on criticism.

it's a pain to have something regular that gets left behind in the rush of the pre-exam paper-writing orgy. i enjoy writing in this journal, but it gets kinda hectic and hard to keep up with when there's so many other things more pressing.

however, i've got something to write about today that needs to be written, and it relates to the inevitable stir caused by my rude little zine article. i'm going to try and make this about how alternative media relates to its audience, and avoid making it about how little fratboy tools can't take criticism. if it veers off toward the latter, i apologize.

now, one of the main focuses of my project thus far has been the withdrawal of mainstream media. the corporate-run media is so isolated and separate from the polis as a whole that it's nearly impossible for it to function as a truly empowering outlet for civil discourse. alternative media might seem to be the solution to these ills, in that it offers citizens an unprecedented level of enfranchisement in producing media content and contributing to the discourse, rather than simply consuming it.

however, to say that alternative media is universally better than corporate is to create a false dichotomy of good/evil that really has no place in ethnographic research. and criticism is one thing that alternative media does really well, but also in a sense really poorly.

the independent nature of alternative media makes it easy to criticize establishment institutions, like i did in my first essay for the zine, without any problems. nobody minds if you diss the war on terror, 'cos it's a favourite punching bag of the quasi-intellectual wannabe media literate folks who constitute the greatest part of the zine's audience.

however, the insular nature of forms like the zine mean that it's a lot more difficult to be critical of those who might also be members of the incestuous little community that forms its audience. since people are bred and indoctrinated to see the corporate media as fundamentally Other, as separate from society as a whole, people tend to respect the right of criticism. growing up with a professional musician as a parent, i can say with some confidence that it's not exactly kosher to confront a reviewer about a review that one feels is unjustified. and especially not to decry them for criticising you "in this kind of environment," as i was. (note also: what is that supposed to mean?)

the band members that i wrote the terrible review of seem to have this expectation in a 'scene' zine that one won't be critical of members of that scene, that a reviewer has an obligation to be 'encouraging' or some such crap. certainly, i do feel some measure of obligtaion to encourage talent where i see it, especially locally - but i do not feel any obligation to encourage shit, anywhere. sorry, but being in the same faculty as me doesn't entitle you to the complete suspension of my critical faculties. i would have been happy to write some encouraging things, if there was a single thing i legitimately liked about the band.

certainly, the band members are entitled to their (incorrect) opinion of the quality of their music, based upon countless stoned mumblings in a frat-house basement. indeed, they are free to call my tastes misplaced, my verbosity pretentious, and my weight gargantuan. i ripped on them pretty bad in my article, and i'd be a pansy if i expected anything less from them in return. but for one of them to walk up to me in class and look me in the eye with disappointment and ask why i'd criticize them so harshly, as though i have some responsibility to cheerlead every bunch of jam-band wannabes that happens to be involved in MIT... well now that's just asking for propaganda.

and if anyone thinks that's gonna come from me before i've even gotten a job in the corporate-shill media... they're sadly (and hilariously) mistaken.

today in alternative media.

how did i use alternative media today?

let's see.

- i read about the marc emery case in cannabis culture online.
- i wrote my MP joe fontana an email expressing my displeasure with this unjust intrusion on canadian sovereignty.
- i published that email on my other blog, and asked my canadian readers to send similar letters to their MPs; i also asked them to leave a comment if they did so.
- i did some research on google to find out about fair trade shops, and other alternative-type establishments in London. found out that Marc Emery used to own City Lights bookshop downtown. that's what actually inspired me to do the above things.
- i forwarded the contacts of the places that i found to the globalaware site, as per their request.
- indulged my addiction to seeing big juicy photographs on overgrow. subsequently was inspired to make judicious use of my cell phone, and engaged in some independent business transactions.
- continued reading the 'taxation is theft' thread and baiting libertarians on slacktivist's blog.
- skipped jauntily across the blogosphere: gizmodo, my friends' assorted blogs, these rather disturbing pictures of jessica simpson with assorted assault weaponry, and the intriguing "my neighbours are hoors" blog. amongst others.

volunteering for globalaware isn't exactly the most exciting thing. considering that i had planned for it to "be" my project... i'm pretty happy that i'm involved in enough other alternative media sources. that being said, it's kinda fun. i shall talk more about it at a future interval.

