Ralph Sir Edward

And The World Changed

Ralph Sir Edward

And The World Changed:

Life in the Digital Reality

(2009)

Table of Contents

1. The Good Old Days: Analog Remembrances

2. Pavlov’s Promise: Advertising Freeness

3. Unplanned Obsolescence: Crappy Immortality

4. Jet Fighters Over North Vietnam: Turning Off The Switches

5. Hemmingway Redux: Dead Men Beating You At Your Own Game

6. The Immorality Option: Stealing More Than A Politician

7. Boiling The Frog Slowly: Content Versus Container

8. The Good New Days: Avoiding the Digital Scrapheap

1. The Good Old Days: Analog Remembrances

The year is 1900, and we’re peeping in on the lives of Mr. and Ms. Everyman. For them, life is good. You can get the latest news from around the world, delivered to your doorstep, the oldest of it only weeks old! They live in a middle-sized town, and are proud to be well read. As Grandpa (1850) Everyman said, to be a quality person, you need to read quality things. They get several of the top fiction magazines, including Saturday Evening Post and Town and Country, none of those penny dreadfuls for them, no siree! Mr. Everyman gets to the big city twice a year, and goes to a top bookstore to buy 5–10 books to read back home. Some classy stuff, like Kipling or Twain for him, some quality romances for Ms. Everyman, and a few adventure books for his kid brother. (His kid brother doesn’t tell him about the penny dreadfuls he keeps stashed away so his snobby big brother won’t lose his temper!) Dozens of publishing companies vie for Mr. Everyman’s reading dollar. And when Mr. Everyman is in the Big City, he will fit in a concert and a play before he comes back. Yes, Sir! Look at the great entertainment available in these grand new times. If he could just move to the Big City, he could go to concerts every week! He could even go to a Baseball game. What a life he could live…Oh well, he makes do by playing Parlor Games with Ms. Everyman or listen to her play sheet music (poorly) on the piano, and taking kid brother out to fish or play catch. A good well-informed life…

Flash forward to 1954. Another peep into Mr. and Ms. Everyman’s lives…

Mr. Everyman is working at the factory, pulling down good wages. He uses the money to buy all sorts of entertainment for himself and Ms. Everyman (and her kid brother). Mr. Everyman likes to read, but not the old, slow stuff that Grandpa (1900) Everyman bought when he was young. Besides he doesn’t have the time to read as much as he’d like. The only one who seems to have enough time to read is Kid Brother, and all he wants to read are those stupid Comic Books! Either that or play pinball. Mr. Everyman grew up listening to Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio, and watching the Three Stooges and 2 reeler Westerns at the theater on Saturdays, like most of his friends. Now, he’s seen a Television, and is slowly saving up to buy one for the family. Just think, two whole channels of entertainment, pictures instead of just sound, all for free! On the other hand, that new High-Fidelity record player lets you play the latest in music, and it sound so real it’s almost like being there. Or maybe a radio for the car. You can the take a trip with musical accompaniment. Oh well it’s just a matter of priorities. Mr. Everyman knows that in a few years, he’ll own all of them. What a life!, he dreams. A baby motion picture theater in his own home, a concert hall as well, playing the latest in Sinatra, and a soundtrack to drive by. And if he wants to go out, he can watch the new color wide-screen movies that are coming out, along with Ms. Everyman and her Kid Brother… Oh well, until then he’ll play Dominoes, Monopoly and Scrabble with Ms. Everyman and her Kid Brother, listen to Bob Hope on the radio, and slip in the occasional mystery novel for reading…

It’s now 2008. Let’s take a look at today’s Mr. and Ms. Everyman…

Mr. Everyman is sitting in traffic on a Thursday, commuting from work to home. Tired of listening to ads on the stereo radio in the car, he turns off the radio and calls Ms. Everyman on his cellphone, telling her he’ll be an extra 30 minutes late. He mulls between plugging in his I-pod music player with 200 hours of commercial-free music on it and putting on an audio book on the audio CD player. He decides not to get started on another audio book, because he probably won’t get around to finishing during his commutes before the week-end, and nobody wants to ride in a car listening to the middle of a book. He settles on an old favorite of his Dad. He continues to wind through traffic listening to Grateful Dead’s Hell In A Bucket—at least he’s enjoying the ride… He muses “maybe I should get Sirius”, 100+ channels, even more variety than his I-pod, only $15 or so a month. Well…maybe in the next car…

Mr. Everyman gets home. After a hurried meal, his kid brother staying with him goes to his room and cranks up 50 Cent. Mr. Everyman yells at him to turn down that miserable crap, he can’t hear himself think. The volume gets turned down to a low thump. Mr. Everyman then looks at the media center. He’s got over 100 movies on the shelf that he’s never seen, and 900 that he’s seen at least once. Plus a 150 live concerts, and who know how many old TV episodes. He knows it’s north of 100 different shows, but he has no idea how many episodes total. He asks Ms. Everyman what she wants to do tonight. She says she just wants to curl up with a book. Ok, he says, knowing that he has 300 books on his e-book reader that he hasn’t gotten around to reading yet, and decides to check tomorrow’s weather and news headlines, and then catch a sporting event on cable TV. The low thump in the kid brother’s room is now replaced with low bangs and explosions. He’s playing Crysis again. Mr. Everyman nostalgically remembers having time for videogames.

