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((Hi there, how’s your weekend going? This is slightly off-topic for Quiet Babylon, but it’s about the future of journalism which is one of my side-obsessions.

It concerns this hilarious opinion piece to which Jay Rosen linked on Twitter. Douglas Rushkoff is afraid that journalism (and by extension all content creation) can’t survive what he sees as Google’s parasitism and sees in Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch a glimmer of hope. There is so much wrong with the argument.

Hope you enjoy it. I promise that Monday will be about lanyards and augmented reality.))

This is kind of a weird post, but bear with me. It was my birthday yesterday and I spent the day buying and playing with plastic bricks, so Lego is on my mind.

Earlier last month, Jason Kottke posted a story about how Lego has become single use. It’s the sort of golden-era thinking that I promised myself I wouldn’t fall in to, but I ended up nodding along. Yeah, Lego’s too corporate. Lego sold out!

Except that it hasn’t.

Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket shook me out of my false nostalgia with the Tao of Lego. Despite opening by agreeing with Jason, Robin put together a post crammed to the gills with links to amazing repurposing of the supposedly single-use bricks. Want an example?

Here’s another. As near as I can tell, those legs are made of Bionicle parts, the least Lego-like Lego I can imagine.

Click through to Robin’s post for more. There’s an astonishing array of clever construction on display.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the notion that we are playing with “other people’s imagination” these days also falls flat. When I was a kid, there was no Star Wars Lego. But there was space Lego and there were translucent antennae. My brother and I pretty quickly figured out that those things looked a lot like light-sabers. So our little guys had light-sabers.

Childhood imagination is always a combination of other people’s and your own stories. Heck, so is adult imagination. You didn’t think that William Gibson invented Levi’s 501s did you?

This left the final complaint, the idea that it’s hard to find basic bricks. The good news is that this isn’t true either. I got inspired by Robin’s post and a stunning set of structures made by architects using only white bricks. So I went shopping for Lego. The cheapest $/brick kit that I could find was the widely available Builders of Tomorrow basic brick set. Every toy store that I checked had some.

I bought a pile of the standard bricks and – as an experiment – this Star Wars kit to see how ridiculous the pieces were. On the box, it appears to be made of all-kinds of single-use bits. Building it told a different story. The feet of the walker turn out to be the same part as the bodies of the Droids. Some of the joints are re-purposed guns. There are dozens of little clever things so that as you follow the instructions, there is moment after moment of discovery. “Oh, I can do THAT with that part?”

The assumption that the new sets represent a step away from the spirit of Lego says more about the poverty of imagination in those of us sitting on the sidelines than it does about Lego itself. Which is a great relief.

More Amazing Lego

• Solaris 8 Station Tour. This was recently featured on Boing Boing.
• Building Utopolis. Amazing city by a Montreal artist.
• A gallery of Lego monsters. What can you do with Lego tentacles? Turns out, a lot.
• Flickr’s Lego Microscale Pool I am rapidly falling in love with these little Lego Haiku.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

photo credit: tripleman

Over at Inventing Green, Alexis Madrigal looks at the adoption of air-conditioners. He talks about how the rise of electrical cooling seems to have lead to a crash in regional building techniques.

“Of course, the use of air conditioning allowed homeowners to enjoy a new degree of comfort, but a goodly portion of the residential air-conditioning load simply replaced the comfort once provided — at little environmental cost — by good design,” Rome writes.

The whole thing put me in mind of three incidents that highlight the critical importance of a regional context in usable architecture.

1. Done Well

   A few years ago I went on a tour of the then under-construction Earth Rangers Wildlife Center in Ontario. It’s a very green building, LEED gold rating and all that. They were showing us the tech and how liquid running through the building kept it cool and how tall ceilings moved hot air away from employees and on and on about how they were keeping the temperature down. This is Canada, where the main problem, you’d think, is keeping warm. Judging by my utility bills, it certainly is.

   One of the students asked the project manager about that and he looked genuinely surprised. Heating was an afterthought, a solved problem – you just needed to keep the place insulated. And then he went back to explaining all the clever cooling solutions.

2. Done Badly

   I remember visiting my parents when they were house-sitting on Salt Spring Island. The proud owners had their home custom built, using a design from California. The result was an unusable disaster.