note that it's been six days since my last journal entry. so much for daily.

theme for project has been decided upon: "the apathetic student's guide to alternative media."

huzzah!

blogorrhea, worldwide.

one of my much-beloved blogs has a recurring segment called 'blogorrhea' that i think is a far more accurate moniker for the community of weblogs than lame-o wannabe sci-fi "blogosphere." this ain't no sphere. it's a random spewing of previously digested content that you'd be pretty unlikely to find anything worthwhile in. i mean, don't get me wrong; this would be the wrong venue for me to say that i hate blogs. but the percentage of worthwhile blogs is so very minuscule that it's getting kind of hilarious. when the majority of the blogorrhea is composed of crap like this, it's hard to be overly enthused about blogging as medium, overall.

and when you're not having your google results filled with useless crap splogs that are little more than a bunch of repetitive keywords designed to pull traffic towards advertisements, you've got to deal with crappy wannabe emancipatory blogs like this one: open source media. the talent show commented that this site was basically copying the mainstream media phenomenon of "intentional misuse of buzzwords." which is very true.

the current top line on the OSM site pretty much says it all: "compiled by OSM staff in Los Angeles."

now. if that's not setting off alarm bells in everyone's head, it should be. OSM STAFF? okay. let's go over the concept of 'open source.' essentially, to riff on the concepts put forth here, it means a piece of intellectual property that is freely shared with a blanket permission that it may be reproduced, copied, altered, reworked in any way. taken in the context of IP writ large, rather than simply the case of software, open-source would be clearly epitomized by something like wikipedia, in which the content is created by a set of individuals working together, at most moderated, and not produced by a staff. this definition would work to a lesser extent for a blog like dailykos or mydd, in which the majority of content is created by an individual blogger, but a good deal of supplementary content is created by the users of the site themselves in the form of diaries, which are recommended by other users and thus promoted to front-page status. in the case of the two aforementioned blogs, the most popular diarists are often promoted to quasi-editorial status. dailykos, for example, began as the individual endeavour of Markos Moulitsas (kos), but the promotion of diarists means that now, a good deal of the front page content is created by former diarists like Armando, Hunter, and Plutonium Page.

but the real kicker is the wretched doublespeak that pervades their whole 'about us' page. now, be warned that this is a blog which has been described as a "conservative circlejerk."

how's this for determinism? "freedom, openness and transparency in media is an inevitable result of the technological advances that have given every citizen the chance to breathe deeply of the news, thought and opinion that hovers in the ether between us." let's ignore the obvious grammatical flaw of that sentence, and evaluate the claim at stake. an inevitable result!? so little green footballs, that delightful forum which features thousands of parrots squawking out the 'daring' claim that the entire muslim world ought to be bombed into the stone age... is somehow a bastion of freedom, openness, and transparency. glenn reynolds, who won't even let people comment on his blog... is a defender of freedom? (digression: i just noticed that instacracker has an ad on his website for the ever-eloquent Larry the Cable Guy's new book, "Git-R-Done." which features the charming byline: "Why the United Nations is useless. Other than Ted Kennedy, what could be more unnecessary than these sumbitches? They can park where they want, fondle women, cuss out valet parkers and get away with it.") or perhaps the true defenders of openness and transparency are Redstate, with such understated, well-thought-out and rational headlines as "Hilary Clinton is a Racist." OR, maybe even michelle malkin's delightfully subtle characterization of Canada as a country with a "rogue, corrupt and repressive regime that [doesn't] know when to cut their losses and leave town."

blogs can just as equally serve oppression, secrecy, and opacity in media as they can serve freedom and openness. in fact, i'd say they're a good bit more likely to do so. because vast majorities of people are idiots. and if there's anything more mob-rule, backward, and populist than a miasma like freerepublic, i don't know what is. but hey, with such awkward rhetorical figures as "In the 1960’s, the medium may have been the message, but in the new century, it’s time for the medium to get out of the way," the toadies at OSM have certainly won me over. side note: what the fuck does that even mean? has this guy ever read McLuhan? does he know that McLuhan is a Canadian?

hell, he may as well be FRENCH!

