or You Can’t Polish a Turd

When I was in Melbourne for EWF I stayed with my friend Pat, who makes amazing comics and thinks amazing things, and we had an unexpected formative conversation about copyright when we were eating cheap Japanese under a speaker in the corner that may or may not have been playing Kanye West. Somehow we got to talking about whether we illegally download content for free.

I said I try not to, unless I know the artist isn’t going to miss the proceeds from my purchase, which is dumb reasoning, because I also have this kind-of Buddhist inkling that stealing shit will bring the bad karma, but also I sympathise with artists because I’d be pissed if someone stole my shit, but this kind of of thinking is waning, after this conversation.

(I also download things I’ve paid for in the past and then lost, such as all the AC/DC albums I had as a teenager. I also have less qualms about downloading from multi-national corporations, but I know this is also stupid: yeah, the companies might not miss the proceeds from my purchase, but the bottom-rung artists will certainly miss the royalties.)

This sort of quasi-ethical consumerism leaves me in a shitty position, because I generally can’t afford to buy all the cool literature and art and entertainment I’d like to, because I work in a poorly paid sector of the publishing economy and I live on my own, so a quarter of my salary goes immediately to rent each week, plus I have expensive habits that I still prioritise because I’m still a recovering bogan.

These are lifestyle choices though, right, and I could quit the drugs and alcohol and the takeaways that come with those, to save money and actually be sober for a while, and I could actually start spending my scant disposable income on things that actually enrich my life, not damage my liver, fuck my short-term memory or leave my neural receptors so coated in gunk they no longer emit endorphins.

Another lifestyle choice I’m on the verge of making is whether I want to make money from my art, or whether I just want it to reach and affect people, because Lawd knows I’m never going to make a living out of the esoteric shit that I write, so why not give it away for free so more people can enjoy it. [Insert Cory Doctorow quote about obscurity here.]

So all of this opens up the question for me of whether I believe in copyright or not, because copyrighting something asserts your ownership of it, and asserting your ownership of something implies that if someone wants to have it, they should pay for that privilege.

But: ‘privilege’. Why should I, or anyone, be the keeper of privilege? I’ve got plenty of privilege. More than enough to share around. My salary sucks, but there’s no denying I’m privileged.

This was the thrust of the conversation I had with Pat. A long time ago stories were told orally, so they couldn’t be owned. You’d hear a story and then pass it on. Maybe you would slap a via @ mention on it, maybe not. Since then, capitalism (I guess) has stipulated that sharing things comes with a price tag, which is a principle I wasn’t told about as a kid: sharing is caring, more like it.

When sharing a story requires a financial transaction you enter troubled territory first alluded to by Thomas Carlyle: if any individual accrues enough of that which is to be shared, they can charge a buttload for it and those who can’t afford it have to do without, especially those who wish to share it: ‘it’ being the privilege to share. Howard’s media-ownership laws illustrate this well enough, but imagine if the same concentration ocurred in the literary-arts economy.

Oh, wait, it already has, which is why we can talk of The Big Five (or Six, depending on who you ask), and why we see shit like the REDgroup fail go down: concentration of media ownership is a bane for cultural diversity, no matter which way you splice it, which is why I’m starting to come round to thinking of a new way of thinking about intellectual-property rights.

Actually it’s not new.

ENTER: CC and the Copyleft movement.

The Creative Commons and Copyleft mobs are two groups I’ve never really understood. I’ve always looked at them with the same sort of wariness I have for self-righteous and indignant vegans: their radical egos seem engorged by principle, devoid of reason – like misguided techno-utopians, perhaps, or like those hippies you’ve lived with who want to go set up a commune in the desert and bask in the glory of their own enlightenment without … well, without sharing that with others.

By that I mean they’ve always seemed like a sort-of enlightened crew, with a progressive mindset they wouldn’t deign to share with the ignorant masses, yours truly included, because I guess I never presented to them as being willing to be receptive to their ideas, because I have this engrained belief that copyright is a virtue, and that we should all be paid for our work.