   Everything about the house had clearly been intended to keep a desert home pleasantly shaded. An overabundance of sunlight is not a problem in heavily-treed, often cloudy, British Columbia. They had to keep the indoor lights on pretty much all day long. Even so, the house felt dank, dark and dismal.

3. Done Badly, Then Fixed

   In Halifax, I used to deliver the paper to the Killam Library. The Killam had originally been designed with some warmer climate in mind (all my stories are about how miserable the weather gets in Canada, I’m realizing). Touches such as an always-dry stream bed that ran from outside the building under the edge into the open air atrium and then into the lobby itself, indicated an architect who imagined a place where water did not freeze for a good chunk of the year.

   During the winter, that open-air atrium became a terrifying safety hazard. Take a look at this photo. Surrounded on all sides by warmed glass, the whole thing became a chimney. The heating pushed an enormous volume of air out the top and sucked gale force winds through the pictured entry-way.

   In the late 90s, Dalhousie fixed the problem, sealing the top of the atrium with glass. The result was a fully usable (safe) courtyard where students now congregate.

So much depends on thoughtful design.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Steve Brill, entrepreneur, law writer, founder of Court TV and recently defunct CLEAR is trying to save journalism by reversing the trend of free news online. He gave a briefing today and while I did not hear it, @NeimanLab posted the slides here.

Let me say that I LOVE the idea of a kind of iTunes for news. It is my fondest wish that I not have a separate login and password for every friggin’ site. I’d also love to be able to pay some reasonable rate to support good journalism. Like the App Store, a unified easy payment system might free up news sites to experiment with more granular payment models. I hope they do, and I hope that they understand that the results need to be consumer-friendly and mindful of the information-firehose context of content online.

I’m not a producer of news, but as a heavy consumer, the future of journalism in the face collapse is of great interest to me. As a periodic entrepreneur, I like playing with numbers. Let’s take a look at Steve’s.

Slide 4

I had NO IDEA that my time and attention was so valuable. And all this time I’ve been GIVING it away to newspapers and magazines. Heck, I’ve been PAYING some of them for the privilege. (Hey advertisers, call me! Let’s work out something where you give me the $500 directly.) But hey, look at those online numbers. Pretty grim, huh?

Taking these figures from the Boston Globe, there are only about 20 times as many online readers as as print readers, where one needs 100 unique visitors for every lost print subscriber.

Slide 5

This is where Steve comes to the rescue. There’s an untapped demand for paying for the news! 92% of us would be willing to pay $300/yr (on average)! That sounds pretty good.

Pay close attention to the chart on the right. Steve is confusing us by playing around with medians and means. The chart tells us that 21% of us are ready to pay pay up to $600, 24% would pay that “average” $300, and 45% of us will pay NO MORE than $120. (There’s an unlabelled 10%. Presumably, they are ready to pay INFINITY dollars.)

Using a mean here is disingenuous. If we charge $25/mo. for online news, we will not see 92% of visitors subscribing. We’ll see 55%. The ones willing to pay more? We’ll have to work out some kind of premium scheme, I suppose. So let’s word it another way. 55% of consumers are willing to pay $25/mo or more. 45% are willing to pay $10/mo or less. That begins to look like a lot less money.

Why this matters comes into sharp focus when we look at…

Slide 12 & Slide 13

You’re going to want to click on those and look at the fine print. The subscription models Steve has up here assume $7-8/month per subscriber, along with some per-article users who are reading only 6 stories every month. Let me be the first to say that if you are a newspaper publisher and you imagine a world where people only want to read 6 of your articles per month, YOU ARE A BAD NEWSPAPER PUBLISHER. I recognize that the idea is that these will be longtail micropayments intended to capture revenue from drive-by readership or whatever, so let’s retreat back to the monthly subscriptions (presumably, all-you-can-eat).

Steve’s numbers in Slide 5 don’t specify whether the amount people were willing to pay was intended to be per-site-they-love or overall. Given that most households only subscribe to a single newspaper and a few magazines, I think we can assume that it’s a monthly budget for online news in general.

At $7.50 a month, we’ve wiped out the budget of 45% of our online readership. They can’t afford a second subscription. Even our 24% ‘average’ readers are subscribing to only three things. Heaven help them if they want to sample from a lot of sites. At $0.25 a story, they get to read 100 stories per month across the entire Internet.