Firing up his computer, he goes to the NOAA government weather site, then shifts over to the CNN website. The world is mismanaged as usual. He pops over to MobileRead to see if RSE has gotten off his duff to write the latest Red adventure. Nope, not yet. Then 10 minutes looking at the latest gadgets. Feeling embarrassed for having wasted 30 minutes, he powers off the computer and goes over to the media center and fires up the widescreen monitor and the surround sound unit. Ah, for the good old days of “57 channels and nothing on”. It’s now over 200 channels and nothing on. He spins through the schedule listing for the time slot and finds 2 basketball games and a hockey game. No baseball for 3 months yet. Hmm. Well, the local team will probably lose, but they are the home team, and the game is still very close, even though it’s half over. So he settles in and watches the rest of the game. Maybe when he retires, he’ll have the time to catch up on things…And he wonders, what did people do with all that time 100 years ago…

What did they do indeed?

Welcome to the Digital World.

Everything (with one exception) in the 2008 scene above is dependent on some form of a computer. And the computer world is a total different world than the analog world of your forefathers. Different rules, different ideas, different plans, futures and ways of achieving goals. And no old experiences that help make sense of it all. Just one ad-hoc fix after another, with people hoping it’ll all settle out in the end. Guess what? It won’t settle out. You will have to settle it out for yourself. Don’t be surprised if your settlement with the Digital World doesn’t match anyone else’s. That’s part of the Digital World, too.

I am an old geezer in the digital world. I played with the first delivered all-in-one home computer in 1977 (the Commodore PET, which shipped the first demo units before the Apple II or the Radio Shack TRS-80). I’ve coded the first generation of computers—the mainframes—when programmers were programmers and users were afraid. But it’s not just technical chops that matter. It’s being able to look at the Big Picture and being able to make a whole out of the entire sweep of change. To look at the forest, not just the trees. That’s the purpose of this book. To show you the forest. And the prairies, the mountains, and the oceans. The context, if you will.

Even at that, I can’t (and won’t) cover everything. The best I can do is show you how to explore for yourselves, and make your own maps and decisions. I know some of your will think I’m being too technical, others will sneer at my simplicity, or my arrogance for even trying. Shrug. Somebody’s got to push the wind through the Tuba. Maybe you can write this book better than I can. Have at it. I’m not Superman. I’m not even a professional writer. Just someone seeing a job that needs to be done and doing it.

Remember, in the new world 1 + 1 = 10. There is no 2. And the rules that made the analog world work smoothly can be nothing but sand in the gears of the digital world. And vice versa.

The shape of this book is as follows. The introduction that you are reading. An orientation, if you will. A series of chapters, each covering an important concept of the Digital World, showing how it disrupts the analog world. Every one is essential to having the base to make your own settlement with the Digital World. The last chapter will tie all the previous chapters into one answer. It’s my answer. You can follow it, or not. With the provided background, you can make your own answer. At least you’ll understand some of the reasons why the Digital world and the analog world clash. And the limits of any answer.

One final note. This is a pro bono publico work. Feel free to disseminate as you wish. But please leave my name on it, as I wrote it, warts and all.

2. Pavlov’s Promise: Advertising Freeness

Shortly after the first tool was made by Uggh the Caveman, he got somebody to tell the rest of the tribe how great it was. Thus the third oldest profession was born. Shortly thereafter, the hardened, advertising resistant consumer was born, fed up about the lies attributed to the greatness of the first tool…

What does this have to do with the Digital World? Patience, as the stripper told the crowd, soon all will be revealed.

Advertising was always limited to the number of people it could reach. So until the creation of mass market communication, it was always a starved and puny thing. You couldn’t tell too fancy of lies to promote something, because you would still be around when the actual truth came out. Tar and feathers were a most unpleasant suit of clothes. To avoid that unpleasant circumstance, the idea of the traveling salesman was invented. Run before they found out the truth. This worked for a while, but soon everybody connected traveling with lies, and the salesmen were back where they had been, imitating a sick swan. There had to be a better way to lie…

Finally, some bright boy got the idea of providing something of value to the people being sold to. It put the potential customers in a better mood, making them feel that they were getting something for their time. They might ever feel good enough to buy your product.

The something had to be cheap to the advertiser/salesman, suitable for providing to the crowd, but something the crowd couldn’t easily get, so that the crowd would value it. And the answer was…entertainment! A storyteller, a dancing girl, feats of strength or skill, that would bring out the crowds. After all, people went to festivals, listened to musicians, saw plays already, and paid for the entertainment as a product itself. Give them a little free entertainment, and some of them will buy your product as a courtesy. A win-win, as it was later said.

This idea dates back thousands of years, but it didn’t really hit its stride until the advent of mass production.

Two things happened then, at odds with each other. First, mass production made the production of entertainment as a product cheap. Therefore it could be packaged and sold more easily as a product itself. At the same time, the cheap production costs allowed more and better entertainment to be used to attract crowds to sell other things to. A conflict. But not too nasty of one, as the entertainment being sold needed to be advertised, just like any other product. Mass production had started opening up new ways to lie…er, advertise, allowing more and more people to be reached at one time, lowering the cost per sale for the advertising. In addition, you were miles away from the tar and feathering crowd. So the world got richer and richer through mass production and advertisers provided more and more entertainment, to get that wealth distributed. (With a cut for their pocket, of course!) And the business world was good…

That’s from the producer’s side. Let’s look at the consumer’s side…

Your typical consumer had three choices for entertainment

1. Make your own. Things like signing, playing musical instruments, telling stories, playing simple games. For many people in the pre mass-production days, this was the only choice. To get a feel of this, read Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer.

