SXSW: Bruce Sterling's SXSW Rant

[Notes from this panel with Bruce Sterling]

Last year he talked quite a bit about RFID and the virtual as the new actual. The bleed-over from the Internet into the world.

There is more to say about this but he will only point out that SXSW badges have RFID chips in them. They say that they aren't connecting this to all the other day they have on you. They aren't doing this.

This year is the year of video. Video is kind of a stupid medium. It is the dumbest medium so this is a dumb year. There isn't much happening in the waning years of the Bush administration.

People are popping up out of the woodwork asking to video him.

Viacom is suing Google for a billion dollars. It's not about media convergence. They don't converge. Broadband eats everything. The old guys are trying to live on artificial scarcity. They are piling up the DRM and it is a terrible weird thing to see.

People get spooked by it. If large three initial corporations are trying to oppose something then it will get squashed. But the teens are coming. Time is not on the side of the incumbents.

There are trend-drivers here that seem interesting. A guy like Henry Jenkins who was here is part of our societies intellectuals establishment. His book is an important book.

Yochai Benkler (sp.) just released a massive book like Das Kapital not in its substance but in the depth of its analysis.

Another guy is Lev Manavich (sp.) who has been doing papers lately on hybrid media.

These guys name check each-other but they are coming from three different worlds.

A guy like Richard Stallman comes from a different perspective. (I missed something here)

Perhaps there is a new approach that will increase the wealth and power of average people.

Information is free now in a profound way. As a journalist he was struck by the incredible torrent of information coming out of Google. You put Google and Wikipedia together and it is game over for any aspiration founded in the 80s. Information is no longer an area of struggle.

You hang out in the second or third world and you realize that the second world is missing and there is a fourth world that is profoundly separate.

The world that is global capitalism is the first world. The second world is all forms of governance from democracy to Islam. The new third world is what Benkler would call common-space peer production. It is a new thing. It isn't the market. It isn't the state. It is growing fast and is becoming a factor in the plans of the good and the great. You can use google as a verb. There is a new world of "didn't you just." There is a commons based "we" world.

Then there is the fourth world of disorder that don't have any of this. This is the fastest growing part of the planet.

In ten years this will be more obvious.

The third world is more powerful than people give it credit. It is Hobbsian and very old. It just has never been put into mass scaled production. It isn't a good thing, it's just a new thing.

The arguments made by these luminaries are very fearsome because they see their baby as being under threat. These new structures are not all that fragile. They won't be the be-all and end-all of the world but they are resilient.

Things that are now business will stop being businesses.

People don't get Craigslist because they don't get Craig. He isn't interested in a business. He just wants 200 million friends. He has fundamentally gutted the newspaper industry and doesn't think of it as a business in anything remotely close to a traditional sense.

Journalists don't understand why they have joined the global precariate. It just isn't a business any more. They don't understand why they have to live like Wikipedia authors. It is deeply threatening when the workers do a better job than you without doing it professionally.

P2P networks will just out-ship anything ever built without a dime spent.

This isn't a golden opportunity. There are downsides to this.

It is a new world of laptop gypsies where there used to be professionals. It is a world vulnerable to lynch mobs and charlatans.

Fan art is terrible. It is not good and it never will be good. You will never see a painting by committee the way you see Wikipedia. Repurposes Harry Potter characters will never be great writing. It is new but not good. It is just aesthetically objectionable and there is no way to tart it up. It is a sow's ear. You just can't make a category error and say that your pig is made of silk.

Mashups are a new vogue. People pretend this is a raw source of creativity. Mashups are novelty music. It is like the Monster Mash. They have no musical staying power. It is pastiche. It is like magazine collage. It is good for what it is. It is not tremendous creative work, it is just tremendous creative power.

We need honesty when we confront things like this. We need to see what is an epi-phenomenon and what is a real cultural advance.

Digital tools are melting media down into a slum gully. It used to be that you were working in video or audio or photography. These distinctions just go away when you have powerful compositing tools.

The effects are becoming the means of production. In a contemporary Hollywod product there is not an untouched frame.

These devices become ever cheaper over time. This means that media are not converging, they are just becoming different flavors from the same mixing machine attached to ever better broadband.

What we thought were different forms of media are just different browsers through which to look at a stream of 1s and 0s. We don't understand what this actually means.

When you have a laser, everything looks laserable. Phil Torrone from the other day

It is a new capacity but it doesn't make it better.

Electronic art stinks.

Deviant art is a huge site. There is interesting stuff there, not great just interesting.

Maybe it has something to do with the ease of production. It is electronic folk culture. It is a real precious and valuable thing but the downside of folk culture is that its for hicks. They exist and they're fine but what we need is a new form of media criticism. We need to abandon film studies and media studies because they are just going away. We need some rigor and discipline to deal with the realities on the ground. To valorize them because they are shiny and new fails to look at effects.

55 million blogs and some of them have to be good blogs. Who knows if they are passing or not. Blogs are not people logging their web activities, which is like watching someone get beaten to death with croutons, instead they are used as a platform for something.

It is hard to find a blog that will make you cry or that has the effect of fine art.

The kind of discourse where it you have three paragraphs, embedded video, two paragraphs, flickr photoset and a dig this link.

