Google vs. Microsoft

UPDATE: Word is that Google announced the Chrome OS with such little buildup in order to pre-empt a big Microsoft announcement on Monday.

Okay quick post. The ongoing quiet storm brewing between Microsoft and Google has recently flared up.

Microsoft release Bing and gets pretty good reviews.

Google is now saying (quite suddenly) that they are developing an OS based on its lightweight and powerful browser Chrome, which is an even greater surprise since most buzz around the Web was that Google would use its mobile phone OS Android for release on netbooks.

The biggest surprise from all of this is not on Google’s end but on Microsoft’s. Their search is actually good? I’m in absolute shock.

Pricing structure for the Pirate Bay…It’s not what you think

For those who were alarmed that Pirate Bay, the embattled BitTorrent site, would somehow sell out so bad after some of their founders and administrators are going to serve jail time for the mantra “information wants to be free,” I say do not worry. The company that bought it out is introducing a new price structure….and it’s not what you are thinking. Visitors to the sites will not be charged.

As BBC reports, Global Gaming Factory, who is buying out the Pirate Bay, will introduce quite a radical pricing schema. Those who share files will be paid! Now for GGF, there is a reason why they decided to take this route. For one, they realized (unlike many of us Americans) that price incentives should be pro-sharing, not against it. This is not a small thing here. It is of major consequence as it highlights the rather large void we have in the States, besides folks like Larry Lessig, who are flag-waiving pro-sharers. Second, other for-pay content sites were spoiling the pot. In other words, with the rise of iTunes Store-model which Amazon, among others, uses and also the services like Rhapsody which is not per-download but rather per-monthly charges, it is rather difficult to not have no pricing structure, or else the company will look like it is pro-piracy. And we all know what kind of bad rap pirates, as of late, are getting.

But as I just hinted to above, the more important thing here is the utter lack of any mainstream figure who vehemently argues for file-sharing. Now, there are too many factors that go into why, but one obvious one that I think deserves repeated mention is what Max Weber called  “this-worldly asceticism,” a concept he uses to describe the work-ethic of all people–capitalists and wage-workers alike in capitalism. What I believe we can add to do that for the American context is that this ethiciziation of work (if you work, you are a moral being) translates on the consumption-side in a kind of hyper-private property protectionism that is pervasive throughout American culture, but especially all over the place in American policy debate.  It boils down to the fact that we all feel entitled to whatever we have, that is, we feel that we somehow earned it, in spite of the realities of the capitalist mode of production, which is based not on compensation but on profit. It is for this reason why it is completley normal for us to see the retail price of a product more than 5x the wholesale price. We Americans accept that brutal fact unquestioningly because we have some false sense of “fariness” projected onto that commodity. It is truly queer.*

Maybe this decision by GGF will convince the newest file-sharing upstart to reconsider the whole thing. Or, we can just wait until we get Lessig on TV. I say the former is a better bet.

*This is a joke on Marx’s famous dictum in the first volume of Das Kapital, in which he calls the commodity-form, “a very queer thing.” Had to let you all in on the nerd-moment.

Shameless Plug: Hans Beck Remix

My good friend and former band mate Chip Beck and I have been getting back into music production recently as “Hans Beck.” We’ve scored our friend Steve Pristin’s short documentary “Lions of New York” which recently premiered at NewFest. You can find the tracks used in the film over at Amie Street.

But more pressingly, though just as important, we have entered a remix contest over at RCRD LBL for Daniel Merriweather’s song “Change” (ft. Wale). I’m asking you to go here and click “download” as it counts as a vote. The top 5 remixes go to Merriweather and Mark Ronson for final selection as the official remix. Thanks in advance!

Facebook’s Name Game

Facebook has  launched its customizable URL feature, joining the ranks of MySpace in giving you a “real” URL that people can navigate to, outside of the Facebook log-in procedure. An unnamed friend of mine shot me an email about how exciting this whole thing was. At a gut level, I was less than enthused about it. (Ask him.) What was the purpose? Isn’t it easy enough to simply type someone’s name in the search box when you are logged in Facebook?

But today Douglas Rushkoff of the Daily Beast and New School has articulated quite well why I was kind of not feeling the whole move. First of all, the hype is overblown since people are going to get stuck with crazy URLs. I tried to get /SamHan but obviously by 2AM when I got home from seeing “The Hangover” with the GF, someone had already taken it. So, what do I have now?–/samhan.samhan. Ha!