According to Google’s RSS reader, I receive 300-400 items, scan through about 30-100 of them, and read some subset of those PER DAY, not counting links from friends/Facebook/Twitter. The Globe and Mail RSS feed alone sends me 180 stories daily (note to Globe and Mail: Guys! That’s too many!). The flood is so bad that I don’t even subscribe to other newspaper feeds. It’s easier and better to click on curated links to the best articles, as picked out by friends and trusted blogs. Steve wants me to rely on a few trusted all-I-can-eat subscriptions or limit myself to 3 articles a day (assuming I’m ‘average’).

Moving from numbers to a boring annecdote: Last week a friend sent me a link to a Financial Times article. I’d gone over my article limit for the month. I went and read something else. (the end) The brutal reality of online news and opinion is that we are inundated with ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more things to read and watch than we have time to read and watch them.

I’m sympathetic with the need to fund excellent journalism and writing, but schemes that are tone deaf to the state of online news are doomed to fail. Hoping that consumers will be willing to limit themselves to a few subscriptions per month while asking them to pay (for magazines at least) 10 times as much as they used to just isn’t reasonable.

Unless the briefing contained a lot of context and nuance that were not captured by the slides, this does not look like the solution. If Brill &co. are going to convince consumers that their new service is a good value proposition, they’ve go an uphill battle.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Check out this article on Ars Technica about law prof. Patricia Akester’s study examining the effects of DRM on the legal use of copyrighted works. As you’re reading it, bear in mind that due to laws similar to the DMCA all over the world, it is often illegal to bypass DRM encryption, even if copyright law allows you to make a copy.

Why is this important?

In a storage locker in Halifax, there is a small box which theoretically contains copies of every essay I wrote in high school. These essays are stored on a stack of floppy disks. I’ll probably never read them again. For this to be otherwise, a lot of things would need to come true.

1. I figure out which Mac OS I was running (System 6?).
2. I find a copy of the OS and get it running either on old hardware (which I also find) or virtualized.
3. I find a compatible floppy drive.
4. I find a compatible copy of the word processor (WriteNow).
5. The disks have dramatically exceeded their estimated 2-year lifespan.

In contrast, consider my University essays, all of which I can still open and read. This is possible because I have been transferring the files from computer to computer over the past 12 years. There is an unbroken chain of digital pack-ratting from the MacBook I’m using now to the Pentium 166 I built in 1997.

The loss of my essays (grades 10-12) are not a big loss to society. But it serves to illustrate a problem that plagues archivists. Digital content is very easy to copy in the short term but degrades very quickly in the medium and long term. To keep digital content alive, you have to keep it moving. Kevin Kelly calls this Movage.

Anything you want moved to the future has to be given attention to keep it moving forward.

In order to preserve content against the decay of laughably short-lived media and compatibilty, archivists need to make copies - early and often. We’re not used to thinking of it that way. We’re used to thinking of preservation as a kind of stasis. We think of climate controlled rooms and white gloves and sealed vaults.

In digital, stasis is death. Stasis is the BBC’s endangered Domesday Project, trapped on laserdiscs, needing hardware that had nearly disappeared in 2002 (interestingly, they knew this was coming but the archivists failed to keep the data alive).

It is bad enough for librarians, what with the fires, earthquakes, moisture, theft, time, and other disasters eating away at the content they seek to preserve. Copyright holders have made it all the worse, by preventing the one thing going for digital - easy, short-term, perfect copies - from happening in a legal setting.

DRM schemes make it illegal for archivists to do their jobs.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Everywhere I go, I carry a pen and a stack of 3×5 index cards held together by a binder clip. It’s a Hipster PDA 1.0, from before all those apps got installed.

On one of these cards are the words: “Entrepreneurship is alive and well at the Anarchist Book Fair”. I wrote them last spring, during a trip to Montreal. This is kind of condescending thought that runs through my head when I see idealist-ideologues try to navigate the shoals of reality.

The book fair is annual. It’s a focal point - the anarchist social event of the year. People travel from all over Canada and the U.S. to visit friends, network, run workshops, and party. The contradictions don’t seem to bother anybody.

It’s literally an anti-capitalist marketplace, crammed to the gills with people selling books, t-shirts, pins and paraphenilia. It’s a weird, vibrant mirror of a county craft fair, complete with live music, hidden bottles of booze and a snack booth (vegan, organic and sustainable, we are told). And why not? Anarchists need to eat, same as everyone else. The clothes are fashionably ragged, instead of old and faded. The patches are silkscreened with black instead of embroidered in red white and blue. There are cupcakes. When the police stop by to let the organizers know that the skinhead rally has been broken up, they get booed.

