The SOPA opera

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Last Sunday’s Observer column.

The key to survival – in business as in the jungle – is to be able to learn from your mistakes. The strange thing is that some industries haven’t yet figured that out. Chief among them are the so-called “content” industries – the ones represented by huge multimedia corporations which own movie studios, record labels and publishing houses.

Every 20 years or so, technology throws up a challenge to these industries. When audio cassettes arrived, for example, the music industry fought tooth and nail to have the technology outlawed or crippled. Why? Because it would encourage “piracy”. What happened? The record labels wound up making lots of money from cassettes as well as records.

Then along came the video recorder, and the movie industry fought it tooth and nail because it was the handmaiden of the devil – on account of facilitating “piracy”. What happened? Same story: it turned out that the studios were able to make tons of money from videocassettes, because films continued to sell long after they had disappeared from cinemas.

Since then the story has been repeated at least twice more – with DVDs and portable MP3 players. So you’d think that the penny would have dropped in what might loosely be called the minds of those who run the content industries. The lesson is that new technologies that look like threats can become glorious opportunities. But there’s still no evidence that media moguls have grasped that simple idea.

The ideas man

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I’ve long been an addict of Edge.org, the website/salon founded by John Brockman. I finally got to interview him for the Observer.

To say that John Brockman is a literary agent is like saying that David Hockney is a photographer. For while it’s true that Hockney has indeed made astonishingly creative use of photography, and Brockman is indeed a successful literary agent who represents an enviable stable of high-profile scientists and communicators, in both cases the description rather understates the reality. More accurate ways of describing Brockman would be to say that he is a “cultural impresario” or, as his friend Stewart Brand puts it, an “intellectual enzyme”. Brand goes on helpfully to explain that an enzyme is “a biological catalyst – an adroit enabler of otherwise impossible things”.

The first thing you notice about Brockman, though, is the interesting way he bridges CP Snow’s “Two Cultures” – the parallel universes of the arts and the sciences. When profilers ask him for pictures, one he often sends shows him with Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, no less. Or shots of the billboard photographs of his head that were used to publicise an eminently forgettable 1968 movie. But he’s also one of the few people around who can phone Nobel laureates in science with a good chance that they will take the call.

The USB Typewriter

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This is the kind of stuff that makes my day — and makes normal people wonder what geeks are smoking.

Lovely, lovely idea. Leading edge uselessness I call it. And that’s a compliment: it’s about doing ingenious things just for fun. You can get the kit from here. Now, where did I put that old Olivetti portable?

Thanks to Brian for the link.

Language and social change

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At dinner last night someone mentioned that a local village had changed the name of its village hall to “the People’s Hall”, and it suddenly made me think about how some words lose their resonance as society changes. “The People’s Hall” has a whiff of Marxist — or at any rate socialist — ideology. Likewise, nobody talks about “workers” (as in, say, the Workers’ Educational Association) any more. Come to think of it, when was the last time you heard anyone use the term “socialism” with approval? Or “progressive”? And then it just so happened that the next item on my iPod playlist was that wonderful satirical song by the Strawbs — Part of the Union.

LATER: I remembered something Ross McKibben once wrote about Margaret Thatcher:

Her fundamental aim was to destroy the Labour Party and ‘socialism’, not to transform the British economy. If the destruction of socialism also transformed the economy, well and good, but that was for her a second-order achievement. Socialism was to be destroyed by a major restructuring of the electorate: in effect, the destruction of the old industrial working class. Its destruction was not at first consciously willed. The disappearance of much of British industry in the early 1980s was not intended, but it was an acceptable result of the policies of deflation and deregulation; and was then turned to advantage. The ideological attack on the working class was, I think, willed. It involved an attack on the idea of the working class – indeed, on class as a concept. People were, via home ownership or popular capitalism, encouraged to think of themselves as not working class, whatever they actually were. The market thus disciplined some, and provided a bonanza for others. The economy was treated not as a productive mechanism but as a lottery, with many winners. The problem with such a policy was that it created a wildly unstable economy which Thatcher’s chancellors found increasingly difficult to control, and in which many of the apparent winners later became aggrieved losers.

In that sense, we’re all living in a world — linguistic and otherwise — that Thatcher created. Which means, I guess, that I will just have to go and see the damned movie.

The new Digital Divide

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From today’s NYTimes.

The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth.

Arieso, a company in Newbury, England, that advises mobile operators in Europe, the United States and Africa, documented the statistical gap when it tracked 1.1 million customers of a European mobile operator during a 24-hour period in November.

