From supreet at sarai.net Sun Apr 1 21:37:46 2001 From: supreet at sarai.net (Supreet Sethi) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2001 16:07:46 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Freenet peer to peer network " Rewiring the internet" Message-ID: <200104011607.SAA01289@mail.intra.waag.org> Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds. Freenet is: Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system. Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing. Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting. Efficient: Freenet dynamically replicates and relocates information in response to demand to provide fast, scalable service and minimal bandwidth usage regardless of load. The system provides a flexible and powerful infrastructure capable of supporting a wide range of applications, including: Uncensorable dissemination of controversial information: Freenet protects freedom of speech by enabling anonymous and uncensorable publication of material ranging from grassroots alternative journalism to banned exposes like Peter (Spycatcher) Wright's and David Shayler's revelations about MI5. Efficient distribution of high-bandwidth content: Freenet's adaptive caching and mirroring is being used to distribute Debian Linux software updates and to combat the Slashdot effect. Universal personal publishing: Freenet enables anyone to have a website, without space restrictions or compulsory advertising, even if you don't own a computer. And many more! Freenet is an open, democratic system which cannot be controlled by any one person, not even its creators. It was originally designed by Ian Clarke and is being implemented on the open-source model by a number of volunteers. This has been dowloaded from http://freenet.sourceforge.net. Things like freenet would be needed due to the way internet is becoming client server system. where server is know all and have all where as client is passive entity. Freenet insures flow of information without any blocks. -- su - -- From monica at sarai.net Mon Apr 2 11:54:11 2001 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 11:54:11 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] freenet Message-ID: Supreet, Your material on freenet sounds fascinating. I was wondering if you could give an idea as to how people could create such a system amongst themselves, and also what does the slashdot effect mean?? cheers Mystified Monica!! -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From jskohli at fig.org Mon Apr 2 21:36:06 2001 From: jskohli at fig.org (Jaswinder Singh Kohli) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 21:36:06 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Prime Numbers Message-ID: <3AC8A36E.D652D6ED@fig.org> hi all of you World has gone crazy over the issues of Prime numbers. Heck lot of companies are employing computers to find em can anyone tell me y are they so important -- Regards Jaswinder Singh Kohli jskohli at fig.org :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: The Universe is a figment of its own imagination. From supreet at sarai.net Mon Apr 2 22:33:14 2001 From: supreet at sarai.net (Supreet Sethi) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 17:03:14 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] freenet In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200104021703.TAA17821@mail.intra.waag.org> The freenet vpn network can be accessed using a freenet software which forms freenet client+server called node. Its a java based client which can work on any platform. What is most interesting about freenet is that the user does not know from where he his accessing the information. The information could be in his own machine or coming from relativly far networks. Even if the information is stored locally the user cannot access it without a key which only system it self knows. This is distributed and secure. -- su - From indata at satyam.net.in Tue Apr 3 12:34:20 2001 From: indata at satyam.net.in (Arun Mehta) Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2001 12:34:20 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Ravi's "Recycling Modernity" paper Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20010403113551.022b48c0@imap.satyam.net.in> One of the objectives of the reader-list is to discuss the excellent papers in the Sarai Reader. Here's my first salvo, I hope others join in before my enthusiasm sags. Ravi's excellent paper describes very well the dichotomy between the techno-elites and the critical underbelly of our IT revolution. On the one hand, you have "young, upper-caste, often English-speaking programmers in large metropoles", and on the other the "dark seedy cluster of grey concrete blocks, which is filled with small shops devoted to the computer trade. Present here are the agents of large corporations, as also software pirates, spare parts dealers, electronic smugglers, and wheeler-dealers of every kind in the computer world." Both sets have their problems. The techno-elites are tied into "traditional patterns of unequal exchange. Indian programmers offer a low-cost solution to the problems of transnational corporations. Indian software solutions occupy the lower end of the global virtual commodity chain, just as cotton farmers in South Asia did in the 19th century, where they would supply Manchester mills with produce." At the lower end, I might add, we will face increasing competition from countries like China, and also obsolescence -- much of the Y2K work we got, for instance, was in languages like Cobol, which provide no future. On the other hand, the grey market, or 'pirate' electronic space, "only reconfirms older patters of unequal exchange and world inequality... this means ... no control over the key processes of electronic production." This segment consists largely of computer semi-literates, where there is an inordinate amount of waste. Perfectly functional cards are ripped apart merely because nobody bothered to keep the manuals or read them. While a throw-away culture may be common in the West, it certainly isn't here. In a country where computers are scarce, this waste is criminal. Through the eyes of an activist, however, problems become opportunities, and this is where Sarai should fit in. Firstly, the effort must be made to break the caste barrier in IT. There is no reason why poor kids could not make great programmers, and I would urge the cyber-mohalla concept to encompass the IT education of poor and street kids as well. Conventional IT education is doing a terrible job -- which is mostly why we find ourselves at the lower end of the cyber ladder, so this presents us with the opportunity to show the way for other IT training institutions as well. We are currently discussing on the linux-delhi list if there might be ways in which the linux community (which Sarai is ably supporting) might actively engage in training people in the process of bringing them into its fold -- get them involved in collaborative projects on the Net, provide a backup to each other and an environment in which everybody learns. More on that soon. As regards helping the grey market, perhaps we could, together with organisations like C-Sec at Delhi University that engage in hardware design, look to see if better training programmes might be developed for people working there. Perhaps a library of all the cards that are sold in the grey market, with digital photographs to help identify them, and some training on how to make and change settings? To help them get some degree of control over the processes of electronic production, perhaps we can look to see if projects could be initiated to add value to old hardware. For instance old hard disks of half a GB are almost useless these days, but with a suitable docking station, they could make excellent mobile storage. Individuals might not need to buy computers of their own, just their own hard disks, which they could simply plug into suitable machines at cyber cafes or schools. I'm sure people can think up other such interesting projects, that might help turn assemblers into proper manufacturers. The hardware sector has a more serious fundamental problem. The attractiveness of the computer software profession has denuded other engineering disciplines of qualified professionals. Hardware design skills are virtually absent now. With the increasing importance of embedded systems, and as industrial equipment becomes increasingly Internet-aware, hardware design skills will be much in demand. Here we need not only the availability of suitable training courses, but also an awareness campaign among the young, so that bright kids opt for them. Thoughts? Arun Mehta, B-69, Lajpat Nagar-I, New Delhi -- 110024, India. Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103. http://members.tripod.com/india_gii To join india-gii, a list which discusses India's bumpy progress on the global infohighway, mail india-gii-subscribe at cpsr.org From Philip.Pocock at t-online.de Wed Apr 4 12:59:47 2001 From: Philip.Pocock at t-online.de (philip pocock) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 08:29:47 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] cITy speak Message-ID: <3ACACD69.4EDEBFC9@t-online.de> hello list forwarding a mail from the Tate concerning a webcast about cities and peripheries. thought participation from sarai with its soft focus on urbanism might expand the discourse. before i append that mail, a comment on freenet. the freenet/gnutella/filesharing system design accessable from freeware such as Limewire, Furi, Gnutella and other such client software programs is rewriting copyright and re-adressing perhaps the inital purpose of copyright which was to free information from the conrtrolling hands of a greedy few central agencies, i.e. the church and the military(early)industrial complex. it works by replacing a central server with potentially incriminating logs concerning who and what was involved in the transfer of information via filesharing client software that turns every client (consumer) into a server (provider) at the same time. a search is begun by a client and results are listed as addresses of other persons connected to the filesharing system. downloading a search result means sealing a connection between the searcher's machine address and the private address of the other client-turned-server who has the requested file at their machine address. once that connection is up, no one can look inside and only the two consenting parties know what and who is involved. mp3 audio files are to music as a blurry newspaper image is to a silver photographic print. mp3 is a poor reproduction and should not subvert the fair recompense to an artist for their work, that is if the filesharing user has ears. in fact, some persons have developed allegies to mp3 and get headaches trying to create music from the digital and compressed sound in mp3 files. ok, here is the mail about a webcast at the Tate: > ANNOUNCING A WEBCAST LIVE FROM TATE MODERN > > Rio de Janeiro: Ideals of Modernity > A seminar, 3 April > > http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/live.htm > > < sincere apologies to anyone who receives this twice, or receives this in > error > > > > TIMES AND DATES > > Tuesday 3 April > 1630 - 1830 [ GMT ] > 1730 - 1930 [ British Summer Time ] > 1830 - 2030 [ Central European Time ] > 1230 - 1430 [ US Eastern Standard Time ] > 0000 - 0230 [ Indian Standard Time ] > 0530 - 0730 [ New Zealand Time - 3 April ] > > > LOCATION > > East Room, Level 7, Tate Modern, London, UK > > > ABOUT THE WEBCAST > > As part of Tate Modern's Webcasting Programme, a live webcast of a seminar > on on Rio de Janeiro will be presented on the Tate website. The seminar is > programmed to coincide with Tate Modern's first major loans exhibition, > CENTURY CITY , which > examines key moments of cultural creativity in nine great cities across the > world. > > Presented live online using the Real Player. To find out more: > http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/live.htm > > > ABOUT THE EVENT > > This seminar looks at the culture of Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s, a decade > which saw the beginnings of the Neoconcrete movement, Bossa Nova and Cinema > Novo. > > Speakers include: > > - Michael Asbury (Associate Research Curator Rio de Janeiro 1950-64) > - Paulo Sérgio Duarte (Centro Hélio Oiticica) > - John Gledson (University of Liverpool) > - Martin Grossmann (Museum of Contemporary Art, São Paulo) > - Maria Esther Maciel (Federal University of Minas Gerais). > > In collaboration with Camberwell College of Arts, with support from London > Arts. > > > > TECHNICAL DETAILS > > To experience this webcast, you'll need access to a computer with a sound > card, a connection to the internet and the Real Player installed. This can > be downloaded for free at the Real Networks website > . For the free version, download the > BASIC VERSION of the Real Player, which can be found at the lower left hand > corner of the webpage. > > Until the webcast begins there will be no audio or video available. > If you haven't experienced webcasting online before, please bvisit our > technical help page: > http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/help.htm > > > FEEDBACK > > As these webcasts are part of a pilot process, qualitative feedback that > will help shape the character of live webcasts from Tate Modern in the > future, is always appreciated. > > Also, if you have questions for the speakers, please email them through to > the Webcasting Curator . The Webcasting Curator > will endevour to deliver these questions, during Question Time. > > > MORE INFORMATION: > > For more on webcasting, and a programme of future webcasts see: > http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/webcasting.htm > or contact: > Honor Harger, Webcasting Curator, Interpretation & Education, Tate Modern > Email: honor.harger at tate.org.uk > PH: (44) 020 7401 5066 > URL: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/webcasting.htm > > > For more information bout Tate or getting tickets for events: > Tate Box Office > Email: boxoffice at tate.org.uk > PH: (44) 020 7887 8888 > URL: http://www.tate.org.uk CU, philip pocock From monica at sarai.net Wed Apr 4 13:16:07 2001 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 13:16:07 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] freenet Message-ID: Excerpted from an email on another list, called cITy speak. Thank you Phillip for sending that to me. A comment on freenet. the freenet/gnutella/filesharing system design accessible from freeware such as Limewire, Furi, Gnutella and other such client software programs is rewriting copyright and re-adressing perhaps the initial purpose of copyright which was to free information from the controlling hands of a greedy few central agencies, i.e. the church and the military(early)industrial complex. it works by replacing a central server with potentially incriminating logs concerning who and what was involved in the transfer of information via filesharing client software that turns every client (consumer) into a server (provider) at the same time. a search is begun by a client and results are listed as addresses of other persons connected to the filesharing system. downloading a search result means sealing a connection between the searcher's machine address and the private address of the other client-turned-server who has the requested file at their machine address. once that connection is up, no one can look inside and only the two consenting parties know what and who is involved. mp3 audio files are to music as a blurry newspaper image is to a silver photographic print. mp3 is a poor reproduction and should not subvert the fair recompense to an artist for their work, that is if the filesharing user has ears. in fact, some persons have developed allergies to mp3 and get headaches trying to create music from the digital and compressed sound in mp3 files. -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From supreet at sarai.net Wed Apr 4 22:40:05 2001 From: supreet at sarai.net (Supreet Sethi) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 17:10:05 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] freenet In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <200104041710.TAA16262@mail.intra.waag.org> What would be most interesting about such distributed systems would be, that people start putting the content they are interested in or their own compositions on systems like freenet, gnutella etc. -- su - From Philip.Pocock at t-online.de Fri Apr 6 13:58:53 2001 From: Philip.Pocock at t-online.de (philip pocock) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 09:28:53 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] [Fwd: Bauhaus Kolleg III Serve City Sydney] Message-ID: <3ACD7E44.83361554@t-online.de> forwarding this.... perhpas you ahve it already. philip -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Ute Lenssen Subject: Bauhaus Kolleg III Serve City Sydney Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2001 15:10:05 +0200 Size: 30704 Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20010406/f4917049/attachment.mht From monica at sarai.net Fri Apr 6 13:14:47 2001 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 13:14:47 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] censorship Message-ID: Apologies to those who might have read this on the Nettime list, but i think that this is a very interesting posting. For those who have read Jeebesh's piece on the history of the Indian State's attempts to control the media, this might seem like a local piece of news. One can imagine it happening in this part of the world fairly easily.. Monica Yesterday a liberticide law has been approved by the Italian Parliament. The law clearly state that the publishers of periodical news on the web who are not 'professional' journalists (or write on behalf of them) could be fined for up to 250 dollars and arrested for up to two years, and accused of the 'clandestine press' crime. Under the big publishers' lobby pressure they applied the same old rules for the printed press to the web. A professional journalist is a journalist that is registered in the National Order of Journalists (Ordine Nazionale dei Giornalisti). In order to be registered you have to take an exam with a National Order's members commission. Today lots of Italian independent webzine publishers, frightened by the announcement, announced to stop the activity. By now one of the major tech-zine is promoting a national petition against this senseless law. In the Italian Constitution is clearly written: "Everyone has the right to freely express his thoughts with spoken words, press and any other medium". -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From jskohli at fig.org Wed Apr 4 15:00:20 2001 From: jskohli at fig.org (Jaswinder Singh Kohli) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 15:00:20 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Prime Numbers References: <200104021703.TAA17821@mail.intra.waag.org> Message-ID: <3ACAE9AC.830B4F91@fig.org> Hi all News follows-- A new Prime number is found, the new number is xxxxxx number bigger than previous one known It was found on a massive Parallel processing architechture driven by 1000's of Processors ====== All I don't know is why they are doing this. OR What is use of Prime numbers( i don't even or odd say know a single one) May be some one knows and can tell me importance of Prime Numbers except the old one which was taught to us in class I. Thanks -- Regards Jaswinder Singh Kohli jskohli at fig.org :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: The Universe is a figment of its own imagination. From jskohli at fig.org Fri Apr 6 21:35:50 2001 From: jskohli at fig.org (Jaswinder Singh Kohli) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 21:35:50 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Prime Numbers References: <200104021703.TAA17821@mail.intra.waag.org> <3ACAE9AC.830B4F91@fig.org> <3ACDC0EE.EA475226@t-online.de> Message-ID: <3ACDE95E.8AB0E9EA@fig.org> philip pocock wrote: > Jaswinder Singh Kohli wrote: > > > Hi all > > > > News follows-- > > A new Prime number is found, the new number is xxxxxx number bigger than previous > > one known > > It was found on a massive Parallel processing architechture driven by 1000's of > > Processors > > > > is this the new omega and superomega numbers recently written up in New Scientist > concerning a mathematician Chaitlin from IBM, who hesitated years thinking no one > would believe him and no use would be found for his new 'magic' numbers? > > No it was just fake made by me ( but orignal news of findings are like this only) > > > > ====== > > All I don't know is why they are doing this. > > OR > > What is use of Prime numbers( i don't even or odd say know a single one) > > they are used - if the numbers you mention are Chaitlin's - by neural networked > machines to predict the probability of success for software written by artificial > intelligence. > > What are this Chaitlin's number? I don't know this stuff at all > NOTE: math like art and film and even urbanism is a modeling system, not a truth or > an absolute, in order to predict and conjure up insight into our psychic and > physical environment in the hope of improving (perhaps naively as the 20th century > has shown) our quality of life. > > i am no mathematician or expert on prime number theory, still, you mail intrigues me > so i send this response. hope it isnt w awaste of other list member's time. if so, > sorry. No need to say sorry et al after all someone somewhere may have gained knowledge out of your response. But it will be better if you explain it more clearly.Still theres some fog at the window( I cant see thru) > > cu, philip -- Regards Jaswinder Singh Kohli jskohli at fig.org :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: The Universe is a figment of its own imagination. From rana_dasgupta at yahoo.com Thu Apr 12 12:20:40 2001 From: rana_dasgupta at yahoo.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 23:50:40 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] Project Censored Message-ID: <20010412065040.16732.qmail@web512.mail.yahoo.com> Hi all If you're not aware of it already, you should check out ProjectCensored.org. they publish a list every year of what they consider to be the most important stories suppressed from the mainstream media and post daily news on censored stories. http://www.projectcensored.org/cyearbook.htm is the list of 2001's top censored stories. Best R __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ From arunmehtain at yahoo.com Thu Apr 12 20:06:17 2001 From: arunmehtain at yahoo.com (Arun Mehta) Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 20:06:17 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] censorship In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20010412183318.017de2b8@202.54.15.1> At 4/6/2001, Monica Narula wrote: >...One can imagine it happening in this part of the world fairly easily.. > >Monica > >Yesterday a liberticide law has been approved by the Italian Parliament. > > The law clearly state that the publishers of periodical news on the > web who are not 'professional' journalists (or write on behalf of > them) could be fined for up to 250 dollars and arrested for up to two > years, and accused of the 'clandestine press' crime. I don't think this could easily happen in India. IT is sort of becoming a holy cow, and such a ban would be quickly branded "anti-IT", don't you think? It would immediately be considered an attempt to muzzle future Tehelkas. And also note, this came in Italy not from the government, but under pressure from the media barons. In India, this lobby isn't that powerful, it seems to me. _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From monica at sarai.net Fri Apr 13 13:07:49 2001 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 13:07:49 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] censorship In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20010412183318.017de2b8@202.54.15.1> References: <5.0.2.1.2.20010412183318.017de2b8@202.54.15.1> Message-ID: well, perhaps i was being trigger happy in saying that this could happen in India in such a way. But i still think that because of the complete lack of transparency of the indian state, many things are enforced without the public necessarily getting to know about them (and the other matter of the fact that there is very little discussion even when they do..) But we are aware of censorship by the state to what it thinks is 'anti-national' and how this is considered acceptable by so many, even otherwise conflicting, factions. Perhaps the muzzling of voices will not happen in such a transparent way at all but through neverending red tapism, and police rights (such as they were trying to pass in the IT bill) and it would happen case by case, and therefore insidiously.. I might still be overreacting arun. What do you think? >At 4/6/2001, Monica Narula wrote: >>...One can imagine it happening in this part of the world fairly easily.. >> >>Monica >> >>Yesterday a liberticide law has been approved by the Italian Parliament. >> >> The law clearly state that the publishers of periodical news on the >> web who are not 'professional' journalists (or write on behalf of >> them) could be fined for up to 250 dollars and arrested for up to two >> years, and accused of the 'clandestine press' crime. > >I don't think this could easily happen in India. IT is sort of >becoming a holy cow, and such a ban would be quickly branded >"anti-IT", don't you think? It would immediately be considered an >attempt to muzzle future Tehelkas. And also note, this came in Italy >not from the government, but under pressure from the media barons. >In India, this lobby isn't that powerful, it seems to me. > > > >_________________________________________________________ >Do You Yahoo!? >Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From arunmehtain at yahoo.com Fri Apr 13 13:15:20 2001 From: arunmehtain at yahoo.com (Arun Mehta) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 13:15:20 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] censorship In-Reply-To: References: <5.0.2.1.2.20010412183318.017de2b8@202.54.15.1> <5.0.2.1.2.20010412183318.017de2b8@202.54.15.1> Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20010413131222.019af270@202.54.15.1> Oh, I agree entirely about the dangers of censorship, the convoluted ways we have to deny people's rights and the need to stay vigilant and discuss these encroachments. I just didn't quite see this particular danger -- however, let us have a discussion on this at Sarai some time? This kind of subject will surely attract lots of people. Arun At 4/13/2001, Monica Narula wrote: >well, perhaps i was being trigger happy in saying that this could happen >in India in such a way. But i still think that because of the complete >lack of transparency of the indian state, many things are enforced without >the public necessarily getting to know about them (and the other matter of >the fact that there is very little discussion even when they do..) But we >are aware of censorship by the state to what it thinks is 'anti-national' >and how this is considered acceptable by so many, even otherwise >conflicting, factions. Perhaps the muzzling of voices will not happen in >such a transparent way at all but through neverending red tapism, and >police rights (such as they were trying to pass in the IT bill) and it >would happen case by case, and therefore insidiously.. > >I might still be overreacting arun. What do you think? > > >>At 4/6/2001, Monica Narula wrote: >>>...One can imagine it happening in this part of the world fairly easily.. >>> >>>Monica >>> >>>Yesterday a liberticide law has been approved by the Italian Parliament. >>> >>> The law clearly state that the publishers of periodical news on the >>> web who are not 'professional' journalists (or write on behalf of >>> them) could be fined for up to 250 dollars and arrested for up to two >>> years, and accused of the 'clandestine press' crime. >> >>I don't think this could easily happen in India. IT is sort of becoming a >>holy cow, and such a ban would be quickly branded "anti-IT", don't you >>think? It would immediately be considered an attempt to muzzle future >>Tehelkas. And also note, this came in Italy not from the government, but >>under pressure from the media barons. In India, this lobby isn't that >>powerful, it seems to me. >> >> >> >>_________________________________________________________ >>Do You Yahoo!? >>Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com > >-- >Monica Narula >Sarai:The New Media Initiative >29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 >www.sarai.net >_______________________________________________ >Reader-list mailing list >Reader-list at sarai.net >http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From supreet at sarai.net Fri Apr 13 13:59:16 2001 From: supreet at sarai.net (Supreet Sethi) Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 08:29:16 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: Mp3 under pressure Message-ID: <200104130829.KAA11326@mail.intra.waag.org> Forwarded From: Jaswinder Singh Kohli > MP3 format under pressure > > 12 April, 2001 07:28 GMT > > > > NEW YORK (Reuters) - MP3, a popular format for downloading music from > the Web, is under pressure from leading technology companies such as > Microsoft, the Wall Street Journal