Capitalism is on the run, have you heard? The Financial Times is running a whole series on what comes next.

I wonder what the fair will feel like this year. What will the mood be? Triumphant told-you-sos? Gleeful excitement at the opportunities for effecting change? Will there be the same cold worry that the rest of us feel, that the collapse might be real and total and we might not get back up? I’ve met them. When they aren’t writing autonomous anti-oppressive zines, they work in the service industry. They don’t have severance packages, they have 2 weeks notice. And they are living paycheque to paycheque or worse. How many anarchists will look in their wallets and decide they can’t make the trip this year, due to the impending collapse of capitalism.

Does it sound like I am making fun of these contradictions? I assure you I am not. It’s these kinds of barely held tensions that keep a movement alive and dynamic. And we need a vibrant anarchism. We need one that is not caught up in internal struggles of self-definition and specialist rhetoric. Come what may, there is a lot of work that needs doing that doesn’t necessarily get done by businesses anymore. The more people offering solutions, the more likely it is that one gets found.

Who am I kidding? The answer to the Financial Times’ question is probably “more capitalism”.

The Anarchist Bookfair collective affirms and promotes values of mutual aid, direct democracy, anti-authoritarianism, autonomy and solidarity. We reiterate our opposition to capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, heterosexism, racism, colonialism, statism and all other forms of oppression; we will not accept anyone to participate in the Anarchist Bookfair that perpetuates or promotes these attitudes.

-from Montreal’s Anarchist Bookfair statement of principles
photo credit: anarchosyn

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Dan Barber’s story (embedded above) is one of my favourite kinds of stories. He begins with something that seems unethical, tells the story of an unlikely maverick who challenges the status quo and wins (a contest). All the while, it turns out that our maverick’s approach involves some down home ingenuity and hands on sustainability. In the end, it turns out that we get to have our cake and eat it to. There is a method for producing foie gras ethically that’s also sustainable (AND DELICIOUS). (If only we didn’t have those evil unsustainable, unethical factory farms that gave us slightly inferior foie gras (and strawberries and mangoes and whatever) year-round.)

At about 8:15 in, Barber unwittingly raises the first issue that will cause massive problems for this kind of farming. He approvingly mentions that the farmer is taking a loss on feeding these geese figs and olives. “The doubly irony is that on the figs and olives, Eduardo could make more money selling those than he can on the foie gras.”

At which point the economist in me asks, “then why does he bother with the foie gras?”

Eduardo is an artisan farmer, he doesn’t need to be profit maximizing, just profitable. So if he wants to take some extra time and effort, he’s welcome to destroy value in the goods he produces as a kind of hobbyist craftsman. That’s fine for him, but does it work on a world-wide scale?

The reason that Eduardo could make more on the figs and olives than he does on the foie gras is that someone has figured out how to make the delicacy more cheaply. It’s far from ethical - it requires factory farming and force feeding - but when it comes to foie gras, people don’t seem to care.

The pricing of foie gras really doesn’t matter to most people, but the same story plays out over and over again in the world of farming. Factory farms produce food more cheaply, with less labour and at a higher density than most organic farms. They also produce the food people want year-round instead of seasonally. They do it at massive environmental and ethical cost, but until there is a price on these things, it is unlikely that entreating people to only eat what is in season will see a shift in the way food is produced.

There’s two ways this story can get better. Either factory food becomes more expensive or sustainable food becomes cheaper.

Eliminating the massive subsidies paid to factory farmers would be a big step in doing both at once. If oil continues to climb, factory farm prices will tend to rise (a lot of oil goes into the machinery and pesticides used on larger farms) making less oil-dependent farming more viable.

The labour issue is a bigger one, which must be solved either by automating organic farming practices, killing western subsidies which will make farming profitable for developing countries (they have a surplus of labour, but ultra cheap grain and dairy from subsidized OECD farmers often forces them out of business), or convincing more OECD citizens to go back to the land.

The last question, to which I don’t know the answer, is: Will organic farming produce enough food to feed everyone? The technologies that underlie the Green Revolution allowed the human population to triple in less than 70 years with very few major famines. Advocates of alternative farming need to account for whether their methods will sustain the human population (or who should die).

They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.

–Norman Borlaug

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.