So besides the problem of creating user names in general, what other problems do I have with this move? Here’s Rushkoff:

Facebook must be hoping the name change will not only make the site more user friendly, but also get people to start thinking of their Facebook pages as their public faces for both personal and business activities: true home pages.

That’s a problem. Facebook’s relative detachment from the Internet is not a bug, but a feature. Its only competitive advantage in the Internet space—its only reason for being—was that it was more personal, more closed off, and arguably more private than the Internet itself. Even then, the biggest problem has never been how to get people to find you, but how to not friend many of those who do. Now that we’ll be quickly findable via Google, what’s left to distinguish this social-networking site from the social network that is… the Internet?

Rushkoff has it right. This is Facebook’s attempt to make Facebook much(more officially at least) people’s public pages. Google has also been a part of this trend with their new “Google Profile” feature. (Yes, I hate Google but I got one too. Kill me.)

I’ve got a problems with this theoretically. I think the attempt to create a “real” home page on the Web is quite silly and nostalgic. Web users, casual ones and addicts such as myself, do not have a single home in utilizing the Web. They are everywhere almost simultaneously. We, as Web users, can never be there, there. Media theorists have been calling this “distributed cognition,” and I called this the “lurking-effect.” I tend to side with Gloria Anzaldua, who gave us the important notion of “borderlands” and also “home-ophobia,” forcing us to reconsider the home-centrism of much of American culture. Whenever we meet people, we ask or are asked “Where are you from?” as if anyone of us are from a single place. Most people in the world are forced to migrate, whether it is from the depths of poverty to the First World or from the desolate factory towns into major metropoles. The 20th century has seen the greatest level in human history, just taking place in China’s massive “deruralfication.” Hence, to assume that individuals have a singular home where his/her “heart” is, is to articulate a spatial metaphysics that runs parallel to the metaphysics of “the soul” of Aristotle and of course Descartes, which assumes that individuals contain an essential “being” inside of them, making them who they are. Facebook and others attempting to lay claim to users’ “true” home on the Web are unable to see the very social effect that they have had. Plus, Cartesian metaphysics are sooooo last century.

Thus, I’m in agreement with Rushkoff when he says:

That shift, I believe, portends the beginning of the end for this social network. That may sound preposterous, but the short history of the Internet is littered with quickly fallen giants. They all appear to be permanent features of the digital landscape—Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, Napster, CompuServe—until they’re not. A minute after midnight on Saturday may just be the moment 200 million more people find themselves thrown firmly onto the Internet, and in the process make Mark Zuckerberg’s digital wading pool obsolete.

D.O.A.

Elder statesman of hip hop Jay-Z recently put out a song called “D.O.A(Death of Autotune).” But more broadly, outside of the tiny section of the blogopshere that consists of rap blogs, we have experienced another DOA–Death of Analog.

We have officially gone digital across the board for television. All stations were required to shutdown analog transmitters at midnight of 12 June.

How prepared were we? Not too bad according to Nielsen, which reported that only 2.8 million homes were completely unprepared. This doesn’t say much since one can just go out and get the $40 signal converter at an electronics store pretty easily, though this is less so the case with elderly viewers, who make up a big chunk of that 2.8 million, I’m guessing.

But all in all, it wasn’t a big deal… since most people have cable. Perhaps the biggest much-to-do-about-nothing deadline since Y2K.

NY Times Media Decoder

Fighting oligarchical capitalism

Intel has been fined $1.45 billion. Yes folks. That’s with a “B.” It is the largest fine that the European Union’s Competition Commission. As James Kanter of the Times reports

Ms. Kroes said Intel had “used illegal anticompetitive practices to exclude its only competitor and reduce consumers’ choice — and the whole story is about consumers.” She said Intel’s practices had “undermined innovation.”

This is the single-largest fine incurred by any company in the history of European commerce. It dwarfs what the commission had previously fined Microsoft–497 million euros. (Intel’s fine in euros is 1.06 billion.) Intel should’ve seen the writing on the wall. They’ve already been fined by similar commissions in South Korea, and been investigated by its Japanese equivalent, though not fined. It is also currently under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (which is the American equivalent). Now, what is that Intel did? It paid computer manufacturers to not use AMD, it’s main competitor in the microprocessor market.

