What's the most important artist's right?
But even worse for artists: when the cost of distributing art goes up, the number of companies involved in it goes down. We all know what that looks like: the record industry, cable TV, the studio system. All systems where there's a buyer's market for art, where the big companies have artists over a barrel.
We live in an age in which more people can express themselves in more ways to more audiences than ever before. The majority of this expression is intimate, personal maunderings -- the half-spelled, quarter-grammatical newspeak adorning MySpace and Facebook pages. These are often intensely personal, with none of the self-conscious artifice that we've traditionally associated with "published work." By turning the personal into the public, an entirely new aesthetic is coming into being -- and a huge proportion of the invisible social interaction of a generation is being recorded forever. As Charles Stross notes, we are living at the end of "pre-history" -- the last days of a patchwork human history. Tomorrow's lives will be remembered by the historians of the day-after-tomorrow with astounding clarity and thoroughness, reconstructed through the midden of personal blips, twits, and chirps emitted by our social tools. By comparison, our own lives will be as opaque and unimaginable as the lives of the poor schmucks who inhabited the same cave for 200,000 years, generation after generation leaving no mark more permanent than a mouldering knucklebone lost in the soil.LinkParadoxically, it is this very feature that leads many artists to view these sites with suspicion and derision. A common refrain goes like this: "These sites are filled with pirated material and they know it. They're making money off our work, and the only 'redeeming' quality they have is that a bunch of idiots get to talk about their cats around the clock and around the world."
Could these sites be remade to prevent infringement, and if they could, what would that mean for free expression?
the latest
latest episodes
Ultimately; Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants
well I'll be damned, he put it on line for free;
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
Except, Except, data on the web seems to have a half life despite the best efforts of the Wayback Machine. There's an awful lot of sites in the deadpool that took all their data with them.
and so many mouldering piles of forgotten books....
"Tomorrow's lives will be remembered by the historians of the day-after-tomorrow with astounding clarity" ... i doubt it.
As long as services such as flickr and facebook keep data behind locked doors and un-exportable formats, and in some cases require credit card maintenance, data will continue to be lost. This applies to web hosting services and even domain names too, where a thin wallet will often ensure the permanent loss of your data and online identity.
And as #3 Julian Bond said, the Wayback machine is unfortunately very limited (images, javascript, flash are rarely archived) Much of this is probably the fault of the robots.txt file, not the machine, but that does not change the fact.
Perhaps part of the answer lies in creating interchangeable data formats so that users of a web service can migrate elsewhere with their data when the need arises. At the very least one should have the ability to export data in a "viewable" format, using HTML, so it can be placed on another server (such as the wayback machine) for history or nostalgia. (and no, the browser's "Save web archive" features are often not enough)
But what about users that don't care?
Somehow, I do not share this optimistic view of the future of our history.
I don't even know if it's really optimistic, anyway. It's probably no bad thing for us to slowly fade away. We will in the end anyway; maintaining a vast data mausoleum, in most cases, probably achieves nothing more than massaging our egos. People in the future, like people today, will generally be more interested in themselves than what we were doing hundreds of years ago. Most of us probably don't even know our great-great grandfather's first name, even though we could probably find out quite easily.
the right to express, I think
i'm not sure "right to distribute" makes sense
I am possessed by visions of tomorrow's archeologists, sifting not through sands but digging deep into obsolete tech with the hopes of scraping free some vestige of lost, forgotten and unreadable data - searching for the technical Rosetta stone to decypher it all - unaware that our past had been buried under layers of blind, stubborn, incommunicative greed - and equally unaware that what would eventually be revealed and finally put on display for all the world of tomorrow to see were the mysterious remains of the cult of LOL Cats.
Great article, Cory. I embellished your point on the new aesthetic on my blog (pwnership.com).
To #3, half-lives are great things. I'd hate to be continually living in the 50s. And I might say in another 10 years or so, I'd hate to be continually living in the 00s. Bring back disco pants.
Practically speaking, we've always had an infinite amount of data even if copies of old art were continually lost. Art that is culture bearing always changes, and the internet is likely to speed of the change. Who cares about the archeologists?
