between school-system approved haircuts and military haircuts ?) – they try all in their power to stifle individual thought. Your job was never to think. It was merely to be an automaton capable of very complex tasks. Never question the system. Never try to quit and start your own factory. 

It was never completely successful (thank goodness) a few mavericks always stood out, but there is a reason that so many of the greatest artists of our time are high-school drop-outs (as are so many people who did nothing with their lives – what could they have been if they had been in a school that helped them find what they should have been great at ?). Joan Jett and Chris Rock and Alice Cooper – people who changed the world for the better, who created fundamentally important parts of our cultural heritage, and didn't finish school. The same pattern emerges in business, most of the people who have started truly huge new enterprises over the past century were not fully high-school educated, among those who were- almost none finished university and the few who did usually only on their third or fourth try (switching courses each time). Even the mighty Bill Gates never finished his Harvard Degree.

While they are a minority of drop-outs, it's frightening that the people who do the best in our world – almost invariable could not cope with our school system. Because what allows people to do the best – is asking critical questions, is challenging the status quo (you can never succeed in the status quo – success by it's very definition is to rise above the status quo, and that means being able to see past it). 

That is what uniforms are a legacy off – and still promote. The sameness of us all, and the us-versus-them attitudes of militarism, authoritarianism and tribalism. From school uniforms came appartheid, came Nazism, came modern day China. Even the mighty Waldorf with it's focus on individual creativity and learning through artistic expression has not been able to shed this relic of conformist control. The USA's refusal to allow uniforms in public schools was a direct statement against just that – and it's present faillings prove that while uniforms are very, very bad – getting rid of them is not enough by itself, you still have to actually teach creativity and critical thinking and rationalism, but with uniformity seen as anything but evil (and uniforms automatically promote that view) you have lost before you started. My best friend is studying to be a Waldorf teacher and I've gotten quite a sense of how they operate (though I won't pretend it's complete). I like a lot of what I've seen, it's so much better than what I had. But it's not quite there. There are still uniforms, perception matters too much (I've heard her talk of entire classes of teacher training about the importance of maintaining the right perception of yourself as a teacher) [see below for why I'm opposed to that]

Most of the modern day defenders of uniforms cite the same arguments over and over, and the vast majority of those are merely gloss-words designed to make the very evil I outlined above sound like a good thing. They say "uniforms promote school spirit, a sense of community and discipline" – but that is nothing but a nicer-sounding way of saying "uniforms promote conformity, sameness and authoritarian subjugation".

We shouldn't be trying to teach discipline. We should be teaching self-discipline. In the end we should raise kids who don't do good because they fear getting punished, but do good because they believe in doing good. Who don't refrain from evil because they fear getting caught (because then you raise kids who will beat up an old lady for her purse money if they know they can get away with it) but refrain from evil because they care about other people. Asian school system (non-Chinese ones anyway) have worked on the principle of teaching self-discipline rather than discipline for thousands of years (a tradition largely destroyed sadly in the modern age, as industrial schooling took hold in Asia ) – of course those school systems (mostly built around Asian philosophy and broad-scale "martial arts" [a horrible translation for a concept which in Asian languages actually cover many fields - there is even a martial art of "beaurocracy"]) were elite – a structure for the very upper classes, and the same approach largely fielded in the elite and wealthy education of the robber-barons of the West. It is only the peasants whose kids were taught obedience and made to look the same. 

They tell us "uniforms promote equality, by hiding the differences between rich and poor". This would almost be an acceptable excuse (though not nearly good enough to undo the evil it causes) if only it wasn't plain wrong. Uniforms don't hide the existence between rich and poor. Kids know exactly who has richer parents. They know who lives in the wealthiest part of the school district, they know whose dad drives the fanciest car, who has the biggest TV-screen and the largest swimming pool. And they know who does not.

Of course uniforms do tend to be designed to desexualize the wearers, which ties in with the war so many of our parents are fighting against sex. But this has never done anything to reduce the amount of raging hormones teenagers have – and uniforms have never reduced the number of teen pregnancies (while honest and truthful sex ed has). It's a waste of time that serves no purpose other than to make self-righteous conservatives feel better.

Ultimately these two little snippets from my old school rulebook sums it up beautifully:

"Children may not smoke on school grounds, or anywhere else in school uniform".

"Students may not touch or kiss or engage with the opposite sex anywhere in school uniform."