has reported. > > Microsoft and Seattle-based RealNetworks are working to subtly wean > consumers away from MP3 technology, encouraging them to use proprietary > software formats instead, the paper said in its online edition on > Thursday. > > The technology companies, which have the music industry's blessing, are > encouraging those who download music to use new proprietary software > formats that make the audio sound significantly better but also make it > harder to share copyright-protected songs, the paper said. > > Microsoft, for example, plans to severely limit the quality of music > that can be recorded as an MP3 file using software built into the next > version of its personal-computer operating system, Windows XP, according > to the report. > > Music recorded in the software company's own format, called Windows > Media Audio, will sound clearer and require far less storage space on a > computer, the paper said. > > Other formats gaining popularity are based on the relatively new > Advanced Audio Codec created by AT&T, Dolby Laboratories, Sony and the > Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen in Germany, the paper said. > > MP3 is the format used to by controversial Internet music-sharing > service Napster, whose operations have delighted consumers happy to > access free music but infuriated the record industry. > > > > -- > > > Regards > Jaswinder Singh Kohli > jskohli at fig.org > :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: > The Universe is a figment of its own imagination. > > -- su - From ravis at sarai.net Sun Apr 15 00:32:34 2001 From: ravis at sarai.net (Ravi Sundaram) Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2001 15:02:34 -0400 Subject: [Reader-list] surveillance Message-ID: <3.0.6.32.20010414150234.00816100@mail.sarai.net> This came out in nettime, so sorry for cross posting... declan Mccullagh keeps at it exposing trans-national surveillance strategies, _____ From: Declan McCullagh Subject: Cypherpunks, Feds, and Pudgyfaced Voyeurism To: cypherpunks at cyberpass.net, cypherpunks at lne.com Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 19:39:44 -0400 X-URL: http://www.mccullagh.org/ User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.2i The cypherpunks list has become a popular tourist destination in the last two years for voyeuristic Feds in Washington and Oregon. This monitoring has been less cyber-stalking of the chargeable sort, and more a kind of spectator sport, something to chat about with fellow TIGTAians at the water cooler, and maybe launch some investigations every now and then. We all know that, from his own testimony, a pudgyfaced Jeff Gordon has become enraptured by the cypherpunks list. We know from exhibits that he subscribes to the list from apparently a Hotmail account, but the relevant headers were redacted so we don't know which one. We also know that Gordon & co infiltrated the common law court and Libertarian Party and monitored the "northwest libertarians" mailing list. Anyone attending the first Seattle-area cypherpunk meeting next week may want to check for Gordonian bodywires. The real surprise is not that investigator-stalkee Gordon has extended his arguably unethical pursuit of Bell and cypherpunks, but that other area Feds have joined the fun. For instance, Assistant U.S. Attorney Floyd Short teaches a course on cybercrime at the University of Washington law school on Thursdays, and has reportedly made the cypherpunks list a part of his class. Short has also spoken about the cypherpunks list and its relation to online lawlessness during at least two speeches, I'm told. The cypherpunks list, in other words, is a staple of law classes not because of participants' views about privacy -- but because of the number of their number who are now serving time. One assistant U.S. Marshal in charge of moving Jim Bell from the downstairs holding pen to the courtroom confessed to me yesterday that he's a cypherpunks fan. Not in the ending-the-nation-state-through-crypto sense, but he finds the list interesting enough to read on a daily basis through the inet-one archive site. He was puzzled about why it's been down; the speculation seems to be that it's related to cyberpass' problems. He told me he's been a list reader for about two years. Someone could make a tidy profit by compiling a complete cypherpunks archive and selling it to the Feds on CD-ROM for use in prosecutions. Note that if Bell had not posted under his real name to cypherpunks during his investigation of federal agents last year, he would not be facing perhaps five more years in prison. The government buttressed its case against Bell by using each message that could conceivably be relevant as structural support for its Good Society vs. Internet tale to the jury. Email to the cypherpunks list appears dozens of times in the government's pretrial list of exhibits. Assistant U.S. Attorney Robb London led the jury on a post-rich digression about plausible deniability that included posts from occasional participants like Michael Froomkin and Black Unicorn. London argued that Bell's investigation gave him plausible deniability for stalking. During closing arguments yesterday, London brought it up once more: "Let's talk about plausible deniability. It's a whole big part of what the cypherpunks are into." You'll recall that London and Gordon were involved in the prior prosecution of Carl Johnson, another cypherpunk regular. Perhaps the Feds are frustrated since during their obsessive-compulsive cyphersurveillance, they can only listen and not post in response to windy rants about the perils of big government. At least not under their real names. The Tacoma courtroom is a sterile place, kind of Singapore-meets-the-Bastille. Not helping the atmosphere is the half-dozen agents, some armed, who populated the audience benches during the Bell trial. In addition to two reporters, only one non-Fed observer showed up every day; she took notes and posted them to the cypherpunks list. When this unnamed 'punk introduced herself to Bell's parents after a week of being anonymous, all the Feds' heads swivelled to hear what her name was. Like the old-media types they are -- London says he's a former legal reporter for The New York Times -- the Feds hardly appreciated online reports from the trial by John Young and that anonymous local cypherpunk. London, whose courtroom demeanor veers between snide and surly, griped loudly during a recess last week about "glorified stenographers" taking up space in the courtroom. The six bodyguards offered up appropriate nasty glares. But Gordon seems to be the true antipunk. (London has indicated he didn't want to prosecute this case, and missed out on a more high-profile one because of it.) After the jury delivered their partial verdict, Gordon leaned over from his seat at counsel table and asked London to seal the court records. London dutifully requested that U.S. District Judge Jack Tanner seal any information or exhibit or transcript that included home addresses of alleged stalkees. Now, those data are arguably key to the government's case against Bell -- did he drive to this address or not? -- and were discussed at great length in open court. Tanner denied the motion, and Gordon wasn't happy. You can be sure that Tanner has learned all about the "TannerWatch" website, and is hardly amused by it. You can also bet that some unnamed agent will be watching who asks for copies of the court file -- they seem to fear that some local 'punk will try to obtain Bell's diary, which was introduced as evidence and seems to include not just inaccurate home address of government agents, but accurate ones as well. Watch for more investigations here -- apparently court information does not want to be free. Anyone know if that grand jury meeting in the Seattle federal courthouse is still in session? It would be interesting to find out why local papers didn't cover the trial, even after some residents repeatedly suggested they do so. The only other reporter there besides your humble correspondent was a Washington, DC correspondent one from 60 Minutes. Other reporters from local newspapers had covered unremarkable pre-trial hearings at great length, but failed to cover a fairly unusual trial. I'm told they didn't want to have to fight subpoenas. As a former journalist himself, London probably knew exactly how to handle them -- and avoid potentially unfavorable press coverage. Government prosecutors now appear to qualify as technical experts on the cypherpunk phenom, having scrutinized listmember behavior as ants under lenses. London told the jury yesterday that "the one unifying theme that defines someone as a cypherpunk on the Internet is the ability to encrypt mail." One could say the same thing about a NAI marketing flack, but that wouldn't be as quotable. It's all so sad and predictable and sad again. The cypherpunks list had its glory days: Wired magazine cover stories, blossoming technology, and, yes, even those damnable tentacles. Now it's become a convenient way for the Feds to land convictions. -Declan Washington, DC April 11, 2001 Background: http://www.cluebot.com/search.pl?topic=ap-politics http://www.mccullagh.org/subpoena/ This article is at: http://www.cluebot.com/article.pl?sid=01/04/11/238254 From Philip.Pocock at t-online.de Sun Apr 15 18:19:43 2001 From: Philip.Pocock at t-online.de (philip pocock) Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 13:49:43 +0100 Subject: [Reader-list] documenta 11 in dehli Message-ID: <3AD998E7.49B86518@t-online.de> Platform2 Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and The Process of Truth and Reconciliation New Delhi, May 7?21, 2001 more at: www.documenta.de From supreet at sarai.net Mon Apr 16 11:06:16 2001 From: supreet at sarai.net (Supreet Sethi) Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 05:36:16 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: Review of the CODE conference (Cambridge/UK, April 5-6, 2001) Message-ID: <200104160536.HAA15058@mail.intra.waag.org> Forwarded From: Florian Cramer > (The following review was commissed by MUTE and will appear in the > forthcoming MUTE issue, see . Josephine Berry has > my cordial thanks for editing the text into proper English. The MUTE > people were so kind to let me speak about literature and systems theory on > a panel with Robert Coover and Jeff Noon at Tate Modern. See > for the details. > -FC) > > > > CODE: Chances and Obstacles in the Digital Ecology > > > The recent Cambridge conference CODE amounted to more than a > straightforward expansion of its acronym into - in computereze - its > executable "Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Economy". It > actually got some of its participants collaborating. The most interesting > idea regarding collaboration came as an off-the-cuff remark from James > Boyle, professor of law at Duke University, who compared the recent > interest in open digital code to environmentalism. The first environmental > activists were scattered and without mutual ties, Boyle said, because the > notion of 'the environment' did not yet exist. It had to be invented > before it could be defended. > > After two packed days of presentations, it could well be that the virus > will spread and make artists, activists and scholars in digital culture > associate 'IP' with 'Intellectual Property' rather than 'Internet > Protocol', whether they like it or not. Unlike many Free Software/Open > Source events with their occasional glimpses at the cultural implications > of open code, the CODE programme covered the free availability and > proprietary closure of information in the most general terms setting it > into a broad disciplinary framework which included law, literature, music, > anthropology, astronomy and genetics. Free Software has historically > taught people that even digitised images and sounds run on code. But that > this code is speech which can be locked into proprietary schemes such as > patents and shrinkwrap licenses, thereby decreasing freedom of expression, > is perhaps only beginning to dawn on people. John Naughton, moderator of > the panel on "The Future of Knowledge", illustrated this situation by > describing how, in the US at least, it is illegal to wear T-Shirts or > recite haikus containing the few sourcecode words of DeCSS, a program > which breaks the cryptography scheme of DVD movies. > > There is little awareness that any piece of digital data, whether an audio > CD, a video game or a computer operating systems is simply a number and > that every new copyrighted digital work reduces the amount of freely > available numbers. While digital data, just like any text, can be parsed > arbitrarily according to a language or data format (the four letters > g-i-f-t, for example, parse as a synonym for 'present' in English, but as > 'poison' in German), the copyrighting of digital data implies that there > is only one authoritative interpretation of signs. The zeros and ones of > Microsoft Word are legally considered a Windows program and thus subject > to Microsoft's licensing, although they could just as well be seen as a > piece of concrete poetry when displayed as alphanumeric code or as music > when burned onto an audio CD. The opposite is also true: no-one can rule > out that the text of, say, Shakespeare's Hamlet cannot be parsed and > compiled into a piece of software that infringes somebody's patents. > > The legal experts speaking at CODE also explained the enormous expansion > in intellectual property rights in the last few years. While patents are > widely known to conflict with the freedom of research and even with the > freedom to write in programming languages, the conference nevertheless > extended its focus beyond this and made its participants aware of IP > rights as the negative subtext to what was once considered the promiscuous > textuality of the Internet. Still, it was surprising to see speakers with > very diverse academic and professional backgrounds position themselves so > unanimously against the current state of IP rights. In another informal > remark, Volker Grassmuck proposed that we refocus 'information ecology' > from software ergonomics to the politics of knowledge distribution. Does > digital code need its own Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund? > > The conference took its inspiration from Free Software, but didn't bother > going into basics and priming the participants on what Free Software and > Open Source technically are - which was both an advantage and a > disadvantage. General topics were advanced right from the first session > without first clarifying such important issues as the meaning of the > 'free' in Free Software. GNU project founder Richard M. Stallman - who > usually explains this as 'free, as in speech' not ' free, as in beer' - > revealed his own questionable conceptions by proposing three different > copyleft schemes for what he categorised as 'functional works', 'opinion > pieces' and 'aesthetic works': as if these categories could be separated, > as if they weren't aspects of every artwork, and as if computer programs > didn't have their own politics and aesthetics (GNU Emacs could be analysed > in just the same way Matthew Fuller analysed the aesthetic ideology of > Microsoft Word.) It was annoying to hear Stallman reduce the distribution > of digital art to 'bands' distributing their 'songs', and it was equally > annoying to hear Glyn Moody call Stallman the Beethoven, Linus Torvalds > the Mozart and Larry Wall - a self-acclaimed postmodernist and > experimental writer in his own right - the Schubert of programming. > > To make matters worse, the artists who spoke on the second day of CODE > echoed these aesthetic conservatisms in perfect symmetry. Michael Century, > co-organiser of the conference and Stallman's respondent, unfortunately > didn't have enough time to speak about the notational complexity of modern > art in any detail. He was the only speaker to address this issue. > Otherwise, artists were happy to be 'artists', and programmers were happy > to be 'programmers'. Stallman's separation of the 'functional' and the > 'aesthetic' was also implied in Antoine Moireau's Free Art License > , a copyleft for artworks which failed to > illuminate why artists shouldn't simply use the GNU copyleft proper. This > question is begged all the more since the license is based on the > assumption that the artwork in contrast to the codework is, quote, > 'fixed'. While Moireau's project was at least an honest reflection of > Free Software/Open Source, one couldn't help the impression that other > digital artists appropriated the term as a nebulous, buzzword-compatible > analogy. While there are certainly good reasons for not releasing art as > Free Software, it still might be necessary to speak of digital art and > Free Software in a more practical way. Much if not most of digital art is > locked into proprietary formats like Macromedia Director, QuickTime and > RealVideo. It is doomed to obscurity as soon as their respective > manufacturers discontinue the software. > > On the other hand, the Free Software available obviously doesn't cut it > for many people, artists in particular. The absence of, for example, > desktop publishing software available for GNU/Linux is no coincidence > since the probability of finding programmers among graphic artists is much > lower than the probability of finding programmers among system operators. > This raises many issues for digital code in the commons, issues the > conference speakers seemed, however, to avoid on purpose. While most of > them pretended that it was no longer necessary to use proprietary > software, their computers still ran Windows or the Macintosh OS. It would > have been good to see such contradictions if not resolved then at least > reflected. > > Code, Queens College, Cambridge, UK, April 5-6, 2001 > > Florian Cramer > http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/ > > -- > http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/ > http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html > GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3D0DACA2 > > > > > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission > # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: majordomo at bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime at bbs.thing.net > > -- su - From monica at sarai.net Tue Apr 17 18:24:59 2001 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 18:24:59 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] "India's New Mantra!" Message-ID: Sent to Sarai by Patrice Riemens: An article with the playful title "India's New Mantra: The Internet" appeared in the April 2001 issue of Current History, continuing their review of Internet penetration and its social impacts around the world. The overweening topic in the article, of course, was the barriors set up by poverty and backward infrastructure. I probably don't need to bore you with the statistics, but here are just a few: * On low penetration: "the Internet reaches less than 0.37 percent of India's citizens." * On costs: "it costs $700 to install a single telephone line in India, making it prohibitive for more than 3 percent of the population to afford telephone lines." (Currently, 2.2 percent do.) * On the geographic digital divide: "although by August 2000 there were 1.6 million subscribers and 4.8 million users, 77 percent were from the federal captiral New delhi and the state capitals." * On comparisons with nearby countries: in India, an impressive "35 million subscribers and 100 million users are expected by March 2008," but "Such growth is by no means unusual if you look at other countries (such as China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan)." Therefore, "India has a marathon course to run." * On literacy and language barriers: "61 percent of females and 36 percent of males age seven above" are "unable to read and write" in any language. English is "spoken only by between 2 and 3 percent of India's population." Many Indian languages "still need standardization in terms of fonts, keyborads, and software for effective Internet use." But governments are trying hard to change this pattern: not only the national government, but several states. Andhra Pradesh has received international attention for trying to promote Internet penetration, education, and use; other such states include Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala. Those who call on the market to do everything should take note that Internet use in India began, as it did in the United States, as a government project. The federal government installed a network for educational and research institutions, encouraged a private consortium called the Software Technology Parks of India to provide low-cost services, and linked government departments together. But the effects were limited; they created islands of Internet use in a country of completely unconnected individuals. Indeed, the article repeats the standard free-market criticisms frequently made of government industrial policy in India, and of telecom in particular, calling its policy "rigid and unimaginative." The article praises deregulation of telecom, and complains about continuing barriers put up by the government-run Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited telephone company (including their famous ban on the use of the Internet to place telephone calls). Only in 1999 were independent ISPs allowed to set up gateways for international Internet traffic. But the solutions presented in the article are still not entirely reliant on the free market. It praises the government for "an innovative scheme of setting up public phone offices in rural areas" and calls for intervention to improve the computer hardware industry. It praises states for putting government information online, and for promoting material in local languages. (It also calls for graphic content that can be accessed by the illiterate.) For the future, the article sees potential along two divergent paths: one private and the other community-based. The first involves putting set-top boxes in the houses of people with cable TV (there are 37 million households subscribing). The second rests on the village telephone offices mentioned in the previous paragraph, turning them "into information kiosks that could provide a range of single-window services such as local and international telephony, Internet access, faxing, and even photocopying." A good deal of the article is devoted to the development of the IT industry in India, a story that is fairly familiar. The large base of Indians successfully practicing high-tech careers in other countries is also cited as a potential benefit to the country, although it means that many commercial services in India are aimed at emigres. While the article repeatedly stresses that enormous barriers remain and government efforts have shown little impact, it ends on an upbeat paragraph: "by empowering constituent groups that make up India's civil society: the media, non-government organizations, businesses, political groups, and other nonstate actors," the Internet can "invigorate the world's largest democracy." -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From arunmehtain at yahoo.com Wed Apr 18 10:41:25 2001 From: arunmehtain at yahoo.com (Arun Mehta) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 10:41:25 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] "India's New Mantra!" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20010418083038.01df6008@202.54.15.1> At 4/17/2001, Monica Narula wrote: >Sent to Sarai by Patrice Riemens: > >An article with the playful title "India's New Mantra: The >Internet" appeared in the April 2001 issue of Current >History, >* On low penetration: "the Internet reaches less than 0.37 > percent of India's citizens." I really would be interested in determining how these numbers are arrived at. What are they counting: Internet accounts? E-mail accounts with an Indian address worldwide? There must be around 2.5 million Internet accounts in the country, and of course the entire family uses each. Then, there are the countless numbers who visit cybercafes. Oh, and do we count those who use SMS on their mobile phones to and from the Internet? >* On costs: "it costs $700 to install a single telephone > line in India, making it prohibitive for more than 3 > percent of the population to afford telephone lines." > (Currently, 2.2 percent do.) Technology is helping here -- CorDECT (a wireless in the local loop last mile solution, developed at IIT Chennai by Professor Jhunjhunwala and team) cuts that cost to half. Better and cheaper solutions exist as well, not least of which is Internet telephony. However, the government is putting roadblocks where it can to prevent these cheaper technologies from being deployed. The problem is not cost, rather bad policies. >* On literacy and language barriers: "61 percent of females > and 36 percent of males age seven above" are "unable to > read and write" in any language. English is "spoken only > by between 2 and 3 percent of India's population." Many > Indian languages "still need standardization in terms of > fonts, keyborads, and software for effective Internet > use." We can overcome these barriers if we strengthen the ability of the Internet to work with audio input and output. To this list, therefore, I would add: speech recognition software that works with Indian languages. >Only in 1999 were >independent ISPs allowed to set up gateways for >international Internet traffic. In theory only: the conditions that apply are so rigid (particularly the requirement that diverse intelligence agencies must be able to independently run keyword searches on all traffic) that nobody has set one up for optic fiber cables so far. >For the future, the article sees potential along two >divergent paths: one private and the other >community-based. The first involves putting set-top boxes in >the houses of people with cable TV (there are 37 million >households subscribing). Cable modems are frightfully expensive. It is cheaper to simply do an Ethernet LAN. _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From monica at sarai.net Fri Apr 20 14:53:07 2001 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 14:53:07 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] essay on open source Message-ID: Might be an interesting read: Ganesh Prasad: Open Source-onomics: Examining some pseudo-economic arguments about Open Source By Ganesh Prasad Synopsis: While the technical arguments against Linux and Open Source are being gradually silenced, several unrefuted myths about the economics of Open Source continue to float about, confusing and scaring off people considering these alternative products. Worse, the Open Source community is itself divided on such issues, and is unable to provide a cogent rebuttal. This article is an attempt to set the record straight. Contents "The poor performance of Linux stocks proves that Linux is a failure" "Open Source is not economically viable" "Not paying for software will ultimately kill the industry" "Why will programmers continue to contribute code if they can't make money from it?" "Even Open Source development involves effort, so there has to be payment for that effort" "Are Open Source programmers writing themselves out of their jobs?" "But free isn't natural. There's no such thing as a free lunch." "Is software a commodity?" "Who will invest in software development if it doesn't yield a return?" "Open Source may have a niche, but proprietary commercial products will continue to rule" "Customers will never trust something that is free" "Open Source may release value, but it doesn't create value" God, Government, Market and Community Conclusion References About the Author "The poor performance of Linux stocks proves that Linux is a failure" What's the relationship between the performance of Linux stocks and Linux's own prospects of success? When stocks of companies like Red Hat and VA Linux Systems skyrocketed in the wake of their IPOs, that was taken as an indication that Linux had arrived, and Linux advocates said nothing to counter the impression. Indeed, many gleefully used the stockmarket to show their peers that Linux was to be taken seriously. So now that the same stocks are trading far below those prices, doesn't it indicate that the Linux shine has worn off? Look at the number of Linux companies in the doldrums, that have laid off employees or closed down. That certainly seems to indicate the end of Linux. It was a great idea that failed to deliver on its promises, and we should now go back to software and companies that are more firmly grounded in economic realities, right? Well, first of all, Linux is quite independent of Linux companies in a way that the market has never seen before. Windows means Microsoft, Netware means Novell, OS/390 means IBM. The fortunes of operating system and company are usually heavily intertwined. That's simply not the case with Linux. If Novell closes down, that pretty much means the end of Netware, unless another company sees fit to buy the product and keep it alive (On the other hand, Microsoft may simply choose to buy Netware and kill it!). Such things can't happen to Linux. As an Open Source operating system, Linux is teflon-coated against the commercial failures of the companies that try to build business models around it. Commercial entities are Johnnies-come-lately to Linux anyway. Linux managed without them for years, and will