To be clear, I’m not really interested in this news because it’s funny to think about how many zeroes there are in 1.45 billion, though that is very hilarious. But why I’m sort of heartened by the news is that trade commissions across the world are becoming a lot more vigilant in anti-trust stuff especially in the realm of technology corporations. As the Times reports, the European commission is investigating CISCO, IBM(again), and Google. What is clear is that Europe is clearly at the vanguard of trade law enforcement across the globe. They are, as the article describes them, “activist.” It seems that the US will follow suit under the new administration. Obama’s effect on the anti-trust activity is not really high on the list of talking points for television news programs but I think it should be. And while I fully acknowledge that the Administration’s position on torture, the wars, and other matters are far more pressing, for those of us who are interested in exploding the system of oligarchal capitalism that has reigned, it is hopefuly news to say the least.

One last note, for those who think that I’m putting all my faith in the rhetoric of regulation a la Keynesianism…I’m not. What I’m interested in is the potential political openings of market dynamics for the left. We have simply blamed a reified notion of “the market” for all of society’s ills for far too long, at the cost of glorifying Statism. There must be some room for an anti-Statist leftism in the States, which has proven to be very difficult. We have to ask again whether capitalism is pro- or anti-market. And I think this case with Intel and the financial mess is that, as the great historian of capitalism Fernand Braudel very early on noted, capitalism is, at heart, anti-market.

Related: Manuel De Landa on markets and anti-markets.

Micropayments for WSJ Online

Sorry I haven’t been blogging as of recent but a quick link on the Wall St. Journal announcing that it will go to micropayments for use of its online content. They follow The Financial Times’ plan to do something similar. Is the fact that these two publications are mainly financial publications a mere coincidence? I don’t think so, but I’m not really sure what it does mean.

Via Huffington Post (via Reuters)

Heffernan (on Sterling) on Twitter

Bruce Sterling, a hero to many of us, who study media critically, has recently gained traction among the New York Times reading crowd thanks to Virginia Heffernan’s blog post this past week on “connectivity as poverty.”

She was echoing the sentiments expressed by Sterling at a panel at this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX, that the poor relish their connections and connectivity (the capacity to connect) because they have nothing else. Here’s how Heffernan describes it:

Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.

Though Heffernan thinks that Sterling’s position is Nietzschean, which I can see, I ultimately think that the position is far more evocative of Marx.

Now some (or many) of you may think, Who cares? Let me briefly lay out the stakes. If Sterling’s stance is Nietzschean, that is to say, “a disdain for regular people,” than there would be a kind of implicit alternative within Sterling’s position. Now granted, I’m taking Sterling at Heffernan’s word (and thus may be misrepresenting him), but Nietzsche’s “disdain for the regular person” is not so much an antipathy but more so a phobia for what he frequently calls “slave morality.” Slave morality can be defined orienting one’s actions (thus developing his her ethics) by taking on the conditions and assumptions of the dominator. In other words, it is the trap of attempting to act ethically within the dominator’s rules. It becomes a trap, in which the slave actively invests in his own domination via ethics. (The most glaring example of this, according to Nietzsche, was Christianity. You can see why.)

Now, I’m not so sure Sterling is coming from such a place. In fact, as I noted earlier, I see him being more classically Marxist. The idyllic life of solitude imagined by Sterling is straight out of ideals of the Enlightenment–culture, leisure and most importanty autonomy (leaving the free-thinking, rational being time and space to think). Marx, at the end of “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848) quotes from The German Ideology, which so strikes a hauntingly similar note to Heffrenan’s characterization of Sterling.

to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

Marx’s argument is that the human being, in a truly utopian-socialist society, would be free to do whatever s/he pleases without it becoming obligatory, and thus alienating, as wage-labor ultimately will be. Despite what people may think of when they hear “communism” or “socialism,” which is some idea about forced sharing, the vision of Marx is completely embedded in the Enlightenment discourse of individual self-realization and expression.

One of Heffernan’s major points of unease about Twitter is that it has become less “mesmerizing” and far more “encroaching.” Or even,

Suffocating. Twitter may now be like a jampacked, polluted city where the ambient awareness we all have of one another’s bodies might seem picturesque to sociologists (who coined “ambient awareness” to describe this sense of physical proximity) but has become stifling to those in the middle of it.