2. Pay someone else to entertain you. The advantage of this was that you got better entertainment. If it wasn’t better than what you made your own, the producers would quickly starve. The drawbacks were considerable, though. First, it cost money. That meant you had to do without something else to buy entertainment. Second, it was transient. You had to go see or do it when it was available, not when you wanted it. You could only see a circus if the circus was in town, for example. The only exceptions were certain mass-produced items, i.e. printed material, like books. You could then keep them until they wore out. Of course, you had to be able to read, which placed a high premium on literacy. Much later, as mass production provided more new inventions, other forms of entertainment became replayable, and available for purchase as discrete physical items.

3. Get somebody else to pay for your entertainment. On the face of it, this sounds absurd. Who would want to give money away? Well, if in giving away this money, it leads to more people seeing the sales pitch for your product and causes more people to buy more of your product, which leads to bigger profits than not giving away the free money/entertainment; well, the line start to the right and goes halfway to Peoria… You raise your prices to cover the cost of the entertainment and you’re on your way to wads and wads of cash.

So this formed a tight, closed entertainment ecostructure. Consumers, either directly, or indirectly via advertising, paid producers to provide entertainment to the consumers. The producers hired performers to create the entertainment. If you were very good at creating your own entertainment, you got hired to do it for money, not for free anymore, and became a performer. The producer and performers spent their money for goods and services from the people they entertained. The few leakages out of the system, such as used books, weren’t bad enough to damage the system, because the cost of communications exceeded the value of the used goods. Life was good…

But there was a ticking time bomb in the heart of the system. It was time for the Law of Unintended Consequences to rear its ugly head…

While advertisers were training consumers to watch their ads, they were also unwittingly training them to expect to be entertained for free. Certainly some forms of entertainment weren’t free initially, but they eventually became free later (such as movies), and others were free immediately such as broadcast audio and television. Even books were available for free or near free from libraries. The consumer weren’t concerned about the ads, they were just something to ignore. As far as they were concerned, anything that wasn’t the latest and greatest—like the latest Hollywood monstrosity or a live concert—shouldn’t cost them anything, unless there a physical aspect to it. They understood physical aspects. It was just like the car or candy bar being advertised. Things cost money. Entertainment didn’t. And advertisers, by paying for free entertainment to anybody who wanted to watch, in order to attract customers for their products, had built the perfect beast. They had unwittingly been building it for generations…

Now the last veil drops…

The Digital World severed the entertainment from any physical package. You can take it out of the package it came in and put it in any package you like that will hold it. You can even get it without any package at all, just like turning on a TV. Anywhere in the world, any type of digitally reproducible entertainment, any time, 24/7. And advertisers have conditioned the consumer for generations that all mass-produced entertainments would eventually be free.

How are you going to override a 100 years of canalization to make the consumer pay for every piece of entertainment, every time…

How are you going to hold them down on the farm, when they’ve seen Paree???

3. Unplanned Obsolescence: Crappy Immortality

Let me tell you a couple of stories. They’re basically true stories, but I’ll lightly file off the serial numbers. Stay with me, there’s a reason.

Many years ago, a bunch of engineers with a very big company were ordered to build a computer in secret. It had to be cheaper and better that the early computers that other little companies were currently making. The computer needed an operating system, and they had a tight time budget. So they decided to purchase an operating system from an existing vendor. Who should it be? Why, the best on the market, of course! So they trundled over to the biggest and best provider of operating systems at the time, and went to the their boss. But before they saw the boss, they asked him to sign a secrecy agreement. The very big company required it. The operating system boss said, “Sorry, won’t do it. We treat all customers equally here, and don’t sign secrecy agreements with anybody. We can port our operating system to just about any computer, but no secret deals.” So the engineers went away, because the very big company would have their hides if they didn’t have a secrecy agreement. But without an operating system, all they had was a pile of parts.

So they went to the next company on their list to provide another piece of software, a BASIC interpreter for people to write their own simple programs with. They asked the interpreter boss to sign a secrecy agreement. He said, “Sure! I don’t care what happens to my other customers.” So the engineers bought a license to the BASIC software, and asked the interpreter boss, “Can you provide us with an operating system?” The interpreter boss said “Sure! On the same terms as the BASIC interpreter.” The engineers went away, not realizing they’d sign the future of their machine away from the very big company.

The interpreter boss had a problem, though. He didn’t have an operating system to sell, and he knew he couldn’t write one in time to meet the very big company’s deadline. And if he didn’t deliver, his company would be sunk. However, across town, there was a rawhide group of programmers who had written an operating system that would work on the very big company’s new computer, but it was buggy and not very good. Besides he didn’t own it. Easily remedied. He went across town, and offered to buy the company from the programmers for a relatively modest sum. It was enough to set them up in Hawaii, so the programmers jumped on the hook and grinned from ear to ear. The interpreter boss didn’t care how buggy and limited it was, he had agreed to provide an operating system, and here was an operating system.