continue to exist even if they should all disappear. In fact, companies that claim to support Linux are wrong -- Linux supports them! "Open Source is not economically viable" OK, so Linux as a technical product may continue to exist, but if companies cannot make money from it (as is seemingly evidenced by the woes of the Linux companies today), then it's another great technical success that is a commercial failure. History is littered with such examples. Linux will never go anywhere unless people can make money off it. Now here's an argument even Open Source sympathisers have trouble with, -- the assumption that money must be made for Open Source to succeed. However, the argument is incomplete because it chooses to concentrate on the supply side alone, without regard to the demand side. While it may well be true that no one can make money from Open Source, that should only serve to discourage suppliers of software. On the demand side, however, consumers are saving tons of money by using Open Source. Since a penny saved is a penny earned, there is a strong economic basis for the success of Open Source after all. Someone is saving money, and they will fight to keep those savings. The demand side is the one that should drag the rest of the market, kicking and screaming, to a regime of drastically lower prices. Vendors will see their margins shrink, many will close down, newer, leaner ones will spring up, vendors in other market segments will provide software, and eventually, the market will adjust itself to the new reality. Dollar volumes will go down even as unit volumes go up. The transition could be quite painful for suppliers of software, but no law of economics says it cannot happen. It is not a law of nature that vendors must continue to make the revenues and profits they are used to. "Not paying for software will ultimately kill the industry" There are the long-term worriers who don't like this scenario at all, even as they accept that it may happen. Yes, they say, customers will save money in the short term, but they're eating their seed corn. Customers need financially healthy vendors to be around to support them and continually improve their offerings. A herd of gnu may be happy at the disappearance of the local lion population, but the herd needs predators to cull its ranks of the weak and the sick, and to keep its gene pool healthy. Saving money by starving your suppliers is not in your own long-term self-interest. This is a strange suggestion from people who probably describe themselves as market capitalists. When customers make a purchase, should they think about their own savings or should they worry about the supplier or the economy? Is it reasonable to ask them to choose costlier products because that will ultimately and indirectly serve their own interests? The argument smacks more of Marx than Adam Smith, -- The State above the individual. This was the convenient argument of horse-buggy manufacturers when the locomotive arrived, and of the railroad companies when the aeroplane appeared. We've seen this dozens of times in our history. A generation of suppliers is threatened, and they try to convince the rest that society as a whole is threatened. If history is any guide, consumers will make the decisions that suit their immediate interests, and vendors will have no choice but to adapt as best as they can. Those decisions may decimate them, but civilisation will survive, as it always has. L'Etat, c'est moi. "Why will programmers continue to contribute code if they can't make money from it?" Right. Given a choice between a free software product and a competitor with a price tag, it is understandable if customers choose the free one. But why should anyone write it for free in the first place? What would they gain? The assumption behind this question is that there are only three types of transactions between parties: win-win, win-lose and lose-lose (Lose-lose transactions should never occur under conditions of rational decision-making). Win-lose transactions occur when the winning party is stronger than the other and can force a transaction through. All other transactions are willingly entered into by two parties and are win-win. In the case of Open Source, the recipients of the software are obviously winners, but the writers of the software don't seem to be winning anything because the recipients don't have to pay them for it. Therefore, our assumption tells us that this not a win-win situation, and that there is no economic incentive for a programmer to write Open Source software. For the moment, let us go along with the assumption that the only motivation for writing software is economic (which is not true). Even with such an assumption, the reasoning is flawed because there are other types of transactions which are not so obvious and which have not been considered: win-neutral, lose-neutral and neutral-neutral. Under conditions of rational decision-making, lose-neutral and neutral-neutral transactions have no incentive to occur, but win-neutral transactions can and do occur quite frequently. Everyday examples include someone asking for directions, or asking for change. Here, the person asking certainly gains something from the transaction, but the other party neither gains nor loses from it. Therefore, the transaction can still take place. Most Open Source programmers would probably not write software and give it away if it cost them something to do so. However, they don't perceive the effort of writing it to be a cost. Most of them write software to solve a specific problem that they happen to be facing, or to "scratch their personal itch", as Eric Raymond points out. The process of developing such software is actually quite pleasurable and energising to most good programmers. Once the software has been written, giving away copies of it does not deprive the programmer of the ability to continue to use it, and it costs them nothing extra to do so. It is a win-neutral transaction, and therefore there is no economic reason to prevent it from taking place. (Economics purists would point out that there is indeed a cost to giving away the software -- the opportunity cost of not selling the software instead. However, for many programmers, the process of selling their software is more trouble than it is worth, so the effective opportunity cost is actually zero, and it is a win-neutral situation after all.) If that was not sufficient reason, Open Source programmers also tend to work with others who share their interest and contribute code. They enjoy a multiplier effect from such cooperation. Metaphorically speaking, each programmer contributes a brick and each gets back a complete house in return. In software, unlike with physical goods, one person's gain does not come at the expense of another because a copy does not deplete the original in any way. Sharing software is not a zero-sum game, and there are tremendous efficiencies from participating in such a cooperative endeavour. No, the absence of direct monetary reward does not really constitute a disincentive to writing Open Source software. "Even Open Source development involves effort, so there has to be payment for that effort" OK, Open Source programmers lose nothing by giving away the software that they have already written (and they may even gain in non-monetary terms). But some effort has gone into their products. Shouldn't such effort be compensated in cash as well? Programmers have families to support, and they need to put bread on the table. They can't live on software and satisfaction alone. To be viable in the long term, Open Source needs to evolve a mechanism to support its contributors financially. Without remuneration, over time, most of these volunteer programmers will simply wander away in search of food. This argument appeals to equity as well as economic commonsense, and finds sympathisers even in the Open Source community. Certainly, we would all like to see programmers being compensated for their contributions. There are several business models that are being attempted. The SourceForge and Collab.Net method of raising contributions from users to pay developers is an innovative one, but its success is as yet unproven. Programmers could also try and make money by supporting their creations, maybe selling copies of it as well, providing consultancy and professional services, etc. But we still don't know of a foolproof business model for this sort of thing. There may not even be one. In the absence of a good system coming along pretty soon, Open Source will perhaps continue to be written by volunteer programmers who have day jobs writing commercial software. It could also expect contributions from hardware or services companies with a stake in its success. But even in this worst case, does it mean that Open Source will stop being written? As long as Open Source programmers have alternative sources of income (i.e. day jobs), they lose nothing by working on Open Source projects in their spare time (a win-neutral transaction). With the increasing number of people being exposed to Open Source, the pool of contributors is in fact growing larger by the day. "Are Open Source programmers writing themselves out of their jobs?" But that leads to what may seem the ultimate argument against the economics of Open Source: How long can programmers work day jobs at commercial software companies and write software at night that puts those same companies out of business? Writing Open Source software is not just irrational, it is positively suicidal. 'Tis an ill bird that fouls its own nest, not to mention an extremely foolish one. Indeed, this appears to be a very powerful argument. However, Eric Raymond comes to our rescue with this statistical nugget: Only 5% of all programmers are actually engaged in writing "for sale" commercial software. The other 95% actually write and maintain custom-built software for in-house use. Open Source doesn't threaten custom-built software at all. It only competes with packaged software that is sold as a product. And so, in the worst case, Open Source programmers are only going to put 5% of their own kind out of work. That's an acceptable level of collateral damage, as the generals might say. "But free isn't natural. There's no such thing as a free lunch." But this entire idea is crazy, somewhat like producing something out of nothing! How can one seriously expect an entire economy to be based on something that is absolutely free? Doesn't it violate some fundamental economic law, just as producing something out of nothing violates the Law of Conservation of Mass in physics? Let's examine whether it does. We realise it is not possible for any supplier to charge less for a product than it cost them to produce it. That would mean a loss. At the same time, if all products in a category are roughly alike in function, and there are plenty of suppliers for those products, it is not possible for any of them to charge significantly more than their competitors without pricing themselves out of the market. So they should all end up charging just slightly more than it cost them to make the product, making only modest profits in the process. The underlying assumption here, though, is that we have "pure competition". "Pure competition" in economics means a buyers' market. Consumers love it and suppliers hate it (though, curiously, all suppliers claim to welcome it). A competitive market means that consumers can easily find any number of alternative suppliers for a product. It also means the product is a commodity. A "commodity" product means that there is very little differentiation between the various versions of a product. They all do the same thing, with only minor, insignificant differences. Consumers don't bother about brands when buying commodities. Suppliers hate commoditisation for the same reason and try their best to create artificial differentiation. (The best example is the Vodka Paradox: Vodka, by definition, is a colourless, odourless and flavourless drink of a specific composition, so all vodkas should be the same! But we know of both premium and downmarket brands of vodka, so at least some of them are, by definition, not vodka at all!) Look at the software market from these angles. Is it competitive? Is it a commodity market? Think about whether it would be easy for you to replace Windows on your PC with another operating system. Think about whether such a system would work the same way. Such an analysis may suggest that this is neither a competitive nor a commodity market. However, these aren't very straightforward questions to answer because some recent developments have impacted the market a great deal, but we'll come back to them a bit later. The important point to note is, if the software market becomes a competitive commodity market, the price of software should be close to the cost of producing it. That's what economic commonsense says should happen. How about the marginal cost of production of software? It's fairly well known that the cost of producing the second copy of a piece of software is so low as to be virtually zero. How much effort and cost is involved in burning a CD, anyway? That's the marginal cost of software, i.e. virtually zero. "Marginal cost of production" refers to the cost of producing the nth unit of a product. It may cost a lot of money to set up the facilities to produce the very first unit of a product, but it costs much less to produce the second (because those facilities are already in place), and probably even less to produce the third (due to continuing efficiencies of production). The marginal cost of production generally declines until it reaches some steady level. -- "Is software a commodity?" But why would the software market suddenly turn competitive and into a commodity market? The answers are standards, the Internet, and Open Source software itself. The correct way to build an application using 1990s thinking is to grab a copy of Visual Basic or PowerBuilder, develop a Windows executable and install it on every user's PC. The larger the number of PCs to install the software on, the more you walk around. When you need to upgrade the software, you put on your sneakers again and take another walk. Now fast-forward to today. The correct way to build an application using millennial thinking is to put the application on a website and get users to point their browsers at it. When you need to upgrade the software, you modify it once on the server and your users hit the Refresh button on their browsers. Web technology, if you stop to think about it, is a predominantly server-side technology. True, there's the Java applet, but hardly anyone uses it. There's Javascript, but ever since the browser wars, when you couldn't be sure which browser would break your code, developers have been wary of coding a lot of Javascript. That leaves virtually all development on the server side. All that the user needs is a lowly browser. At one stroke, the web has commoditised the server, because all a server needs to do is talk some standard "protocols". If it knows HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), it can talk to a browser. If it spits out some HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the browser can actually render it for the user to read. Whither brand? Neither the browser nor the user sees the brand of the server software. The same goes for other Internet standards such as SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). They have completely commoditised the servers that implement them. Suddenly, standards are king, and anyone can play. The favourite vendor tactic, -- differentiation, -- doesn't work very well in this situation. Differentiation breaks standards. More is less. A product that fails to comply with a standard is automatically incapable of surviving in the Internet ecosystem. Any superfluous features it boasts simply wither away through disuse. It's a self-perpetuating discipline. Internet protocols and standards rule with an iron fist. So it looks as if commoditisation is here to stay, however much vendors may hate it. What's more, every such standard and protocol is faithfully implemented in at least one Open Source product. That keeps commercial implementers honest, too. No oligopoly is possible in the Internet-era software market, because any Open Source implementation pre-emptively breaks the cartel! (As an example, the nascent oligopoly among web application server vendors is coming under severe pressure from the Open Source JBoss and Enhydra. Expect to see prices tumble in this market). And so, here we are, in a competitive and commodity market after all. We know that in such a market, the price of software will be close to the cost of producing it. So if we can show that the cost of producing software is zero, then the price tag of zero is justified. "Who will invest in software development if it doesn't yield a return?" It sounds a preposterous argument on the face of it. How can the cost of software ever be zero? Doesn't it take significant effort to develop software? Even Open Source software is not miraculously produced. Programmers spend many man-months of effort on it. So how can the price of software ever be zero? Selling below cost is considered predatory pricing in many countries. In international trade, it's called "dumping". Is Open Source guilty of "dumping" or predatory pricing? If unchecked, this could destroy the commercial software industry. Who will invest in developing software if they cannot recoup their development costs? The answer to this question may be surprising, because it overturns many of our fundamental assumptions about the way the world is run. Let's start by observing that if Linux had been developed by a commercial organisation, it could never have been free. Commercial organisations, whether funded by debt or by equity, need to show a return on their investment. They cannot waste that investment by giving away their products. Therefore, even if it costs nothing to create additional copies of software (what's called the "marginal cost" of software), the initial costs of development must be spread over many copies, they must be priced in such a way that those costs can be recouped, and a positive return must be shown on the initial investment. Of course, for this to work, software must be shoehorned into the mould of a physical product. Copying of software by anyone other than the producer must be made a crime. The infinite replicability inherent in software must be artificially curtailed through legislation. Only then can the model work. This is precisely what we have with commercial software today. It is important to understand that the commercial model works by imposing a system of artificial scarcity. It is physically possible and economically feasible to produce as many copies of software as the world needs, but that is however, legally punishable. That means that many people who need software but cannot pay the asking price must go without it. That is the only possible (legal) outcome. There are people who need a software product, and the product can be replicated at little cost, yet the transaction cannot take place. From society's viewpoint, this inefficiency is the price it pays for choosing a commercial vehicle for software development. But now, consider an alternative to the investment model. If the cost of software development can somehow be treated as an expense, and simply written off, then the software is freed from the requirement to show a return on investment. There will be no need to artificially constrain its natural replicability. The world can have as many copies of it as it needs. There will be no need for restrictive legislation. From society's point of view, what could be more efficient? Large expenses, however, cannot readily be written off. They need to be "amortised" over a sufficiently large number of units. This is where another property of software becomes invaluable. Software can quite practicably be developed by hundreds, even thousands of programmers. Other intellectual works, such as books, music or movies, while sharing software's trait of infinite replicability, cannot be produced by a cast of thousands. Of all the works of mankind, physical and intellectual, software stands alone in its twin characteristics of infinite replicability and amortisability of effort. Looked at this way, Open Source seems the more natural and efficient way to build software. Get a large number of interested developers to work on a piece of software. Most of them spend less than a couple of hours a day on it, so they don't mind "writing off" the effort in terms of expecting a monetary return. That is why Open Source operating systems and associated software are free for every man, woman and child on earth to copy. By keeping important software like Linux out of the ambit of commercial interests, society has benefitted handsomely. Software, like wealth itself, is potentially limitless. Capitalism correctly views wealth as potentially infinite, and fuels global growth to increase the overall size of the economic pie. However, the current structure of the commercial software market is not capitalistic at all, but mercantile. It sees software as a limited good that needs to be hoarded and released sparingly. It is therefore incapable of being an engine of growth. Lest our current "capitalistic" mileu should give anyone the wrong idea, it must be noted as a matter of sociological interest that commercial organisations do not have a divine right to exist. They exist at society's pleasure, because they have hitherto been the most efficient known means of producing quality goods and services at reasonable prices. However, it appears that the investment model that underlies all commercial activity is a grossly inefficient vehicle to deliver to society the levels of software that it needs. So here's a really subversive thought: Perhaps corporations shouldn't develop software at all! Just as free market advocates call for governments to get out of the business of running industries, perhaps we should call for corporations to get out of the business of writing software. They are applying the wrong economic model to software, and it is proving too costly and inefficient for society to bear. We need a model that takes a capitalistic view of software, not a mercantile one. What we see today with the gradual success of Open Source is perhaps society's "invisible hand" turning over software development to the more efficient (from its viewpoint) Open Source vehicle, and gradually relegating commercial software to the fringes of economic activity. Adam Smith would have approved. (Along the way, notice that we have also shown how the cost of software can be effectively reduced to zero, thereby justifying its zero price-tag.) "Open Source may have a niche, but proprietary commercial products will continue to rule" We may have shown that Open Source is viable and will most likely continue to survive, maybe even thrive. But isn't it too much to suggest that proprietary, commercial software will go the way of the dodo? Is this really a commodity market? Aren't most leading commercial software products ahead of their Open Source equivalents, anyway? How can Open Source hope to beat commercial software in features? For example, can the Open Source database package PostgreSQL ever hope to match Oracle? Customers won't use inferior products just because they're free! They'd prefer to pay for better products. This situation is similar to the story of the two men who come upon a tiger in the jungle. One of them starts putting on his running shoes. "Are you crazy?" whispers the other, "You can't hope to outrun a tiger!" "I don't have to outrun the tiger," explains the first, "I only have to outrun you!" Open Source products don't have to become better than their commercial equivalents. They just have to become good enough to meet user requirements. Why would users pay for features they don't need? Do you really need a webserver inside your database? A Java Virtual Machine, perhaps? Or a whole host of features you're never going to use? No? Then why pay for Oracle 9i? PostgreSQL lets you create tables, fill them with data, fire SQL queries at them, and gives you reasonable performance. Isn't that good enough for you, and for 90% of the market? So PostgreSQL didn't have to outrun the tiger, did it? Notice that this is an economic argument. It is not a technological argument along the lines of "Open Source products evolve faster and fix bugs quicker, so they'll get better than their commercial rivals one day". Actually, we couldn't care less. At a certain point in time, commercial vendors may be reduced to selling differentiated features that 90% of the market doesn't need, while the most commonly-required features will be available to all, free of charge. Those common features will conform to standards, while proprietary, differentiating features will remain exactly that, -- proprietary and non-standard. It is such commoditisation of the market that could slaughter proprietary commercial software, driving it into niches and ensuring that the mainstream goes Open Source. "Customers will never trust something that is free" All of this sounds pretty convincing in theory, but Open Source should have been growing like gangbusters if all of this is true. But we see very gradual adoption of Open Source in the market. Is it perhaps because people will never respect and trust something that is free...? In economics, we have two concepts, -- competing products and substitutes. Competing products are other brands in the same category. Substitutes are products in another category that perform much the same function. If I don't like Nescafe, I'll go with Moccona (a competitor), but if I read a medical report finding that coffee is extremely dangerous, I will drink tea rather than coffee when the urge hits me. It's not the same thing, but I could bring myself to settle for tea. That's what a substitute means. It's more difficult to switch to a substitute than to a competing product, but it can be done when there are compelling reasons. Open Source software is a substitute, not a competitor, to the entire category of proprietary commercial software. It requires a different mindset and a willingness to work with different development and support mechanisms. That's what makes its uptake less than straightforward. With both substitutes and competitors, "good enough" is a great reason to switch when the price is far lower, and that is what Open Source offers. But with substitutes, there is an extra mental adjustment process that consumers need to go through before full acceptance happens. That takes time. Consumers need time to gain confidence from the positive examples of early adopters. The current situation with Open Source in the marketplace reflects exactly this stage of the proceedings. Potential savings and a greater degree of control over one's destiny are the compelling arguments that will encourage the switch. When the mental adjustment process is complete, the downfall of proprietary software could be swift (put options on Oracle, anyone?). "Open Source may release value, but it doesn't create value" New thinking among financial analysts has discovered that most firms reporting improved earnings year after year are doing so by cutting costs rather than by increasing revenue. By reducing waste and improving productivity, companies are "releasing" value that was hitherto "locked up" in inefficient processes. But they aren't creating new value. They're not innovating. True wealth comes from new ideas, and there don't seem to be too many of them. So there are natural limits to how far these companies can go before they hit a plateau. Isn't Open Source something similar? Sure, it'll help us reduce costs, but is it helping us create anything? It's nothing more than a cheaper substitute for our existing software, so its long-term impact will probably be marginal, not revolutionary. Well asked, and therein lies the difference between a market and a community. To play in a market, you need to have money. That automatically excludes all the people who can't pay. It's a shame that in a world of over 6 billion people, about half are just bystanders watching the global marketplace in action. There are brains ticking away in that half-world of market outcasts that could contribute to making the world better in a myriad little ways that we fortunate few don't bother to think about. There are problems to be solved, living standards to be raised, yes, value to be created, and the "market" isn't doing it fast enough. God, Government, Market and Community There are millions who have been waiting for generations for their lot to improve. Religion has promised them a better afterlife, but no god has seen fit to improve their present one. In a world where socialism has been humiliatingly defeated, governments seem ashamed to spend money on development. Everyone now seems to believe that governments must be self-effacingly small. The market is now the politically correct way to solve all problems. But the market, as we have seen, doesn't recognise the existence of those who have nothing to offer as suppliers and nothing to pay as consumers. They are invisible people. Therefore it falls to the miserable to improve their lot themselves. Given the tools, they can raise themselves out of their situation. They will then enter the market, which will wholeheartedly welcome them (though it hadn't the foresight to help them enter it in the first place). Where will such tools come from? In a world where intellectual property has such vociferous defenders that people must be forced to pay for software, information technology widens the gap between the haves and the have-nots, a phenomenon known as the digital divide. If producers of software deserve to be paid, then that means hundreds of thousands of people will never have access to that software. That's a fair market, but a lousy community. Open Source is doing what god, government and market have failed to do. It is putting powerful technology within the reach of cash-poor but idea-rich people. Analysts could quibble about whether that is creating or merely releasing value, but we could do with a bit of either. And yes, that is revolutionary. Conclusion Is it possible to make money off Open Source? In the light of all that we have discussed, this now seems a rather petty and inconsequential question to ask. There is great wealth that will be created through Open Source in the coming months and years, and very little of that will have anything to do with money. A lot of it will have to do with people being empowered to help themselves and raise their living standards. No saint, statesman or scholar has ever done this for them, and certainly no merchant. If this increase in the overall size of the economic pie results in proportionately more wealth for all, then that's the grand answer to our petty question. Economics is all about human achievement. It wasn't aliens from outer space who raised us from our caves to where we are today. It was the way we organised ourselves to create our wealth, rather like the donkey with a carrot dangling before it that pulls a cart a great distance. Open Source gives means to human aspiration. It breaks the artificial mercantilist limits of yesterday's software market and unleashes potentially limitless growth. When the dust settles, and even the greatest industrial creations of today stand dwarfed by the scale of development that Open Source will bring in its wake, the world will have learnt a thing or two about economics. References "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond ( http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar) "The Magic Cauldron" by Eric S. Raymond ( http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldron) "A-Level Economics" by Ray Powell, Letts Educational "The Real Meaning of Money" by Dorothy Rowe, Harper-Collins, 1997 About the Author Ganesh Prasad has been a Linux user since 1996, and his major fascination with Open Source has been its social and economic impact, though the technical side has its appeal, too. He has been troubled by much of the pseudo-economic bunkum around Open Source, and has decided to shine the brilliant light of his logic to cut through the clutter, making up for lack of rigour with stabs of attempted humour. Copyright (c) 2001 Ganesh Prasad. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html. http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-04-12-006-20-OP-BZ-CY (The sender's internet address was 202.169.133.50 -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From supreet at sarai.net Mon Apr 23 16:51:59 2001 From: supreet at sarai.net (Supreet Sethi) Date: 23 Apr 2001 16:51:59 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] an interesting link Message-ID: <87eluj7tew.fsf@lucky.sarai.kit> http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html From monica at sarai.net Tue Apr 24 16:11:07 2001 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 16:11:07 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Simputer Message-ID: An email sent by Geert. I believe that there are many who think that this is not working out too well in terms of licences etc. Any responses? Open source of inspiration? By Tim Nott A computer for less than 10,000 francs destined for developing countries? No, this didn't really impress Grok either, until the realisation that this was in Belgian francs and therefore around 250 euros. The Simputer has been developed at the University of Bangalore, and will be officially unveiled this week. According to the photograph printed in La Libre, the computer looks like a restrained version of a handheld device. ITDirector says the Simputer (simple, inexpensive and multilingual) has an Intel chip, a 320x240 display, 32MB of memory, and a soft keyboard. It runs on Linux and open source products. The ITDirector article's says the device won't be available for purchase until March 2002. La Libre goes into more technical detail: the operating system is based on Linux and IML (Information Mark-up Language), and it has data encryption and speech recognition capabilities, including a "dictionary of several Indian dialects". It also has infrared and USB ports that may or may not be connectable to a full-size keyboard. "Pas cher" comments La Libre, but not "cheap" - a point also made by ITDirector, which states that for many of the potential billion users in India, this will still be "way out of their price range". Both reports end on a negative note: ITDirector believes that although the "real effort and achievement will be the delivery of an open-source solution" by next March it is unlikely that it will be the first to market with the idea. La Libre compares it to the ill-fated Apple Newton: a product launched too early. So it's going to be too expensive, too late and too early. Voici le PC «Pas Cher» http://www.lalibre.be/article.phtml?id=13&subid=96&art_id=18738 India sets out to bridge the divide http://www.it-director.com/article.asp?id=1751 -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From shuddha at sarai.net Tue Apr 24 18:03:17 2001 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 18:03:17 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: Oekonux: Interview with Stefan Merten Message-ID: <4.3.0.20010424175927.00af2580@mail.sarai.net> Dear All, This is my first posting on this list, I have been a sly watcher form the sidelines till now. But enjoy the occasionall sparks of life. Actually this is not my own writing,. but something I am borrowing from the web to share with us all. SOme fo how have a history with Marxism and some of us have a future with free software. here is something that is a bit of both;;; An interview by Geert on some people in Germany trying to find a relation between free software and Marxism, and trying to work on the necessary engineering needed to formulate the concepts of a GPL model for society in general. Interesting. >Interview with Stefan Merten >By Geert Lovink > >Oekonux is a radical German mailinglist discussing free software from >green-alternative and post-Marxist perspectives. The tone on the list is >unusually open, not to say utopian. There is a true sense of possibilities >felt: a free software revolution; revolution through free software. This >weekend the Oekonux list is holding its first conference, in the grey, >industrial city of Dortmund. Stefan Merten is the initiator and moderator >of the list and co-organizer of the upcoming conference. > >GL: Could you tell us the history and context of the Oekonux list and >OpenTheory site that you are running? > >SM: Your question gives me the nice opportunity to correct a rather common >misunderstanding. I, Stefan *Merten*, am maintaining the Oekonux project, >while Stefan *Meretz* maintains OpenTheory. Though both of us are involved >in the other project, respectively, though we often have similar views, >and though our names are very similar, we are two different persons with >different backgrounds. > >But now for the history and context of the Oekonux list and project. >Personally I had the idea that Free Software is something very special and >may have a big potential for a different society beyond labor, money, >exchange - in short: capitalism - in 1998. In September 1998 I tried to >make that an issue on the Krisis list. However, that didn't work since >next to nobody was interested. > >In July 1999 there was the "Wizard of Open Source" >(`http://www.mikro.org/Events/OS/frameset_d.html?Submit=deutsch') >conference in Berlin. I attended that conference and was especially >interested in the topic "Neue Ökonomie?" ("New economy?"). However, on the >background of the idea mentioned above, I found the talks presented there >not very interesting. After the talks I took the opportunity to organize a >spontaneous BOF session and luckily it worked well. So we sat there with >about 20 people and discussed the thoughts presented in the talks. At the >end I asked all the people at the BOF session to give me their e-mail >address. > >After the WOS conference the organizers of the conference (Mikro, >`http://www.mikro.org/') created a mailing list for us - and that was the >birth of the Oekonux (Oekonux stands for "OEKOnomie" and "liNUX") mailing >list. From the start we had a very interesting discussion with some silent >periods but usually rather much traffic. The atmosphere on the list is >very pleasant and flames are nearly unknown. The discussion is focussed on >content and covers a rather big number of topics. At the moment we have >about 160 subscribers at `liste at oekonux.de'. Though the traffic is quite >high we have nearly no unsubscribe messages which I think is a proof for >the quality of the list. > >As far as I can see the subscribers come from a quite wide range of >thinking traditions and areas of interest. Though of course they all share >a common interest in political thinking, there are people from the Free >Software and Hardware area as well as hard core political people as well >as people with a main interest in culture and so on. Thinking about one >and a half year back, our discussion made big advances and though we have >some very skeptical people on the list, today there seems to be a common >sense and common understanding, that we might have a very valid and >important point. > >In December 1999 I created the web site `www.oekonux.de'. It's main >purpose is to archive the mailing list. Of course some material created in >the realm of the project is presented there also as well as a link list >listing links to web sites and pages relevant to our discussion in some >way. There is also an English / international part of the project >(`www.oekonux.org' archiving `list-en at oekonux.org'), which, however, is >nearly non-existent until today. I find this a pity but unfortunately >until now there is nobody with enough free time and energy to give this >part a real start. So until today all the material is in German. In June >2000 I created another mailing list (`projekt at oekonux.de') which is >concerned with the organization of the project. Meanwhile we have some >people there who are really working and so reduce my personal load and >responsibility for the project. > >Currently the project team is mainly concerned with the first Oekonux >conference (`http://www.oekonux-konferenz.de/') we will have from April >28-30, 2001 in Dortmund. The conference's main goal is to bring together >people from different areas all interested in the principles of Free >Software and are thinking about possible consequences these principles may >have in their particular area. We'll have people from the Free Software >movement, political persons, people with a scientific background, people >interested in cultural things, people involved in Free Hardware projects >and so on. I think it'll be a very exciting conference and another >milestone in the way we and - if we're not completely wrong - the whole >world is going. > >GL: The relation between Marxism and open source is a highly debated topic >on Oekonux. For some this might be a unusual combination. There are even >discussions about general principles of a "GPL society", extending the >legal framework of free software into a variety of social and economic >fields. That's pretty ambitious, not to utopian, with the fall of the >Berlin Wall a little over a decade ago. Don't you think that it would be >better to debunk failed leftist principles than to come up with new ones? > >SM: The question is what leftist principles are. Personally, I think Marx >created a very good and still very valid analysis of capitalism. Of course >some of his thoughts must be brought into a contemporary perspective, but >that doesn't make them worthless. However, rethinking Marx in the >framework of the world is of today is something leftists of all currents >seldom do. In the history of workers movement there are very few >exceptions and most currents concentrated on other things. Leninism and >Stalinism had further negative influence on rethinking Marx in an adequate >way. Even the people calling themselves "Marxians" are rarely very >interesting. My main criticism to the very most of those leftist (Marxian) >currents in the past is there lack of a utopia. The "utopia" they had was >not more than an improved labor society rather similar to the one they >lived in. > >Well, of course this analysis is very shortened and omits a number of >points, but to defend earlier leftist currents, I think they had one big >disadvantage: They didn't live at the decay of capitalism where the new >society already starts to raise its head. In Oekonux there is a common >sense, that Free Software might be exactly this: an early form of the new >society embedded in the old society. (We call this new society "GPL >society" to have a word for this new thing we're trying to explore.) And >if you have some knowledge about Marx' theory you will note, that a lot of >phenomena fit perfectly into his analysis of capitalism and its intrinsic >contradictions which it can't overcome. > >GL: Some on the Oekonux list seem close to the "Krisis group" around the >'apocalyptic' Marxist critic Robert Kurz. Could you explain to outsiders, >not familiar with contemporary German Marxist currents, Kurz's position >and what he has got to do with Linux, open source and the network society? > >SM: Well, the thinking of the Krisis group is manifold and not easy to >describe in a few sentences. They are not widely accepted in the German >leftist scene. In fact there are some people which you might call fans and >there is a big number of people which with some right you might call >enemies. However, my personal impression is, that the enemies of the >Krisis group mainly don't understand what the Krisis people are talking >about. This is a real pity because of this the Krisis people have nearly >no one to discuss with besides themselves. > >May be the Krisis group's main position basing many of the others is, that >capitalism is on its decay because the basic movement of making money from >labor works less and less. Of course this doesn't mean that capitalism >must end soon. Of course capitalism may continue to exist for hundred of >years. But it won't ever be able to hold its old promises of wealth for >all. > >In my opinion meanwhile this is clearly visible even in our Western >societies and I find it astonishing how good leftists are in defending >capitalism and expecting a long life of it. However, the reality of >capitalism is apocalyptic - take the climate catastrophe as one of the >most visible and dangerous signs. In some way it's not fair to call the >Krisis position "apocalyptic" just because they say how things are. > >The relation of the Krisis group to Free Software is non-existent. I tried >to talk with Robert Kurz about that once in a while a few years ago, but >learned that this is simply something he isn't concerned with and doesn't >know anything about. However, at the start of December 2000 there was a >workshop with Stefan Meretz and Robert Kurz in Dortmund, which I attended >as well. This was the first time I think Robert Kurz was really confronted >with the thoughts discussed in Oekonux and I think he understood a number >of points. Maybe there are new developments to expect. > >GL: Development of open source software seems to be particularly >successful amongst Germans, so it seems. Statistically, Germans come >second after the Americans. Would you know of any specific cultural >explanation? > >SM: First of all I question how meaningful the figure is as a basis for >your question. Germany is the country with the biggest population in >Europe. To have a really meaningful figure you need to calculate the >number of German free software developers per capita of the German >population and compare that with the same figures for other countries. > >Besides that I guess that the share of people with academic education is >quite high in relation to some other European countries which are among >the most industrialized countries of the world. In addition the English >language is pretty well known in Germany - opposed to e.g. Japan. So the >preconditions in Germany to enter the free software scene are relatively >good and the high absolute numbers simply may be a result of these good >preconditions. > >GL: It strikes me that participants on the Oekonux list are not that much >worried about attempts of certain IT-companies such as IBM to gain control >over the production of open source software. Could you explain this >worry-less optimism? > >SM: Well, I guess most people on the Oekonux list don't recognize IBM's >activities as to gain control over the free software scene. I think IBM >and some other companies simply start to understand, that they should >better not slaughter the cow they want to milk in the future. Many of >these companies are mainly hardware manufacturers or sell services and >they have their own good reasons to have a flourishing free software >scene. They seem to understand that they may break this with their >activities if they are not careful. > >On the other hand in the past companies, who tried to exploit the free >software scene solely for their own advantage, had some bad experiences. >For instance the free software scene didn't like the activities of Corel >when they started to create their own distribution. Until now to my >knowledge at least no big player has been able to really betray the free >software scene. This is a result of the power the free software scene >itself already has today. > >GL: Even on the Oekonux list the interests seem to be very much focused on >open source related issues and not so much to create a wider network. Many >computer users are saying that open source will only become a success if >it is able to transcend the (male) geek culture of software engineering, >making alliances with interface designers, activists and artists, >cross-linking with broader cyber-cultures such as the games communities. >Do you think that the withdrawal into the technical is only a temporary >phenomena? When is the free software/open source movement ready to break >out? > >SM: IMHO on the Oekonux list we are actively trying to see the whole >picture. The conference has its focus on exactly that: Bringing together >people from as many professions as possible who are all interested in the >model of free development the free software is only the most visible >example of. On the other hand we are talking of a new model of goods >production in general, which transcends the industrial model. So it is >clear, that a big part of the picture has to be technical and that people >with knowledge in engineering of any kind play an important role in that >picture. > >GL: Yes, this is what you and others call the "GPL society." Could you >explain this? Isn't free software and open source more like a source of >inspiration and metaphor rather than a model for the entire society with >all its complex relations? The digital economy itself is everything but >open source. The Internet Economy is all about accumulating intellectual >property. What makes you think that the free/open source models can go >beyond the realm of software production? > >SM: With GPL society we describe a society beyond capitalism. The main >difference is, that this society is no longer based on exchange and >exchange value and thus the term labor doesn't make much sense any longer. >Instead the basis of this new society will be the individual >self-unfolding ("Selbstenftaltung") combined with self-organization and >global cooperation. Goods in this society are not sold but simply >available and taken by those who need them. Of course such a society is >difficult to imagine for people who grew up with only money on their mind. > >To my knowledge the historical new thing of this concept is, that the GPL >society will transcend the industrial model of production into a new form, >which allows human potential to really flourish. In particular the work >machines are doing is actually used for setting people free in the sense >that the machines do the necessary things while humans can be artists, >engineers, ... whatever they like. This way the permanently rising >productivity no longer results in the curse of unemployment but in the >benediction of freedom from the necessity for mankind. A world where the >individual freedom of each single person is the precondition for the >freedom of all. > >These aspects of absence of exchange value (i.e. money), self-unfolding, >self-organization, and global cooperation are the ones in the Oekonux >project we recognize in the principles of free software development. >Indeed many people on the Oekonux list think free software is a germ form >of the GPL society. Insofar it is much more than a metaphor, because the >analysis of the phenomenon of free software constantly brings up new >aspects which often can be transformed into a different organization of a >society very well. Actually I'm astonished over and over again how good >this works. > >Of course we don't have a full-blown concept in our drawers how the new >society will look like - and we better should not have such a drawing >table model IMHO. Of course today there are many questions which can't be >answered honestly. However, it is possible to think about this GPL society >and which trends in the presence may extend and lead us into this GPL >society. Indeed given the frame work of Oekonux you can find a number of >aspects already existing today, which may also be seen as germ forms. For >instance, NGOs share a number of interesting aspects with the development >of free software and may be seen as a non-technical counterpart among the >germ forms for the GPL society. And even in the midst of capitalism you >can see how the production process more and more depends on information. >Today the material side of material production is rather unimportant even >in capitalism. And information is something very different from the >material world simply by the fact that you can copy it without losing the >original. > >What is known as the new/Internet/digital economy is indeed the plain old >money economy on new territories. What this economy does is to try to make >profit from things which are inherently not profitable. > >The very basis for any profit is scarcity. Since the invention of >computers and particularly the Internet, however, scarcity of digital >information is difficult to keep. Once a digital information has been >produced it is reproducible with extremely marginal cost. This is the >reason why information industries of all kinds are making such a fuss >about intellectual property rights: IPRs could make digital information a >scarce good you then can make profit with. Personally I think the >technical means of reproduction, which meanwhile are distributed among >millions of households, opened the bottle, the ghost is out and nothing >will be able to put it back in there. > >Take for instance the freely available music files Napster started to >establish. The music industry may destroy Napster but what for? The clones >and even better, non-centralized ideas are already there and these things >will survive everything - even a hoard of hungry lawyers. > >However, there is a even more fundamental reason why I think the free >production of information and in the end of free material goods as well >will overcome societies based on exchange: They simply produce better >goods. You can see that with free software and there are more and older >examples proofing that the free flow of information results in better >products. Science and cooking recipes both are good examples IMHO. >Particularly the cooking recipes show how useful global cooperation and >sharing of information is. As well as capitalism with its industrial model >was able to deliver better products than the former feudalistic models and >therefore overcame feudalism, free production of goods will overcome the >former model of capitalism. > >But wait a minute. I'm not saying that these trends will become dominant >all by themselves. IMHO they are only potentials humans must actively put >forward to transform the world into something better. That's the deepest >reason I think the Oekonux project is not only useful but ultimately >needed. > >GL: What would you advice new media artists to do if they want to get >involved into free software but find it too hard to learn programming >themselves? How do you think the gap between those who program and those >who don't should be dealt with? Should everyone become a technician? >That's not very likely to happen. Many people simply look at the available >free/open source software and conclude that there is almost nothing ready >to be used. There are no drivers available etc. In part this is a >prejudice, but anyway, it is the common attitude, even of those who have >worked with computers for decades. How could they be convinced? > >SM: Well, the idea of free information goods is not limited to software at >all. Every piece of information possible to represent as bits is instantly >subject to exactly the same form of free development as software is. So my >advice to media artists who are interested in the principles of free >software is to set up free art projects, which make possible the >fundamental principles of free software (absence of exchange value, >self-unfolding, self-organization, global cooperation). There are already >a number of them out in the Internet e.g. for writing and music. As long >as the free art fits onto a computer monitor or another computer device, >there are next to no limitations given the broad availability of web space >at next to zero price. > >What can be done about prejudices - good question. And it's a even better >one when M$ starts demonizing free software. I think the best what can be >done is to confront people with reality and facts. Today even for a person >used to Windows it's no problem to use a Gnu/Linux system for the same >office work s/he does on M$ products. Take KDE and StarOffice and you will >notice only a few minor differences. Well, a major difference you may >notice: The system is far more stable than say for instance M$ Word on >Windows. > >Actually today IMHO for a lot of computer users there is no technical >reason not to use free software. Most things are readily available and I >know a number of people who are interested amateurs who had no problem to >install e.g. a SuSE distribution on their computer. And if you won't do >that yourself, it's likely, that you'll find a Gnu/Linux enthusiast in >your environment who will hurry to install whatever you need. > >GL: Do you have free software projects, which are under way at the moment, >that you personally particularly like? > >SM: Not really. Personally I'm using a number of free programs: Emacs, >Perl, gmake, CVS, SDF, TkDesk, fvwm2, StarOffice, Netscape (which is not >really free) a hell lot of standard Gnu/Linux tools, and so on. >Unfortunately I don't find the time to offer my software to the world. >It's a pity :-( . > >Well, I'm keen to see what the GPL-ization of StarOffice / OpenOffice will >bring. Actually I'd had some wishes about a integration with command line >oriented processing of data. > >GL: Could you tell us what the main discussion in Dortmund is going to be >and what outcome you would like to see? > >SM: [laughing] Fortunately not! In Dortmund we'll have a very broad >spectrum of people, and to me it's exciting to think of the many, many >discussions which for sure will take place there. Personally I hope, that >I'm not too loaded with organizational work so I'll have a chance to >attend some talks and workshops. > >Of course I would appreciate if the conference is able to spread our ideas >a bit more and to make them fruitful for others as well as the opportunity >to take into account new thoughts, perspectives and ideas from others. >Given the big attention the conference has got during the last few months >I think the plain existence of the conference alone has already done part >of the work. > >--- > >Related URLs: > >Website of the Oekonux list: www.oekonux.org >Oekonux Dortmund conference: www.oekonux-konferenz.de/ >Wizard of OS, Berlin conference: www.mikro.org/wos >(the second WOS will be held from 11-13 October, 2001) >The Open Theory site: www.opentheory.org >Krisis Group ("Critique of the Commodity Society") www.krisis.org > > > > > > Shuddhabrata Sengupta SARAI: The New Media Initiative Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 052, India www.sarai.net From monica at sarai.net Tue Apr 24 18:39:16 2001 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 18:39:16 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] a sufi story Message-ID: Here is a Sufi story, perhaps 800 years old, that can be interpreted in many ways, and one way could have a relationship with much of what we discuss... -------------------- The Story of Fire  Once upon a time a man was contemplating the ways in which Nature operates, and he discovered, because of his concentration and application, how fire could be made. This man was called Nour. He decided to travel from one community to another, showing people his discovery. Nour passed the secret to many groups of people. Some took advantage of the knowledge. Others drove him away, thinking that he must be dangerous, before they had had time to understand how valuable this discovery could be to them. Finally, a tribe before which he demonstrated became so panic-stricken that they set about him and killed him, being convinced that he was a demon. Centuries passed. The first tribe which had learned about fire reserved the secret for their priests, who remained in affluence and power while the people froze. The second tribe forgot the art and worshipped instead the instruments. The third worshipped a likeness of Nour himself, because it was he who had taught them. The fourth retained the story of the making of fire in their legends: some believed them, some did not. The fifth community really did use fire, and this enabled them to be warmed, to cook their food, and to manufacture all kinds of useful articles. After many, many years, a wise man and a small band of his disciples were travelling through the lands of these tribes. The disciples were amazed at the variety of rituals which they encountered; and one and all said to their teacher: 'But all these procedures are in fact related to the making of fire, nothing else. We should reform these people! The teacher said: 'Very well, then. We shall restart our journey. By the end of it, those who survive will know the real problems and how to approach them.' When they reached the first tribe, the band was hospitably received. The priests invited the travellers to attend their religious ceremony, the making of fire. When it was over, and the tribe was in a state of excitement at the event which they had witnessed, the master said: 'Does anyone wish to speak?' The first disciple said: 'In the cause of Truth I feel myself constrained to say something to these people.' 