The gap between extreme users and the rest of the population is widening, according to Arieso. In 2009, the top 3 percent of heavy users generated 40 percent of network traffic. Now, Arieso said, these users pump out 70 percent of the traffic.

Michael Flanagan, the chief technology officer at Arieso, said the study did not produce a more precise profile of extreme users. But the group, he said, was probably diverse, with a mix of business users gaining access to the Internet over a 3G network while traveling, and individuals with generous or unlimited mobile data packages watching videos, the main cause of the excess traffic.

Interesting data. At the moment, only about 13 per cent of the world’s 6.1 billion cellphones are smartphones, according to Ericsson, the leading maker of mobile network equipment, but the rate exceeds 30 percent in larger markets like the United States, Germany and Britain. My (informal) guess, based purely on observing those around me in the street and on trains, is that the proportion of smartphones is much higher than that in the UK.

The increasing penetration of smartphones is a one-way street — and, as Jonathan Zittrain, Tim Wu and others have pointed out — the destination it’s heading towards is not necessarily an attractive one in terms of freedom and innovation.

As the NYT report puts it:

The more powerful phones are rapidly replacing the simpler, less voracious devices in many countries, raising traffic levels and pressure on operators to keep pace. In countries like Sweden and Finland, smartphones now account for more than half of all mobile phones … About 35 percent of Finns also use mobile laptop modems and dongles, or modems in a USB stick; one operator, Elisa, offers unlimited data plans for as little as 5 euros, or $6.40, a month.

As a result, Finns consume on average 1 gigabyte of wireless data a month over an operator’s network, almost 10 times the European average. As more consumers buy smartphones, the level of mobile data consumption and congestion will rise in other countries.

Kodak & Eve RIP

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Kodak RIP, originally uploaded by jjn1.

The news today is that Kodak is preparing to file for bankruptcy and there can’t be a photographer of my generation who doesn’t feel an incredulous shudder at the prospect. It was an iconic company, and its products (especially Kodachrome) attained near-mythical status. (I mean to say, how many other commercial products have inspired a Paul Simon song?) Business school students will see the company’s demise as an illustration of Clayton Christensen’s idea of the Innovator’s Dilemma. Stranger still is the discovery that Kodak was a pioneer in the digital photography field (it built the first digital camera in 1975), and indeed its only current prospect of escaping bankruptcy seems to rely on selling its portfolio of patents, some of the most valuable of which are in digital imagery.

My hunch is that because the film-retailing and chemical processing sides of the business were so profitable and successful, those involved in that carried most weight in the company, and the engineers working on digital simply couldn’t persuade senior management to pay attention to a technology that would eventually cannibalise that core business. In a way, the same thing happened with the music industry when MP3 and the Net came along.

Today also brought news that Eve Arnold has died at the great age of 99. It sent me to Magnum (of which she was the first female member) to look again at their carousel of her most famous images. (The BBC also had a slideshow which includes the lovely picture of her sitting crosslegged on the ground shooting with a Leica.) The Guardian had a lovely piece by the film-maker Beeban Kidron, who became Arnold’s assistant at the age of 16.

“From Eve”, she writes,

“I learned: how to pack a suitcase – with a dress you could wear to a palace and shoes to run a marathon if required; how to look at pictures – for metaphor, form and truth; how to work – until it was done; how to be kind to your fellow artist – judge the endeavour not the result; and how to be a friend – through thick and thin; and how to laugh – uproariously and often.

I haven’t worked for Eve for more than 30 years – that privilege resides with Linni, her long-term colleague and assistant. But she became my adviser and friend. And when my son was very sick shortly after he was born, she did the one thing she knew how to do – she took his photograph – breaking her own rule of no baby pictures. It is one of those pictures, along side one of her with Marilyn, that adorn my office wall. “

The photograph shows the last roll of Kodak film that I possess.

The other side of the tracks

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Other side of the tracks, originally uploaded by jjn1.

For over 150 years, Cambridge railway station was basically just one long platform (the third longest through-platform in England, according to Wikipedia). But it recently acquired a second platform, together with a bridge to access it. My train from London today stopped at the new platform.

When it first appeared in 1845 the station was way out in the countryside — the result of campaigning by the University to keep it away from the city centre, on the grounds that it would bring in ambitious whores from London, and/or enable students to visit same in the metropolis. Sadly, the station no longer serves such agreeable purposes and is now just a terminus for jaded commuters and academics like me going to and from meetings in London.

Hat trick

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Hat trick, originally uploaded by jjn1.

At dinner, I kept seeing out of the corner of my eye what I assumed was one of our cats. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a strange creature, namely my daughter’s winter hat. Sigh.