Not to diminish Wikipedia’s importance in the encyclopedia world and Britannica’s decision, but there are a lot of reasons why a choice made in 1768 to distribute 32 volumes of printed book might be worth re-evaluating in 2012. Wikipedia’s open and collaborative authorship certainly has its advantages, but Carmody identifies a more important difference between the two organizations: Britannica’s business depended on the books being seen as a “marker of prestige.” As the PC toppled the encyclopedia as the “purchasable ‘edge’ for over-anxious parents,” the bundle fell apart and the value proposition no longer made sense for most of the market.
Far from being the inevitable victory of open over closed then, Britannica’s announcement represents the complex result of values decoupled. This story is especially important for independent bookstores and public libraries to understand; they are subject to the same forces.
A little over two years ago, Clay Shirky wrote a great essay about local bookstores as a social hub that speaks to this problem. In both cases, sales numbers are easily measured and easy to fixate on, but they are secondary to factors that are much less easily measured. For Britannica consumers, there’s the value of owning a 32-volume printed encyclopedia. That value might just not exist anymore; if that’s true, they’ve made the right decision to move away from a printed edition. (It’s probably true. According to the New York Times article about the announcement, less than 1% of Britannica’s revenue was coming from print sales.)
But there are still many compelling arguments for the side-effect values of a bookstore or library as an inviting physical space dedicated to the exchange of information, even as communities and their information consumption preferences change. Keeping the bookstore’s ability to deliver these values coupled with the sale of paper books would be a mistake.
Institutions like bookstores and libraries (and newspapers, record labels, movie studios, etc.) are all dealing to a greater or lesser extent with the problem of bundle failure. That is to say: they can no longer count on subsidizing the real value they deliver with more monetizable ancillary functions. Instead, they have to take a critical look at what people value about them and figure out how to charge for it.
I’m sure it was a hard decision after a quarter millennium of print, but Britannica made the right move jettisoning a product that people weren’t interested in to focus on the one that they were. I really want bookstores and libraries to continue to succeed in the years to come, in no small part because I value the products and services they provide that I can’t directly pay for. I hope they can do the introspection to separate their core values from their most easily-measured ones in order to make the difficult decisions to make it work.
I’ve been thinking a lot about two different kinds of tokens lately. One is a fare token, which I’ve been thinking about as it relates to public transit and locational privacy. Another is a currency token, which has come up in the last few weeks as I’m reading Debt by David Graeber. Obviously there’s some overlap there, but thinking about the ways in which they differ has been really interesting, and there’s enough weird history of each to fill a Thomas Pynchon novel.
Fare tokens are intriguing as artifacts of a transit system, which are pretty much always interesting to me. Like system maps, which I’ve also thought about a bit, fare tokens are necessarily unique to one place and provide a physical history of that system’s character and aesthetic. They’re also ephemeral, anonymous, and completely commoditized. There’s some sort of paradox there: something inherently interesting about objects that are so non-descript. (Rick Prelinger put it well in a story in the New York Times this weekend: “As time passes, the works we tried to junk often prove more interesting than the ones we chose to save.”)
As a privacy-preserving technology, fare tokens are great. Entrance into a public transit system should be a question of authorization: are you permitted to do what you’re trying to do? The answer to that should only be contingent on whether or not you’ve paid the fare, which is a piece of data the token can communicate just fine. Too often, though, fare systems first ask who you are. Swiping (or tapping) a fare card gives the system an identifier, which it runs against a database to see whether that identifier is tied to a paid fare. There are tempting reasons to go with the latter scheme — a lost card can be replaced because the value is recorded, and the system can gather and use data about riding patterns in order to target improvements — but there’s a trade-off with rider privacy.
(To my mind, the trade-off is akin to that between database loyalty programs, like Target’s recently documented “Guest ID” system and punch-card loyalty programs. Both provide rewards to return customers, but one is more privacy-friendly and generates less monetizable data.)
Of course, another issue with letting customers carry around the authorization information in their own token is that it depends on the issuer’s ability to reliably generate and verify their own tokens. One interesting anecdote I found out about this weekend was the New York City “Token War” with Connecticut. Tokens for Connecticut Turnpike tolls were the same size and shape as NYC subway fares but cost much less, which led to Connecticut Turnpike tokens ending up in NYCTA collection boxes. Connecticut promised to change the shape of their tokens, but failed to do so for years. I’m not sure how it ended: one NY Times article cited on the issue’s Wikipedia page but unavailable online suggests it happened when Connecticut discontinued their toll charges and paid the NYCTA for all the collected tokens; another article available online says it ended when the NYCTA rewired their turnstiles.
On the other hand, you’ve got currency tokens, which make up the field of “exonumia“. These tokens are like coins, but issued by somebody other than the government. Sometimes these tokens really take off, as in the case of the Strachan and Co Trade Tokens that were South Africa’s first circulating indigenous currency.1
In the US, there were a series of “hard-times tokens” which circulated as currency between about 1833 and 1843, and were only officially outlawed in 1857. One of the most prominent examples was the endearingly named Feuchtwanger cent, which is now pretty collectible by exonumismatists. Lewis Feuchtwanger’s story is interesting for his persistence in minting these coins and his attempts to get them recognized officially. His appeals to Congress give the story a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington vibe — a film whose plot also turns on a coin, albeit a tossed one.
In any case, the parallels between these hard-times tokens and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin seem straightforward, but they’re not ones I’ve seen pointed out elsewhere. Bitcoin’s got someproblems, but supporters who’ve read Cryptonomicon are quick to point out the benefits: things like anonymous transactions, the ground-up minting and lack of reliance on a centralized nation-state, and the security of the currency against counterfeiting. These are laudable goals, and maybe last delivered on in the hard times era. Lewis Feuchtwanger would be proud.