'If you will do so at your own risk, you may do so,' said the master. Now the disciple stepped forward in the presence of the tribal chief and his priests and said: 'I can perform the miracle which you take to be a special manifestation of deity. If I do so, will you accept that you have been in error for so many years?' But the priests cried: 'Seize him!' and the man was taken away, never to be seen again. The travellers went to the next territory where the second tribe were worshipping the instruments of fire-making. Again a disciple volunteered to try to bring reason to the community. With the permission of the master, he said: 'I beg permission to speak to you as reasonable people. You are worshipping the means whereby something may be done, not even the thing itself. Thus you are suspending the advent of its usefulness. I know the reality that lies at the basis of this ceremony.' This tribe was composed of more reasonable people. But they said to the disciple: 'You are welcome as a traveller and stranger in our midst. But, as a stranger, foreign to our history and customs, you cannot understand what we are doing. You make a mistake. Perhaps, even, you are trying to take away or alter our religion. We therefore decline to listen to you.' The travellers moved on. When they arrived in the land of the third tribe, they found before every dwelling an idol representing Nour, the original fire-maker. The third disciple addressed the chiefs of the tribe: 'This idol represents a man, who represents a capacity, which can be used.' 'This may be so,' answered the Nour-worshippers, 'but the penetration of the real secret is only for the few.' 'It is only for the few who will understand, not for those who refuse to face certain facts,' said the third disciple. 'This is rank heresy, and from a man who does not even speak our language correctly, and is not a priest ordained in our faith,' muttered the priests. And he could make no headway. The band continued their journey, and arrived in the land of the fourth tribe. Now a fourth disciple stepped forward in the assembly of the people. 'The story of making fire is true, and I know how it may be done,' he said. Confusion broke out within the tribe, which split into various factions. Some said: 'This may be true, and if it is, we want to find out how to make fire.' When these people were examined by the master and his followers, however, it was found that most of them were anxious to use firemaking for personal advantage, and did not realize that it was something for human progress. So deep had the distorted legends penetrated into the minds of most people that those who thought that they might in fact represent truth were often unbalanced ones, who could not have made fire even if they had been shown how. There was another faction, who said: 'Of course the legends are not true. This man is just trying to fool us, to make a place for himself here.' And a further faction said: 'We prefer the legends as they are, for they are the very mortar of our cohesion. If we abandon them, and we find that this new interpretation is useless, what will become of our community then?' And there were other points of view, as well. So the party travelled on, until they reached the lands of the fifth community, where firemaking was a commonplace, and where other preoccupations faced them. The master said to his disciples: 'You have to learn how to teach, for man does not want to be taught. First of all, you will have to teach people how to learn. And before that you have to teach them that there is still something to be learned. They imagine that they are ready to learn. But they want to learn what they imagine is to be learned, not what they have first to learn. When you have learned all this, then you can devise the way to teach. Knowledge without special capacity to teach is not the same as knowledge and capacity.' ========================================== Ahmed el-Bedavi (died 1276) is reputed to have said, in answer to the question: 'What is a barbarian ?' : 'A barbarian is one whose perceptions are so insensitive that he thinks that he can understand by thinking or feeling something which can be perceived only through development and constant application to the striving towards God. 'Men laugh at Moses and Jesus, either because they are utterly insensitive, or because they have concealed from themselves what these people really meant when they talked and acted.' According to dervish lore, he was accused of preaching Christianity by Moslems, but repudiated by Christians because he refused to accept later Christian dogma literally. He was the founder of the Egyptian Bedavi Order. -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From raju at linux-delhi.org Thu Apr 26 08:47:58 2001 From: raju at linux-delhi.org (Raju Mathur) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 08:47:58 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Reader-list] RMS visit to Delhi in August Message-ID: <15079.37734.572647.79962@mail.linux-delhi.org> Hi, As some of you would be aware, FSF-India is organising a big set of events with Richard M Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the Father of GNU in Kerala later this year. RMS may also be able to stop over in Delhi in August on his way back. We'd love to have him speak to ILUG-Delhi, Sarai and all interested people. If you feel that you can help with organising any of the following: - Press meeting(s) - Professional seminar/talk - Hotel accommodation - Local Transport - Sightseeing (?) - Food - Publicity - Anything else which would help Please get in touch with me. I'll start a mailing list for this specific event soon. Your ideas would help immensely. Regards, -- Raju -- Raju Mathur raju at kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ From rkrishnan at ti.com Thu Apr 26 09:27:09 2001 From: rkrishnan at ti.com (Ramakrishnan M) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 09:27:09 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [FSF-India] EFF releases Open Audio Licence v1.0 Message-ID: <3AE79C95.8FA3A30F@ti.com> http://www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/20010421_eff_oal_1.0.html Makes lots of sense. For some background info, read Courtney Love interview at Salon.com (which appeared sometime back) -- Ramakrishnan M _______________________________________________ FSF-India mailing list FSF-India at river-valley.com http://202.88.232.42/mailman/listinfo/fsf-india From monica at sarai.net Thu Apr 26 12:31:15 2001 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 12:31:15 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Courtney Love Message-ID: Here is the whole speech by Courtney Love that was recommended in an email. Enjoy. ----------------------------------------------- Courtney Love does the math The controversial singer takes on record label profits, Napster and "sucka VCs." Editor's note: This is an unedited transcript of Courtney Love's speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, given in New York on May 16. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Courtney Love June 14, 2000 | Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software. I'm talking about major label recording contracts. I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, and do some recording-contract math: This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I'm positive it's better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide. What happens to that million dollars? They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager. That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person. That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released. The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is another rant entirely, but it's based on any basic civics-class knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.) So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band's royalties. The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable. The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations -- the unified broadcast system -- are getting paid to play their records. All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band. Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company. If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record. Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals ... zero! How much does the record company make? They grossed $11 million. It costs $500,000 to manufacture the CDs and they advanced the band $1 million. Plus there were $1 million in video costs, $300,000 in radio promotion and $200,000 in tour support. The company also paid $750,000 in music publishing royalties. They spent $2.2 million on marketing. That's mostly retail advertising, but marketing also pays for those huge posters of Marilyn Manson in Times Square and the street scouts who drive around in vans handing out black Korn T-shirts and backwards baseball caps. Not to mention trips to Scores and cash for tips for all and sundry. Add it up and the record company has spent about $4.4 million. So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven. Of course, they had fun. Hearing yourself on the radio, selling records, getting new fans and being on TV is great, but now the band doesn't have enough money to pay the rent and nobody has any credit. Worst of all, after all this, the band owns none of its work ... they can pay the mortgage forever but they'll never own the house. Like I said: Sharecropping. Our media says, "Boo hoo, poor pop stars, they had a nice ride. Fuck them for speaking up"; but I say this dialogue is imperative. And cynical media people, who are more fascinated with celebrity than most celebrities, need to reacquaint themselves with their value systems. When you look at the legal line on a CD, it says copyright 1976 Atlantic Records or copyright 1996 RCA Records. When you look at a book, though, it'll say something like copyright 1999 Susan Faludi, or David Foster Wallace. Authors own their books and license them to publishers. When the contract runs out, writers gets their books back. But record companies own our copyrights forever. The system's set up so almost nobody gets paid. Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Last November, a Congressional aide named Mitch Glazier, with the support of the RIAA, added a "technical amendment" to a bill that defined recorded music as "works for hire" under the 1978 Copyright Act. He did this after all the hearings on the bill were over. By the time artists found out about the change, it was too late. The bill was on its way to the White House for the president's signature. That subtle change in copyright law will add billions of dollars to record company bank accounts over the next few years -- billions of dollars that rightfully should have been paid to artists. A "work for hire" is now owned in perpetuity by the record company. Under the 1978 Copyright Act, artists could reclaim the copyrights on their work after 35 years. If you wrote and recorded "Everybody Hurts," you at least got it back to as a family legacy after 35 years. But now, because of this corrupt little pisher, "Everybody Hurts" never gets returned to your family, and can now be sold to the highest bidder. Over the years record companies have tried to put "work for hire" provisions in their contracts, and Mr. Glazier claims that the "work for hire" only "codified" a standard industry practice. But copyright laws didn't identify sound recordings as being eligible to be called "works for hire," so those contracts didn't mean anything. Until now. Writing and recording "Hey Jude" is now the same thing as writing an English textbook, writing standardized tests, translating a novel from one language to another or making a map. These are the types of things addressed in the "work for hire" act. And writing a standardized test is a work for hire. Not making a record. So an assistant substantially altered a major law when he only had the authority to make spelling corrections. That's not what I learned about how government works in my high school civics class. Three months later, the RIAA hired Mr. Glazier to become its top lobbyist at a salary that was obviously much greater than the one he had as the spelling corrector guy. The RIAA tries to argue that this change was necessary because of a provision in the bill that musicians supported. That provision prevents anyone from registering a famous person's name as a Web address without that person's permission. That's great. I own my name, and should be able to do what I want with my name. But the bill also created an exception that allows a company to take a person's name for a Web address if they create a work for hire. Which means a record company would be allowed to own your Web site when you record your "work for hire" album. Like I said: Sharecropping. Although I've never met any one at a record company who "believed in the Internet," they've all been trying to cover their asses by securing everyone's digital rights. Not that they know what to do with them. Go to a major label-owned band site. Give me a dollar for every time you see an annoying "under construction" sign. I used to pester Geffen (when it was a label) to do a better job. I was totally ignored for two years, until I got my band name back. The Goo Goo Dolls are struggling to gain control of their domain name from Warner Bros., who claim they own the name because they set up a shitty promotional Web site for the band. Orrin Hatch, songwriter and Republican senator from Utah, seems to be the only person in Washington with a progressive view of copyright law. One lobbyist says that there's no one in the House with a similar view and that "this would have never happened if Sonny Bono was still alive." By the way, which bill do you think the recording industry used for this amendment? The Record Company Redefinition Act? No. The Music Copyright Act? No. The Work for Hire Authorship Act? No. How about the Satellite Home Viewing Act of 1999? Stealing our copyright reversions in the dead of night while no one was looking, and with no hearings held, is piracy. It's piracy when the RIAA lobbies to change the bankruptcy law to make it more difficult for musicians to declare bankruptcy. Some musicians have declared bankruptcy to free themselves from truly evil contracts. TLC declared bankruptcy after they received less than 2 percent of the $175 million earned by their CD sales. That was about 40 times less than the profit that was divided among their management, production and record companies. Toni Braxton also declared bankruptcy in 1998. She sold $188 million worth of CDs, but she was broke because of a terrible recording contract that paid her less than 35 cents per album. Bankruptcy can be an artist's only defense against a truly horrible deal and the RIAA wants to take it away. Artists want to believe that we can make lots of money if we're successful. But there are hundreds of stories about artists in their 60s and 70s who are broke because they never made a dime from their hit records. And real success is still a long shot for a new artist today. Of the 32,000 new releases each year, only 250 sell more than 10,000 copies. And less than 30 go platinum. The four major record corporations fund the RIAA. These companies are rich and obviously well-represented. Recording artists and musicians don't really have the money to compete. The 273,000 working musicians in America make about $30,000 a year. Only 15 percent of American Federation of Musicians members work steadily in music. But the music industry is a $40 billion-a-year business. One-third of that revenue comes from the United States. The annual sales of cassettes, CDs and video are larger than the gross national product of 80 countries. Americans have more CD players, radios and VCRs than we have bathtubs. Story after story gets told about artists -- some of them in their 60s and 70s, some of them authors of huge successful songs that we all enjoy, use and sing -- living in total poverty, never having been paid anything. Not even having access to a union or to basic health care. Artists who have generated billions of dollars for an industry die broke and un-cared for. And they're not actors or participators. They're the rightful owners, originators and performers of original compositions. This is piracy. Technology is not piracy This opinion is one I really haven't formed yet, so as I speak about Napster now, please understand that I'm not totally informed. I will be the first in line to file a class action suit to protect my copyrights if Napster or even the far more advanced Gnutella doesn't work with us to protect us. I'm on [Metallica drummer] Lars Ulrich's side, in other words, and I feel really badly for him that he doesn't know how to condense his case down to a sound-bite that sounds more reasonable than the one I saw today. I also think Metallica is being given too much grief. It's anti-artist, for one thing. An artist speaks up and the artist gets squashed: Sharecropping. Don't get above your station, kid. It's not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster or Gnutella or Freenet or iMesh or beaming their CDs into a My.MP3.com or MyPlay.com music locker. It's piracy when those guys that run those companies make side deals with the cartel lawyers and label heads so that they can be "the labels' friend," and not the artists'. Recording artists have essentially been giving their music away for free under the old system, so new technology that exposes our music to a larger audience can only be a good thing. Why aren't these companies working with us to create some peace? There were a billion music downloads last year, but music sales are up. Where's the evidence that downloads hurt business? Downloads are creating more demand. Why aren't record companies embracing this great opportunity? Why aren't they trying to talk to the kids passing compilations around to learn what they like? Why is the RIAA suing the companies that are stimulating this new demand? What's the point of going after people swapping cruddy-sounding MP3s? Cash! Cash they have no intention of passing onto us, the writers of their profits. At this point the "record collector" geniuses who use Napster don't have the coolest most arcane selection anyway, unless you're into techno. Hardly any pre-1982 REM fans, no '60s punk, even the Alan Parsons Project was underrepresented when I tried to find some Napster buddies. For the most part, it was college boy rawk without a lot of imagination. Maybe that's the demographic that cares -- and in that case, My Bloody Valentine and Bert Jansch aren't going to get screwed just yet. There's still time to negotiate. Destroying traditional access Somewhere along the way, record companies figured out that it's a lot more profitable to control the distribution system than it is to nurture artists. And since the companies didn't have any real competition, artists had no other place to go. Record companies controlled the promotion and marketing; only they had the ability to get lots of radio play, and get records into all the big chain store. That power put them above both the artists and the audience. They own the plantation. Being the gatekeeper was the most profitable place to be, but now we're in a world half without gates. The Internet allows artists to communicate directly with their audiences; we don't have to depend solely on an inefficient system where the record company promotes our records to radio, press or retail and then sits back and hopes fans find out about our music. Record companies don't understand the intimacy between artists and their fans. They put records on the radio and buy some advertising and hope for the best. Digital distribution gives everyone worldwide, instant access to music. And filters are replacing gatekeepers. In a world where we can get anything we want, whenever we want it, how does a company create value? By filtering. In a world without friction, the only friction people value is editing. A filter is valuable when it understands the needs of both artists and the public. New companies should be conduits between musicians and their fans. Right now the only way you can get music is by shelling out $17. In a world where music costs a nickel, an artist can "sell" 100 million copies instead of just a million. The present system keeps artists from finding an audience because it has too many artificial scarcities: limited radio promotion, limited bin space in stores and a limited number of spots on the record company roster. The digital world has no scarcities. There are countless ways to reach an audience. Radio is no longer the only place to hear a new song. And tiny mall record stores aren't the only place to buy a new CD. I'm leaving Now artists have options. We don't have to work with major labels anymore, because the digital economy is creating new ways to distribute and market music. And the free ones amongst us aren't going to. That means the slave class, which I represent, has to find ways to get out of our deals. This didn't really matter before, and that's why we all stayed. I want my seven-year contract law California labor code case to mean something to other artists. (Universal Records sues me because I leave because my employment is up, but they say a recording contract is not a personal contract; because the recording industry -- who, we have established, are excellent lobbyists, getting, as they did, a clerk to disallow Don Henley or Tom Petty the right to give their copyrights to their families -- in California, in 1987, lobbied to pass an amendment that nullified recording contracts as personal contracts, sort of. Maybe. Kind of. A little bit. And again, in the dead of night, succeeded.) That's why I'm willing to do it with a sword in my teeth. I expect I'll be ignored or ostracized following this lawsuit. I expect that the treatment you're seeing Lars Ulrich get now will quadruple for me. Cool. At least I'll serve a purpose. I'm an artist and a good artist, I think, but I'm not that artist that has to play all the time, and thus has to get fucked. Maybe my laziness and self-destructive streak will finally pay off and serve a community desperately in need of it. They can't torture me like they could Lucinda Williams. You funny dot-communists. Get your shit together, you annoying sucka VCs I want to work with people who believe in music and art and passion. And I'm just the tip of the iceberg. I'm leaving the major label system and there are hundreds of artists who are going to follow me. There's an unbelievable opportunity for new companies that dare to get it right. How can anyone defend the current system when it fails to deliver music to so many potential fans? That only expects of itself a "5 percent success rate" a year? The status quo gives us a boring culture. In a society of over 300 million people, only 30 new artists a year sell a million records. By any measure, that's a huge failure. Maybe each fan will spend less money, but maybe each artist will have a better chance of making a living. Maybe our culture will get more interesting than the one currently owned by Time Warner. I'm not crazy. Ask yourself, are any of you somehow connected to Time Warner media? I think there are a lot of yeses to that and I'd have to say that in that case president McKinley truly failed to bust any trusts. Maybe we can remedy that now. Artists will make that compromise if it means we can connect with hundreds of millions of fans instead of the hundreds of thousands that we have now. Especially if we lose all the crap that goes with success under the current system. I'm willing, right now, to leave half of these trappings -- fuck it, all these trappings -- at the door to have a pure artist experience. They cosset us with trappings to shut us up. That way when we say "sharecropper!" you can point to my free suit and say "Shut up pop star." Here, take my Prada pants. Fuck it. Let us do our real jobs. And those of us addicted to celebrity because we have nothing else to give will fade away. And those of us addicted to celebrity because it was there will find a better, purer way to live. Since I've basically been giving my music away for free under the old system, I'm not afraid of wireless, MP3 files or any of the other threats to my copyrights. Anything that makes my music more available to more people is great. MP3 files sound cruddy, but a well-made album sounds great. And I don't care what anyone says about digital recordings. At this point they are good for dance music, but try listening to a warm guitar tone on them. They suck for what I do. Record companies are terrified of anything that challenges their control of distribution. This is the business that insisted that CDs be sold in incredibly wasteful 6-by-12 inch long boxes just because no one thought you could change the bins in a record store. Let's not call the major labels "labels." Let's call them by their real names: They are the distributors. They're the only distributors and they exist because of scarcity. Artists pay 95 percent of whatever we make to gatekeepers because we used to need gatekeepers to get our music heard. Because they have a system, and when they decide to spend enough money -- all of it recoupable, all of it owed by me -- they can occasionally shove things through this system, depending on a lot of arbitrary factors. The corporate filtering system, which is the system that brought you (in my humble opinion) a piece of crap like "Mambo No. 5" and didn't let you hear the brilliant Cat Power record or the amazing new Sleater Kinney record, obviously doesn't have good taste anyway. But we've never paid major label/distributors for their good taste. They've never been like Yahoo and provided a filter service. There were a lot of factors that made a distributor decide to push a recording through the system: How powerful is management? Who owes whom a favor? What independent promoter's cousin is the drummer? What part of the fiscal year is the company putting out the record? Is the royalty rate for the artist so obscenely bad that it's almost 100 percent profit instead of just 95 percent so that if the record sells, it's literally a steal? How much bin space is left over this year? Was the record already a hit in Europe so that there's corporate pressure to make it work? Will the band screw up its live career to play free shows for radio stations? Does the artist's song sound enough like someone else that radio stations will play it because it fits the sound of the month? Did the artist get the song on a film soundtrack so that the movie studio will pay for the video? These factors affect the decisions that go into the system. Not public taste. All these things are becoming eradicated now. They are gone or on their way out. We don't need the gatekeepers any more. We just don't need them. And if they aren't going to do for me what I can do for myself with my 19-year-old Webmistress on my own Web site, then they need to get the hell out of my way. [I will] allow millions of people to get my music for nothing if they want and hopefully they'll be kind enough to leave a tip if they like it. I still need the old stuff. I still need a producer in the creation of a recording, I still need to get on the radio (which costs a lot of money), I still need bin space for hardware CDs, I still need to provide an