and, to close an overlong and disjointed post, Open Source Media is, conveniently, not even close to open source. in fact, it violates the prime commandment of open source: free distribution. dailykos operates under the fairly simple rule: "Site content may be used for any purpose without explicit permission unless otherwise specified." 'Open Source' Media, however, has a lengthy page of legalese, which effectively states, in so many words, that the editors of OSM own your soul for eternity.

well, not quite. but let's compare this:

"Our Site and all its contents, which includes, but is not limited to, text, graphics, photographs, logos, video and audio content, is protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation under the copyright laws of the United States and other countries. All individual components of Our Site, including, without limitation, articles, content and other elements comprising Our Site are also copyrighted works. Additionally all of the weblogs linked to by us are likewise protected. You must abide by all additional copyright notices or restrictions contained on this site and our linked weblogs. "

with this, from opensource.org.

"The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale."

yeah. how's that for doublespeak. "open source" media that's all rights reserved. not... fucking... likely.

okay, that's enough.

norm defying community, part two.

this is gonna be a shorter entry, in which i'm going to try to continue the thread started by this post and perhaps draw some preliminary conclusions. or something.

so. i'll set overgrow aside for the time being, and talk about filesharing. i don't really think there's any filesharing software that's as conducive to the construction of virtual community as bittorrent. the product's main website describes their programming efforts as an endeavour to make "publishing files on the web painless and disruptively cheap." which eloquently states what bittorrent does.

filesharing is the cause célèbre of geeks like me, and favourite demon of the corporate interests that hold the mechanisms of our entertainment in their tightly-clenched anuses. i've been on-board since before napster, having started onto the MP3 bandwagon with mp3.box.sk, which began as a simple FTP search engine for mp3s. i then quickly discovered the joys of napster, to which i shan't provide a link, because its paid-content model disgusts me, and because everyone knows about it already. following the demise of napster, i moved on to the short-lived audiogalaxy, which was a wonderful service and in many ways presaged the development of bittorrent. after audiogalaxy, too, was shut down, i was without a decent service for the downloading of music, and as a result i listened to basically the same music for a very long time. until i discovered the joy of bittorrent.

music was, in fact, only the beginning. bittorrent is effectively the mechanism of my escape from corporate dominance of the cultural sphere. i can get all the shows i want to watch, commercial-free, from myspleen, which features shows available only on the [adult swim] network in the US, that i pretty much can't get in canada. i can get any video game i'd care to play, without having to pay 70+ bucks, and any new movie from torrentspy. and, of course, i can get literally any music i could want to listen to from OiNK. what's most notable about these sites, beyond simple pirated media, is that they all function as online communities. less so with torrentspy, just because it's got so much information and so many people, but myspleen and oink particularly foster discussion and dialogue between the site's participants. and bittorrent is uniquely structured in that it requires some sense of community to function properly. without going too much in-depth into the software behind the system, torrents from torrentspy tend to be of much poorer quality than myspleen or oink, because the site does not require membership.

the essential basis of bittorrent, like FTP's of yore, is that one must upload as much as one downloads. so, on myspleen or oink, once i download a movie or piece of music or something, i need to leave the torrent running on my computer and upload to other users as much as i had previously downloaded. this is kept track of via a ratio system which is persistent and associated with the IP address that i've logged in from. unless i maintain a decent ratio (ie, i give back to the community as much as i have received), then i get banned. with oink, the community is even more exclusive in that it requires an invitation to join; you have to know a member to join, and once you've joined, you can't invite new members until you've uploaded 20 gigabytes of material.

so, i'm not gonna lie; the ethical dimensions of piracy are pretty much foreign to me. i haven't purchased an album for well over a year, and haven't thought twice about it. i go to the movies very rarely; pretty much only when i feel that the theatre can offer me something that my living room can't. but really, i'm a student. i haven't got the money to buy even a minuscule fraction of the entertainment commodities that i enjoy. without filesharing, i basically wouldn't hear any new music, see any new movies, or play any new games.