How do we tell if we've done this well or badly? Barely do we have a web design critique that tells us if we are doing it properly or not.

It is deeply worrying that we don't have our head around it and we may not be able to do this before it turns into something else. It may not aspire for greatness because the ground is being eaten out from under it. This is the nature of folk culture.

You try to bamboozle people by using the processing power of a machine and then pretending that it is a mode of self expression. Generative art is worth taking seriously but it needs to be understood for what it is. It is mostly a form of semiotic pollution. Spam is the best example of this. What kind of medium would do this? Imagine if you had a TV, you turned it on, and someone immediately tried to rob you, or if all the ushers in theaters were pickpockets.

See: Reed Hundt, former head of the FCC

He has the weary look that you see on Washington political figures. They always look like sewing scissors that have been used to cut barbed wire.

He was one of the guys involved in auctioning spectrum. This is like chloroform in print. Nevertheless, this guy has come up with a mad scheme to steal, err, sell the 700mhz spectrum to police and other users (you). The idea is to take this away from broadcast tv (which nobody watches).

Broadcast is for the semi-education, the shut-ins, and a kind of lower-end evil medium that debases the poverty stricken people who watch it. It's true and we all know it. It was bad before American Idol and now there's just no budget left to produce even Dallas which was at least globally popular.

Take those wavelengths, which were chosen because they aren't junk spectrum, and just put the internet on them instead of TV. Just saturate TV areas with broadband internet. Should this happen so many of the distinctions between the Internet and other media would just go away.

There is no technical reason why this can't be done. It would just take a few channels worth of spectrum to saturate a whole city. Hunt's coalition involves the security services and that is very powerful. He thinks they have enough muscle to push Congress to act.

This guy has been around enough to seriously think that this could happen. This would take American from 22 in broadband to the forefront. We are the birthplace of the Internet not the vanguard. There are semiliterate divorcees in Korea with better broadband than the best in America.

Check out his web site, it's boring, there's no dancing bologna but its very good. Hell, volunteer to jazz it up for him.

So Yochai Benkler.

Socially motivated commons based peer production. How to do it.

First you have to divvy up the work. You aren't the state and you aren't the market. You have to suck them into it somehow.

It has to be granular, modular, and integrate-able.

Even five minutes of work will contribute merit. It has to be divided up into projects that are properly sized and measurable so people can see what it takes to get there. It then has to turn into one thing that actually achieves something within the broader concept of society.

• Business doesn't do this. Government doesn't do this.
• Self-selected, people are choosing to join you. No draft, no pay, no arm twisting. There has to be some membrane of differentiation. You want to suck them in fast but not trap them inside. You need a two-way in/out membrane of differentiation.
• Communication, a platform for fast efficient communication.
• Humanization
• Trust Construction, lot's of people are charlatans so you need confidence building measures that get everyone to really work together, to do one thing and hand it off to someone else
• Norm Creation, how do people behave to fit in, different schemes have a different folk culture vibe, what's normal behavior here
• Transparency, you can't do it from behind the curtain like the wizard of Oz, people will question your motives, think of the way people hassle Catarina Fake
• Monitoring, you do need a police force, people whose business it is to make sure that others aren't just screwing up the system
• Peer Review, you want people to know who is good at it and who is a slacker
• Discipline, this is Achilles heel of peer production, how do people discipline themselves
• Fairness, Marxists are very upset about web 2.0 because you don't want to make giant exploitation machines, you don't want to just be lining your pockets
• Institutional Sustainability, how long can you make this happen, how long will this paradigm continue

There are lots of things that used to be professions that are just melting like the Artic. Some think that these means of production will be made into businesses but the opposite is happening, things that used to be businesses and professions are vanishing.

Benkler does not look at Al Qaeda which is probably the most powerful example of this model. They don't rat each-other out, you go in and come out in a box, they've created new norms, they spend a ton of time on video, they seem to be very good at monitoring, somehow people get promoted, they sure have discipline, fairness maybe not, but they are pretty damn hard to kill because if you kill them more come pouring through the cracks.

They are military, they are religious, and they are kind of state based but they are proof of the potency of this kind of organization.

Computers are platforms for self-expression, not well-behaved appliances.

Designers get upset about this raggedness but it is the way it is. Everything is challenging, filled with barbed wire and endless betas, they have a steep learning curve, they are not an appliance. When see something that barely works like Ubuntu Linux you are seeing an example of peer production because it hurts to use it.

There is one other thing about this. Benkler distributed his book via pdf all over the web and then opened a wiki to explore this change. But there's nobody there. It's easy to start a wiki but it's not easy to be as smart as Yochai Benkler. There's a vast echo.

But you can go to a lefty pajamahadeen web site anywhere in the world you see a torrent of agreement of the most inane opinions in the world.

Here you see one of the most brilliant guys around today sitting alone in his wiki with nobody to engage in a discussion with him that actually advances his thinking.

He's just out of everyone's league. If you're in his league, go help him.

Last year he read a poem to end his speech about how tough and bitter everything is.

He wants to change it back by reading a poem by Czes?\xC7aw Mi?\xC7osz about serenity and fulfillment.

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.