How did the story end? The very big company’s new computer was a smash success. The operating system company (with the best operating system at the time) would eventually fail, and the “fair treating” boss becoming an alcoholic and eventually being stomped to death in a biker bar. The interpreter boss became one of the richest men in the world. The descendant of the buggy operating system (still buggy) control 60–70 percent of all the computers in the world. And the very big company finally had to get out of the small computer business it had standardized with it’s machine, because without the control of the operating system, they didn’t have a competitive advantage over other cheap computer producers. The very big company’s engineers had signed it away, way back at the beginning…

In the early days of home computers, a company that had specialized in arcade games decided to make a home computer. It was a modest success as a computer, but sneered at for being game oriented by other computer manufacturers. It attracted game programmers at the time, and caused a small software firm to get started. Rather than writing their own games, they decided to buy games from other programmers and package them up fancy, and act like a Hollywood studio. The first four games they released were for the home computer from the arcade maker. They were a success, and were eventually ported over to another similar machine. But the Hollywood model was always “the next big hit”, so after a few years the original programs were dropped and forgotten about, except for a few cult players. The arcade company went bust, and so did the other similar machine. The programs were destined for the scrapheap…

But a funny thing happened on the way to the scrapheap. Some of the cult gamers were also programmers. The modern computer had gotten so fast and powerful, you could run extremely complex programs at blinding speed on them. So they thought, what if we could write an emulator for the old machine that would run under the modern common operating system? Would the modern machine be fast enough to emulate the old machine at the pace the old machine actual ran at? The answer was YES! and suddenly there were emulators for just about all the old machines from the early days. And you can now run the first four programs, or just about any program you can get converted into a file that the common operating system can read. It didn’t stop with emulators for old, obsolete, computers. Some other programmers got the idea of writing emulators for old versions of the common operating system. Suddenly, for a few bucks you could buy an emulator that would let you run operating systems and the related software all the way back to the buggy first version of operating system. (With a few drawbacks. It didn’t slow down the software to a particular speed, like the obsolete computer emulators did, so games that depended on the machine being at a particular speed wouldn’t be playable, and programs that drove outside hardware, like printers, didn’t have the interfaces for modern hardware replacements, so you couldn’t drive external hardware anymore.) Now you could run that 10, 20 or 30 year old software with few problems…

Why am I telling these stories?

Because there’s a hidden reality embedded in these stories. That reality is that in the Digital World, immortality is an option, not a hopeless dream. Let me be more specific. A program, or a data file, can be executed as long as there exists some form of computer capable of executing it. And that changes the whole world of obsolescence. In the old analog world, things wore out and had to be replaced with a new item. The Digital World can’t depend on old stuff going away. It’ll always be out there, somewhere. And some people will still be using it, if it can be used. The logic of programs doesn’t change. The content of data files doesn’t change, unless a program deliberately changes it. This immortality isn’t perfect, though. Whatever bugs and flaws you started with, you’ll still have. That makes it a pretty crappy immortality. But it’s still competition to the latest and greatest. It doesn’t wear out, like things in the analog world. And that has a direct impact on you.

When you acquire a piece of data, you’re potentially getting it for a very long time. As long as you back it up, to protect it from the varagarities of hardware failure, it could last long past your lifetime. So this makes getting even a trivial piece of data a long term planning event. It’s not just “will you be happy with it today”, but what about 20 years from now, or 50? Can you even back it up? If you can’t, you’ve just rendered your purchase long term meaningless. When the hardware dies, so does the value of your purchase. Eventually, you’ll have to buy it over again. Now if you only want the latest and greatest, this probably won’t matter to you. But you’ll be forking over money for your tastes for all your life. Don’t be surprised when people who don’t require the latest and greatest end up far more affluent than you.

I guess that leads to the moral (sic) of the story. Acquiring data (and programs are just a form of data that can be executed), is the longest-term purchase you can make. Longer than good furniture, longer than a house, longer than a stock. So choose wisely, for the long term. It really is an investment, even the most trivial music file. With a little planning, you’ll have it for the rest of your life, and pass it on to somebody else. Get the best quality you can find that meets the requirements of being able to be backed up, and pay for it only once. Paying for it more that once is merely pouring money down a drain. And there are so many better uses for money than that…

4. Jet Fighters Over North Vietnam: Turning Off The Switches

In 1965, the U.S. got heavily involved in a proxy war in a country called Vietnam. The how, what, and why are immaterial for this book. There was one part of this war that has serious relevance to the Digital World.

The U.S military believes in the importance of pilot survival in its combat aircraft. To enhance the probabilities of survival, combat pilots had (and still have) long, intense, training programs. In addition, gadgets were designed to help the pilot find out about dangerous situations before it was too late. Radar tracking warning systems, missile launch warnings systems, airspeed, altitude, fuel warning systems, all sorts of warning systems. A major part of the training was how to recognize and react to the warnings from all the various warning systems. The U.S. military felt that these systems would make the American pilot victorious in air combat, even though they added weight and reduced the performance of the aircraft. But until 1965, they had not been tried in actual combat. When the Vietnam War fired up, the senior military planners knew they would get a chance to see how great their new bells and whistle actually work in combat…

The first trials came over North Vietnam. It had hand-me-down Soviet air defenses, but that included some obsolete jet fighters, radar guided anti-aircraft missiles, and old fashion guns.