Felice and Connor spat chips when I mentioned this to them on Twitter. They made disparaging comments about my ‘crazyleft’ ways and used ironic hashtags like #copysorightbilloreillywouldapprove. I had to google that hashtag to figure out what he was on about and, shit Connor, I respect you, but don’t throw me this politically dichotomous bullshit like it’s a case in point. Rush Limbaugh’s an arsehole too, and Andrew Bolt’s deluded, but wah wah wah, don’t come at me with this as though it’s a political matter. It’s ideology we’re talking about here, and I know you’re bigger than politics, so quit the bigotry and let’s talk.

You too, Felice. I know you love DRM and everything, but why? Is it possible you’re clinging to a conservative view of publishing and you don’t want to let go of it because you think Cory Doctorow’s a douchbag? That’s a shitty reason to hold onto an opinion.

Keep in mind here, Dear Readers, that one of my biggest beefs is the insufficient remuneration of authors in this economy of ours, which is all we’ve got to work with right now, which is why doing away with copyright is not the immediate answer, but what devealuing copyright affords us is the opportunity to think about distributing content for reasons other than to make money. Who really thinks they’re going to make money out of this game anyway? So there must be another value currency we can think of.

ENTER: the ideas market.

Before ideas were a commodity they existed in the public domain, free to be enjoyed by all. The public domain is being brought back into vogue in the software industry, with your GNU and and your WordPress getting all up in yer  proprietary software and changing the world, and even the Gutenberg name has been reappropriated to give access to (classic) literature to anyone who can afford at least a shitty PC and a free wi-fi connection.

Yeah, most of their authors are dead and their works out of copyright, but why wait until you’re dead seventy years only to find out no one gives a shit anyway? Deal with it, you’re never going to be Shakespeare, because manuscript ideas are like arseholes these days – you’re nothing special, so why not give it away for free and hope that maybe you contribute to the unofficial economy at least, where people might actually just fork out their time to read your shit.

You’re reading this, after all: buy me a beer when we meet IRL if you like, but it’s equally likely I’ll buy you a beer, so really, what are we trying to get out of this if it’s not a royalty cheque or a free beer or maybe a root?

Communion, of course. Secular communion. It should be free, but it’s not, because we’re used to paying for shit, unless it’s on the internet, in which case we jump through all sorts of ethico-logistical steps to justify our stealing from HBO. Well, fuck that. Steal this blog, because it is (un)officially licensed under a [blah blah blah licence] whether Felice or Connor like it or not.

And the reason for that is there seems to be two ways we can set up this economy of ideas: we can allow individuals to accrue buttloads of content and then bundle it with hardware and fuck on the creators; we can do away with the concept of ownership and allow people to share freely and work shitty jobs to fund that activity. Or get grants. Or sugar daddies. Or trust funds. Any sort of benefactor will do.

I happen to have an arts job that pays me a salary, so you’d think I’d be all for the former, but yeah, nah. People will always create, regardless of whether you or I get a salary out of it, and if distribution is unencumbered by capitalist principles then maybe myriad others will share the privilege of consuming that content. Or we can let Walt Disney and the Murdoch/Packer sons control the dissemination. It’s up to us.

We need to think anew about this, because the current system is pissing a lot of people off, even the privileged few. And there’s nothing worse than hearing the privileged few crap on about how fucking hard it is. Why is it hard? Because we want to make a living out of this, which is a stupid idea.

I just got home from a day helping to select successful applicants to the Write in your Face (WIYF) round of grants offered by Australia Council (OzCo) and administered by Express Media (EM). Those links will tell you more about this whole shebang, but I’ll copy/paste the juicy bit for all our Canadian readers:

WIYF grants are offered to young and emerging writers who use language in innovative ways. This may involve writing in the digital space, blogs, graphic novels, comics, multimedia, multi-artform or cross-media works.

Basically it’s a really exciting grant, because all sorts of weird shit gets thrown at it in applications. It’s especially exciting for me at the moment because this is my first opportunity to sit on a selection panel and be directly involved in delivering necessary funding to literary-arts projects that otherwise might never see the light of your computer screens.

I made some notes today, but it’s too late to type them up and I have to work in the morning.