what's the point of me talking about overgrow and bittorrent? so what, i'm a stoner who likes to steal music. big friggin deal. well, that may be the case. but both are examples of alternative media which serve to allow the average citizen an unprecedented amount of self-determination and enfranchisement. the government, and the corporate interests it largely serves, sets bounds on our self-determination in law. we are, of course, always free to transgress those bounds at our peril. yet our peril is fairly remote in these situations. the chances of prosecution for participating in either of these communities is minimal. if someone's getting busted for growing, it's not because of overgrow; simultaneously, someone sued for filesharing isn't being punished because of bittorrent. so, even though people have always been technically free to violate the norms of the larger community, they have in the past been denied enfranchisement or communal participation altogether if they chose to do so. overgrow and bittorrent mean that the groups of people who transgress the norms of the larger community can form their own, separate community to suit their needs.

this is, of course, a not un-problematic concept. based on what i've described so far in relatively neutral terms, similar alternative media could and do quite obviously form to suit the needs of comparatively more reprehensible norm-defiers. pedophilia, terrorism, and violent crime writ large are all acts which transgress social boundaries, and which have employed the mechanisms of alternative media to create communities whereby they could more effectively pursue their nefarious goals.

in conclusion, then, how can i justify the intuitively substantial difference between communities i feel are relatively harmless, and communities which pretty much anyone rational would deem destructive to the fabric of society as a whole? well, let's think philosophically. in my opinion, there are some laws which are clearly in our 'enlightened self-interest.' thus, i do not murder, rape, or rob because i would not wish to be murdered, raped, or robbed. these are clearly aspects of a social contract to which i would agree. one ought not to perform such acts as one would not wish to be subject to; indeed, one must give up one's right to do such things in order that all others might similarly give up their right. yet in the cases i described, it is unclear how exactly these could be construed as destructive to the fabric of society. marijuana should be legal, and the cost of cultural products is predicated upon a ridiculous lie central to the capitalist mode. would i be worse off living in a society in which everyone grew pot? of course not. i'd love such a society, in fact. haha. the question of filesharing is a bit trickier, but not much - would i be worse off in a society in which everyone stole intellectual property? perhaps not in general. but, how about a society in which record companies, television and movie studios were constantly being robbed, to the point the whole system of cultural industry collapsed. i'd be perfectly, PERFECTLY happy to pay a few bucks for a CD to cover the cost of production and get a decent living wage directly to the artists who poured their heart and soul into it. but paying 20 bucks to cover the costs of a whole bloated, unnecessary bureaucracy that destroys everything sacred and wonderful about culture, and hardly even compensates the artists? not so happy to do that. so, bittorrent is my cheap wannabe civil disobedience.

and that's enough for now.

interlude: wikipedia love

i haven't finished my last entry, really, yet. but just a brief thought: electricity is TOTALLY crazy. i mean, maybe i'm just ill-informed, but i have no idea how it works. and by going to the wikipedia entry on watt, i just went on an oddysey of trying recursively to find definitions of things i didn't understand in that definition, and eventually ended up at the definitions of such basic things as force and electromagnetism.

i don't understand physics at all.

this is what i'm doing at 2:17 am on a saturday night whilst my roommates and girlfriend are at the bar. haha, i'm such a nerd.

but there was a lineup! and i wanted to play hockey on the PS2 so my roommates didn't kick my ass so badly anymore.

this entry has officially blurred the line between academic exercise and random musing. hurrah!

on the enfranchisement of the rule-breakers.

disclaimer: this post should in no way be construed as an endorsement of or admission of complicity in any illegal act.

this is gonna be a heck of a long-winded entry, i think, because i've got lots to say. and it's probably going to be a bit snippy, cos that's pretty much how i feel right now. this is something which i've been thinking about for awhile, but let's begin by citing exactly what just provoked me. this is an email from my boss.

"Team,
As you know, I am a proponent of furthering one's education. So it is with some regret that I must announce a directive that has come from upper management that homework/educational materials may no longer be completed/read while on work time. In fact, to be more precise, the only reading materials and Internet sites that reps may visit are:
-work-related
-automotive industry-related
-news and current events related
Please do not hesitate to discuss this with a TL should you have any questions, or dislike email as a communication medium.
Thanks,
[name deleted]"

well, let's have a little think about this, shall we? this means that, whilst my erstwhile comrades are busy on their "London Auto Club" forums, talking about the 'phat rides' in which they intend to 'mack' on 'bitches;' i am forbidden from doing my Wittgenstein readings, or perusing the statutory materials for my poli sci paper. this should bother me quite a bit, i'd say. in fact, it's the sort of thing which, if there was nothing i could really do about it, i would fire off a terse little email advising my thoughtfully euphemistic boss where he could stick his flowery Newspeak corporate bullshit.

