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[Michael]

Revolting.   

Let's revolt.

Just found this interesting blog post:

War and Peace in the Global Village: The Terrorist Discourse

Last evening at the McLuhan Program, we hosted a "McLuhan Salon" on this topic. The following longish post are my opening comments at that event.

On September 11, 2001, hijackers presumably organized by Osama bin Laden turned what might be considered the defining technology of the United States of America – namely, television – from a weapon of mass distraction, into a weapon of mass destruction. Not only were the 50,000 people who worked in the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center attacked. 300 million Americans were simultaneously attacked in their homes, living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms. Americans were held captive, to relive that violence again and again, through the video replays of the 24-hour news channels. The cultural and societal reaction of the American leadership in the wake of that disaster instructed antagonistic organizations around the world in precisely what must be done in the ensuing years to lead to the ultimate destruction of that country, with the potential of destroying the entirety of the Western world.

As Marshall McLuhan writes in his book, War and Peace in the Global Village,

In any war the foe studies the resources and characteristics of his attacker as earnestly as the attacker tries to understand the foe in depth. The generals and their staffs discuss and meditate on every aspect of the enemies’ psychology, studying their cultural histories and resources and technologies, so that today war, as it were, has become the little red schoolhouse of the global village. It’s a gory little schoolhouse at that.

In warfare, each opponent attempts to destroy infrastructure, plunder the resources of the land, and demoralize populations. The tactics and weaponry are selected for maximum effectiveness in accomplishing these tasks, with particular attention paid to the last one – demoralizing the population. “When our identity is in danger, we feel certain that we have a mandate for war,” observes McLuhan. Indeed, one can easily make the argument that all wars of the modern era are wars of identity, or at the very least, wars of ideology that is a proxy for identity. If this demoralization can be accomplished, if one side loses its will to fight – not against an enemy, but for the unique defining characteristic of their society – then they will capitulate and come under the control of the victor, who will then impose his own social and cultural definition upon the conquered.

In prior wars, one of the most successful tactics in accomplishing this demoralization was the destruction of habitat: Think of the bombing of London and Dresden, think of deforestation and burning of villages, think of the destruction and bulldozing of towns and settlements, think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cold-war concept of the so-called neutron bomb was not terrifying, since it would instantly kill only people, and spare their environment. Poisoning the water supply, or sending anthrax through the mail is far more effective, since it infiltrates the total environment, rendering it unfit for habitation, and thereby instilling terror.

If terrorism is the use of fear as a weapon, to accomplish military or political objectives, then all modern wars are wars of terror. The tragedies of East Timor, Rwanda, Darfur in Sudan, the Congo, are all, first and foremost, wars of terror. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a prolonged civil war of terror, not unlike Ceausescu’s Romania, or Honecker’s East Germany. Ever-present fear was used as a weapon by a totalitarian leader against his own population, to maintain total control. And the more deftly and effectively that weapon is deployed, the less actual violence is required.

The terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center attacked 300 million people at one blow. As the superstructure of that building began to crumble, so too did the superstructure of the nation itself, that superstructure being its fundamental founding principles, its Constitution and Bill of Rights. It cannot be argued that the USA Patriot Act is not a direct attack on fundamental Constitutional rights and freedoms, regardless of whether one believes it is a justified attack on those freedoms, or not. I find it interesting in the extreme that the extension of the Patriot Act came up for Congressional consideration and passage in the wake of the recent London bombings. Most certainly, it was the rhetoric of fear that carried the day for George W Bush’s re-election in 2004. In essence, spreading fear amongst the population effectively accomplishes the political objective. Currently, the big guns of fear are being rolled out and aimed directly at America’s heartland to bolster flagging support for the war in Iraq.

The lessons that we have learned in the “gory little red schoolhouse of the global village” is that success in modern warfare depends on demoralizing, not necessarily physically destroying, your adversary. That demoralization is most effectively accomplished by attacking the habitat in which your adversary exists. And, as has been most clearly demonstrated in the United States, fear can be used with tremendous efficacy as a weapon in a civil war of terror that divides north from south, east from west, red from blue, and pits neighbour against neighbour.