See between the lines (as reinforced so many times in teacher speeches) – what matters here is not what the children actually do, but the perception about what they do. The school doesn't actually care if kids smoke or not, as long as other people don't know the kids in this school smoke. They don't care if kids are having sex or kissing (and what high-school kid never got a kiss ?) just as long as everybody thinks the teenagers in this highschool never kiss. There is no true caring about the children – either morally, realistically or in any other sense, all that matters is the perception of obedience, control and discipline.

It doesn't matter if quite a few girls will drop out because they fell pregnant after the sex ed classes failed to mention condoms, what matters is that when the right-wing parents of younger children drive past them in street, they don't see the kids kissing, in case they decide to send their young kids to another high school instead.

It doesn't matter what your share of the shockingly high teen-suicide rates are – as long as your kids appear to all be perfect little robots who are never any trouble to anybody in charge.

When the perception people have of your children's behavior is more important to you than what they actually do and think and feel – you are a very bad parent, if you are a teacher who acts and thinks that way about a thousand children entrusted to your care – you are a thousand times worse.

It's not without reason that the suicide rate of children raised in conservative homes is three times that of children raised in liberal homes. Lack of self expression is the number one cause of depression world wide. This is no less true in adults than teenagers but those who made it to adulthood without giving up have obviously got a lesser risk of failing now than teenagers who are just discovering their true identities, and for whom self expression is – if anything – a thousand times more important.

In public schools world wide there is a strong correlation between suicide risk and IQ. The smarter a teenager, the higher the risk of suicide. This is a big warning sign, but interestingly in gifted-schools where the percentage of high-IQ students is well above the standard-distribution you expect in a public school the suicide rates are the lowest in the world. Why ? Because there are no uniforms or uniformity. Creativity and imagination are expressed and used for teaching rather than suppressed. Critical thinking and problem solving and questioning of ideas is encouraged, not brainwashed away. Those kids are expected to change the status quo, not to follow it (or worse, believe it unchangeable – which equals hopelessness – which causes death).

In the end. When people say "think of the children" so they can take yet another artistic expression and hide it behind a mask of shame and censorship… I think to myself "yes, please do think of the children. Think of all kids who will hang themselves today, or walk into their school with a gun and shoot a bunch of people and then themselves… because nobody ever really cared to listen to them".

Michael Moore asked Marilyn Manson "what would you have said to the columbine kids if you could talk to them before the shooting ?", meaning how would Manson have tried to dissuade them from their planned course of action ? Manson replied: "I wouldn't have said anything to them. I'd have listened to them – and that's what nobody did." – Simplistic, yet one of the most insightful comments on modern education I have ever heard. 

Teachers who truly care about children, should hate this as much as me – and realize that it's not impossible to change. I had a few teachers like that, who would in private speak out against the horrors of the education system (the same horrors I mention in this post) and then say "but there is nothing we can do – the schoolboards will always be run by conservative parents who care about perception over reality" … no, they don't have to be. We can change that, bit by bit chipping away at it, and making it all better.

That's exactly what I'm doing right now.

As regular readers of my blog know, I am a big fan of the works of George Orwell. Orwell as a social author had a far better understanding of political reality and history than almost any other author in history. Orwell also understood something nearly all other authors had either glossed over entirely (as it's not a nice story) or just not understood at all.

Animal farm runs us through that process in intricate detail, but it also gets several paragraphs from Emannuel Goldstein in 1984. Goldstein's summary comes down to this: the abuses of the lower class (the workers and the poor) by the wealthy ultimately and inevitably leads to revolution. In this revolution the middle classes lead, claiming to be fighting for the poor (many of them may even genuinely believe that). When the revolution is won – the middle classes take power, and promptly become a new upper class whose abuses are no less severe than the previous upper class. Later the process repeats. The only people whose lot is never improved, who never gets more freedom, greater equality or improved opportunity are the poor (the lower classes).

This summary of revolutions have played out in our history a thousand times for as long as we've recorded it. Whenever the revolutionaries won – the same result inevitably came about. It didn't much matter what the political system of the leaders were – corruption and abuse would inevitably lead back to the same unequal society after the fact – even as they claimed to have corrected it. It happened in the French revolution – it's happening in South Africa right now.

