While visiting the homestead this past weekend, as I sat cooking in the jacuzzi, I stumbled upon an interesting and highly insulting hypothesis. Not insulting to me, mind you, but to the group I am about to describe.
The basis of this hypothesis lies in the idea that many popular social perspectives, views, and/or positions are at least somewhat influenced on a biological or instinctual level. For instance, racism, which is still something that modern civilizations have trouble with, might well be rooted in a biological bias against others different from yourself (i.e., the notion that a gazelle will be biased against a cheetah, albeit using more obvious physiological cues). I am not attempting to justify racism or other issues of this type, only to lay the logical foundation for my hypothesis.
Fortunately for humans as a species, our brain has allowed us to overcome instinctual and biological triggers to some extent, in part by allowing for the rationalization and implementation of societal frameworks that abridge various behaviors. It is unlikely that the cheetah feels remorse over his “murder” of the gazelle; but humanity, having moralized the value of life on a widespread scale, often takes steps to preclude or disincentivize the commission of murder. This is useful in maintaining a cohesive, functioning civilization; civil rights laws, too, are useful in much the same way.
Which brings us to the insulting part:
I hypothesize that, at least in part, the (socially and/or politically) conservative individual is in some senses less evolutionarily advanced than his liberal brethren.
Talk about a qualified statement! But how do I arrive at this hypothesis? Basically, it comes down to fear, and how we as a species treat fear-inducing stimuli. Fear is a useful biological reaction, but much of humanity’s progress has involved overcoming frightening things. The ability to achieve flight; exploration of inhospitable areas on and off Earth; interaction with other cultures within our own species: all acts that required behavior contrary to what instinct might dictate, yet all acts that have yielded immeasurable benefit for humanity.
Now, let us examine the conservative ethos. In popular politics and social commentary, the overriding emotion is fear. Fear of government; fear of gays; fear of change; fear of socialism. The word “fear” may not be used in many or even any of the statements made about these subjects by conservatives, but it’s most often the underlying emotion, the driving force behind an argument that the politician or popular speaker is hoping will bring his message home, bypassing more logical or rational analyses in favor of a response from the gut. Whether any individual argument is logically sound, presenting it in a shroud of fear does not belie the fact that the logic often seems less important than the emotion.
Which is not to say that liberals don’t sometimes employ similar tactics, but in the age of the “party of no” it’s fairly obvious as to which camp employs them more often. And, as such, is it unreasonable to hypothesize that part of the impetus for the more conservatively-minded among us is that they are less developed? That their mental progress is not yet sufficient to overcome as much biological bias as others are able to? That gays and taxes and health reform and the less fortunate are simply too much like the cheetah to risk trusting?
This is my hypothesis.
Though things are getting better, big content (see: RIAA, MPAA) still seems preoccupied with the golden times of yore when only tangible technologies were used to encapsulate their precious media. But like it or not (and they most certainly do not), the world has changed, and digital mediums are fast becoming the norm for content distribution, delivery, and storage. CD sales are down and digital sales are on the rise, with the latter likely to overtake physical format purchases sometime within the next year or so. After all, who wants pesky discs lying around when you’ve a perfectly good hard drive sitting inside your computer? This is good news, right?
Wrong, at least if you’re the recording industry. As usual, executives are still trying to lay the blame for falling revenues on the big bad wolf of the industry: illegal file sharing (and, by extension, swappers). As the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (the UK’s version of the RIAA) states rather straightforwardly:
…the net effect of file-sharing on music purchasing is overwhelmingly negative as evidenced by numerous third party studies around the world.
By which they mean to imply that illegally downloaded files equate to lost sales. But is this logic sound?
Let’s ignore whether or not downloading music is correct in an ethical sense; while that’s a part of big content’s overall message, it’s not a component of this individual argument. Instead, let’s focus on the one thing we know: an illegally downloaded file generates no direct revenue for the content owner. (I say “direct revenue” because it’s quite possible an illegal download might spur legitimate purchases in some cases.) And that’s it. We don’t know, for instance, if the downloading individual will further distribute a file once acquired. We don’t know if the individual will keep the file or discard it. And we don’t know whether the one downloading an item illegally would purchase said item if file sharing avenues were not available or accessible.