The old 'saw' about artists having to suffer for their art gave merit to the idea that only the most determined artists had the best chance for success or recognition. The easier any endeavor becomes, the more players and kibitzers come to the table. The traditional business infrastructures of art, music, writing, design, photography and creative thinking were built upon subjective filtering of demonstrable junk, leaving in the main mostly good stuff for us to peruse. The problem now is simply that the old mechanisms (e.g., critics, curators, studios, publishers) evolved to deal with traditional numbers of new works coming on the scene. It was reasonably well handled, but for the carping and whining of those artists whose work was derided or ignored. Now there are uncountable and unmanageable legions of so-called artists of all stripes whose works are seeing wide distribution. The old mechanisms have been toppled to some extent and are often tossed out the door along with all of the dedication and single minded pursuit of style, quality and substance offered by most of the traditional arbiters of taste. Instead we're now confronted with the fact that the wishes of so many heretofore unimportant artists are coming true: they now have a platform as visible as the one normally provided to better writers, musicians, artists and thinkers whose traditional regimen of having to run a gauntlet in order to achieve success is no longer necessary. The net effect is already felt. Now too often, the one with the best search engine optimization gets the most attention. We are averaging down. The same people who bemoan the difficulty of sorting through the private eructations of myriad bloggers, incompetent musicians and writers seriously in need of grammar lessons, also bemoan the difficulty of finding "good stuff". Just as the quality of a Wikipedia entry survives scrutiny in direct proportion to the objective accuracy of the writing and number of factual, germane citations associate with the entry, so too do writers, musicians, painters, photographers and philosophers publishing online survive the cull of popular opinion. The problem is, the late '90s pronouncement that millions of undiscovered artistic gems would be uncovered has not come true. There is not a greater percentage of good quality work now and there is no recognizable quality mechanism to use as a filter. Existing filters demand that inexperienced users apply their own criteria. That, by any definition, is not a move to quality. To determine the differences between good quality and bad quality, dedicated observers whose principle focus is the type of work being scrutinized remains the very best way of filtering creative output. Seeking out the opinions of a variety of experts has always been the most reliable way of finding "good stuff" and at the same time educating ourselves. I just don't have the time to study hundreds of thousands of paintings, books, music recordings and opinions. I have a business to run. I rely on people who have dedicated themselves to becoming experts - making art or writing or music their business essentially - to tell me where to look first. This is just common sense. Those same experts come to me or someone like me when they are in need of expertise in my speciality. The Internet and the Web have failed in this regard because they are a long way yet from being a platform capable of sustaining the aforementioned experts.
"As Charles Stross notes, we are living at the end of "pre-history" -- the last days of a patchwork human history. "
I guess. There seem to be bennifits for the memory in reviewing your day in picture form. But this "pre-history" might last longer than the Electonic Age, because if all our records are digital and in computers only, then they are very fragile. One good EMP in a date dump and it's gone. We better make lots of back ups and make sure some of them are on the moon.
The Wayback Machine is an intentionally cheap operation. Even if they did try to save all JavaScript and images, chunks of the archive are lost all the time.
Even though computers are free now (a friend who recently moved begged me to take more from his pile of "junk" computers in his kitchen than just the multiple GHz, GBs, and TBs that I did), person time is still expensive. It takes person time to maintain a backup system. Somebody has to care.
Instead, people are spending their time ruining data (think of all those wikipedia pages deleted for not being "notable").
http://io9.com/333890/wikipedia-is-no-place-for-alien-civilizations
http://sentientdevelopments.blogspot.com/2007/12/astrosociobiology-article-on-wikipedia.html
I'd like to see a daily snapshot of Wikipedia. But who has the time...
@Dmitri: Open formats work against the business models of "social networking" sites. If you can easily leave and migrate your data to another site, they lose the only thing they can sell (your attention).
The answer to the question in the title of this post is, of course, "to party". Some fight for it.
@11 Agitator: There is still suffering in art. It has just been shifted from the artist to the audience.
I really just wanted to make a soundbyte. That's all. Now suffer.
@14
Hear hear!
The best parties end up involving reproduction anyhow, right?
"generation after generation leaving no mark more permanent than a mouldering knucklebone lost in the soil."
Ask any genealogist trying to get past great-grandma's "important dates."
But then: when did "data about our lives" get to be all that important? Exactly who's out there clamoring to know what kind of toilet paper Beethoven used? Do we all *really* want to be dissected on Entertainment Tonight?
Art should exist in spite of its repressors.