objects-on-demand

Cory Doctorow’s introduction to his recent SF short short story “Printcrime” explains that it stems out of a talk attended by a friend at which a British recording industry exec talked of the “industry’s great and hysterical spasm.” It’s assumed by this that he means the gradual chipping away of DRM by consumer dissatisfaction and lagging sales, and the inevitable formation of a new form of intellectual property law/media copyright. The recording exec claimed that this “great and hysterical spasm” of the recording industry would become the template for virtually every other industry that deals in trademarks or patents once the development of rapid prototypers (wanna know how to build one?) and 3D printers becomes viable. For those who don’t want to click through the links, these are machines, in existence now and being developed for personal use, that “print” actual objects. That’s right, just like the replicators on Star Trek.

Doctorow, really one of the most interesting SF authors–among other things–working today, finds the connection between music copyright and 3D printers incredibly strange. In one of his characteristically witty historical analogies, he says that to worry about the future of trademark and patent law in the face of object-on-demand technology is “as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses.”

Perhaps this is a problem today with SF and futuristic thought in general. Politicians began using phrases like the “information superhighway” (Al Gore’s pre-global warming pet project/marketing campaign) ten years ago. When SF concepts and the discourse of speculative thought enter the political and popular domain outside of any traditional generic conventions, what is there for SF to do? When advertisements for new technologies have the strange ability to prefigure or even simulate our interaction with these as yet unreleased tools, how can SF react with counter prefigurations of future technologies? And how does any futurist deal with objects whose complexity can only be explained by teams of tech people?

Steampunk, a subgenre of SF that deals with Victorian-era technologies, seems to serve as a valve for some of these frustrations in many interesting ways, especially the challenge of dealing with overdetermined technological complexity. Steampunk Magazine is one online magazine working with this stuff. It looks back to a moment when technological objects were still intelligible as objects, when their development and evolution could be seen as moving in many different directions, when one didn’t have to read through an entire wiki in order to build a tool that made more objects.

(P.S., the lolbladerunner was done by Jamais Cascio)

advertising torrents

I am trying to download the 2004 Korean movie 3-Iron (dir. Kim Ki-duk–an interesting article on him here) through bit torrent sites. Apparently, only five people in the world currently have this complete .avi on their computers. Which is why the file is being assembled in fits. I’ll have a strong download around 20 kb/s and then for long stretches of time absolutely nothing. Currently at 19.73%, it has stalled out, and the file as it stands on my computer looks like this:

The application Transmission graphs out the motion picture in a single freeze frame, tracking its progress as it assembles itself. That film can now be mapped out in such a way is dizzying enough as it is, but the topic of my post leads elsewhere.

As I’m staring at the list of peers fall from 4 to 2 to 0, I find myself wishing that more people knew about and had the film. When a new episode of a tv show or a recently released film is posted, there are hundreds and hundreds of peers plugged into the torrent file, and the video can easily be downloaded in a matter of minutes. I find myself wishing that I had a way to disseminate both the knowledge of the film and the .avi of the film itself.

Basically, I want to know how to market the film. Like the Hollywood production companies who outsource their leg work to trailer houses such as The Ant Farm and Mark Woollen & Assoc., my motives are purely self-serving. But I don’t want money in return, I simply want to see the film. If more people know about 3-Iron and more people have the film or are currently downloading it on their computers, then I will be able to download, watch, and enjoy the film that much faster.

What would advertising would become in a post-DRM, post-RIAA lawsuit world. The specters of this possible future are already out there. Take axxo, for instance, the nickname of a teenager who uploads movies which are downloaded literally a million times per month (see an interview with him here). This nom de plume(?) has become a brand name when searching for bootlegged and ripped movies, “axxo” being searched for more than any individual movie title. It’s like going to Blockbuster.

Similarly, when users upload films they often include summaries about both the content and quality of the file, asking peers to please seed. Here’s one for Jacques Tati’s Playtime that I recently got:

“Jacques Tati’s Playtime is cinema at its precise best. There’s not much of a storyline, as the camera loosely follows a group of American tourists in 1960′s Paris and, of course, the bumbling but gentlemanly Monsieur Hulot, payed by the director himself. The movie took three years to complete and by the time it was released to a lukewarm audience, Tati was virtually bankrupt. The director died in 1982, suffering from pneumonia, but by then, he had sealed his place as celluloid [sic] visionary, who would inspire a thousand ideas to bloom — the most notable being, as some claim, Spielberg’s Terminal. [...]The audio is 2 channel AC3 (224kbps). The file plays fine in standalone DiVX players.”

Where do these compositions and the people writing them come from? What’s amazing to me is that even in a marketplace stripped of any consumerist structure, a forum in which all the goods are completely free, the rhetoric structuring the dissemination of these films basically parrots the copywriting on the back of DVD cases, in reviews, and in the worst kind of sentimental trailers all produced by corporate ad teams.

The reasons for this kind of promotion and rhetoric must go far beyond any desire to create some sort of utopian community, or any dreams of living the life of a pirate for that matter. For me, I just want to see 3-Iron and would do anything to advertise the thing at this point. What does it mean to advertise when its impetus is not commerce but entertainment itself? Hints of what is to become of advertising once the entertainment industry figures out how to adapt to a file sharing market are beginning to reveal themselves.

Just an afterthought, you’d think more people would have the Battlestar Galactica miniseries. Why, why is it taking this long to get.

And for those of you interested, see why Harvard is one of the few universities pledging to protect its students from file sharing lawsuits.