“Piece of cake”, the American military planners thought, and so they started sending attack waves into North Vietnam. They figured they could bomb at will.

Then they started to get the reports back from the first raids…

They were losing planes and pilots, left and right. This wasn’t supposed to happen! American technology was supreme; how could these third rate defenses be so effective? Obviously, we’re just not planning the raids right. And so it went until early 1968, when the American halted raids over North Vietnam. With no more raids, the U.S. planners could spend to time to analyze just what happened over North Vietnam. What they found directly impact you, today and tomorrow…

What they found was when the pilots need the information the most, because things were happening so fast, the pilots were freezing up! The human mind could only handle so much information. And when it got too much at the same time, it just froze up and did nothing. Flying a high-speed airplane, doing fancy maneuvers, with six different bells and whistles going off, the human mind just ignored what it couldn’t handle. So the Surface To Air missile warning system worked perfectly, but the pilot was so busy he didn’t hear it, and got shot down.

Some pilots though, seemed to do well in these raids, hitting their targets and even shooting down some of the obsolete aircraft, and coming home intact, raid after raid. Aha! The military planners thought, it takes a particular type of person to do well in the modern air combat. Let’s intensely interview the few who did well and learn how to select the people who can handle the environment.

They got the shock of their lives. The successful pilots ’fessed up. They were mavericks who didn’t like all the bells and whistles they’d been forced to use. So every time they went into enemy airspace, they disobeyed orders and turned off all the bells and whistles; and flew by the seat of their pants. They didn’t tell anyone, because if they got found out, they might be court-martialed. It was referred to by most of the pilots as “turning off the switches”. So they didn’t go into sensory overload, and stayed alive.

This caused the American military to totally revise the uses of their bells and whistles, and to retrain their pilots in more seat of the pants flying skills. When the bombing of North Vietnam resumed in 1972, the American planes and pilots showed a 10 fold increase in effectiveness and survivability, despite flying the same equipment into a vastly more intense set of air defenses that had been built in the bombing lull.

What does this have to do with you?

Are you turning off the switches?

Why should you turn off the switches? There’s so much entertainment to enjoy nowadays. You don’t want to miss any of it…

Yes, indeed. Let’s start adding up what’s available.

Hollywood admits to over 100,000 talking movies in their vaults. If you watched movies 16 hours a day, (using the other eight hours to eat, sleep, and bathe) it would take you 25 years to see them all, once. TV shows? Say 40 years, at 3 hours a night, times 3 channels on average, (oops, make that 5 channels, and combine American and British television shows for viewing), times 22 new shows a year, equals…16 years to see all the television shows at 16 hours a day. And that’s not including all the US soap operas and games shows over the years, which would probably triple that number. Recorded music? There’s at least a million discreet pieces of music recorded at various times in the last 80 years. So 1,000,000 times 3 minutes at 16 hours a day works out to 8 years to hear it all once. Books? Oh my! Who knows how many books have been written in the last 300 years. The books controlled by the big publishers, and the books from Project Gutenberg as of January 2009, easily exceed 100 thousand books. If you figure 3 hours a book, you get about 51 years of reading. And there’s sporting events, concerts, video games, card and board games… (Oh my God, I’ve left out the 3,000 or so old radio comedy and drama shows! Yipes! News and Newspapers! And casinos and stock charts and…)

Just in the items I’ve measured, it would take 25 years (movies) + 16 years (TV) + 8 years (recorded music) + 50+ years for English language books = 100 years of entertainment, at 16 hours a day, 365 days a year. And that is a conservative estimate, even of the entertainments listed. And the pile keeps growing every day.

How long do you plan to live? Let me tell you, it’s not long enough.

So the typical American is now flirting with sensory overload all the time. Reading snatches of a book during the commercials of a TV show, or driving a car, listening to music, while talking on a cell phone, or…

All this multitasking is a vain attempt to keep on top of the flood of entertainment out there today, which can’t be done. All you can do is prioritize what you want to accomplish with the time available. And to truly enjoy what you’re doing, you need to concentrate on it. And that means you have to leave things out. Lots of things out. There’s no other choice. I’ve accepted that I can only read so many books, see so many movies, listen to so much music. And I know that there will be entertainment that I would have love to experienced, but I didn’t have the time to experience it. I’ve started turning off the switches, to enjoy life better, even if it is more limited.

So… When will you start turning off the switches…

5. Hemmingway Redux: Dead Men Beating You At Your Own Game

This is a tale I heard in my youth.

Ernest Hemmingway was at a party in Hollywood. He was asked, “What did it take to be a successful writer?” His quoted response was “Either you do something new, or you’re beating dead men at their own game.” In the analog world, it was much easier to be dead men at their own game. After all, the dead Bambino (Babe Ruth) was not going to swing at even an amateur’s pitch. However, in the Digital World, the Bambino never died and everybody can have him at his peak on their baseball team. (For those of you in the British Commonwealth, please substitute the greatest cricket batsman in history.)

How do you out-hit Babe Ruth?

How does this apply to your life in the Digital World?

As I write this, I have Louis Armstrong playing on my stereo. Pops died in 1971, but I’m still listening to his artistry. What he did, no one has done it better. Of course, he has lots of company. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jerry Garcia, John Lennon, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Hank Williams… the list goes on and on. And that’s the problem. If you’re a new musician, how do you do it better? And if you’re going to do it differently, the remaining choices to create in keep getting less and less. But at least in music, due to current copyright laws, you’re on a level playing ground. The dead men (and women) you’re competing with charge their customers just like you do. So the customer has no economic reason to listen to Satchmo instead of your garage band. What would happen if all of Satchmo’s works were free? Could you compete?