In the contemporary developed world, we inhabit more than physical space. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that intellectually, socially, politically and culturally, we are increasingly finding our habitat extending to a world that is less and less tangible. We first made our entry into this world in the 1930s and 40s via radio, through the 1950s, 60s and 70s via television, and from the 1990s through to today via instantaneous, multi-way communications. At one time, fear would race through a village by word of mouth, leaving psychological devastation in its wake. Today, as word of mouth has accelerated to word of mouse, fear becomes a far more potent weapon with which to lay waste to the global village.

What better way is there to attack the contemporary habitat of modern humankind than to fly planes into buildings in full view of television cameras. What better way is there to demoralize troops and war profiteers alike than with videos of decapitations. What better way is there to dehumanize and objectify the quote-unquote enemy than by injecting photographs of apparently government-sanctioned torture techniques into the digital zeitgeist. What better way is there to carpet-bomb into submission what may remain of critical thinking and incisive investigative journalism that might challenge political leadership or incite a population to action than with Janet Jackson’s breast, Michael Jackson’s boys, and one missing, blonde white-woman after another. The populace is left reeling, losing its will to fight for the unique defining characteristic of their society, capitulating and coming under the control and social definition of the victor.

In his inaugural address in 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt intoned these now famous words: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Over seventy years later, in the reversal that has resulted from our age of ubiquitous connectivity, the only truly effective weapon available is that nameless, unreasoning unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to liberate an unwitting, and unaware society. Today, the discourse of war and conflict is necessarily a discourse of terror.


BTW - Here's one of the best explanations I've yet read, of why "open-source" software and media matter:

From Virtual Commons To Virtual Enclosures:
Revolution and Counter-Revolution In The Information Age (PDF file)

[Michael]

Larry Lessig, the Net's most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the "ASCAP cartel" to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you've ever seen.


Related:

David Byrne at WIRED

[Jana]

Veterans against the war...
http://ivaw.org/wintersoldier/howtowatch  —piles of testimony to watch.

Note China just complained about America's hypocrisy on the silly human rights watch statement the Gov. just made. http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hZVaNj95dwVAqXz6ciwqiIaVtYDQ
"China on Thursday accused the United States of human rights hypocrisy, as it branded the US invasion of Iraq the "greatest humanitarian disaster" of the modern world."
 

[Michael]

We Are All Pirates

by Edward Baker

3/11/08
Author Matt Mason takes a hard look at how established companies should face the growing threat of copyright piracy.

Given his support of the ascendancy of pirate culture, it should come as no surprise that Matt Mason began his career as a pirate. “I grew up in London, where pirate radio stations — which broadcast illegally or without a license, sometimes from offshore ships and oil rigs — were in abundance,” he said in a recent telephone interview with strategy+business, “and I was a DJ on pirate radio for many years. So I always had this very different idea about what piracy meant and what piracy could be, and the kind of value it could add to society.” In Mason's view, piracy has gone far beyond teenagers illegally downloading copyrighted music to become a part of our culture and a successful business model in its own right, one that legitimate businesses would do well to learn from.

Since his radio days, Mason completed a degree in economics and economic history at the University of Bristol in the U.K., worked for Atlantic Records in the press department and in advertising at Saatchi & Saatchi, and then founded the urban music magazine RWD (pronounced “rewind”). His first book, The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism (Free Press, 2008), examines how interconnected cultural pursuits such as piracy, hip hop, remixing music to make new songs, graffiti, and open source have transformed how we think about using and reusing information.

Mason’s premise: Thanks in great part to the Internet, piracy is becoming more firmly established in our culture and economy. Consequently, it is incumbent on every industry — not just media and entertainment — to come to terms with that reality or at least to try to understand how piracy delivers value, in order to compete with or perhaps even benefit from it.

S+B: In your book, you quote the co-chair of Disney as saying, “Piracy is just another business model.” What does that mean?
MASON: Look at the DVD pirates on Manhattan’s Canal Street. They release films on DVD for US$5 just as Hollywood releases the films in theaters. That business model is in direct opposition to the way Hollywood set up the system. Hollywood’s model depends on exclusive release of films to theaters, followed months later by a DVD release. Yet despite the activity of the pirates, the summer of 2007 was Hollywood’s biggest ever, with movies taking in $4 billion at the box office. That doesn’t add up; if piracy is such a problem, then you would think it would have a negative impact on the box office. Hollywood has simply refused to acknowledge the idea of simultaneous release because they’re so worried about the effect it will have on theater revenues. But according to the evidence, movies in the theater and movies on DVD are two different products. That tells me that if Hollywood accepted the presence of the pirates’ business model, as Disney’s co-chair seems to have, the movie companies could actually learn how to compete with them.