I want to write here soon about: how WIYF has been (de)devolved from EM to one of OzCo’s more general digital funds (that ‘evolved’ is now bearing the suffix ‘ded’ makes my squidgy little progressive heart want to curl up and vomit out my arse); how something Lefa (EM’s Program Manager) said reminded me of the importance of thinking of the literary-arts as contributing in ‘not immeasurable economic value’ to society; and how reacquainting with the dreadful process of ‘scraping the barrel’ made me consider the importance of not awarding grant money, following on from feelings I’ve had for sometime about not awarding prizes to literature that you otherwise wouldn’t publish, just because you said you’d award a prize.

These are all subjects near and dear to my heart, and ones that have been bouncing around for a while, but some other things came up that I’d like to explore some more if I get the time: how to set up systems to allow people to tell stories without telling stories to them; and how to avoid writing to markets by creating markets for your own writing instead, and how to use digital technology to do this.

To cap this off in the spirit of Three Degrees of Uncoordination, I’m going to quote from the editorial of Chalk, one of the magazines I had the fortune to read as part of the WIYF process:

…

edition1

a co-composition _ _ a communicating collaboration _ _ these are a series of conversations and interconnecting threads _ _ alive in the informal economy of the culture industry

 

A four year-old iPod is not something anyone can rely on, and, after leaving it in the snow last year then drying it on the radiator, dropping it several hundred times, getting sand in and out of the screen, and more relocations than I can count, it’s not really that surprising that mine’s on the fritz. One headphone will never work again (a problem with the input port that I’ve lived with for about 10 months), it’s scratched to shit and the battery only charges intermittently. This means I can listen to it if it’s plugged into either the wall or the computer, but it sort of defeats the purpose of mobile music and so forth.

So, as I do with most electronic products that don’t work as they should, I’ve been trying various configurations of on/off to see if one or any of them will results in the battery charging consistently. One such configuration means that I don’t have it playing while it charges, so I went to Youtube for my music. I pulled up a Radiohead playlist, and one of the songs started with a spoken-word bit that went ‘One day I found out that my urine was acting like a powerful foaming agent…’. Then came the phrase: ‘piss-scented foam parties’. So, of course, I Googled the line and was directed to the  Slowly Downward website, where there is a collection of similar prose poems with the black tongue-in-cheek humour that are so sparse and welcome in life. I’d recommend ‘Sky Sports’ and ‘Romance’. There’s a beautiful simplicity and honesty to this writing that’s gotten me all excited about fiction and poetry again. The stark human aspect coupled with surreal elements makes for a twisted story-snack: somehow the writer has also managed to get the length just right. Apparently this dude is the guy who does Radiohead’s awesome cover art. Shit, I love the internet sometimes.

Stone Soup

There’s a magazine that publishes writers even younger than Voiceworks: Stone Soup, published out of Santa Cruz and described by someone as ‘The New Yorker of the 8 to 13 set’.

In the interests of SIB’s subtitle, I wonder if they have an adult readership. They reckon their circulation is at 20 000, with library subscriptions taking their estimated readership to near 80 000. Epic!

My whole world at the moment is about marketing. Against my will, it’s become increasingly important to my job and my life. Sales figures, profit margins, the whole lot. I know I might have been pretty critical of the way independent publishers don’t use marketing to their advantage, but the more I learn about it the more I want it to disappear. Or at least keep its ego in check.

Recently I was having a discussion with a guy I know, who wrongly thinks he knows everything about everything, regarding whether a marketing plan that utilises the public’s opinion to influence creative process was ‘genius’ or not. I fell on the side of not. Something seems horribly wrong with the idea that developers, in this case of a game, had to compromise their creative vision because the marketing team came up with the suggestion that people might feel more involved if they had direct input into the production of the thing. From a creative point of view, my argument favoured the position that characters that come to life in games, books, films whatever are not necessarily the ones that most resemble the players/readers/viewers or the ones we would chose to create ourselves. That’s why writers exist – to tap into and display creativity not everyone has.

And why does marketing exist? Apparently to tell writers how the masses think they’re doing their job wrong.