Well, in Britain some of them might be available free, legally, if there were the equivalent of a Project Gutenberg for music as a repository. Many of the performances are free, as in Britain, an actual performance is only copyrighted for 50 years flat. If the song involved has fallen into the public domain, then the whole thing could be passed around free in Britain. Nobody has set up a music equivalent of Project Gutenberg yet, so this is a moot point, today…

Even so, you’re still competing with dead men at their own game. They’re not going away, as would happen in the analog world, due to the old recording wearing out. They don’t wear out on the Digital World.

But in the book world, you are competing with dead men who charge nothing…

Books are constructed to last a long time. Admittedly some were constructed so poorly as to last only a few reads and/or a few years, but these are the vast minority. I have mass-market paperbacks, which are still in quite readable state after 50 years, and readable hardbacks that are over 80 years old. They were the first mass-produced item of the information age, and have been around for over 500 years. This leads to two competitive problems for new authors and new books. First, competition from existing, older books that are sold used. And second, legal Digital versions of books whose copyright has expired, despite the best efforts of copyright holder to keep extending the terms of copyright. I’ll cover each separately.

Some people only read a book once, or have so many books that to but a new one means getting rid of an old one to make room for it. What do you do with the leftover book? American are culturally reared to never throw away a book in good condition, so the result has been a used market, just like a used market for older cars or other durables. People buy and sell used books, usually at far cheaper prices than new, for which the original publisher (manufacturer) sees nothing from the sales. Publishers always grumbled this at, but they could do nothing about it, as American law did not allow recoupment of intellectual property rights once a product was sold. Still, this was consider a minor nuisance, due to the fact that finding a particular title was very difficult, as each used bookseller was independent from the others, and nobody felt that it was worth the effort to catalog and advertise all the books they had. So used book buyer had to go to various stores and browse the shelves, looking for wanted titles. It was so inefficient that most people would buy a new edition of an old book rather a used one, because it was readily available, which couldn’t be said of a used copy.

The coming of the Internet completely changed the dynamic. If you want to buy a used book, go look at some of the websites, which act as aggregators of thousands of used book dealer’s inventories. You will find a copy of almost any book, no matter how obscure, available for sale. For example, I just searched for 6 books, compromising a circa 1960 pulp juvenile science fiction series (the Dig Allen series). All 6 were available. Until the internet, I had been missing one of them for 25 years. I had never seen one to buy. Now, each and every used book is a direct competitor to a new book sale, readily available. Writers end up competing with themselves. And as Peter Lorre said in Casablanca, they find themselves much cheaper…Why spend $8 for a mass-market paperback when you can buy a used one for $5 (with postage) or a hardback for $6? Books that had been out of print for 50 years are readily available, competing with the latest author.

But those are the easy competitors. What about the books on which copyright has expired? That’s where the Digital World shows its glorious teeth, fangs, and claws. For there is nothing to prevent these book from being converted into digital versions, which can legally be passed around to anybody, for free. And they are!

For example, Project Gutenberg was founded to do just this. As of this writing, it has over 27,000 different file available for download. They’re not alone. Other countries have different rules for Public Domain, so there are different sites with different books available. There are probably 30 to 35 thousand books available in the public domain, in one place or another. And they all have the same price—free.

And this is the ultimate competitor. I can read Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Alexandre Dumas, Henry Thoreau, Edgar Rice Burroughs, L. Frank Baum, Zane Grey, and thousands of other writers for free. Legally and easily. Just go to a website and select the book, click on it and save it to your computer. If a book is in the public domain and you don’t see it, well, scan it yourself and put it there. (I’ve done 5 so far, with one in progress and another promised, and another 10 on the waiting list if nobody else does them first…) There’s been billions and billions downloaded so far.

That’s the problem for the publishing industry. The Digital Bambino is still swatting ’em out of the ballpark, for free. If you want to make the team, you have to out-hit him. Very, very few can. Not only do you have to out-hit him, but you have to convince the owner that spending money on you is worth more than getting the Bambino for free. So it’s not a matter of beating dead men at their own games any more. The dead men are now starting to beat you at your own game, even when you are doing something new…

6. The Immorality Option: Stealing More Than A Politician

In the movie To Catch A Thief with Cary Grant, there is a scene where Cary Grant (as a reformed jewel thief) is lunching with an insurance investigator, trying to get information from the agent to enable Cary Grant to catch the person who is using his Modus Operandi to steal jewels.

Cary Grant: I’ve treated you to a nice meal at my villa. Are you going to expense a meal with your insurance company?

Investigator: I suppose so.

Cary Grant: You’re a thief!

Investigator: Now really. Companies expect some padding of agent’s expense account. They budget for it.

Cary Grant: You’re still a thief! The difference between you and me is that you can get away with it. I can’t. As part of my release during the war to join the resistance was that if I ever stole again I would go straight back to jail, no questions asked. I have to prove my honesty every day. You don’t.

So let me ask you…Are you a thief?

By the way, what is a thief in the Digital World?

Good question!

It’s not a trivial question.