Every company is capable of having its business model turned upside down by piracy, but every business is also capable of competing with that model. The people I refer to as pirates in the book are all people who use information in really unconventional ways. So rather than thinking about how we can stop piracy, let’s consider how we can come up with better ideas by thinking in the same way as the pirates.

S+B: You have said that there are going to be more and more instances of companies encouraging us to share, use, and disseminate information and content more freely. But why should companies be willing to allow people to share?
MASON: The kind of boundaries that used to exist in capitalism are breaking down. Capitalism used to be about whoever owns the means of production calls the tune. Now, it’s about the quality of the ideas you produce. It’s about creativity. That fact is causing a shift whereby companies are reluctantly starting to compete with piracy because they have to. As more people do that, I believe the benefits of making content more freely available and working out other ways to make consumers pay for it are going to become more obvious.

But this shift won’t be easy. Ten years ago, all of the major music labels knew they could sell music online, but they didn’t want to — it wasn’t in their interest. It took an outsider, Steve Jobs, to force the labels to act together and agree to do this. But now, Jobs and iTunes are in the same boat. A licensing model in which people were charged a small fee each time they listened to a song, for instance, would suddenly put iTunes in a much more competitive marketplace. And the notion of licensing copyrighted material would disrupt a lot of other incumbents, even the new ones. It would be really bad for Google, for example, which makes its money by collecting and disseminating other people’s information and putting its own ads around it. But in a licensing model, Google would have to pay for that information, too.

S+B: Have you tried to adopt content-sharing ideas in your own work?
MASON: I’m talking to my publishers about giving away a free e-book version of The Pirate’s Dilemma, which I think would be a really great marketing strategy and would actually help us sell more physical copies of the book. But they’ve been very cautious about doing that because it’s a huge change for them in terms of how they think about what they sell and what they do. In fact, book publishing is a really good example of the pirate’s dilemma. From the author’s point of view, the threat really isn’t piracy; it’s obscurity. Two hundred thousand books are published every year, and the average book sells 500 copies. Against those odds you need as many people reading your book as possible. One of the best ways to do that is to give away an electronic copy in the hopes that people will read it and talk about it, and that it will generate a buzz that leads to the sale of physical copies.

When authors offer free versions of their books, one of two things typically happens. Either people like the book and the pirate copy helps sell print copies or people don’t like the book and so they don’t pay to download it or buy the print version. What is lost by downloading a free version of the book?

Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist, recently said that he had been leaking his own books to BitTorrent (a peer-to-peer downloading site) behind his publisher’s back, and that this had been helping him sell books. He has since created a Web site where his books can be downloaded for free. In Russia, after he made a Russian translation of The Alchemist available on his Web site, Coelho went from selling 1,000 physical copies of The Alchemist a year to selling 1 million copies of all of his books within three years. Now he sells 10 million books a year in Russia.

S+B: Are there any industries that you believe are adapting well to the threat from piracy?
MASON: Yes, the fashion industry. In 2006, Congress began considering extending copyright protection to fashions — which had never before been protected — to try and bring them more in line with European laws, which are designed to protect smaller companies from having their designs stolen immediately by large retailers. Yet even during this reevaluation it was universally accepted that piracy is literally how the fashion industry innovates. Because people are able to copy the 3-D design of garments, they can create trends. And because those trends can be disseminated so quickly and the new rapidly becomes old, we have seasons in fashion. This allows the fashion industry to sell more clothes than if individuals could protect their designs for a long time and trends lasted a couple of years rather than a couple of months. The problem now is that copying is happening so fast in fashion that people are losing sight of the original.

The legal question facing Congress was how to protect the small designer from the potential losses from the copying of their designs. But what was so amazing to me was that everybody involved — the largest companies, the smallest designers, Congress itself — were all in agreement that the ability for people to be able to copy each other to a reasonable degree has to be preserved. You never hear anything remotely like that in the movie or music industries, or in any other industry that involves intellectual property.

