Virtual Reality - Pt 2: Digital Thieves

Something of a late follow-on post here, due in no small part to the various real world pressures that have a great deal of control over my life.

We previously looked at some examples of the ways in which our lives have become "virtual", how much of our consumer needs are now found in digital form, as opposed to the physical existence of the past. This has a huge impact on how we value these things. Our economy is essentially based upon scarcity, we can apply a value or worth to physical items as there is always a finite amount of them. However, as the old saying goes: time is money, as workers living in a monetary system we necessarily have to apply a value to time.

Digital goods are effectively nothing more than information. Music, films, software, all of these things we consume are ultimately binary code. Information has been exchanged freely for as long as mankind has been able to. Whether that be early man using basic forms of communication to share hunting/gathering info with his kind or a group of friends discussing their various thoughts and ideas on any subject they care to talk about. Of course, we also pay for information in the form of books (physical items) or education (time-based), but no-one can deny us our right to share the information in our heads (non-physical) with anyone we see fit.

This leads us into the subject of piracy. If your MP3 collection is ultimately non-physical information then surely it is your right to share it as you see fit. On the other hand a great deal of time and money went into the recording of those MP3s, which surely should be reimbursed. And this is where the dilemma lies. Its a simple fact that most people do not see piracy as theft. But theft is not so black and white, it has many shades. No-one can deny that there is a massive difference between stealing from a big corporate shop and stealing from your friends, likewise robbing a bank is not the same thing as robbing a granny. There are many different types of theft, each with their own moral and legal status.

Piracy is a form of theft, albeit very different to the others. To put it into perspective, if i go round your house and take your new U2 CD, then the result is i will have it and you won't, even though you payed for it. On the other hand if i go round your house and copy your U2 CD, then you have lost nothing. Clearly these 2 situations are different. However, while you may own that U2 CD that you payed for, you do not own the music within it, nor do you own the right to copy it (that of course belongs to the copyright holder). Essentially all you do own is the otherwise worthless piece of plastic that the music is stored on.

Now if we remove that mostly insignificant physical element of the album, we are left with just the information. As consumers, when we "purchase" and download an MP3 we don't own anything. Even the artists rarely own their music, publishers own the copyright and record labels own the recording. Believe it or not artists make very little from the actual sales of their albums, regardless of format. Music piracy harms the music industry more than it harms the musicians, and as we have seen there is a huge difference between stealing from a corporation than stealing from a person. For unsigned artists, or those signed to independent labels, it can be a bit different, certainly as far as the morality is concerned.

By no means am i trying to advocate piracy, as a musician myself i would obviously prefer people to pay for my music which i have spent a lot of time making (my only release to date is available as free download but thats not to say future releases will be). I am certain that without the needs of the physical world and the associated costs most musicians would be happy to give their music away, but unfortunately our society is not like that. It costs money to feed ourselves, it costs money to keep a roof over our heads and musicians should be paid for their work.

Nevertheless, piracy exists. It is not a new thing, but the semi-virtual nature of our world has made file-sharing so easy and huge that piracy is no longer contained to friends taping each others music. There is in principle no difference between a legal MP3 from iTunes and an illegally-sourced MP3 from PirateBay, infact often the DRM-free tunes from the latter make for a better "product" from the consumers perspective (i know Apple have dropped DRM, but that doesn't help the millions who have paid for tunes they can't even make copies of for themselves).

Has piracy devalued music? No. Has the digital/virtual nature of our media consumption devalued music as a product? Arguably, yes. These are just my opinions, but they are based on the way i see the world around me. Piracy is a big concern for the music industry, an industry that has been ripping off artists and music fans for too long. Piracy is an issue for the artists stuck within an industry that is rapidly collapsing. The "illegal" distribution of music through file-sharing is nevertheless an example of people taking back their rights to share information freely.

The monetary system has been around for a long time, it was conceived to manage the exchange of physical goods and services. Digital goods and virtual products cannot be valued in the same way. There is potentially an infinite availability of any MP3 or digital file, while the value of money is based upon its finite quantity. Clearly this leads to an imbalance. For the sake of this argument i have focused on music, quite simply because it is the industry that is being affected the most by this new digital age. You can find pretty much anything you want online for free somewhere, but this is of course limited to virtual goods or digital information.

In part 3, i want to look further at how the principles of the monetary system cannot be applied in the digital world. For now though, i would like to hope that the collapse of the music industry is the start of something newer and better, the opportunities for artists and musicians to empower themselves have never been greater. Whatever the future holds, people will still want to listen to music and musicians will still want to create it. Until now, huge corporations have controlled music and its consumption, but digital downloading has changed everything. The future may be unclear but the potential is great.

Virtual Reality - Pt 1: The Digital Age

It seems that our lives are becoming increasingly more virtual. Not in the all-encompassing way of films like The Matrix or Lawnmower Man (although its no great stretch of the imagination to envisage a world like that in the future), rather a virtual reality that we have a detachment from that keeps us in the real world. Digital technology has replaced the need for physical items in many aspects of our lives, most prominently entertainment. For many of us our computer has become central, integral even, to our daily business. As consumers, many of our favourite "possessions" exist on our hard drives, likewise a great proportion of our social lives are spent online.