But as 2011 started, we saw a kind of revolution that has never happened before – perhaps was never possible before. It was made possible by the existence of the internet -by it's power to give every member of society an equal voice. In a small country in North Africa the people got tired of the abuses of their long-ruling dictatorial government. They took to the streets. Not with guns but with posters. Not with weapons but with slogans. But most importantly – without any discernible middle class leaders. This revolution did not aim to put anybody into power. It didn't make any claims about who should be in charge – all it said loud and clear is this: the current leadership must go.

It didn't have any of it's own leaders to take the plunge, it was anarchist revolution at it's best. Leaderless and uncontrolled people merely demanding their own freedom – without any charismatic leader talking for them, they were talking for themselves. They didn't support any particular opposition – they only spoke against the current leadership and demanded his dismissal. Thus the tyranny in Tunisia ended, but now the entire system is different. The way this revolution happened makes one thing clear: the new leader had better do a damn good job, or he'll be ousted very rapidly. 

This smacks deeply and wonderfully of the system most anarchist philosophers have espoused: instantly recallable representatives who have no right to make any decision that is not entirely in line with the direct, democratic will of the people. The closest thing to self-governance for all that can feasibly work in a large society. Representatives without any real power, not rulers – but implementers of the people's voice. They can't dare do anything else because the people have shown that even without an official line of "instantly recallable" in a constitution – they can and will recall you instantly if they aren't happy with what you're doing.

The wildfire spread, within days an identical revolution was happening in Egypt and a dictatorship which as stood for decades – apparently unassailable toppled after just a few weeks. Even as it happened other authoritarian governments panicked. China's internet clamp-downs worsened. Cameroon banned twitter. One thing was clear, the dictators didn't get it. Clamping down on the internet was tried in Egypt and had no effect. The internet has already changed the very nature of the human mind in such a way that even if you remove it now, it won't stop what that change has made possible, it's too late already.

These revolutions are not following the Goldstein pattern at all. There are no middle-class leaders merely using the poor majority as pawns in their power game. Even as the dictators use weapons to try and defend their position – the people fight back successfully using just information – words. And they win. Because they didn't appoint the revolutionary leaders to power in the aftermath – there is no "we fought for you" to hide corruption behind. The new leaders just know that they rule with a sword over their heads. Do it right, or we'll replace you, and keep replacing you until somebody does.

This is the closest thing to an anarchist revolution humanity has seen since Catalonia in the 1920's and it's beautiful. The likely end result may well be what happened in Catalonia – a society Orwell himself described by the 1930's as the most equal,  peaceful, wealthy and productive in the world – despite the absence of any government at all. Despite the absence of any corporations or any bosses in the factories -these factories were owned by their workers, who managed themselves, and split the income according to contribution.

That had all the best features of socialism and capitalism without any of the negative effects of either. It was both economic and social equality without poverty – and yet without the stagnation of communism (since contributing more meant earning more). It's not quite as far, there is still a government – with force of arms. This is by no means an anarchist revolution so please don't think I am saying that. It is however the closest thing to one we've seen in over 90 years. 

It has very strong parallels to anarchist philosophy (or socialist libertarian if you prefer), and those parallels have changed the picture. This is not a Goldstein-revolution. These revolutions may actually make life better for the people who took part in them, who saw their loved ones killed to bring them about. These revolutions have a nature that has hardly ever happened before in all of history (barring a few rare anarchist revolutions – which were indeed few and far between, perhaps the most successful being Greenland which was an anarchist country for nearly 200 years starting at the end of the middle ages). 

This is the end of the Orwellian picture of society… this is the start of something very new, and very different, and I think, very wonderful. As we speak the once apparently unassailable leadership of Gadaffi in Libya is facing a revolution – and fighting back hard. It seems almost impossible that it can withstand it much longer. The other dictators and authoritarians are right to be afraid, this is a new kind of revolution altogether – and one against which there is almost certainly no defense. The kind of revolution that the world has always needed. With every dictator that falls, another country will be galvanized, we may well not see these end until there are no dictators left in the world. Perhaps even the mostly loved Castro in Cuba will see his power vanish ? 

Who knows how far this spirit of freedom and equality will spread ? All I know is, this is an extremely exciting time to be a live. We are living in a series of events that have almost no historical precursor whatsoever. Events that have already changed the face of the world – and it's only been 3 months ! Events that may well see the entire nature of global politics changed irrevocably changed for the better before they are over. 

Scary isn't it ? But a good kind of scary. A very, very good kind of scary.