This is basically the crux of my argument. I had always thought marketing was a process where you take something, anything, and display it in such a way that it is appealing to the largest possible audience. Commissioners and writers make the thing, and the marketing team go fuck yeah you know what would make this a success? An intensive fliering campaign! Or a week of skywriting over London. Or a competition in the newspaper. Whatever, I don’t know. Now, though, focus groups and user data have the ability to influence the direction of publishers. If a marketing campaign is to become the beating heart of a creative process, then won’t creative industries such as publishing, film, music, gaming and all that just produce stuff based on what’s already out there rather than pushing boundaries and challenging consumers? I’m thinking specifically of the absolute fucking deluge of vampire/supernatural novels that followed the release of they Meyer books, but this is just one example in a swamp of many.

Effective marketing can make the difference between a successful product and a not so successful one. Lots of great ideas go by the wayside because they’re not marketed well. But as an editor or a developer or whatever it is that I do now and will do in the future, I value my aesthetic judgment more than my market knowledge. I’m starting to feel pretty fuckin’ lonely out here.

Then, my mate made this point:

If you stick only those you know to be creative, you will get specific creations.  Give everyone and their dog an open invitation, and you will get a whole mass of shit, but the odd unexpected result… It is the logic that within a mess of fuckwits, there will be great things.  Rather than just picking great things you know and having a tiny number of created entities

Will sterility of creativity result from a belief that market knowledge will hold the key to future production, or will it result from writers who have limited vision in the first place? Both? In which case, is this guy right in thinking that the only way we can really grow creatively is by throwing in the towel as producers and leaving it for other people to decide the exact products they want? But then isn’t that sort of like… making ourselves redundant, and analogous to throwing away a million dollars to pan for gold in a river?

The fact is, people will not always do themselves favours.

This never was, is, or will be acceptable to wear. Anywhere. Just no.

I don’t know whether I trust the beast that is public opinion to be the single driving force behind all creative creation, but isn’t this the underlying principle behind market-driven production?

There’s heaps of shit that hasn’t been thought of yet because people are putting their energy toward creating similar products to what they made last year (with small differences, of course) that are a safe bet economically as they pander to an established audience base.

This does not mean that different things don’t have a market.

It does means marketing will need to be more creative in winning over an consumer.

Then I read this and realised I haven’t even scratched the surface of the consumer-driven vs creative-driven issue.

I just found these two grouse websites, Brazen Careerist and Location Independent Professionals. I’ve been thinking of mobilising Paine Management for some time, and it’s been great to bump into a bunch of like-minded souls: people who want to be financially (and locationally?) independent. Each of them have great blogs – in fact, Brazen Careerist has many, somehow linked to members’ sites.

I even found a post called ‘Putting Together A Portable Office That You Can Take With You Anywhere You Go In The World’.

The first time I thought of myself as the sort of guy who might use a portable office was when I was interviewed by David Prater for Cordite. He described the man bag I carried at the time as a ‘portmanteau’. I’m pretty sure Orwell’s listless Gordon uses a ‘portmanteau’ in Keep the Aspidistra Flying as well.

What I’m talking about is not a ‘portmanteau’. It’s just a portable office. I always thought ‘portmanteau’ meant, specifically, ‘portable office’. It doesn’t.

But the thing with Gordon would be the second time I bumped into the notion.

It’s difficult to articulate how excited it makes me when I discover  whole groups of disparate people doing similar things with their life that I’d like to do. When it gets as specific as building a portable office, it gets kind of boggling.

Combine all this with my principle of Three Degrees of Uncoordination and a decision pops out: I’m going to create a portable office. If I do, I might need to do what this guy (presumably) did, and ditch all my stuff. Getting rid of my books is proving to require a few more than three collisions of colluding ideas, however.

I had started creating something other than a portmanteau before I found these websites, and I had begun to break it down into items I would be able to transport with me, and items I would need to buy at each location. Ideally I could have a bike wherever I go, but transporting one each time I move is simply impracticle, so that’s an item I’d need to have in my ‘Purchase Onsite’ category. Bike pants, on the other hand, would go in the ‘Transport’ category, of course.