It’s easy to explain what a thief is in the old analog world. I have an apple. You take it from me without my permission. Now I don’t have it, and you do. That’s what thought of as stealing in analog days.

The first problem with this cropped up with mass production. Why should I invent a better way of building things when somebody else will use it without having to do all the work of inventing it? That started the beginning of patent law. At about the same time, you could write a book, but not be able to profit from it because somebody else could just copy the words and print their own copy of the book. In order to get more books and inventions, laws were created, patent laws and copyright laws, to give a limited monopoly (more about this later) to creators to encourage more inventions and books. Even so, it was acknowledged that the world would be richer if these inventions and books weren’t protected by a monopoly. So the monopoly was set to expire in a few decades. Then anybody could use the ideas for free. The creators got paid for a while and the public got it later. A balancing act.

And an enforceable one. It took a factory to make things, so if you stole patents or copyright, the factory could be seized. That made it not worth the economic risk to steal patents or copyrights. So few people violated them. Besides, you had to make a thing to copy “intellectual property”.

But that wasn’t good enough for some powerful corporations. They wanted to get to use inventions as soon as possible. So they lobbied to have patent laws shortened. They also wanted to keep copyright as long as possible, so they could keep getting royalties off the copyright. So they lobbied to extend and extend copyright laws.

This is easily understandable from an economic sense. When a patent expires, everybody who then uses it gets an economic gain out of the expired patent, while only the person/corporation holding it loses revenue. And that corporation may figure it will gain more from using other expired patents than it would gain from extending it’s own patent. With more gainers that losers from expiration, the trend was to shorten patent length.

When a copyright expires, just the opposite happens. The owner of the copyright loses any further revenue from the copyright, but nobody gains revenue from the use of the copyright. So they only voice heard is extend, extend. The public good of expired copyrights is cheerfully ignored.

The Digital World has shattered this cozy worldview. The physical husk has been stripped away from the information that truly is “intellectual property”. Every computer is also a universal digital duplicating machine. You can make a digital copy of anything that starts out digital, for pennies, whether it in the public domain or not. And you can make a perfect copy of a copy of a copy…

And this kicks the economics out from under “intellectual property”. Suddenly, people don’t have to pay for “intellectual property”. They just take a copy and make a copy. Punch a few buttons and you’re done. The “limited monopoly” now becomes nearly worthless. But don’t worry, it gets worse.

Connect this up with the internet, and you can copy not just information you already have purchased. You can copy any information that’s available on-line around the world. All for free, once you’ve tracked it down. Sort of like an individual “age of exploration”, when new worlds were being discovered. Aye matey, and booty to be had for the risk of a broadside…

So what is stealing in the Digital World? What did you buy when you bought a piece of copyrighted material? Did you buy the right to back up your purchase? Can you morally copy it to a different machine so you can use it on the go? Are you more of a thief buying a used book or a used audio CD, or making an unauthorized download? Does the first purchase doctrine have meaning, even in the US? What is ownership of intellectual property? Do I own a book, or just the paper it’s printed on?

I could list a dozen more questions. The continual extend and extend of major copyright holders has undercut the morality of their position, even if not the legality of their position. So I ask you, from a moral standpoint, when are you a thief?

1. When you make a copy of a digital work, no matter even if you have just bought it?

2. When you make a permitted copy of a digital work you’ve bought, because the copyright owner says you can make a particular copy.

3. You make a copy of any non-encrypted digital file you’ve already bought. Converting analog information to digital tends to fall here.

4. You make a copy of any digital file, encrypted or non-encrypted, that you’ve already bought.

5. You make a copy of any digital file you can get your hand on, whether you’ve bought it or not.

Sony’s CEO say #1 is stealing. Your current classic pirate says #5 isn’t. Most people fall in the middle.

Of course, there’s the practical problem of being sued by the copyright holders. For levels 1, 2, and 3, the odds pretty poor. If your computer is not attached to any other computers, it becomes virtually impossible to detect copying. For #4, your detection risks go up, because you have to get the decryption software from somewhere, and if it came from an Internet site, you’ve left a trail. So far, nobody has followed these trails, but they’re there. As for #5, ye’ll need to be wearin’ your cast-iron underwear, matey, ’cause the government fleets will get you sooner or later…

What can copyright owner do?

Sue for stealing? Go ahead. Most of the people you sue will be poor. You lose even if you win.

Harden the target? That’s the job of Digital Rights Management (DRM). That’s a fancy term for encryption of a file, so that only the people you want to read the file can read it. Sooner or later, it always gets broken. It discourages casual copying, at the cost of losing sales. Losing sales? Some people won’t buy an encrypted file, but they would have bought an unencrypted one. That’s a lost sale. Serious copiers with break the DRM and pass along the software to do so, DRM won’t stop them.

Refuse to Digitize? There are analog to digital converters everywhere, so really all you are doing is abandoning the claim to your property.

And that’s about it. These are all holding actions anyway. Losses through piracy are part of the Digital scenery. The trick is to make money despite them.

Yes Virginia, it can be done. Just not at the fat levels of monopoly pricing. People make money selling milk, wine, and chips (both potato and computer). They control their costs and do the dead-level best to make their customers happy. Novel thought for I.P. providers. (Stop laughing, peanut gallery!). Provide a cheap product, with easy purchase convenience, and you’ll keep selling. Happy customers come back and buy more. This is customer service 101. But if you keep the attitude, “you’ll take what we give you, when we give it to you, and you’ll take it! See!”, a million Jolly Rogers will be blasting at your profit margins until you economically sink. The Digital World has changed the picture for good, and the good old days aren’t ever going to come back.