opportunity for people without computers to buy the hardware that I make. I still need a lot of this stuff, but I can get these things from a joint venture with a company that serves as a conduit and knows its place. Serving the artist and serving the public: That's its place. Equity for artists A new company that gives artists true equity in their work can take over the world, kick ass and make a lot of money. We're inspired by how people get paid in the new economy. Many visual artists and software and hardware designers have real ownership of their work. I have a 14-year-old niece. She used to want to be a rock star. Before that she wanted to be an actress. As of six months ago, what do you think she wants to be when she grows up? What's the glamorous, emancipating career of choice? Of course, she wants to be a Web designer. It's such a glamorous business! When you people do business with artists, you have to take a different view of things. We want to be treated with the respect that now goes to Web designers. We're not Dockers-wearing Intel workers from Portland who know how to "manage our stress." We don't understand or want to understand corporate culture. I feel this obscene gold rush greedgreedgreed vibe that bothers me a lot when I talk to dot-com people about all this. You guys can't hustle artists that well. At least slick A&R guys know the buzzwords. Don't try to compete with them. I just laugh at you when you do! Maybe you could a year ago when anything dot-com sounded smarter than the rest of us, but the scam has been uncovered. The celebrity-for-sale business is about to crash, I hope, and the idea of a sucker VC gifting some company with four floors just because they can "do" "chats" with "Christina" once or twice is ridiculous. I did a chat today, twice. Big damn deal. 200 bucks for the software and some elbow grease and a good back-end coder. Wow. That's not worth 150 million bucks. ... I mean, yeah, sure it is if you'd like to give it to me. Tipping/music as service I know my place. I'm a waiter. I'm in the service industry. I live on tips. Occasionally, I'm going to get stiffed, but that's OK. If I work hard and I'm doing good work, I believe that the people who enjoy it are going to want to come directly to me and get my music because it sounds better, since it's mastered and packaged by me personally. I'm providing an honest, real experience. Period. When people buy the bootleg T-shirt in the concert parking lot and not the more expensive T-shirt inside the venue, it isn't to save money. The T-shirt in the parking lot is cheap and badly made, but it's easier to buy. The bootleggers have a better distribution system. There's no waiting in line and it only takes two minutes to buy one. I know that if I can provide my own T-shirt that I designed, that I made, and provide it as quickly or quicker than the bootleggers, people who've enjoyed the experience I've provided will be happy to shell out a little more money to cover my costs. Especially if they understand this context, and aren't being shoveled a load of shit about "uppity" artists. It's exactly the same with recorded music. The real thing to fear from Napster is its simple and excellent distribution system. No one really prefers a cruddy-sounding Napster MP3 file to the real thing. But it's really easy to get an MP3 file; and in the middle of Kansas you may never see my record because major distribution is really bad if your record's not in the charts this week, and even then it takes a couple of weeks to restock the one copy they usually keep on hand. I also know how many times I have heard a song on the radio that I loved only to buy the record and have the album be a piece of crap. If you're afraid of your own filler then I bet you're afraid of Napster. I'm afraid of Napster because I think the major label cartel will get to them before I do. I've made three records. I like them all. I haven't made filler and they're all committed pieces of work. I'm not scared of you previewing my record. If you like it enough to have it be a part of your life, I know you'll come to me to get it, as long as I show you how to get to me, and as long as you know that it's out. Most people don't go into restaurants and stiff waiters, but record labels represent the restaurant that forces the waiters to live on, and sometimes pool, their tips. And they even fight for a bit of their tips. Music is a service to its consumers, not a product. I live on tips. Giving music away for free is what artists have been doing naturally all their lives. New models Record companies stand between artists and their fans. We signed terrible deals with them because they controlled our access to the public. But in a world of total connectivity, record companies lose that control. With unlimited bin space and intelligent search engines, fans will have no trouble finding the music they know they want. They have to know they want it, and that needs to be a marketing business that takes a fee. If a record company has a reason to exist, it has to bring an artist's music to more fans and it has to deliver more and better music to the audience. You bring me a bigger audience or a better relationship with my audience or get the fuck out of my way. Next time I release a record, I'll be able to go directly to my fans and let them hear it before anyone else. We'll still have to use radio and traditional CD distribution. Record stores aren't going away any time soon and radio is still the most important part of record promotion. Major labels are freaking out because they have no control in this new world. Artists can sell CDs directly to fans. We can make direct deals with thousands of other Web sites and promote our music to millions of people that old record companies never touch. We're about to have lots of new ways to sell our music: downloads, hardware bundles, memory sticks, live Webcasts, and lots of other things that aren't even invented yet. Content providers But there's something you guys have to figure out. Here's my open letter to Steve Case: Avatars don't talk back!!! But what are you going to do with real live artists? Artists aren't like you. We go through a creative process that's demented and crazy. There's a lot of soul-searching and turning ourselves inside-out and all kinds of gross stuff that ends up on "Behind the Music." A lot of people who haven't been around artists very much get really weird when they sit down to lunch with us. So I want to give you some advice: Learn to speak our language. Talk about songs and melody and hooks and art and beauty and soul. Not sleazy record-guy crap, where you're in a cashmere sweater murmuring that the perfect deal really is perfect, Courtney. Yuck. Honestly hire honestly committed people. We're in a "new economy," right? You can afford to do that. But don't talk to me about "content." I get really freaked out when I meet someone and they start telling me that I should record 34 songs in the next six months so that we have enough content for my site. Defining artistic expression as content is anathema to me. What the hell is content? Nobody buys content. Real people pay money for music because it means something to them. A great song is not just something to take up space on a Web site next to stock market quotes and baseball scores. DEN tried to build a site with artist-free content and I'm not sorry to see it fail. The DEN shows look like art if you're not paying attention, but they forgot to hire anyone to be creative. So they ended up with a lot of content nobody wants to see because they thought they could avoid dealing with defiant and moody personalities. Because they were arrogant. And because they were conformists. Artists have to deal with business people and business people have to deal with artists. We hate each other. Let's create companies of mediators. Every single artist who makes records believes and hopes that they give you something that will transform your life. If you're really just interested in data mining or selling banner ads, stick with those "artists" willing to call themselves content providers. I don't know if an artist can last by meeting the current public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don't think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don't know many lasting works of art that are condescending or deliberately stupid or were created as content. Don't tell me I'm a brand. I'm famous and people recognize me, but I can't look in the mirror and see my brand identity. Keep talking about brands and you know what you'll get? Bad clothes. Bad hair. Bad books. Bad movies. And bad records. And bankrupt businesses. Rides that were fun for a year with no employee loyalty but everyone got rich fucking you. Who wants that? The answer is purity. We can afford it. Let's go find it again while we can. I also feel filthy trying to call my music a product. It's not a thing that I test market like toothpaste or a new car. Music is personal and mysterious. Being a "content provider" is prostitution work that devalues our art and doesn't satisfy our spirits. Artistic expression has to be provocative. The problem with artists and the Internet: Once their art is reduced to content, they may never have the opportunity to retrieve their souls. When you form your business for creative people, with creative people, come at us with some thought. Everybody's process is different. And remember that it's art. We're not craftspeople. Sponsorships I don't know what a good sponsorship would be for me or for other artists I respect. People bring up sponsorships a lot as a way for artists to get our music paid for upfront and for us to earn a fee. I've dealt with large corporations for long enough to know that any alliance where I'm an owned service is going to be doomed. When I agreed to allow a large cola company to promote a live show, I couldn't have been more miserable. They screwed up every single thing imaginable. The venue was empty but sold out. There were thousands of people outside who wanted to be there, trying to get tickets. And there were the empty seats the company had purchased for a lump sum and failed to market because they were clueless about music. It was really dumb. You had to buy the cola. You had to dial a number. You had to press a bunch of buttons. You had to do all this crap that nobody wanted to do. Why not just bring a can to the door? On top of all this, I felt embarrassed to be an advertising agent for a product that I'd never let my daughter use. Plus they were a condescending bunch of little guys. They treated me like I was an ungrateful little bitch who should be groveling for the experience to play for their damn soda. I ended up playing without my shirt on and ordering a six-pack of the rival cola onstage. Also lots of unwholesome cursing and nudity occurred. This way I knew that no matter how tempting the cash was, they'd never do business with me again. If you want some little obedient slave content provider, then fine. But I think most musicians don't want to be responsible for your clean-cut, wholesome, all-American, sugar corrosive cancer-causing, all white people, no women allowed sodapop images. Nor, on the converse, do we want to be responsible for your vice-inducing, liver-rotting, child-labor-law-violating, all white people, no-women-allowed booze images. So as a defiant moody artist worth my salt, I've got to think of something else. Tampax, maybe. Money As a user, I love Napster. It carries some risk. I hear idealistic business people talk about how people that are musicians would be musicians no matter what and that we're already doing it for free, so what about copyright? Please. It's incredibly easy not to be a musician. It's always a struggle and a dangerous career choice. We are motivated by passion and by money. That's not a dirty little secret. It's a fact. Take away the incentive for major or minor financial reward and you dilute the pool of musicians. I am not saying that only pure artists will survive. Like a few of the more utopian people who discuss this, I don't want just pure artists to survive. Where would we all be without the trash? We need the trash to cover up our national depression. The utopians also say that because in their minds "pure" artists are all Ani DiFranco and don't demand a lot of money. Why are the utopians all entertainment lawyers and major label workers anyway? I demand a lot of money if I do a big huge worthwhile job and millions of people like it, don't kid yourself. In economic terms, you've got an industry that's loathsome and outmoded, but when it works it creates some incentive and some efficiency even though absolutely no one gets paid. We suffer as a society and a culture when we don't pay the true value of goods and services delivered. We create a lack of production. Less good music is recorded if we remove the incentive to create it. Music is intellectual property with full cash and opportunity costs required to create, polish and record a finished product. If I invest money and time into my business, I should be reasonably protected from the theft of my goods and services. When the judgment came against MP3.com, the RIAA sought damages of $150,000 for each major-label-"owned" musical track in MP3's database. Multiply by 80,000 CDs, and MP3.com could owe the gatekeepers $120 billion. But what about the Plimsouls? Why can't MP3.com pay each artist a fixed amount based on the number of their downloads? Why on earth should MP3.com pay $120 billion to four distribution companies, who in most cases won't have to pay a nickel to the artists whose copyrights they've stolen through their system of organized theft? It's a ridiculous judgment. I believe if evidence had been entered that ultimately it's just shuffling big cash around two or three corporations, I can only pray that the judge in the MP3.com case would have seen the RIAA's case for the joke that it was. I'd rather work out a deal with MP3.com myself, and force them to be artist-friendly, instead of being laughed at and having my money hidden by a major label as they sell my records out the back door, behind everyone's back. How dare they behave in such a horrified manner in regards to copyright law when their entire industry is based on piracy? When Mister Label Head Guy, whom my lawyer yelled at me not to name, got caught last year selling millions of "cleans" out the back door. "Cleans" being the records that aren't for marketing but are to be sold. Who the fuck is this guy? He wants to save a little cash so he fucks the artist and goes home? Do they fire him? Does Chuck Phillips of the LA Times say anything? No way! This guy's a source! He throws awesome dinner parties! Why fuck with the status quo? Let's pick on Lars Ulrich instead because he brought up an interesting point! Conclusion I'm looking for people to help connect me to more fans, because I believe fans will leave a tip based on the enjoyment and service I provide. I'm not scared of them getting a preview. It really is going to be a global village where a billion people have access to one artist and a billion people can leave a tip if they want to. It's a radical democratization. Every artist has access to every fan and every fan has access to every artist, and the people who direct fans to those artists. People that give advice and technical value are the people we need. People crowding the distribution pipe and trying to ignore fans and artists have no value. This is a perfect system. If you're going to start a company that deals with musicians, please do it because you like music. Offer some control and equity to the artists and try to give us some creative guidance. If music and art and passion are important to you, there are hundreds of artists who are ready to rewrite the rules. In the last few years, business pulled our culture away from the idea that music is important and emotional and sacred. But new technology has brought a real opportunity for change; we can break down the old system and give musicians real freedom and choice. A great writer named Neal Stephenson said that America does four things better than any other country in the world: rock music, movies, software and high-speed pizza delivery. All of these are sacred American art forms. Let's return to our purity and our idealism while we have this shot. Warren Beatty once said: "The greatest gift God gives us is to enjoy the sound of our own voice. And the second greatest gift is to get somebody to listen to it." And for that, I humbly thank you. -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From jeebesh at sarai.net Thu Apr 26 14:27:36 2001 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (jeebesh at sarai.net) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 08:57:36 -0000 Subject: [Reader-list] On Tools and Regulation Message-ID: <200104260857.KAA15136@mail.intra.waag.org> Looking at some regulations and reflecting on them, somewhat: Certain disturbing regulations (or would-be regulations) Britain: - Encryption keys: Police can get the private key from a person. This person is then prohibited from telling the other user/s of the list or group about this. - All programmers need to be licensed with the state. Italy: - A journalist license is required to publish on the web. This I think also applies to even paticipating in mailing lists, or discussion groups. - All software needs to be certified for usage. The certification system is so cumbersome and unfriendly that only a few software producers will have the resources to apply and then get the certification. And according to Patrice (patrice at xs4all.nl) the police are very active in enforcement. What is significant here is that these regulations are not `content` regulations but `tools` regulations. They are trying to work out modalities of usage and directionalities of `tools`. The last decade or so has seen a massive proliferation of everyday `tools` that make possible diverse ways of software production, of forming groups, of creating sharing circuits, of creating indeterminate communication orbits. (e.g Napster, listserve, countless free softwares etc.) The earlier regulation regimes did the same with radio. It was pushed from the domain of communication to a broadcasting medium, ie from being a transmitter as well it was reduced to being only a receiver for most public. Transmitter/ receiver technological combinations was massively resisted but regulations devised a comprehensive and contained system of broadcaster and receivers/ consumers. Now it seems almost natural that the radio is what it seems to be... It would be interesting to look at various regulations around `tools`, along with specific histories of `tools` to see how `tools` re-constitute practices, social interactivity and possibilities. Maybe it will help us to understand the present juncture, and be more inventive within this regulation madness. A small side remark. When I am talking about `tools`, I would understand that it would include various practices that make these `tools` emerge/dynamised within the public imagination. For example, after seeing Graham Harwood's imaginative and radical use of the scanner in his `Rehearsals of Memory`, I realised the tremendous potential of scanners. From rana_dasgupta at yahoo.com Fri Apr 27 12:01:29 2001 From: rana_dasgupta at yahoo.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 23:31:29 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] On Tools and Regulation In-Reply-To: <200104260857.KAA15136@mail.intra.waag.org> Message-ID: <20010427063129.20171.qmail@web512.mail.yahoo.com> These regulations all seem to be preventative measures against (perhaps as-yet-unimagined) social formations that make existing systems of control inadequate. The fact that, as Jeebesh points out, the regulations are directed against the tools with which these social formations construct themselves, rather than against the content of their exchange, shows that the anxiety is not that communities will exchange undesirable content, but that they will exist at all. The stern control on the use of email and Internet facilities within corporations (where surveillance, if it does not exist, is usually at least implied) is due quite substantially to the fact that they allow incredibly efficient informal communities to arise among personnel which are more or less invisible to conventional systems of control. These networks may not do anything except share jokes, but they represent a significant shift in the information economy of the corporation. Suddenly �horizontal� communication outnumbers �vertical� communication by a massive amount, thus diminishing the relative importance of the latter. Placing restrictions on the use of email itself (the �tool� rather than the �content�) is the most obvious way of dealing with this because it is the strength and efficiency of these networks that is threatening, not the content they pass around (which is probably completely harmless for the most part). High-profile media stories about the efficiency with which child pornographers and terrorists can use the Internet to organise into large international groups demonstrate the extent to which these micro paranoias operate also at the macro level of the nation-state�s legal apparatus. New technology-enabled social formations are usually portrayed in the media (I�m thinking of a recent CNN report about how to protect your kids from cyberprowlers) as collections of social outcasts with modems who put their deviant heads together online to make disgusting plans against �our� security � and particularly our children. But the regulations Jeebesh lists tell another story � it�s not just a peddler of child pornography that is going to feel the hard real-world boot of the law, but anyone who seeks to create communities that seem to evade conventional description or control. The fact is that no one can ever tell, when a �tool� such as this is introduced, what uses will be made of it and what society will look like with it. What will cyberterrorism, cyberpornography, cyberactivism, cybertheft etc turn into, and what new cybercategories for which there is no real-world equivalent will emerge? It is this unimaginability of future social formations that makes the managers of society very edgy - and consequently very aggressive. The legal system does not want to be caught out in the future by phenomena which �clearly� need to be prevented but which are not illegal because the law had never anticipated their existence. So at such a (still early) stage in the emergence of new social formations it must ensure that there are as many ways of preventing their activities as possible. Once again, concentrating on the the tools rather than trying to anticipate the uses that will be made of the tools, is simplest. Hence these regulations which help expand the category of �cybercrime� until it is pretty much equivalent to sitting at a computer with a connection. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From rana_dasgupta at yahoo.com Fri Apr 27 17:40:10 2001 From: rana_dasgupta at yahoo.com (Rana Dasgupta) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 05:10:10 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] Humour - The Evil Genius Gates In-Reply-To: <200104260857.KAA15136@mail.intra.waag.org> Message-ID: <20010427121010.103.qmail@web512.mail.yahoo.com> Microsoft satire, for those of you who haven't seen these before. http://www.theonion.com/onion3311/microsoftpatents.html http://www.theonion.com/onion3321/windows98.html Enjoy. R __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/ From shuddha at sarai.net Fri Apr 27 11:27:47 2001 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 11:27:47 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Fwd: China alert (wave of repression against web dissidents)] Message-ID: <4.3.0.20010427112320.00afdba0@mail.sarai.net> >Apologies for Cross Posting for those already on the Nettime List. >But this is the kind of news that all of us living under draconian legal >regimes to police the Internet need to be wary of. I am sure that the men >in suits and khadi who determine the texture of the present in the >Republic of India are learning things from the men in suits and mao suits >in the People's Republic of China. When will the rest of us begin to wake >up? When the gentlemen from the cybercops come knocking on our doors? Cheers Shuddha ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >ALERT - CHINA > >26 April 2001 > >Wave of repression against web dissidents > >SOURCE: Reporters sans frontières (RSF), Paris > >(RSF/IFEX) - In a letter to Jia Chunwang, Chinese minister of public >security, RSF protested the arrest of Lu Xinhua and Guo Qinghai. Both are >accused of violating the law on the content of information published on >the Internet. RSF asked the minister to guarantee the release of Lu and >Guo, and for the charges against them to be dropped. "We see the >disastrous consequences of the Internet laws promulgated in 2000 by the >Chinese authorities. The police services in charge of the Internet are now >tracking down all web dissidents," noted RSF Secretary-General Robert >Ménard. > >According to information collected by RSF, Lu was detained on 11 March >2001 in Wuhan (central China). According to the Information Centre for >Human Rights and Democracy, he was formally arrested on 20 April for >"subversion". Lu is the author of several articles published on overseas >websites. He has reported on human rights violations in China and openly >criticised Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Guo, a bank employee, has been >on trial since 3 April in a Hebei (northern China) court, for violating >the law on the content of news published on the Internet. His family was >not informed of the date of the trial. He wrote pro-democracy articles on >an American web site. > >In a report entitled "Enemies of the Internet" (www.rsf.org) published in >February, RSF wrote: "Over the past two years, the Chinese authorities >have considerably changed their policy for controlling the Internet. The >'Great Cyber Wall' strategy, implemented in 1997 by the Ministry of Public >Security and the State Prosecutor, was abandoned in favour of selective >enforcement and control carried out by ISPs and site managers themselves. >...Chinese web dissidents are considered to be real criminals, and run the >risk of hefty prison sentences." > >Four web dissidents are currently jailed in China: Qi Yanchen, chief >editor of the online magazine "Consultations", arrested on 2 September >1999 and sentenced to four years in jail (see IFEX alerts of 21 September, >13 July, 26 and 5 June, 17 and 3 March and 26 January 2000 and 3 September >1999); Huang Qi, creator of the website www.6-4tianwang.com, detained >since 3 June 2000, whose trial was postponed (see alerts of 9 February and >18 January 2001, 13 July, 26 and 7 June 2000); Jiang Shihua, teacher and >owner of Silicon Valley Internet Cafe, jailed since 16 August 2000 and >sentenced last December to two years in jail (see alerts of 14 March 2001 >and 22 August 2000); and Yang Zili, creator of the website >www.lib.126.com, whose family has not been informed of his whereabouts >since he was detained by the police on 13 March (see alert of 20 April >2001). > >For further information, contact Vincent Brossel at RSF, 5, rue Geoffroy >Marie, Paris 75009, France, tel: +33 1 44 83 84 84, fax: +33 1 45 23 11 >51, e-mail: asie at rsf.fr, Internet: http://www.rsf.fr > >The information contained in this alert is the sole responsibility of RSF. >In citing this material for broadcast or publication, please credit RSF. > >_________________________________________________________________ > >DISTRIBUTED BY THE INTERNATIONAL FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION EXCHANGE (IFEX) >CLEARING HOUSE 489 College Street, Suite 403, Toronto (ON) M6G 1A5 CANADA >tel: +1 416 515 9622 fax: +1 416 515 7879 alerts e-mail: alerts at ifex.org >general e-mail: ifex at ifex.org Internet site: http://www.ifex.org/ > > > ># distributed via : no commercial use without permission ># is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, ># collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets ># more info: majordomo at bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body ># archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime at bbs.thing.net Shuddhabrata Sengupta SARAI: The New Media Initiative Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 052, India www.sarai.net From shuddha at sarai.net Sat Apr 28 14:36:45 2001 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 14:36:45 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Space, Cyberspace, and Cspace Message-ID: <4.3.0.20010428143604.00aaad90@mail.sarai.net> Dear Folks on the Reader List This is an attempt to think about the relations between space and cyberspace. And a request for help in attempting to find an adequate word, term or expression that can articulate what I am trying to talk about.Please intervene. In a book called Memory Trade: The Prehistory of Cyberspace by Darren Tofts, (a book I have not read, but only read about) the author coins a term called "cspace", pronounced space , (just as psyche is pronounced syche) as a median term between space and cyberspace. Now this was criticised at the time that this book came out as a vague and indeterminate excercise in term coinage that meant nothing quite specific.You were either in space or in cyberspace. What on earth did it mean to be somewhere in between? But, my recent days of mooching around in New York, Chicago and London have convinced me that we need again to look at the relation between space and cyberspace in a more concrete way. methinks that there is something that straddles the fjord between space and cyberspace. Sometimes this connecting medium, which for want of another term I will call 'cspace' is thick and sometimes it is thin. It could perhaps be measured like humidity is measured. As the relative density of grounded or suspended online possibilities in a given unit of physical space. Let me try and explain what I mean. I would spend long hours each day looking for cybercafes that were reliable and affordable in New York, Chicago and London. With little success. While In New York and Chicago, the Public Libraries, (bastions of the public domain, shelters against the cold wind and the elements, as well as hospitable refuges for reading) did offer some repsite - (notwithstanding the long queues to use the computer terminals by the indigent and the public spiritied) they were not the rough and ready portals into cyberspace that I am more used to. One waited, and one waited and one waited. ((In London, the spanking new British Library building has decided not to offer its public any form of internet access for fear that the readership would wisely disregard the stipulations of the intellectual property rights regime. A true sign of our times - A Public Library, built out of taxpayers money, running scared of the unmediated public access to knowledge) Outside the public library system in New York, there were a few shady dives in Greenwich village and around the spots where backpackers backpack. Here, typically the connection would be erratic, and the lights dim. Or else, there was the cash guzzling monster of the Kinko's outlets (with padlocked photocopiers and computer terminals that had a CD drive, a floppy drive and a credit card drive). Kinkos terminals regularly digested my meagre dollars and cents at amazing speed. They had a big appetite for my money. Here I could surf for 3 US Dollars (120 Rupees) for seven minutes or so. They called this cheap. In London, there was the gigantic collection of rabbit warrens called "Easyeverything" which too guzzled my cash. At 2 Pounds (140 rupees) for twenty minutes, this experience, and the abruptness with which the computer said to me "Your Time is Up. Pay to Continue !" was scary. Coming back to Delhi, I was reassured to find that as usual, the Cybercafes were five minutes walk away in either direction at most places in the city. And that I could surf at the comfortable rate of 10 Rupees for every half an hour.