In other words, she argues that Twitter has taken away some aspect of individual freedom.

The vibe of Twitter seems to have changed: a surprising number of people now seem to tweet about how much they want to be free from encumbrances like Twitter.

Freedom from knowing about someone’s kid who has a fever. Someone who is afraid of being laid off. Basically, Twitter strips us away from not having to deal with other people’s (excuse my language) shit. And indeed, she’s right when she says that if she did indeed have a personal assistant (a wish someone expressed on Twitter), then it would probably be to on Twitter for her, “to do “Twitterwork” as she put it, to subsidize her having to deal with other peoples’ neuroses.

But isn’t that precisely what wealth in the US has always been about–the privilege to live above everyone else’s day-to-day grumblings? It seems that Heffernan (and perhaps even Sterling) are upset not only at social networking’s “instrusiveness” but also it popping our bubbles, which had been rather untroubled by the problems of others. According to them, Twitter has turned into a media of radical engagement, even to the point of our own distaste, which in my book, is not such a bad thing.

Really, AP? Really?

First off: I have to beg forgiveness from you all for being so bad with posting. I’ve been busy as hell. And in fact I’ve been busy with making some moves for next year which would give me more time to blog, so please, again, I ask for your patience.

Now onto actual blogging…

So, I think everyone has heard that the Associated Press has been recently waging some kind of war against news aggregators on the Web. They are not only trying to charge them but also starting a rather outdated discussion on “content”-ownership on the Web. What is this, the Napster days?

Here’s where the fools at the AP stand (via NY Times):

“We own the content but we’ve let those who spend very little, if any, get the most advantage from it,” Dean Singleton, the chairman of The A.P. and chief executive of the MediaNews Group, told PaidContent. The news association announced a stepped-up effort to use technology to find unauthorized use of its articles and photos on the Web to put pressure on site owners to respect its copyrights.

What’s completely hilarious is that the AP does not even address the issue of fair use. Hansell of the Times rightfully notes this.

There are a lot of problems with this approach. It relies on a very narrow interpretation of how much of a copyrighted article can be used by another site under the “fair use” doctrine. That view may well hurt news gathering and writing as much as help it in the long run.

AP’s actions are a compensatory action rooted in a old-thinking and will ultimatley lead to not more revenue for the AP but in fact far less. Why? Well, the link culture of the Web has increased the profile of the AP far greater than it has hurt its revenue. By going after aggregators, AP is hurting itself more than anything.

Now, the AP’s actions must be analyzed with the backdrop of all this discourse surrounding the “end of the newspaper.” Would I be sad if the Times, for example, went out of business? A little, sure. Print is dying but it’s not the end of the world people! The Web has killed print but it has saved writing, which was on its death bed with the advent of television and short-form video. (I always think of this as parallel to the advent of Serato SCRATCH Live, which has killed vinyl but saved the turntable.) With the AP engaging in reactionary media politics and economics, it will hurt writing, which it is supposedly in the business of.

Sooner they realize that, sooner they’ll come up with a better plan. As of now, the AP is engaging in hypocrisy at best and suicide at worst.

Hunch, Or the Turing test for the Web

Quick post via Tech Crunch:

Earlier today Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake announced the release of her latest startup, Hunch, in private beta. The site revolves around helping users make decisions spanning a wide array of topics. To help users make their decisions, Hunch presents them with a brief series of questions that have been submitted by other members, using their responses to help them make their ultimate decision. It’s a great idea that combines the crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia with services like Yahoo Answers. But does it work? We’ve managed to get our hands on an invite to the service, and have put it to the test.

Sounds kind of nuts, right?  Hunch basically will be the closest thing to web-based artificial intelligence. This is kinda/sorta reminiscent of the Turing test, one of the earliest experiments in Artificial Intelligence.

I’m not sure how to read the politics of this yet. It’s easy to say that by outsourcing decision-making to an algorithm is the most sophisticated form of control. And on some level, that may be right. But what are some conceptual openings provided by something like Hunch? Will it lead us to finally put to the grave the idea of “critical reason” as most famously imagined by Kant and then virulently defended by the Frankfurt school? And lastly, is Hunch the signalling of a new trend in web-based computing which is still so rooted in what I’ve been calling on this blog the dominant “culture of search” that has such a strong hold on Web practices?

Let’s see…