I bought a mini stapler today, to replace my clunker, which had run out of staples anyway.

Now I will never be late again!

I’m excited about Brazen Careerist because, as a testimonial run from FastCompany said, they ‘decided to turn existing traditional online career management tools on their ear’ by merging the best of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, in a way that might practically advance your career. Basically it seems like a fun version of LinkedIn, which is a weird schmoozy site of the most boring variety, until you have hundreds in your network, which is not where you’re going to be if you’re interested in things like Brazen Careerist. A good stopgap, then, between Facebook and Linked in, via Twitter.

As you read and write around the site, your updates and comments are published in your personal feed, which is called Ideas. In the tab next to that you have your resume, so that if people like what you’re thinking, they might check out your resume to see if you’re good for a job they know about, or an opportunity coming up. That’s how I imagine the site to work, anyway – I’m still new to it.

I never cease to be amazed by what I find on the internet created by like-minded young people.

I’ve set up my profile on Brazen Careerist¹ and joined the Ning group for Location Independent Professionals, the Clubhouse. If you’re in Melbourne and this sounds like your sort of thing, it’d be great to see you there because I feel like the real value of these new mediums is found when they intersect somewhat with your physical world.

1. which, although it’s irrelevant, my fingers insist on typing as Brazeen Carerist – watch out for that one!

I’ve been interested in this guy Lee Siegel lately, since I found his critique of What is the What and the cult subculture that Eggers has spawned with McSweeney’s.

This was the first well-considered and in-depth critical review of the whole phenomenon that I had read since feeling awkwardly contrarian in criticising What is the What myself on The Book Show. (There is another one here.)

Siegel has written a book called Against the Machine, which seems to be an outspoken, sarcastic and scathing critic of The Internet. Ray Bradbury would love him – Ray Bradbury, the guy who reckons we should burn books, but burning The Internet’s alright.

And I’m reviewing a book called Say Everything, a book about ‘how blogging began, what it’s becoming, and why it matters’.

And I’m starting this blog, obviously.

According to Three Degrees of Uncoordination, something is about to pop.

Meanwhile, check out this short video of Siegel acknowledging that he would never want to punch the internet in the face – ‘there are two many faces – it would take me a lifetime to do that’. The guy on the left’s a cack – he’s gotta be on coke.

I have this thing – a kind of guiding principle – that I have come to call Three Degrees of Uncoordination. Calling it a principle is a bit of a stretch. It’s more like an explanation for my disorganised, frenetic, fumbling approach to life. For a long time, before I labelled my own methodology of life, I just read and wrote and observed the world, noticing things and ideas and wondering what on earth to do with them. And I talked a lot of shit.

Recently I began to get pretty tired of all the talking, and frustrated by the lack of doing. But I’m reluctant to act without conviction in my opinions, so I got kind of stuck: how could I act without conviction about my ideas, but how could I reach conviction without experiencing life (without acting)?

This was all happening at the end of my tenure as Voiceworks editor, where I had been reading a lot, talking a lot, editing a lot, crunching spreadsheets a lot, and not writing a lot. I was leaving my editorials to the last minute, but they came naturally when I finally got down to them.

This, I found, was because all of the reading and talking I was doing had a place to coalesce: as I drew from things that had happened in the three months since I last wrote an editorial, usually about three separate instances of something like intellectual coincidence would occur and I would have an idea – something to write about, some intention for the editorial.

Usually the process of writing the editorial had forced me to think about something in a way that I had not previously considered. I would express this, with the intention of encouraging readers to do the same.

Since then this ‘principle’ has developed naturally as a way of connecting ideas into some form of coherent thought, without which I get wickedly confused and forget my opinions all the time. I still chase ideas down rabbit holes until I find bits of grit, around which all those ideas coagulate.

I don’t have editorials to write anymore, but I have posts to write for this blog. The themes will develop sporadically, as I process ideas and output them here: kernels of principles I will then use to guide my way through life in an approximation of goodness and decency. Maybe, dear reader, you will too, as, here, in the category Three Degrees of Uncoordination, I will capture those kernels in the hope of disseminating something useful.