*Transcendental *Logic

I kid you not:  I have spent the last 24 hours trying to figure out how I could write a post that would recommend the following book enough.

In the end, I probably can’t.  But I’ll give it a go, because to say nothing would be a capital crime of bookwormdom.

Look, I did something yesterday that I haven’t done, seriously, in about ten years — not since I started my first run in college, I think.  Because college makes you busy, and while you still read "fun" books, it’s no longer with the same all-consuming verve that they get read when you’re younger.  …Unless one comes along that grabs you by the hair, shoves your face into it and doesn’t let go until you’re satisfied in a way you forgot you needed to be.  (Yes, I meant that to sound like sex.  It damn near was like sex.)

Yesterday I read.  For about seven straight hours, minus bathroom and coffee breaks.  Yesterday I finished an entire book in ONE SITTING.  Thankfully this didn’t take me any longer, because I was fully prepared to blow off taiji and stay at work as late as I had to to finish it.  (Also, thankfully it was a slow day at work, because besides answering a few phone calls, I got nothing done.  Don’t tell my boss. ;)  About 5/6 of the way through, I started mumbling feverishly to myself and checking the clock, making plans for who I would lie to and how, or if I would just turn my phone off and lock my door, because I sure as hell wasn’t leaving until I finished.

The book is Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.  That link will take you to a free downloadable version; all hail Creative Commons.  (HAIL! HAIL! HAIL!)

I’m…I’m not sure if this was just the best book I’ve read since Xmas 2007 (when I got hold of Bridge of Birds), or if it actually changed my life.  Certainly I spent the whole rest of yesterday in a cloud.  Certainly I feel branded by some of the truths this fun little novel contains.  Certainly I’ve gone from being "a fan" of Cory Doctorow’s writing to a rabid fan, and certainly I’m trying to figure out the best way to get copies of this book into the hands of everyone I know. 

This is the most important book since 1984.  In fact, it IS 1984, written for our own age.  But don’t let that turn you off:  It’s also substantially more fun than the aforementioned classic (though I think the original is quite fun; but I know that my love of dismal, gritty stories isn’t shared by everyone). 

There are two things about Cory Doctorow, specifically, that just make this book.  One is his grand knowledge of modern technology, not just in electronics terms, but also in social terms.  The tech in this book is dead real; nothing that’s mentioned can’t either already be done on a wide scale, or already be done on a small scale, and is just waiting for its moment.  Some of the names are changed, but not very many, and there’s a solid bibliography where you can learn about anything you don’t know already.  As a technophile myself, I knew about most of it, but to see it all so well-understood, put together and presented in a real, vibrant, fictional world was breathtaking, to say the least.

But Sir Doctorow (who needs to get knighted asap; hell, give the man a duchy) is more than a knowledgable geek who writes stories.  He’s also a fantastic writer, one of the purer examples of why I love (good) science fiction writing.  His technique is absolutely transparent to the reader, meaning his stories race along like the good old breathless mindless fiction of our youths — like good comic books, like good adventure stories.  No pedantry.  No purple prose or long explications.  Fun.  You’re too busy, in Little Brother, loving the characters and gripping your chair and grinning and wincing and all that, to really realize what a gem of modern culture you’re holding, and how absolutely vital a piece of educational material this is for anyone living in the digitized Western world today.  

Now, I just have to figure out how to get this in everyone’s hands, yesterday.  It’s CC, so I could make copies and give them away…or I could just spam everyone with the URL and harrass them until they read it…Hmm.

Anyway, that’s what I did yesterday:  I read, no, devoured, a book whole.  And it devoured me.  Like 1984, reading this book changed things in my head.  Though none of the tech was really new to me, seeing it portrayed this way–understanding it this way–shoved some tectonic thinking hard into place, and opened up a portal to my youth that I’d thought was lost.  Part of me feels, all kidding aside, like it was saved.  Saved from complacency, obscurity, and fading into the background of a comfortable pseudo-American life. 

Wow.

GO READ THE BOOK!!!

While I was on vacation this last weekend, a (new, awesome) friend gave me a copy of Fast Company.  It’s a magazine I’ve liked from afar for a while, but never really get around to reading.  So this one, I read every page of on the flight home.

Excellent magazine, overall.  Highly recommended.

What really blew me away, though — and the reason I asked to steal this particular back-issue — was the feature article on Johnathan Goodwin.  Amazingly enough, they’ve reprinted the entire article online so you can read it.  DO.  Seriously.  Not only is it interesting, but it’s big on details and points of view, something that it’s hard to get out of a magazine and lovely when you can get it.