(I coud surf twice, sometimes thrice as much by paying twelvetimes less than I could in New York or London, and it wouldn't take me long to find my fix). The air in Delhi is thick with smog and with connectivity.There are power cuts, but then there are improvised solutions like computers hooked on to car batteries. I know there is a digital divide. I know the figures of per capita computer usage and access in India and how dismal they are. I know how bad the lines and what a waste of time VSNL is. But still, Delhi as an online cspace, is friendlier than cities that have more computers to the square mile. (How I wish that Offline Delhi were even half as friendly, or considerate as Online Delhi is). The public nature of computing culture in Delhi (which is predicated on ease, affordability, sociability and conviviality) suggests that the quality and possibility of being online can be very different in different places. In some ways I felt the pinch of the 'digital divide' much more sharply in the cspace of New York and London, than I do in Delhi. On the other hand, it is now possible to get messages on your mobile phone, if you are, say in the middle of Times Square in New York, telling you what you could buy in the radius of a fifty metres. Of course you could also go online. This suggests that in New York, if you have your own private handheld device, you can be thickly enmeshed in cspace. If you dont, cspace is a thin membrane that tears around you. Welcome to the First World Digital Divide. if you need a quick leak or need to look at your e mail, you'd better not be in a public space. Stay at home, or in your office, or carry your WAP and your WC with you Now, isn't that strange.What is one to do when the urge hits. When you have got to go, you have got to go. Online or Offline. And what do you do when you have no 'cspace' to step into'. Where do you get off? I know what to do in Delhi. I have found my cspace. But I am still lost in New York, Chicago and London. Now, how about some other accounts of Cspace Travel? Shuddhabrata Sengupta SARAI: The New Media Initiative Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 052, India www.sarai.net From arunmehtain at yahoo.com Sat Apr 28 17:25:17 2001 From: arunmehtain at yahoo.com (Arun Mehta) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 17:25:17 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Simputer In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20010428172133.01ee1eb0@202.54.15.1> Firstly, I think it is terrific that someone has shown some technological inventiveness and actually done some hardware and software design addressed to developing country problems. And secondly, I really would like to take a closer look at the capabilities of the machine before condemning it out of hand, particularly its speech recognition capabilities. If it does a halfway decent job of transcribing my Hindi ( I can type pretty fast in English, but not in Hindi), this is a hot product. Does anyone have a simputer in Delhi? Arun At 4/24/2001, Monica Narula wrote: >La Libre compares it to the ill-fated Apple >Newton: a product launched too early. So it's going to be too >expensive, too late and too early. _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com From raju at linux-delhi.org Sat Apr 28 15:52:00 2001 From: raju at linux-delhi.org (Raju Mathur) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 15:52:00 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Reader-list] Space, Cyberspace, and Cspace In-Reply-To: <4.3.0.20010428143604.00aaad90@mail.sarai.net> References: <4.3.0.20010428143604.00aaad90@mail.sarai.net> Message-ID: <15082.39368.998662.556911@mail.linux-delhi.org> Interesting write-up, Shuddha. I'm finding it more and more difficult to move between ``have'' and ``have-not'' modes in cspace or whatever you choose to call it. For people like me (Uber-geeks?) the idea of not being able to access e-mail, the 'net, information, my address book, etc from wherever I am is getting increasingly repugnant. No, I don't mean that I suffer withdrawal symptoms when away from my computer -- it's only when one needs some information which one knows is a click or two away and is unable to get it that irritation sets in. One could say that Information has become a sort of Sixth Sense to many human beings. The sense organs are artificial, expensive, kludgy and slow, but they're improving and our dependence on them is growing each day. That they're becoming increasingly more important can be judged by the fact that I (personally) routinely make decisions and judgements about people based purely upon information that I have gathered using this Sixth Sense. People decide to work with an organisation or not, to pay someone or not, to sleep with someone or not, even to marry another person or not based upon what this Sixth Sense has told them. As our dependence on Information grows, we will see many issues like censorship, cracking and false information in a new light. Censorship would be equivalent to blinding and cracking to reorganisation of nerve connections, for example. And the new Super (Wo)Men will be the ones whose sense organs work the best: i.e. those who have the best-integrated, fastest and smoothest connections to each other and the Repository. Question for you: How does Free Software translate into this model? The sense organs themselves? The Palm Pilots, the Nokia Communicators and the Simputers of this world are striving to become, as one incredibly tasteless ad puts it, ``an extension of you''. I don't see much besides better miniaturisation happening in making access to information faster for us Mere Mortals. Anyone aware of new developments in this field? Regards, -- Raju P.S. Check out http://www.agendacomputing.com/ for a handheld running Linux and all Open Source software. >>>>> "Shuddha" == Shuddhabrata Sengupta writes: Shuddha> Dear Folks on the Reader List This is an attempt to think Shuddha> about the relations between space and cyberspace. And a Shuddha> request for help in attempting to find an adequate word, Shuddha> term or expression that can articulate what I am trying Shuddha> to talk about.Please intervene. Shuddha> In a book called Memory Trade: The Prehistory of Shuddha> Cyberspace by Darren Tofts, (a book I have not read, but Shuddha> only read about) the author coins a term called "cspace", Shuddha> pronounced space , (just as psyche is pronounced syche) Shuddha> as a median term between space and cyberspace. Now this Shuddha> was criticised at the time that this book came out as a Shuddha> vague and indeterminate excercise in term coinage that Shuddha> meant nothing quite specific.You were either in space or Shuddha> in cyberspace. What on earth did it mean to be somewhere Shuddha> in between? Shuddha> But, my recent days of mooching around in New York, Shuddha> Chicago and London have convinced me that we need again Shuddha> to look at the relation between space and cyberspace in a Shuddha> more concrete way. methinks that there is something that Shuddha> straddles the fjord between space and cyberspace. Shuddha> Sometimes this connecting medium, which for want of Shuddha> another term I will call 'cspace' is thick and sometimes Shuddha> it is thin. It could perhaps be measured like humidity is Shuddha> measured. As the relative density of grounded or Shuddha> suspended online possibilities in a given unit of Shuddha> physical space. Shuddha> Let me try and explain what I mean. I would spend long Shuddha> hours each day looking for cybercafes that were reliable Shuddha> and affordable in New York, Chicago and London. With Shuddha> little success. While In New York and Chicago, the Public Shuddha> Libraries, (bastions of the public domain, shelters Shuddha> against the cold wind and the elements, as well as Shuddha> hospitable refuges for reading) did offer some repsite - Shuddha> (notwithstanding the long queues to use the computer Shuddha> terminals by the indigent and the public spiritied) they Shuddha> were not the rough and ready portals into cyberspace that Shuddha> I am more used to. One waited, and one waited and one Shuddha> waited. ((In London, the spanking new British Library Shuddha> building has decided not to offer its public any form of Shuddha> internet access for fear that the readership would wisely Shuddha> disregard the stipulations of the intellectual property Shuddha> rights regime. A true sign of our times - A Public Shuddha> Library, built out of taxpayers money, running scared of Shuddha> the unmediated public access to knowledge) Shuddha> Outside the public library system in New York, there were Shuddha> a few shady dives in Greenwich village and around the Shuddha> spots where backpackers backpack. Here, typically the Shuddha> connection would be erratic, and the lights dim. Or else, Shuddha> there was the cash guzzling monster of the Kinko's Shuddha> outlets (with padlocked photocopiers and computer Shuddha> terminals that had a CD drive, a floppy drive and a Shuddha> credit card drive). Kinkos terminals regularly digested Shuddha> my meagre dollars and cents at amazing speed. They had a Shuddha> big appetite for my money. Here I could surf for 3 US Shuddha> Dollars (120 Rupees) for seven minutes or so. They called Shuddha> this cheap. Shuddha> In London, there was the gigantic collection of rabbit Shuddha> warrens called "Easyeverything" which too guzzled my Shuddha> cash. At 2 Pounds (140 rupees) for twenty minutes, this Shuddha> experience, and the abruptness with which the computer Shuddha> said to me "Your Time is Up. Pay to Continue !" was Shuddha> scary. Shuddha> Coming back to Delhi, I was reassured to find that as Shuddha> usual, the Cybercafes were five minutes walk away in Shuddha> either direction at most places in the city. And that I Shuddha> could surf at the comfortable rate of 10 Rupees for every Shuddha> half an hour.(I coud surf twice, sometimes thrice as much Shuddha> by paying twelvetimes less than I could in New York or Shuddha> London, and it wouldn't take me long to find my fix). Shuddha> The air in Delhi is thick with smog and with Shuddha> connectivity.There are power cuts, but then there are Shuddha> improvised solutions like computers hooked on to car Shuddha> batteries. I know there is a digital divide. I know the Shuddha> figures of per capita computer usage and access in India Shuddha> and how dismal they are. I know how bad the lines and Shuddha> what a waste of time VSNL is. But still, Delhi as an Shuddha> online cspace, is friendlier than cities that have more Shuddha> computers to the square mile. (How I wish that Offline Shuddha> Delhi were even half as friendly, or considerate as Shuddha> Online Delhi is). Shuddha> The public nature of computing culture in Delhi (which is Shuddha> predicated on ease, affordability, sociability and Shuddha> conviviality) suggests that the quality and possibility Shuddha> of being online can be very different in different Shuddha> places. In some ways I felt the pinch of the 'digital Shuddha> divide' much more sharply in the cspace of New York and Shuddha> London, than I do in Delhi. Shuddha> On the other hand, it is now possible to get messages on Shuddha> your mobile phone, if you are, say in the middle of Times Shuddha> Square in New York, telling you what you could buy in the Shuddha> radius of a fifty metres. Of course you could also go Shuddha> online. This suggests that in New York, if you have your Shuddha> own private handheld device, you can be thickly enmeshed Shuddha> in cspace. If you dont, cspace is a thin membrane that Shuddha> tears around you. Welcome to the First World Digital Shuddha> Divide. if you need a quick leak or need to look at your Shuddha> e mail, you'd better not be in a public space. Stay at Shuddha> home, or in your office, or carry your WAP and your WC Shuddha> with you Shuddha> Now, isn't that strange.What is one to do when the urge Shuddha> hits. When you have got to go, you have got to go. Online Shuddha> or Offline. And what do you do when you have no 'cspace' Shuddha> to step into'. Where do you get off? I know what to do in Shuddha> Delhi. I have found my cspace. But I am still lost in New Shuddha> York, Chicago and London. Shuddha> Now, how about some other accounts of Cspace Travel? Shuddha> Shuddhabrata Sengupta SARAI: The New Media Initiative Shuddha> Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29, Rajpur Shuddha> Road, Delhi 110 052, India www.sarai.net Shuddha> _______________________________________________ Shuddha> Reader-list mailing list Reader-list at sarai.net Shuddha> http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list -- Raju Mathur raju at kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ From jeebesh at sarai.net Sat Apr 28 17:04:22 2001 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 17:04:22 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Licensing and Space Message-ID: <4.3.0.20010428170338.00a97b40@mail.sarai.net> Continuing the discussion around licensing for programmers... In a recent email to me by Joy (joy at sarai.net), he made a very pertinent point. According to him there are countless professions that are licensed (lawyers, doctors, architects, chartered accountants etc) also, large amount of products are licensed with marks (like the ISO marks, or now enviormental stamps etc). Keeping this in view, he wonders why I am objecting to programmers being licensed. His basic argument is that licensing per se needs to looked at or we will not be extending the argument to the necessary limits. Interestingly, when listening to some hawkers and rickhaw-pullers recently speak onthe immediate need for disbanding the licensing rules on their profession, I was struck by a strange parallel between urban space and virtual space. At present Delhi has about 4 lakh rickshawpullers, out of which only 1 lakh are licensed. What this means is that 75% of these rickshaw pullers are under constant threat of being robbed of their livelihood. Also, since parking for rickshaw pullers is not provided for in the street legal structure, all these persons are under constant threat of eviction and detention by the police. The same is the case with a very large section of street hawkers. This population - which supplies the majority of our urban population with fast-food and other things of utility - is again divided into legal and illegal by the working of licenses and urban space usage laws. The most important point these people was making is very simple: anybody can become a street hawker (all for the question of livlihood) and it should not need licenses. What is needed is a recognition of the profession and adequate urban space allocated for these activities. This factor, of entering a space and working on it - and in it - without licenses is very central to crores of people in urban India. The central problem is that urban planning and regulation are the work of the elites who define what is the usage of space going to be, and who will have access for it. For this the arguments of public health, aesthetics, morality, productivity, etc are mobilised and used. I think the same is happening in the domain of vitual space. A serious attempt is being made to organise and plan the space, with adequate gatekeepers and sentries posted. From rehanhasanansari at yahoo.com Sat Apr 28 19:41:20 2001 From: rehanhasanansari at yahoo.com (rehan ansari) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 07:11:20 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Reader-list] c space shuddha if he were to look for refuge in saddar, karachi Message-ID: <20010428141120.54193.qmail@web12903.mail.yahoo.com> A Conversation with Ajmal Kamal " I was watching Liza Minelli's "Cabaret" on video at a friend's place one August night, when his younger brother slammed open the door to announce in a voice choking with excitement: "Bhaijan! General Zia mar gaya!" We thought it was too good to believe. But, well, it was true. That night, sitting in a yellow minibus, going back to my place in North Karachi, I was amazed at the fact that not one person in the bus even mentioned the news or uttered the name of the killed dictator. Then, in my dazed state, the torment and anger of the past eleven years passed through my agitated mind. This man, I thought, had destroyed more than a third of my life. Now, I was almost certain, everything would change, although I could not hope to get back the eleven years that had passed under the shadow of a cruel dictatorship. Now, thirteen years further down the line, I cannot help smiling sadly at my innocence which I was to lose soon enough." In the Saddar of Karachi there is Zainab Market, a market of export reject shirts, t-shirts, jeans and you get the picture. I didn�t like going into the maze of Zainab Market back when I went to school, at Karachi Grammar School, also in Saddar, or now. I was mostly driven through the early morning traffic and the end of school traffic, and in those timeless Karachi afternoons when the sky and the air become one sheen of heat Zainab Market was just a place that I passed for 13 years of afternoons, or an afternoon that stretched the years 1975-1988, on the way to and fro from school. Now I went there because I had heard of a book store/caf�/ publishing house/ on top of Zainab Market. Like any book store it had book shelves. But the shelves in the middle of the room had wheels and I learnt that that was so so that the shelves could be moved to the side for the fortnightly film club. The last film that was shown was a film by Gautam Ghosh. The next film to be shown is Satyajit Ray's last film. Past the bookshelves was a kitchenette with a sign saying Tea and Coffee 10 rupees, please help yourself�Past the kitchenette is an office by a balcony full of potted plants. Ajmal Kamal sits among flowers, great light and a lovely breeze. I had first heard of Ajmal Kamal when I saw in a bookstore in Lahore the journal of contemporary writing that Ajmal Kamal edits. AAJ has contemporary writing in Urdu, writing translated from several Indian languages, as well as writing translated from English. So what you may get in an issue of AAJ, and there have been 33 of them since 1988 is something from (I list the contributors to the 33rd issue) Vaikom Mohammed Bashir, Fehmida Riaz, Joseph Conrad, Rajesh Joshi, Nirmal Verma, Uday Prakash, Goethe, Minno Bhandari, Sameen Danishwar, June Ailya, Zeeshan Sahil, William Teen, and Milan Kundera. The publishing house is called City Press and I picked up their recent publication Understanding Karachi (Planning and Reform for the Future). Understanding Karachi is written by Arif Hasan, an architect and prot�g� of Akhtar Hameed Khan. The book was lying in the pride of place of the bookstore and I also picked it up to see what Ajmal Kamal chose to publish. In the book I looked up Saddar and realized why I had never stopped in Saddar in those 13 years. The first chapter called Karachi's prepartition history says that Saddar was part of the European part of town, that Karachi boomed along with Bombay because of the cotton trade during the years of the American Civil War and that Karachi had the first municipal committee in all of India. By 1947 Saddar consisted of wide roads on a grid iron-plan, , residential areas dominated by Goans, Parsis and Europeans. The bazaar was dominated by churches, missionary schools, community halls and civic buildings. In the second chapter on post partition Karachi he writes that the 600000 refugees who came lived in refugee settlements in walking distance from saddar bazaar. A short distance from the bazaar a university ws established in 1952, and the federal secretariat was constructed adjacent to the bazaar. The older educational institutins and the courts of law were already in the vicinity. Thus within 4 years of the creation of Pakistan saddar became the centre of the city with a unique cosmopolitan culture and karachi became a high density multi class city. So how did Saddar become a place by the late 70s, so easily drive passable? In 1953 student riots erupted, supported by the city's proletariat, and a number of governments fell in a year. When Ayub Khan came he shifted the capital to Islamabad, working class migrants were discouraged from living in the city centre. Satellite towns were developed 25 km from the city centre.. Present day Karachi university is nowhere near saddar. The port, the working classes, the university, the industries were now at the 4 corners of a city and since there was no proper network at the time the entire movement was through saddar and saddar became a drive through and a drive by. I finished my cup of tea and on my way to the kitchenette realized that all the books in the bookstore were either fiction, poetry, culture studies or urban planning, and almost all had something to do with Karachi. ------ Our conversation about his motivation as a publisher was a conversation about the nature of innocence, hope, optimism and survival in the face of the Zia years and its legacy. He is in his mid 40s and I am in my early 30s but we both found that we share an era as our formative experience: we have in common are the 11 years of General Zia. People of my generation, I said to him, urban, from Karachi and Lahore professional families, who were young teenagers in the late 70s, have not recovered from dictatorship, segregation and Islamisation. They are the children of men and women who were young in very optimistic times-- the late 50s and early 60's, the Ayubian era of nation-building. Their children, us, were designed to experience optimism. When we were on the verge of adulthood it was the late 70's and all hell broke loose: Bhutto's sharaab peena and khoon peena, General Zia's smile and the Afghan Jihad. Those times represent the extra-judicial killing of my generation's optimism. This is how he responded: My family had settled in Hyderabad in 1965 after living briefly at several places in the then West Pakistan. I came to Karachi in 1976 to study engineering. Which means that I jumped directly into the political turmoil of 1977. I was 19, and beginning to know Karachi, and life, when Gen Zia imposed his Martial Law. I watched the city change before my eyes. It was in a DCET hostel that I first heard about a new kind of gun called "Kalashnikov". Well, we all saw it dominating the atmosphere in the days ahead. I was plodding through an academic discipline I did not have my heart in. Most of the time I read English and Urdu books, tried (unsuccessfully) to write poetry, learned to translate from English into Urdu, watched the parochial students politics from a distance, experienced my share of the sexual barrenness that used to be the lot of young men in those days. (I do not if things have changed for young men today.) I went back to Hyderabad in 1981 to while away my jobless days there. Brought out an anthology of Urdu and translated writings called "aaj" pehli kitab" the same year. It was meant to be first of a series, which could not become a reality till September 1989 when I was able to launch it as a quarterly journal. I was watching Liza Minelli's "Cabaret" on video at a friend's place one August night, when his younger brother slammed open the door to announce in a voice choking with excitement: "Bhaijan! General Zia mar gaya!" We thought it was too good to believe. But, well, it was true. That night, sitting in a yellow minibus, going back to my place in North Karachi, I was amazed at the fact that not one person in the bus even mentioned the news or uttered the name of the killed dictator. Then, in my dazed state, the torment and anger of the past eleven years passed through my agitated mind. This man, I thought, had destroyed more than a third of my life. Now, I was almost certain, everything would change, although I could not hope to get back the eleven years that had passed under the shadow of a cruel dictatorship. Now, thirteen years further down the line, I cannot help smiling sadly at my innocence which I was to lose soon enough. Yes, it was not hope that we lost in an "extra-judicial killing" (I do not remember if I had it in the first place) but innocence. By which I mean the ability to see things in black and white. How simple it was for us to think that once democracy returned, everything would be all right. I remember watching Benazir Bhutto, our darling of those na�ve days, on the TV screen in the lounge of Saddar's Hotel Sarawan, declare in her imperious style and charmingly flawed Urdu: "Aaj se law ministry awam ki law ministry ho gi!" She was, at that moment, appointing Aitezaz Ahsan as her Legal Eagle. And we were gullible enough to take it at face value, literally. What we were to discover later is common knowledge today. Hope, to me, is an intellectual stance. It may or may not have anything to do with the objective conditions. (What do we know about the objective reality anyway? We have nothing but a very fragmented subjective perception of it.) You need hope as you need fuel for a car. Because you need to go on. You just cannot sit down and decide whether the good has at least 51% chances to prevail over evil before embarking on what you want to - have to - do. This kind of calculation is valid only for those who have a zero-one option of continue to feel frustrated here or to join their folks in the States. Most of us, obviously, do not have that kind of a choice. For those to whom life has not been kind, the only choice is the oldest one: to be or not to be. They require their daily ration of hope in order merely to survive, just as they need to have their national identity card ready to be checked by the cruel and greedy policeman in the night returning to their home in a far flung abadi. And they somehow manage to get it. We lost innocence, not in a police encounter, but through a process of realisation. It is the realisation of our own past history as a nation state, the realisation of, if you will, the so-called post-colonial experience so wonderfully described for us by, for instance, Abdul Razzak Gurnah, the writer from Zanzibar, in his "Admiring Silence". --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20010428/2a833e26/attachment.html From supreet at sarai.net Mon Apr 30 11:07:03 2001 From: supreet at sarai.net (Supreet Sethi) Date: 30 Apr 2001 11:07:03 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Simputer In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20010428172133.01ee1eb0@202.54.15.1> References: <5.0.2.1.2.20010428172133.01ee1eb0@202.54.15.1> Message-ID: <87d79v0wzk.fsf@lucky.sarai.kit> It is definately a interesting machine. But question is to which market group to which it belongs. As its specs say it could very well be a de-facto market leader in handheld segment. Techincally solid but the repair costs would be high. People who can now buy cell phone would be definately able to buy this thing. But thinking