but, i like making 12 bucks an hour for doing nothing. and why am i not really very upset about this? because it doesn't matter in the least, really. all it means is that i can't openly have a book out when my boss is walking about. let's take into consideration two basic facts: my boss is almost always sitting at his desk, out of sight. and he's not in on weekends. so that limits the times when i even have to worry about this. but let's get to the point: alternative media let me do what i want, regardless of what my boss says. by simply pulling down my windows taskbar, i can make what programs i am in invisible - and my boss is dumb or something, and has never once noticed this. and alternative media, via the internet, are the VESSELS OF MY EMANCIPATION!

haha. okay, that was lame. let us ponder the alternative media that let me get around restrictions set up to stifle my intellectual career. i can do basic research for stuff on wikipedia, of course. and i can get my readings from hobbes, locke, and rousseau for philosophy online, in full hypertext. my poli sci prof has thoughtfully put a good chunk of his readings online. and of course my beloved blogger allows me both to contribute to this journal for MPI online, sans conspicuous paper and pen, and to vent my frustration at the crappy postmodern alienation-fest that is this call centre job. i can write papers in word (ick!) and send/receive them to/from my home computer with gmail. and when my boss is gone, i can jack my notebook into the intranet here, and do anything i'd be able to do from home... even the marginally-legal stuff that'd probably get me fired if it was monitored. (because when plugged into my laptop, it doesn't transmit any identifying data to the network; since i don't need to login using my own account, even if traffic was being monitored, the sysops could only tell that someone was accessing those sites, not who.)

in a way, my workplace here is a microcosm of a phenomenon that exists across the world, spread by the internet. just as my employers have a very limited toolkit with which they can restrain my actions, governments, especially in liberal democracies, are having their control mechanisms pushed into obsolescence or ineffectuality by the internet. certainly, the internet is not a realm in which the law does not exist. particularly in the case of crimes deemed sufficiently reprehensible by society, from pedophilia to terrorism, the government uses the internet to catch criminals as often as the criminals use it to evade. indeed, i remember reading that pedophilia was thought to be an extinct crime, like grave-robbing and such, until the development of the internet allowed investigative agencies to police rings of offenders more effectively. so the internet is as often a mechanism of control as it is one of emancipation. (not that i think criminals that infringe on the rights of others, like the ones mentioned above, ought to be 'emancipated.')

but in terms of crimes that are far more widespread and generally considered less 'destructive' to the fabric of society, the internet provides a great deal of enfranchisement to those who choose to disobey the laws. indeed, just as in our reading on the 'gay global village in cyberspace' pointed out, the (sometimes illusory) anonymity granted by the internet allows people who would be marginalized for fear of persecution in the 'real world' to find community in virtual spaces. one such community with which i am familiar is overgrow, an online information resource and forum with over 125,000 registered users. particularly in the United States, draconian drug laws mean that those interested in cultivating marijuana could face extremely harsh penalties. thus, few independent growers can discuss their craft in public for fear of discovery and prosecution. while some enterprising activists and growers like ed rosenthal published books on the subject of marijuana horticulture, rosenthal's subsequent felony conviction makes the consequences of such activism clear. (parallels obviously exist the case of marc emery) though books on the subject were available, they were often vague and of little use to beginning growers or growers with specific problems, even when they could get their hands on them.

overgrow, however, means that growers from across the world can effectively 'come out' online. (this was precursed by Usenet, like basically everything else online.) unlike the case of the 'gay global village,' however, the consequences of such a coming out have had less to do with legal emancipation (decriminalization) and more to do with practical emancipation. the mechanics of marijuana horticulture are not simple, and in order to obtain results, growers need to know what they're doing. overgrow (in notable conjunction with digital cameras) enables growers to post pictures of their growing cabinets or rooms, and obtain precisely-tailored advice from a community of 'experts.' they can obtain information on proper lighting, ventilation, odor control, media (growing medium, that is), and security/law enforcement concerns. through overgrow, new techniques for growing have been established, communal norms set up and enforced through moderators, and countless new growers indoctrinated in the cultivation of an illegal plant. contributors are ranked by a 'karma' system like Slashdot's, whereby gifted contributors can gain recognition, status, and often become moderators. some growers, like Tokahontas and NIMBY have taken on a near-celebrity status for their contributions. overgrow also helps perpetuate the community; the detailed advice on regional drug law and search&seizure legislation helps the community to gain knowledge of their rights and to ensure that, by way of carbon filters and sewer ventilation, their growing remains stealthy and unnoticed by "LEO," as they are (un-)affectionately called.