If we look at music, the days of having physical collections of CDs or records taking pride of place in their rack, shelf or strewn about the place possibly not in their correct sleeves are gone, instead replaced by some sort of organised system found in the My Documents folder on your computer. The only physical space required for an extensive music collection is the hard drive itself, which we measure in terms of Gigabytes rather than metres (or feet). The way we acquire music has changed similarly, virtual stores like iTunes or Beatport have replace the traditional record shop providing convenience (instant downloads, pick the tunes you want, no disappointment of finding out the record you want is out of stock) at the cost of the record shop experience (the excitement of looking through the artwork on the way home, the personal touch of talking to the staff and receiving recommendations).

For movie lovers, downloading the latest Hollywood titles, and watching them on your PC connected to a TV or decent monitor, is often better than renting movies from the likes of Blockbuster or LoveFilm, only to find that when its finally in stock the disc is scratched and ends up skipping at the best bit. Again, the convenience of instant downloads comes at the cost of the personal touch of dealing with the film-lovers working at your local rental store. Although the sheer size of movie downloads can also take the "instant" out of the download process.

Keeping up to date with the latest news is even easier now with the multitude of websites that provide breaking stories almost immediately. The need to sit down and flick through pages of crap and adverts in newspapers that tell you what happened yesterday is effectively gone.

MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and the millions of forums and other social websites provide ways of communicating with each other that were practically impossible only a few years ago. We can talk with people all over the world at any time with costs and timezones practically irrelevant.

These are just a few examples of the sort of virtual reality that exists in our lives. Of course, we still exist in physical reality, we still need physical goods, we all need to eat, we all need a roof over our head, our computers, TVs and stereos need manufacturing and the electricity required to power them has to come from somewhere. Watching a film at home is not as good as going to the cinema, listening to music at home is a completely different experience to going to a concert or club event, reading a newspaper on the train to work is often more practical and convenient than surfing the net on a laptop. And of course, social networking sites are no substitute for real socialising and spending time in the company of your friends and loved ones.

Not everyone in the world has access to the technology that we do, while the internet is not exclusively for the rich, it is nevertheless a luxury only available to those who can afford it. For much of the world, this kind of virtual reality is the stuff of fantasy.

The subject of piracy is the root of many debates, with a great deal of differing opinions. The virtual world, not being bound by scarcity in the same way that physical items are, leads many to change the way in which they value the virtual items they "own" (in many cases we own nothing now, instead we merely purchase a license to use). In the virtual world money is not necessary, or at least not in the way it is now. Infact it is only the needs of the physical world that require any sort of financial costs to be applied to digital products. While virtual money exists, and has the same value as its paper companion, the vast amount of legitimate free music, information and software shows that the monetary system as we know it is rapidly becoming outdated.

These last points i will expand on and investigate further in my next post. For now though, i think we can see that while our relationship with the virtual world is more detached than that of the "virtual reality" concept, it is certainly true that the need for physical items has largely been removed in many aspects of our lives, instead replaced by a digital universe (webiverse even) through which we can not only satisfy many of our needs but also achieve so much more than we ever could in the real world alone.

Shitty Internet Explorer

So, i've bin somewhat neglecting my myspace for a while now. Probably got something to do with the time i had the misfortune to be using internet explorer for some web boredom. what the fuck is wrong with my page on it? All the colours are the wrong way round, black n white negatives and shit!!!! The transparency is all wrong too.

Internet explorer is shit! I dont wanna get all techy geeky about this but its true, the fact that the vast majority of people suffer this browser on a day to day basis is a real shame. I dare say that a number of people are unaware of the alternatives (i wont bother mentioning Safari beyond this point cos Macs are a completely different subject that i may well complain about another day).

At the risk of sounding like i'm after some kind of sponsorship deal i have to emphasise how great a program firefox is. Fully customaizable, and 10 times more secure. But thats enough blatant plugging.

I cant help but feel the problem is to do with the shitty commercial capitalist nature of society. By some degree of laziness and ignorance the really good quality programs get ignored in favour of the "industry standard" corporate crap fed to us by the likes of Microsoft and a load of equally bad companies. Firefox is a perfect example of a FREE program that is ignored by the masses happy to have there day-to-day choices decided for them by the establishment. How many of you lot have got Norton on your PC? Another piece of shit commercial application, that not only drains a big chunk of your CPU but can replaced by better quality FREE alternatives.

Theres another attitude that exists aswell, if its free it must be crap! Like the quality of something directly relates to its price. Or worse still, if you aint heard of it it must be crap, like the advertisers never lie!! Lurking behind all the corporate bullshit that dominates the www, there is a massive community of people that make programs and share programs freely, simply because they want to. I'm not talking about cracked copies of overpriced software on piratebay. Im talking about genuine free stuff, made by people who do it for the love. Heres another good site for free bits of techiness: snapfiles

Enough of this advertising on my part, not that i get anything out of this except the pleasure of possibly making someones internet experience better. My point being that we shouldnt just settle for the crap thats fed to us by the corporate industry, the internet offers a place for everyone to be free of that shit, and its not hard to find. Free software is only a small part of this, look at all the good music people are sharing happily online without the all the bullshit of the music biz.

This aint a "Fuck the Establishment" rant, just a little encouragement for people to delve a little deeper online and see whats going on behind the scenes, cos thats where the best stuff is.