7. Boiling The Frog Slowly: Content Versus Container

Question: How do you boil a live frog without it jumping out of the pot?

Answer: Put the frog in cold water and slooowly raise the temperature until the water starts boiling. If you put the frog straight into boiling water, it’ll hop right out. But as long as the water starts out cold and is the temperature is raised more slowing that the frog’s nervous system can keep track of, it’ll stay there until it boils.

A nasty piece of trivia, yes? Fine, let’s look at a different question, one that involves YOU…

Question: Which costs more—$6 or $400?

The answer that question is what this chapter is all about. (By the by, feeling warmer by any chance?)

In this day and age, most people base their gadget purchases on the cost of the gadget. If it cost’s too much, people don’t buy it. This is a fine idea, when all you buy is the gadget. It starts falling apart when you buy things to use in the gadget.

I’ll uses the world of DVD’s for an example. (You could use audio CD’s or the IPod for an example.) As an early adopter, I paid big bucks for my first player. I thought long and hard over the expense. I was afraid I would end up scrapping it in a few years. And guess what? I did end up scrapping it in less than two years. A huge waste of money? Well maybe…

By the time I scrapped the first generation DVD player for one that would play anamorphic widescreen discs properly, I had accumulated over 100 discs. At around $20 a disc, that was more than both players cost. I didn’t worry and dither over buying the discs, I bought them at a rate of a couple a week, and cut out eating out lunches at work to pay for them. The gap kept widening. I kept buy more and more discs, and spending more and more money in total on the discs. Now I have over 1500 discs. I estimate I’ve spent nearly $20,000 in DVD discs over the last 12 years. A huge number! How much have I spent on DVD hardware, total for the same 12 years? Maybe $2,000. But I only spent a little over $30 a week over that time. If I had held off buying the first player, I probably would have bought VHS tapes, which I would have later scrapped and replaced with the better DVD. $30 a week for 6 months would have paid for the first player. So which is worse, overpaying for the hardware or wasting money on software you’ll later scrap? My observation it that over time, wasting money on hardware is better that wasting money on software, even though the cost of the individual software units is cheaper.

And so it is in the brave new world of e-books. If you plan to spend money buying e-books, versus strictly living in the public domain world, you will end up paying far more for e-books over time than you will pay for your reader. There’s one big gotcha in the e-book world. With DVD’s, the encryption was on the individual disc, which meant the disc could be played in any player. You could swap out players and keep you investment in software untouched and unchanged. If you download DRM’ed e-books, your investment is tied to the hardware you have, limiting the scope for moving on to better hardware, or even being able to read the e-books in 20 years. (The same holds true for DRM’ed music downloads.)

It’s the software that drives your need for hardware, nowadays. When you do you budgeting, plan accordingly…

8. The Good New Days: Avoiding the Digital Scrapheap

How will Mr. and Ms. Everyman thrive in the year 2062? I’ve discussed some of the themes they will deal with as second nature in 2062. Here are my answers. If you don’t like them make up your own. You’ll be living with the results anyway. It’s your life.

The first and most important to remember, is that you can’t do everything. What you choose to leave out and how you choose what to leave out of your life is as individual as you are. Some people will just do it at random; others will use other people’s review to pick and choose with. But at the current growth of information, by 2062, you won’t be able to view it in 500 years, much less a lifetime. There will be all sorts of social/cultural implications to that, but that’s a different book, one I don’t want to write.

The next thing in importance to remember is that, over time, razor blades cost far more than razors. What I mean by that is that the costs of buying information will cost more, in the long haul, that the cost of the hardware to use the information. So controlling costs in buy information is more important than controlling cost in buying the hardware to use the information on, even though the hardware cost much more for a single purchase. Whatever you invest in information, remember to back it up, and put a back up somewhere else rather that the place you use it. That way come fire, flood, wind, or theft, you still have the data you paid for. It becomes the cheapest insurance policy you can have.

Avoid DRM whenever possible. In the long haul, it will go away, because the producers will finally realize that the cost of adding to information exceeds the losses they have from not having it in the first place. But that’ll take another decade, or so. But DRM blocks you from backing up your information, making you pay more than once for it. That’s a total waste of time and money.

Despite the razor/razorblade problem, don’t be afraid to spend money to spend money in new information. You, too, are a patron of the arts, just the same (if not as much individually) as the Getty Museum. Today needs to be documented every bit as much as yesterday, and it’s your dollars that will make it so. And I said buying, not stealing. Creators need to eat just the same as you. However, if an advertiser wants to feed the creator, there’s nothing wrong with taking the proffered freebie.

On the other hand, there’s a huge free world of information in the public domain. Smile and enjoy it. It is the intellectual patrimony of civilization.

Whatever your choices, you should have that information for your lifetime. And in the Digital World, it won’t take a warehouse to store it. Small and cheap, easily transportable and simple to use, you’ll live in a world that Kings from the Middle Ages would have drooled over, and abdicated to just be able to live in. A world of endless entertainment, almost free.

How can you ask for more that that…

The End