Johnathan Goodwin is a guy without a high-school diploma who lives in Kansas and messes with cars.  He’s really good at messing with cars, but the most startling things he does aren’t PhD-level custom jobs:  They’re done with existing parts made by the Big Three and available for years now.

What can he do?  He can get 100MPG out of almost anything, including an old Lincoln.  He makes Hummers into zero-emissions miracles that can run on up to five different kinds of fuel.  Oh, and he usually at least doubles the horsepower of any vehicle he’s working on, not "in spite of" the amazing emissions and fuel work, but as a consequence of it.

His explanation?  It takes a little creative thinking to do this stuff, but it isn’t hard, mechanically speaking.  He’s even shown GM mechanics how to do it, and makes no secret of his methods.

And the rich, unsurprisingly, are already reaping the benefits — several celebrity cars sit in Johnathan Goodwin’s garage, ready to be turned into 800-horsepower, zero-emissions fry-oil burning paragons of awesomeness.  Yet, for all the years he’s been doing this, there seem to be no plans in Detroit, or elsewhere, to emulate his successes.

Yes, big companies are slow…but does that really explain the lack of more than passing, shrugging interest here?  Are the Big Three* willfully killing off Detroit, or trying to commit suicide?  Or do they think that, by holding fast to an outdated and harmful model, they can predatorily scrape as much money out of a failing industry before it all falls down, stranding the little guy while the execs pack their suitcases and head for Rio?

I think I’m a little too close to speculate even a little objectively.  But the next time you wonder why we "can’t" break our dependence on foreign oil, and why struggling families "have to" pay three bucks a gallon for gas, and why we just "have to" put up with smog and pollution, think again.

Also think again the next time you want to write this sickness off as Detroit’s.  Yes, we’re suffering in Michigan, but everybody’s being hurt by this, economically and otherwise.  The U.S. is sitting on a global goldmine in the form of Johnathan Goodwin and his ideas.  We’re willing to tear our natural resources to shreds looking for oil, but we can’t mine this intellectual resource that would make us all rich, and put us down in history as the kind of country we like to think we are?

*there really isn’t a Big Three anymore…but there still is a Detroit, and it’s still full of out-of-work skilled workers who got shitcanned by "pension reforms" and factories moved wholesale overseas….

In the same vein as the last post, here is an excerpt from the Introduction of Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig.

I’m not very far into this book yet, but  I’m loving it so far, and of course his other books, Code and The Future of Ideas, are both phenomenal.  (They’re not necessary reading in order to read this one; just evidence that Mr. Lessig is a great writer as well as an awesome lawyer & professor.)

Royalty proceeds from Free Culture are going to benefit Creative Commons, which may be our best hope to stem the tide of "permission-ification" that’s overrunning America’s creative and intellectual space.  So if you enjoy this bit, please buy the book! 

You can use this page to buy the book and have the "referrer" commission go to any of a couple different organizations of your choice; or you can use this link (or the "Wonderful Book" link on my main page) and give the tip to me.  ;)

…

The focus of the law was on commercial creativity. At first slightly, then quite extensively, the law protected the incentives of creators by granting them exclusive rights to their creative work, so that they could sell those exclusive rights in a commercial marketplace. [8] This is also, of course, an important part of creativity and culture, and it has become an increasingly important part in America. But in no sense was it dominant within our tradition. It was instead just one part, a controlled part, balanced with the free.

This rough divide between the free and the controlled has now been erased. [9] The Internet has set the stage for this erasure and, pushed by big media, the law has now affected it. For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history–between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission–has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture.

This change gets justified as necessary to protect commercial creativity. And indeed, protectionism is precisely its motivation. But the protectionism that justifies the changes that I will describe below is not the limited and balanced sort that has defined the law in the past. This is not a protectionism to protect artists. It is instead a protectionism to protect certain forms of business. Corporations threatened by the potential of the Internet to change the way both commercial and noncommercial culture are made and shared have united to induce lawmakers to use the law to protect them. It is the story of RCA and Armstrong; it is the dream of the Causbys.

For the Internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility for many to participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far beyond local boundaries. That power has changed the marketplace for making and cultivating culture generally, and that change in turn threatens established content industries. The Internet is thus to the industries that built and distributed content in the twentieth century what FM radio was to AM radio, or what the truck was to the railroad industry of the nineteenth century: the beginning of the end, or at least a substantial transformation.
Digital technologies, tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more competitive and vibrant market for building and cultivating culture; that market could include a much wider and more diverse range of creators; those creators could produce and distribute a much more vibrant range of creativity; and depending upon a few important factors, those creators could earn more on average from this system than creators do today–all so long as the RCAs of our day don’t use the law to protect themselves against this competition.