a milk man would be computing with this thing is far from reality AFAIK Would take lot of time for this technology to seep in. Arun Mehta writes: >|Firstly, I think it is terrific that someone has shown some >|technological inventiveness and actually done some hardware and >|software design addressed to developing country problems. And >|secondly, I really would like to take a closer look at the >|capabilities of the machine before condemning it out of hand, >|particularly its speech recognition capabilities. If it does a halfway >|decent job of transcribing my Hindi ( I can type pretty fast in >|English, but not in Hindi), this is a hot product. >| >|Does anyone have a simputer in Delhi? >|Arun >|At 4/24/2001, Monica Narula wrote: >|>La Libre compares it to the ill-fated Apple >|>Newton: a product launched too early. So it's going to be too >|>expensive, too late and too early. >| >| >|_________________________________________________________ >|Do You Yahoo!? >|Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com >| >|_______________________________________________ >|Reader-list mailing list >|Reader-list at sarai.net >|http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list From supreet at sarai.net Mon Apr 30 11:34:13 2001 From: supreet at sarai.net (Supreet Sethi) Date: 30 Apr 2001 11:34:13 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] [Jaswinder Singh Kohli ] wanna get rid of this trojan --- REDESIGN WINDOWS --- Message-ID: <87vgnmhqjm.fsf@lucky.sarai.kit> An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Jaswinder Singh Kohli Subject: wanna get rid of this trojan --- REDESIGN WINDOWS --- Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 14:13:18 +0530 Size: 4345 Url: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20010430/0067fccb/attachment.mht From shuddha at sarai.net Mon Apr 30 12:00:26 2001 From: shuddha at sarai.net (Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 12:00:26 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Tools, Regulations and Space Message-ID: <4.3.0.20010430115011.00b04690@mail.sarai.net> This is in response to Jeebesh's and Rana's recent writing about tools and regulations. I think the interesting thing that Rana is pointing out is that the real issue that bothers power (corporate or state) is the formation of ungovernable communities itself and the proliferation of horizontal as opposed to vertical communities. That this is done in the name of content is another issue. An interesting sidelight on this is that in a recent presentationon law and the city in CSDS, DElhi we came to know that sixty percent of Delhi's population is involved either in illegal occupation of space, or illegal pursuit of trades, or is consuming illegal products. The entire spectrum of daily life is enmehed in notions of illicit and illegal spaces/trades/communications. The state and coproate interests can police the interent in the way that they do, because the methodology of control that they deploy has already been tried and tested on the streets. This seems to suggest to me that those keen on ensuring that the net stays a free space need to give some attention to the erosion of everyday libverty in the offline world. Of course it goes without saying that those who work in the sphere of civil liberties 'offline' would run the risk of a certain 'scotoma' an unwillingness to see what is in fornt of thewir eyes if they do not recognioze that the sophisticated methods of surveillance that are being developed in cyberspace will not also impinge on daily life. At present there seems to be a huge gulf betweeen the discussion on online and offline liberty. Any ideas on how we can bridge this gap? Or is it worth trying at all? Anything for a little bit of free and fresh air in 'cspace' ? Cheers Shuddha Shuddhabrata Sengupta SARAI: The New Media Initiative Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 052, India www.sarai.net From monica at sarai.net Mon Apr 30 12:38:55 2001 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 12:38:55 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] Digital Divide Message-ID: Following is a series of queries sent to Sarai by John MacGregor around the concept of the Digital Divide, and replies to them by some people at sarai. Makes for interesting reading, as the questions are very pertinent. (answers are in the sequence they reached my desktop!) cheers Monica ====================== I guess I'm zeroing in on Steve Jobs's recent statement that the digital divide is "just a new sticker we use to cover up a more important word: poverty. "I am living in America and you in Australia, and we are really doing quite nicely, thank you. We have great medicine and good roads and clean water. We invent terms like digital divide to distract us from the real problem that must be solved in the world, and that's poverty." * Do you agree? Jeebesh >> All technologies create problems of access. Whether it is print or telegraph or railways or even language, the problem of access and the kind of access will always be posed. But to construct a dramatic term like `digital divide`, the motivations are not merely to understand or critique access. The term comes with the moral baggage of other terms like `first world`and `third world` to create an imaginary of `lack and adundance`. In the process it neither helps in the understanding of `lack (lagging!)` societies nor the so called `abundant` societies. Lets take the example of radio. If we look just in terms of access, radio transmission can be accessed from anywhere in India. Also, you have a large population owning/sharing radio receivers. But, there is no significant radio culture in terms of listeners clubs or a wide production base. It is more or less a vehicle for a minuscule minority to reach millions with their messages and opinions. This is the kind of access that state and corporate will love here, and will engender technologies and practices that suit this end. The moral stance of terms like `digital divide` serves this purpose only. The digital domain is a very contested and heated domain with sharp battle lines drawn between regimes and apparatuses of control, regulation, surveillance on the one side and layers of sharing culture that we all participate and aspire for on the other. The real `digital divide` is here!. The incessantly expanding world of the `new economy` of html factories, medical transcription, software components assembly lines, time-zone accounting, educational graphics and entertainment screens makes sure that connectivity is there and labour is continuously available. The missionaries of this new economy sometimes incline towards `dotcom rushes` and sometimes towards `lets make infrastructure` panic. Actually, I have rarely seen a business guy here talk about `digital divide`, probably it is bad for investments! Ravikant >> Yes and No! Poverty is real. So is the Digital Divide. And like 'poverty' 'digital divide' is complicated. There are layers of people who have access to the virtual world by virtue of their wealth. But among the wealthy, there are people who do not have access on account of sociological, linguistic and technological reasons. It is a good idea to keep reminding ourselves that poverty is still there but also that new inequalities are born and reproduced everyday. Can we therefore think of solutions that are cheap and accessible to a large body of people cutting across class. linguistic and physical boundaries. Aditya >> In India, we neither have great medicine, god roads (except for the recent six-track highways being built thanks to the IMF/WB insistence on efficient infrastructure), nor have clean water (except for expensive, bottled mineral water). Yet the terms 'digital divide' seems to me to be absolutely central in some ways. Let me explan. The way I see it is that we in India are quitew accustomed to the industrialists and government tell the trade unions that "the poor unorganized sector workers are rthe really exploited ones, whom you ignore"; that the real issue is poverty is the way any demand of the subaltern sections is responded to. if you talk about affirmative action, you are only thinking about the 'reservation elite' - so we are told. Poverty in this discourse is the business of the already oppressed. Poverty is centrally important and the trade unions etc have a lot to answer for. But I think that power needs to be challenged at every level. The idea that the poorer countries need only think of poverty while the other questions be left to those who can afford it is in my view politically dangerous. In the last analysis, this can only make poverty and related issues - like clean water, air and good roads more problematic. Joy >> -- Yes I agree. Poverty has to be the first priority against any cause. * Tell me how you're getting around the problem of access in Delhi. E.g. is Internet access more of a community thing? Are computers shared? Are emails printed out and posted on? (This happens in some developing countries, I'm told.) Here in Australia every net-surfer has his/her own computer and modem. Is that trend happening with you too? Jeebesh >> If everybody works with personal computers here, then you will have a very big global ecological crisis at hand. Where will you get all the plastics!! The most interesting part of Internet culture here is the shared nature of access. We share computers and access at various levels. The most prominent are the cybercafes that allow access to millions and are the most effective mode of street-level net connectivity. Also, these access nodes act as a kind of local post office with courteous couriers... These nodes mostly run on 128kbps ISDN lines and give a reasonable speed (lease lines are very costly). The charges vary from Rs 10 per hour to Rs 40 per hour. There is now a growing corporate interest in these cybercafes and some chains are beginning to emerge. Also a new combinations of fibre optic and cable network is emerging. It promises cheaper and better access, but the cable modems are prohibitively costly we have to see what new kind of organisational and spatial structures emerge. ravikant >> Delhi is poised to take a leap into the big bandwidth zone through the cable network. So the access is bound to be fast. Also, apart from the whole phenomena of Internet cafes dotted all over the cities and small towns of India, Access is a community thing. People work on shared computers, they also share the connection and even the mail account. The potential of the net remains, however, largely underexplored. To give you one example, out of a 100-odd colleges in Delhi, only 10 would have a website. And the web pages do not contain information beyond the basic names of the faculty, etc. Students will have to go to the college to find out the details of the courses, as also when a particular teacher is going to be available. Aditya >> Access is certainly a major problem. Internet access is still very limited and primarily a matter of corporate use. For the rest it is shared. This is itself a function of poverty in a more general sense. There is also a problem because of the rapidly changing culture of technology - as it descends from its 'monumental' form to forms of more everyday use. Adapting to such changes is slow - as it is only in the last few years that these forms have started becoming availbale. In our own institute even now, many faculty members get their emails printed out and dictate responses to assistants. many are not comforable with computers, modems and dialling are even more incmprehensible to them. Joy >> Though in Delhi access is quite easy, but in other regions of India access is not so simple. Lack of good telephone lines and electricity are common problem in India. Anyway, both computer and internet both are useless in most of the regions of India as language poses most important difficulty. And finally obviously education is too limited which creates major problem in growth of a society which includes computer and internet. * Is limited access to power and phone lines in some areas a fundamental block to many Indians accessing the Net? Jeebesh >> Erratic power supply and poor telephone lines are a reality we all live with. Slow and disrupted downloads, U(ninterrupted) P(ower) S(upply) and inverters, noisy generators are things that we are used to. Actually compared to travelling, at least on Delhi roads, online travel looks much simpler! On the other hand the issuse of power is a very contested one. There is growing criticism on the methods of producing power. Big hydel power projects or Nuclear projects are all under severe criticism, and face massive resistance. Displacement of millions, large scale ecological destruction and unequal distribution are significant issuses. So to argue for more power for access without sensitivity to these struggles will be very facile. Its a little complicated! Ravikant >> It is. Vast areas in India do not get adequate supply of power. The telephone connectivity has improved considerably in the last decade or so. Yet, majority of people still rely on Public Phones as they can't afford to own phone lines. Aditya >> Yes, both are major problems,not in some areas but in most, practically all except metropolises. Joy >> Yes, along with that lack of education and poverty adds to the problem. * In more general terms, has the Net been a democratising force? Or has it just concentrated power/information in a few hands? Jeebesh >> Net has definitely created a new dynamics of horizontal communication and complex power play. The present legislative and dominant media practices show a deep anxiety around this technology. On the one hand there is this constant talk of e-commerce and e-governence and on the other a massive attempt at regulation and policing. The full implication of this will be understood after sometime. Actually, the Net is being looked primarily as a `broadcast medium` for state and corporate (a la newspaper, radio and television) rather than what it is. The horizontal multi-nodal network at present is kind of a threat. The older mindset/practices of technology and content regulation is in crisis. Ravikant >> The Net has thrown up an opportunity for people to be able to communicate across languages. Also to record things which they would not otherwise do in a predominantly oral and pre-literate culture. Language on the net is eclectic and closer to the popular as diverse individual initiatives try to speak to an unpredictable audience. The print and TV are still the major modes of communication. Once the people working in Indian languages transcend the psychological and other barriers the enterprise of small magazines can be amphibianized : a wider range of people could have access to productions tucked away in remote corners. That, however, is in the future. Aditya >> Yes, the Net has had a more democratising impact in terms of opening up flows of information. Right now though, the main users have been activists - rather than the mass of people - who have used it, even if to a limited extent, both for information dissemination and communication. The problem however, is that due to limited access this information, once received has to be relayed through print and oral means. There is, I suppose, always a differential advantage that sdocial groups have in such cases and the already powerful get further strengthened. Joy >> Net has the potentiality to empower larger section of society but lack of access does not help much. * Are there any government (or even private) initiatives to get Indians online? Jeebesh >> Actually it was the state that got online first, and then released access. There is a huge industry because of IT enabled industrial applications. Also, the entertainment industry is keenly watching with an eagle eye. Waiting to enter in a grand way as soon as bandwidth is little better... Ravikant >> There are both government and private initiatives working in this area. The Net has come in the Liberalising phase of the Indian economy. An interesting war is on between the private companies and the public sector enterprises over territories and profits. The government is trying hard to grapple with issues of surveillance and it seems at the moment it does not quite know how to go about it. Joy >> They are always doing that, but online means nothing as most of the people (among the little population of net users) are habituated to be passive user like television, very few people has the ability to use net in active mode, i.e., generating contents for net. * What about artists and writers: has the Net given them a wider audience? Jeebesh >> Artists at present feel somewhat threatened by the net. Very few artist are interested to work on it and through it. It will take sometime before a new generation of artists emerge who use the net effectively. Although some discussion lists run amongst media practitioners working in cinema and video. Joy >> For most of the artists (who use net) net is a cheap way of marketing and advertising compared to television ads. * Has the Net countered the influence of mainstream newspapers - i.e. through providing information to the public that they won't print? Jeebesh >> The mainstream newspaper is a part of a long established public culture. People carry it with them around in the circuit of home-travel-work-travel-leisure-home. It forms a part of everyday conversations and circulations of ideas about the political and social process. People have a general scepticism about these media but it is very much part of everyday life. But, now a few websites are getting attention for investigative journalism. Low cost circulation/distribution network of web based news agencies may create interesting constellations. Mainstream newspapers are at present more threatened by the entry of international newspaper brands. Ravikant >> The Net is there as another usable source for disseminating and gathering information. Newspapers continue to remain the dominant mode. The government and other agencies have started using the Net for example,for publication of results of All-India exams, something that was done exclusively through the newspapers. Aditya >> In at least two areas, it certainly has. First, in terms of subcontinental information flows - especially between Pakistan, India and to some extent, Sri Lanka. During the Kargil war and on such other crucial occasions, it was the availability of dissenting voices on both sides that made the situation very differenty this time. At least at the level of the subcontinental elite, there was enough information available for the forces interested in peace. Second, in the case of the Narmada peoples' struggle against displacement from the damming of the river, in the last couple of years we manage to get almost daily postings on the situation in the valley. Otherwise the information is usually balcked out or presented in very biased terms. Joy >> As net is mainly controlled and used by elite section of the society thus the news are also geared to serve the elites. Thus net news is same as newspapers. Sensational newsmakers finds some way to get attention but again deals with only elite problems. * Any general facts and figures re how many people have Net access in India would be useful, if you happen to know them. Jeebesh >> check out www.bytesforall.org for good details about these kinds of facts. Ravikant >> Here is something, by way of data, that I read in The Hindu, Folio, April 8, 2001: The Internet is a freak global happening which no one could have foreseen 20 years ago, and whose growths since then has made nonsense of all predictions. Radio was around for 38 years before its audience reached 50 million. TV took 13 years to reach that figure. The personal computer were latching on to the World Wide Web, just four years after it became publicly accessible. The traffic seems to double every hundred days - and currently 750 million worldwide are estimated to be able to access the Net in one form or another. -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net From monica at sarai.net Mon Apr 30 12:49:28 2001 From: monica at sarai.net (Monica Narula) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 12:49:28 +0530 Subject: [Reader-list] uncomfortable proximity Message-ID: Below is Graham Harwood's extended piece on his work "Uncomfortable Proximity", available online at http://www.tate.org.uk/home/default.htm (his page comes up automatically in a while). "Uncomfortable Proximity" is the title of an on-line project which mirrors the Tate's own web-site, but offers new images and ideas, collaged from his own experiences, his readings of Tate works and publicity materials and his interest in the Tate Britain site. Related critical texts by Matthew Fuller are in the Connections section of the Tate web-site Uncomfortable Proximity by Graham Harwood Tate Britain: the 500 year old home of tasty babes, luxury goods, own goals and the psychological prop of the British social elite When asked to create a new website by Matthew Gansallo of the Tate, I found myself awkwardly situated by my admiration for parts of the collection and my equal disdain for the social values that framed it and much of its art. This work forced me into an uncomfortable proximity with the economic and social elite's use of aesthetics in their ascendancy to power. I was delighted with the creative power and imagination of the artists in the Tate collection - I enjoyed the information contained in the works, whether it was aesthetic formalism, mathematical structures of perception, raw emotion, opto-chemical reactions of light across time or the social history they contain. But when I stepped outside the temple and smelt the filth of the Thames, I was reminded that down there - in the silt - under the stones - beneath the floor - lay the true costs of such a delight. The tragedy of any social elite's possession of public creativity and imagination has led me to try and trace at least two threads of this elite's ascendancy in present history. The first involves mapping the rituals of tastefulness, the distance it creates from the uninspired Victorian mob, the language and manners of the tasteful, and the inherent hypocrisy that this implies. The second centres on the histories of different peoples, my friends and family, either ascendant, static or uncounted, which recognize themselves in terms of that tastefulness, or in reaction to it, and act accordingly. The Tate's scrapbook of British pictorial history has many missing pages, either torn out through revision, or self-censored before the first sketch. Those that did make it created the cultural cosmetics of peoples profiting from slavery, migrant labour, colonization and transportation. Clearly the images in the historic collection and the image of the Tate itself are pregnant with the past's cosmetic cultural surgery: made ready for the shopping lists of the future. The skin of these paintings was stretched over a psychological frame - a shield against which were thrown the filthy, diseased, rotting corpses of daily life, profit and excess. The scrapbook's scalpelled pages will never be found - but they articulate in their absence the political and economic relations of that society and ours. While the Tate cannot ever be fully inclusive of those histories that run counter to its own, it can at least be a site of critical participation in the present history of the cultural cosmetics of these islands. From adolescence I had visited the Tate, read the art books and pulled a forelock in the direction of the cult of genius - on cue relegating my own creativity to the Victorian image of the rabid dog. We know well enough that this is how it was supposed to be. The historical literature on 'rational recreations' states that museums were envisaged as a means of exposing the working classes to the improving mental influence of middle class culture. I was being inoculated for the cultural health of the nation. Tate Britain stands on the site of Millbank penitentiary - and parts of the prison are incorporated within its own structure. The drains that run from the building to the Thames, a stone's through away, bleed this decay into the city's silt. By 1776, transportation to the New World had been interrupted by the American War of Independence and so instead, old sailing ships known as hulks were dragged up the Thames and stuffed with up to 70,000 prisoners. This 'expedient' lasted till 1859. In 1779 the government introduced an Act which created a new form of hard labour for prisoners. They began by dredging the river Thames - a profitable precursor to expanding trade with the colonies - and made provision for building Millbank penitentiary. The penitentiary was the largest in Europe, and it became the 19th century's cesspit for the rowdiest of political mobs. Henry James visited the prison in 1884, and later wrote it into his novel The Princess Casamassina (1886): "brown, bare, windowless walls, ugly, truncated pinnacles and a character unspeakably sad and stern. It looked very sinister and wicked, to Miss Pynsent's eyes, and she wondered why a prison should have such an evil air if it was erected in the interest of justice and order...it threw a blight on the face of the day, making the river seem foul and poisonous." In the 19th century, as today, there was considerable delay in government building programmes. Before the birth of the prisons, punishment was a public display of civic power: executions, floggings, disembowelling in the street. Worried that these overt displays were a source of contention to the mob and that public order was threatened in various ways, parliament detached punishment from the public gaze and put it into prisons. Millbank penitentiary finally opened in 1817. A convict at this time was stripped, shaven and sentenced to penal servitude, not imprisonment, and spent the first nine months of the sentence in solitary confinement. Middle class society increasingly condemned the poor as products of their own low and immoral natures, and in 1834 the Poor Law was introduced, in which Disraeli announced to the world "that in England poverty is a crime". Other opinion of the time wrote off the poor as "mere human street-sweepings" who "serve as manure to the future crime-crop of the country". The main view of the ascendant middle class was that the poor existed beyond the farthest reaches of civilized, art-loving society and were an indolent, ignorant, degraded, criminalized sub-race. These views were structured into science by, amongst others, Beddoe, a future president of the Anthropological Institute. Liberals, believing in the 'levelling-up' theory (that the labourer would emulate the artisan) dwelt upon the possibility of teaching even the lowest the virtues and satisfactions of self-help. The liberal elite of the mid and late 19th century put their faith in the new persuasive power of museums, schools and public parks. Thus, the birth of museums became a complement to the birth of prisons. The museum, then as now, provided a mechanism for the transformation of the crowd into an ordered and, ideally, self-regulating public. The democratic education of the mob was an attempt to addict them to the aspirational tastefulness of Victorian society. For the new social elite, sharing what had previously been private, exposing what had been concealed, became a totem of progressiveness. The Tate, with a more or less free admission policy, provided a solution to the social chaos of the street: a site where bodies, constantly under surveillance, could be rendered docile through exposure to Gainsborough, Turner and Hogarth (instead of the jailer's whip and bludgeon). If the prison changed you through discipline and punishment, then the museum was a way of showing you how to look and learn. The purpose was not to know about people's culture - but to address people as the subjects of that culture; not to make the population visible to power - but to render power visible to the people and, at the same time, to represent to them that power as if it were their own. The museum became, and is still, a technical solution to the problem of displaying wealth and power without the attendant risks of social disorder. Emerging social elites still appear to find it necessary to justify their 'natural' right to wealth and privilege. This is done in many ways. The one that interests us here is the use of aesthetics to negotiate the social positions of new economic forces. As class compositions change, new economic forces take over the mantle of British taste. Each succeeding social elite must have its own art, its own brand around which secret codes and systems of value can be exchanged. This is usually in the form of what is to be tolerated and what is not, what's in and what's out, who's in and who's out. New money needs to be part of history. With money you can buy your way into art history. With even more money you can shape the future of that history: as the Tate Modern, Britain's newest national museum of modern art, is attempting to do. From its beginning, the Tate has supported the taste values of whichever social elite is contemporarily emerging. In this work, I have tried to play with the broken links within the Tate's collection, grafting on the skins of people who are close to me, dragging parts of the collection through the mud of the Thames, and infecting some of it with a relevant disease. -- Monica Narula Sarai:The New Media Initiative 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 www.sarai.net