It’s not often that Wikipedia disappoints, but I can’t find any real information there about these coins. Instead, there’s a charmingly Web 1.0 site, which I really like. ↩
In the firestorm that followed, many people — including some US Representatives — called on Apple raise the walls of their garden and address the issue by limiting app access to the address book and notifying users when the application requests access. Apple agreed, and will be introducing those changes in a future version of iOS.
So case closed. Until this last weekend, when the (London) Sunday Times reported that many popular mobile apps, including Facebook for Android, were “reading” user text messages. (Incidentally, the Sunday Times article is behind a paywall, and I haven’t seen a copy of the original article.) Extrapolating from other articles covering the Times “scoop”, it looks like the story is likely about the permissions apps typically request during the installation process.
Apps that overreach in their requested permissions are a bad thing, but they’re not new, and they’re not a smoking gun: developers may have legitimate and non-obvious reasons for requesting certain permissions, and they may require them for reasons that aren’t immediately clear to the end user. Facebook, for its part, denied “reading of user text messages” and explained that the app requires SMS read/write to test an as-yet-unreleased feature.
These two stories follow different arcs, but the second one certainly seems to complicate the first. The clickwrap privacy policy that Apple agreed to require is exactly the sort of permission screen that has been ignored so consistently that a major newspaper decided to publish it as a scoop.
Raising the garden walls is too easy an answer to a hard question. The response to these two privacy stories makes clear that people want their privacy to be respected, which requires effort and resources on the part of the developer. How do we convince developers that those expenses are worth the cost before a PR fiasco about their privacy practices? I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s not expanding clickwrap privacy policies.
I’m a sucker for stories that are tied to places I know. When I first read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, I was only glancingly familiar with most of the Bay Area settings for the different scenes. Now I spend time every day in the Mission, where most of the action takes place, and have a much better feel for the character of the location.
One critical scene, though, takes place outside of the Mission in a place called the Sutro Baths. The Baths are way out on the northwestern corner of the peninsula, and Doctorow calls them “San Francisco’s authentic fake Roman ruins”. They were built in 1896 as the world’s largest indoor bathing house, and left to collapse after a 1966 fire destroyed most of the structure. (In Little Brother, Doctorow says the fire was started by the owners to collect insurance money. I don’t know if that’s true.)
In 1897, Thomas Edison recorded two videos of the attraction, which are available through the Library of Congress: one, two. I made this animated gif from one of them.
I saw the play adaptation of the book this weekend, and I was reminded of this cool location that I hadn’t seen before. So I did some research and decided to make a trip out there with my buddy Robb. I took a handful of pictures which don’t really do the location justice.
The ruins are definitely worth seeing. Bring a jacket, though, because it gets very windy in that part of the city. It’s a bit of a trek to get there on public transport, but mostly a straight shot.
It’s hard to ignore successes in middleman elimination like Radiohead’s In Rainbows, NiN’s Ghosts I-IV, Louis C.K.’s Shameless and the Double Fine Adventure. But they’re not immune to criticism either. Sure, it works for them — the argument goes — but they’re already famous. And the legacy players have always served (at least) two roles; while the Internet may beat them for distribution, it’s not as good for discovery.
The most ready response to this, I think, is that there are also plenty of examples of the Internet “discovering” artists: Amanda Hocking, the 27-year-old self-publishing millionaire; J.A. Konrath, who turned down a $500,000 contract to self-publish; Jonathan Coulton, one of my favorite musicians, to name a few. Cory Doctorow has said (I can’t track the quote down, unfortunately) that his CC publishing was only dismissed because he was unknown and could afford to experiment until it was dismissed because he was famous and could count on people buying copies.
But that response isn’t the most interesting one to me. What’s interesting is the underlying embedded question: is there an appropriate “yield” we should seek for artists achieving commercial success? What factors influence that number — pursuit of the social good, some kind of commitment to artists, something else entirely? Should the likelihood of success be dependent on commercial viability, or some other quality like “artistic value”?
One thought strikes me immediately while considering the question. The system we’ve had in place until now has been a pretty awful one for discovery. Picking up a guitar, or a video camera, or a paintbrush has never been a “secure” career path, has it? I don’t know how one would quantify what the ratio of aspiring to commercially successful artists was in, say, the second half of the 20th century, but I imagine it’s vanishingly small. Without that quantification, and without settling on an ideal ratio, I think we can say neither which direction things are moving, nor whether it’s the right one.
That (some percentage) of artists and authors deserve to derive a living from the right to copy their work is a relatively new idea, sometimes attributed to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. I like art and creativity, and while I don’t believe it’d go away absent monopolies like copyright — Mozart and Shakespeare, et al, managed to do some pretty good things without it — I’m happy to cede a little common ground to make the lives and livelihood of artists easier.
It’s worth nothing, though, that some people (and even some artists) are willing to go further. The filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola gave a great interview last year where he addressed this point: “I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?” And the aforementioned Jonathan Coulton has made some really thought-provoking comments on the issue:
making money from art is not a human right. It so happens that technological and societal blahbity bloos have conspired to create a situation where selling songs about monkeys and robots is a viable business, but for most of human history people have NOT paid for art. I don’t want this to happen again, and I would be very sad if this came to pass, but it’s not up to me to decide. We are constantly demonstrating through our actions what we believe to be the norms for acquiring and consuming content.
These are hard questions, and I don’t know the answers. But I think they’re worth discussing before we ask new questions on top of them. If we’re going to ask whether the Internet is capable of making enough artists successful we have to first ask how much is enough, what we call successful, and why we’ve made these decisions.