alright, i'm running out of steam. i'm gonna call time out; my next entry i'll move on to filesharing, and try to make some kind of generalized conclusions. until then: basically, the point is just that law becomes less relevant as the internet provides the people with skills and access the ability to engage in new levels of self-determination.

i just wrote 1300 words off the top of my head about random shit in an hour and a half, and loved it. i wish all schoolwork was like this.

the low stakes of indie journalism.

my dad has a quote he's fond of repeating incessantly - "why are university politics so bitter and divisive? because the stakes are just so low."

it's the truth, though. if there's one thing that my little concert-review experience last week has shown me, it's that if there's a peril to alternative indie journalistic writing on a small scale, it's definitely in terms of the insignificant issues. the band that i saw, to put it gently, sucked the big one. and my instinctive reaction would be to rip them to pieces. if i had been reviewing them for my blog, that's what i would have done. this is for a couple reasons: i wouldn't have had to check with anyone, because my blog is mine alone (well, this one is anyway), free from editorial control. perhaps more importantly, i also wouldn't have any reasonable expectation that the band members would be reading my blog.

but, even though my roommate and i gleefully pointed out how hilariously lame this band was, i wasn't entirely prepared to put my actual vitriolic thoughts out there for a mass audience, particularly not with my byline, and particularly not when a bunch of people involved with this band were in my year of MIT, and thus i'd have class with them for the next two years. self-censorship hath reared its ugly head!

eugene, our illustrious zine editor and the person who asked me to cover this band's show, was quite supportive of the fact that the band in question blew ass. and although he beseeched me to try and be constructive in my criticism, he by no means told me to avoid criticizing the band. my first instinct would have been to savagely tear into the band for being a bunch of slack-jawed hacks devoid of any artistic vision, but to be honest, eugene was probably right to ask me to be constructive. i mean, apart from the visceral thrill of criticizing a group really harshly, there's not a lot to be gained for the reader by suffering through 800 words of me being a pretentious dick to some poor fratboys with a penchant for instrumental jams. but my unwillingness to give my 100% sincere opinion on the group was less because of a fear of editorial control, but merely because of concern over the smallness of scale involved. i didn't really want to raise the ire of a bunch of neanderthal-type frat boys because their homeboys' bands got dissed. nor did i want to seem like too much of a snob to the microcosmic world of our faculty in general. i mean, i am, of course, but one must be diplomatic about such things.

(in the interest of divulging any prejudices which i might have, let me say that the band's "manager," who i talked into letting me in for free by saying i'd give his band a good review, is probably the most annoying person in my MIT required courses. so it didn't give me a particularly good first impression when he was the one taking money at the door. plus, why the fuck does a crappy university-student band with no prospects need a manager? i think my roommate said it best when he commented that "having a manager is something you should be forced into," by the fact that you've got a dozen record labels clamoring to sign you and you need to pick out what's best. otherwise, you're just a bunch of douchebags who aspire to be corporate, conglomerated, mainstream drivel before you're even talented enough to be.)

in any case, i took the middle ground in my article. or rather, made an ironic attempt to seem like i was taking the middle ground. i gave a variety of things that i liked about the show. mainly: cheap beers, i didn't have to play cover, they were almost good musicians. i also gave a variety of things that i didn't like. such as, no inspiration, no taste, nothing likeable about the music they played, terrible choices of covers, terrible vocals, and just plain incorrect lyrics on some of the songs. plus i gave some constructive comments like "Practice this song more." really, i guess, if i could give this crap band one piece of advice it would be this: find a decent singer/songwriter, and play exactly what he or she tells you. so, journalistic integrity won out, in a manner of speaking, and stupid MUZO got told how much they stank.

but there you have it. my thoughts on music journalism. also, i wrote up a brief journal entry at work the other night, but blogger was down so i couldn't post it. i'll put that up another time.