That last point is the kicker. You can’t assume that every download represents a necessary choice between “I will purchase this” and “I will illegally download this.” This has even been backed up in the courts. In fact, my guess is that such is rarely the case. Consider if you will these other possible scenarios, in order from what I consider least to most likely:
- Downloader is acquiring music he already owns in another, non-digital format for ease of use and portability
- Downloader is employing a “try before you buy” strategy
- Downloader is actively choosing to acquire content illegally, but might acquire content legally given a comparably convenient legal alternative
- Downloader is actively choosing to acquire content illegally, and would not buy said content even if it were not available through illicit channels
In all of these cases, while big content might be able to argue that downloads represent “deserved” revenue (though that too is debatable), you cannot state with certainty that file sharing results in lost sales. A person who at no point had any intent to purchase the content he is acquiring is not a potential customer.
So why are recording industry revenues declining? There are a number of theories, but one of the most likely reasons is outlined by William Patry in his Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars:
The problems in the Copyright Wars are not caused by technologies or by consumers acting badly, and they cannot therefore be solved by laws, and certainly not by more draconian laws. The problems—such as the decline in sales of CDs and DVDs—are the result of the copyright industries’ many and considerable failures to focus on satisfying consumers’ desires as opposed to stifling those desires out of a woefully misguided view that copyright equals control and that control equals profits.
And though it’s somewhat beside the point of this post, this logic may help explain some of the actual lost sales that come about because of file sharing (for, certainly, there will be some users who fit this bill). Which is to say, a lack of desirable or user-friendly legal alternatives may act as a sort positive reinforcement for piracy. The availability and quality of such alternatives is improving, but the continued machinations of big content belie a still extant distrust of digital distribution avenues.
I’ve performed some minor updates, both aesthetic and otherwise, to the blog. The overall layout is now slightly wider than before, and default text sizes have been reduced for a nicer overall feel. Some colors have been adjusted, and the style switcher has been removed so that my despotic preferences take precedence. Hope no one misses the old color schemes; I was never much of a fan.
Update: and the tweaks continue! A few more visual enhancements have been made, and there’s now search functionality on the site, accessible either via the form on the bottom of the front page or the form at the top of every archive page. Additionally, the RSS feed is no longer syndicated by Facebook. Instead, I’ve set up a plugin to handle automatic posting of new entries as Shared Items on my wall, providing for a link to the entry along with a short excerpt.
Be they ranting, raving, salivating, praising, or deifying, Apple’s newly announced iPad has just about everybody buzzing. As a professed technology enthusiast, not to mention a long-time Mac user (among other things), I thought I might weigh in on a few of the more popular comments and bits of punditry floating around the web.
“What’s with the name?”
One of the first reactions to the announcement was: “you’re calling it the what?” Indeed, aside from the acclaimed alphabetic prefix, the name seems rather un-Apple. It’s almost preposterously, purposefully entertaining, and has of course already spawned a number of humorous responses. Personally, I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the choice, especially on an aesthetic level. But on a marketing level, I believe the name could be genius. It’s eminently recognizable, memorable, and straightforward, all qualities Apple gravitates toward in more areas than just its naming conventions. And, as with Nintendo’s own funnily named device, I’m betting the iPad name will slowly transform into something household and ordinary, a process made possible in large part because of the satirical attention the device will at first receive. A form of word assimilation, if you will.
“It doesn’t have enough features!”
This is perhaps the biggest area of complaint, and one that goes hand in hand with questions about what the device is actually for (which I’ll address below). Michael Pusateri has a useful perspective on this phenomenon:
Remember way back to January 2007, when the iPhone was announced? Oh Internets, you wailed and gnashed your teeth endlessly. No 3G network? No MMS? No apps on the iPhone? No replaceable battery? Oh, your complaints were endless. You were sure that the iPhone was doomed because it didn’t meet all your requirements.
And what happened? Well, Apple has sold 40 million iPhones. FORTY MILLION. They have become the largest mobile device company in the world.
So today, you moan on and on about all the features you expected and demand in the iPad. What no Verizon? No two-way camera? It’s not weightless? A full half inch thick? Only 10 hours of battery life? You make tons of predictions on the success and failure with scant details and without ever actually trying one.