Yet, as I argue in the pages that follow, that is precisely what is happening in our culture today. These modern-day equivalents of the early twentieth-century radio or nineteenth-century railroads are using their power to get the law to protect them against this new, more efficient, more vibrant technology for building culture. They are succeeding in their plan to remake the Internet before the Internet remakes them.

It doesn’t seem this way to many. The battles over copyright and the Internet seem remote to most. To the few who follow them, they seem mainly about a much simpler brace of questions–whether "piracy" will be permitted, and whether "property" will be protected. The "war" that has been waged against the technologies of the Internet–what Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) president Jack Valenti calls his "own terrorist war" [10]–has been framed as a battle about the rule of law and respect for property. To know which side to take in this war, most think that we need only decide whether we’re for property or against it.

If those really were the choices, then I would be with Jack Valenti and the content industry. I, too, am a believer in property, and especially in the importance of what Mr. Valenti nicely calls "creative property." I believe that "piracy" is wrong, and that the law, properly tuned, should punish "piracy," whether on or off the Internet.

But those simple beliefs mask a much more fundamental question and a much more dramatic change. My fear is that unless we come to see this change, the war to rid the world of Internet "pirates" will also rid our culture of values that have been integral to our tradition from the start.

…

Happy Monday, Mighty Proletary!

Yay! I’m so geeked. Literally. A weeks-long conversation I’ve been having with Google has borne some mighty fine fruit — I’ve gotten them to clarify that Google Checkout can be used for micropayments!!

This is huge news for artists, writers, coders, and other small or individual merchants, especially those who’ll profit from being able to sell little things for cheap. Nobody would pay \$5 for a neat poem I wrote (you can get a book of poems for that!), but they might pay \$0.50 to download a .pdf or \$1.50 for a signed print. You can take payments of as little as \$1.00 on PayPal, but of course with PayPal you have to give them access to your bank account, and with Google, not so.

Google isn’t offering a “donate” button yet like PayPal has, but I bet it doesn’t take them long. I have noticed that they take feedback seriously, and I bet I’m not the only person to ask for a way to take starving-artist donations.

Oh, and lest I sound like a shill (I’m not, but you know, I can be reasonable… ;) — their customer service is fantastic, too. The people I emailed could spell and form coherent sentences, were polite, and showed patience if they didn’t understand my request right away. They also take replies directly to the emails they send you, and don’t take forever to answer (though it can take a couple days, which seems like a long time on the Internet!).

Anyway, text of my emails and their replies behind the cut. (You have to read them in reverse-chronological order; sorry.) Can I get a “yay”?

Yaaaaay!

-PD

P.S. - Be sure to read the comments for more detailed info on fees and such.

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I’ll be blunt: This is my first interview. Journalism always seemed a little too reality-bound for me, so I just never went there. But I think I really liked doing this interview — that may just be because my subject is so cool, but if it works out well, maybe I’ll try to track down other cool people and harass them with long-winded questions, too. ;)

Welcome to the Interview of Kristopher Young, whom I ended up conversing with because he was tolerant of my colorful posts & emails praising his novel. Not that one can praise his novel colorfully enough, mind you — it’s called Click and if you follow that link to Amazon, you’ll see nothing but glowing reviews, and for good reason. I’ve mentioned his book before (I believe I called it “Chuck Palahniuk with the volume at eleven, and perfect noise-reduction”, and I stand by that) — but what I didn’t mention, because I didn’t figure it out until Kris kindly shoved my nose in it, is that the author is also the entrepreneur behind Another Sky Press.

Another Sky Press is truly a special development in publishing — it may even be revolutionary, which is obviously what Kris is after. The company sells print copies for “cost plus a voluntary donation”, and it gives away free electronic copies of everything online. (Nice, well-designed .pdfs, too, with no DRM-y crap at all.) Besides Click, the company currently has an anthology and some art available (including a coloring book that makes me drool), and claims to have plans to offer more books, music, short-stories, and the gods know what else, all in their unique, consumer-centric fashion.

Whatever you think about Kris’ decision to offer his almost-certainly-would-have-been-a-conventional-bestseller to the public this way (I ask him what he thinks about it in the interview), you have to admit that closing your eyes and envisioning a world where most art is published the way Another Sky is suggesting is a pretty, pretty picture indeed.

You just don’t get better than idealistic, forward-thinking businesspeople…or at least that’s what I thought, until I met one who’s also a jaw-droppingly good writer. Hmm, is this guy for real? Well, I can’t say for sure, but if he’s a construct, his AI is fantastic. I mean, check out how well it answered all these questions about Another Sky Press and Click and even some other stuff I threw in just to trip him up in case he was a robot!

[Click to read the entire interview in all its glory!]

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