S+B: What makes the culture of piracy so effective?
MASON: When you think about the effectiveness of piracy, you also have to consider the impact of remix culture and the open source movement. All three are based on sharing and, ultimately, they’re more powerful than most intellectual property laws because they operate in the public domain, which is indefinable and mutable. The public domain may be defined legally, but where it begins and ends must be viewed culturally. For example, most remixes fall on the wrong side of copyright laws because they involve pirated samples, film clips, music clips, designs, and trademarks that are mashed up and reused. And the average person in the U.S., even if he or she doesn’t illegally download music or movies, violates copyright laws so many times a day, according to John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, that if he or she were sued for just one day’s worth of violations, the damages would amount to about $12.45 million. It involves everything from forwarding an e-mail with another e-mail or a photo attached to taking a photograph with a TV on in the background. All these activities are technically illegal.

But humans are copying machines. We learn by imitating one another. That’s how we learn to speak. That’s how we learn social norms. That’s how culture happens. Everything we do is an invitation to copy. And now, thanks to digitization and the Internet, we can express that in ways that we couldn’t before. The Internet is the ultimate copying machine, and it’s affecting many business models. There are times when piracy is a great idea and there are times when it’s not; that’s why I call it a dilemma. The point is, though, it is not a dead end. It’s in the interest of all who deal with the buying and selling and sharing of ideas to confront piracy and its implications now — that is, to reevaluate their business models so they include ways to capitalize on a freer flow of ideas and on more sharing of information and content.

[marianthi]

I´ve been thinking, after watching a Bond film ad, that a 3-D tabletop version of your Integral wheels, MichaelD, would be marvelous in a roulette form, where a speaker would have to expose all he knows/feels about the area where his marble would fall after a good spin of the roulette - and then he/she would be challenged by the other players.   

Great visuals and colours. What´s the update on all of it?
M.

[jimtzu]

A Free And Self-Governing People

Bill Moyers Video

"It is up to you to fight for the freedoms that makes all other freedoms possible"

Journalist Bill Moyers address the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis, June 7, 2008.





<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/Y0r71L7cojE&amp;hl=en" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/Y0r71L7cojE&amp;hl=en</a>

[jimtzu]

here's a talk by john pilger


Freedom Next Time

Propaganda as Journalism

By John Pilger Video

Australian journalist, author, film maker John Pilger speaks about global media consolidation, war by journalism, US military's quest for domination/hegemony in the post 9/11 era, false history in the guise of 'objective' journalism.

Filmed in Chicago at Socialism 2007: Socialism for the 21st Century by Paul Hubbard. June 16, 2007 Broadcast on Democracy Now - The War and Peace Report



http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4258131083758254736

[Michael]

Thanks again Jim.  I'll look at that when I get a chance later...

Media Permaculture on Reality Sandwich.  Very interesting article.

[Michael]

Good article by Clay Shirky
Source

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.

As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of  various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better? Shouldn’t we try a carrot-and-stick approach, with education and prosecution? And so on. In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason.

The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiency, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard  customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of its most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

* * *

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.

“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers  demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

* * *

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were  books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.

What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the effects of the press circa 1500. To describe life before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before  the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”

Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word, as books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, expanding the market for all publishers, which heightened the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

* * *

If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other. In a notional town with two perfectly balanced newspapers, one paper would eventually generate some small advantage — a breaking story, a key interview — at which point both advertisers and readers would come to prefer it, however slightly. That paper would in turn find it easier to capture the next dollar of advertising, at lower expense, than the competition. This would increase its dominance, which would further deepen those preferences, repeat chorus. The end result is either geographic or demographic segmentation among papers, or one paper holding a monopoly on the local mainstream audience.

For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.

The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard  Daily Racing Form and Christian Science Monitor as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.

The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

* * *

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be  extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, “This points to future ways of managing local information”, and so on. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.

In craigslist’s gradual shift from ‘interesting if minor’ to ‘essential and transformative’, there is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.

Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s  you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like  ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.

[Francis]

the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.

“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers  demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

It's like the telephone replacing the telegraph. Guess we'll just have to adapt. The people that used to get rich printing news are going to be out of work. Boo hoo.