The same sort of reactionary punditry we’re hearing today is exactly the same kind of talk we heard when the original iPhone is released, and that is now one of Apple’s biggest successes. They have a tried and true philosophy that began with the iPod, was applied to the iPhone and iPod Touch, and now will be used with the iPad: design a product with superb core functionality in place, make it look slick and feel great, release it, and then iterate on that core. Given how well it’s worked in the other product areas Apple has applied it to, I see no reason to doubt its efficacy when applied to the iPad.
Also, regarding the loudest individual feature complaint–no multitasking–I would remind you that Apple holds an annual developer conference, and that iPhone (and, as it were, iPad) OS 4.0 is due out this summer. Nothing is confirmed, but it is widely presumed that Apple will address multitasking in both their Phone and Pad paradigms at that time. To paraphrase a friend from Apple, their biggest competitor is Android, and they’re looking very closely at the competition in designing OS 4.0.
“But, what is it for?”
Far and away the most difficult question to answer, but also the most important to understanding the iPad’s potential. It has already been addressed by a number of respected pundits more eloquently than I could ever hope to, but my favorite take is more of a meta-analysis of the impact the iPad will have on the state of personal computing, penned by Steven Frank of Panic fame. I suggest you read it in full, but the basic premise is encapsulated below:
In the Old World, computers are general purpose, do-it-all machines. They can do hundreds of thousands of different things, sometimes all at the same time. We buy them for pennies, load them up to the gills with whatever we feel like, and then we pay for it with instability, performance degradation, viruses, and steep learning curves. Old World computers can do pretty much anything, but carry the burden of 30 years of rapid, unplanned change. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X based computers all fall into this category.
In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.
Apple, with the iPad, is betting on a future where so-called New World Computing is the norm. Under-the-hood tinkering and hierarchical file systems will give way to an abstracted, blobular form of interaction, one in which we can focus on tasks rather than specific applications or data types. There are obvious caveats, especially for those heavily invested in Old World methods (such as myself!), and I don’t believe the Old World will ever fully disappear–someone will be developing applications and writing OSes, after all–but for a more detailed analysis thereof you should read the essay.
But what about right now, in this moment? I am certainly not the target audience for this device–an uber-nerdy, low-level complexity enjoying, tinkerer of a user–but someone like my mother would love an iPad. It’s straightforward and easy to use; it does everything she needs to do (browse the internet, check email, look at pictures); it’s thin, portable, and can be toted around the house with ease; and it frees her up from having to worry about, for instance, what a ZIP file is, or what exactly a disk image does, or where that pesky Downloads folder is located. All of this is abstracted away in lieu of a New World experience.
“What’s in it for Apple?”
Apple has, as with the iPod and iPhone before it, identified what they consider to be a new and relatively untapped computing niche. Smartphones and portable MP3 players existed before the former two Apple products were released, but because they applied their design sense and the aforementioned iterative product philosophy, they were able to capture those markets and transform the product landscape (especially with the iPhone; see Google’s Android, Palm’s WebOS). I have no doubt they’re attempting to do the same thing here, to release a product that no one else quite has and, ultimately, dominate the forthcoming market on account of their prescience.
The Old World/New World dichotomy is still likely a long ways away from being fully realized in a majority of consumer computing appliances, but in the meantime I’ll bet people are going to fall in love with these things as soon as they get their hands on them. And, despite all the racket over what’s “missing,” Apple’s going to be laughing all the way to the bank as those whose concerns don’t lie explicitly with Gigahertz, Gigabytes, or Graphics Cards buy iPads up like hotcakes.
Yes, yes, I’ve been neglecting the blog even more than usual. But, in my defense, I’ve been busy. Since the last post, I’ve done the following:
- Moved into a new apartment in downtown Berkeley
- Furnished, decorated (somewhat), and cozified said apartment
- Worked like crazy at the new job, and had a lot of fun to boot
- Purchased a new TV, built a new HTPC, and built a new networked storage box
- Written a few new songs
- Had entirely too much beer (damn you delicious Berkeley pubs!)
Ok, so not all those items are exactly great excuses, but I have no regret. (That Catholic guilt won’t get me; being raised ostensibly Protestant helps, I suppose.) As for those new songs, here are a couple of them, with the usual caveats that they were recorded with what low-quality means I have available and thus are pretty rough. The second one is also pretty ridiculous.
Jam for Cami
The Whiz Song
Oh, and if you’re going to be in Berkeley, feel free to give me a shout out. I promise I’ll lead you to the best beer in town.
