08.12.10: “Don’t wash the dishes, I’m going to take a shower!”

Big brouhaha as Google and Verizon propose an arrangement which, in my understanding, constitutes a second Internet, a faster Internet, that would be created for medical, industrial and…here it comes…entertainment usage. This 2nd Internet would not be open to the public, at least not for free. So, when your streaming movie stutters and stops because little sister is video Skyping her boyfriend in the next room, you’ll say to yourself, “Hey, I thought the Internet bandwidth was, um, just there, like air.”

Despite Moore’s Law the recent exponential growth expansion of some online capabilities is slowing down in certain areas. I noticed when traveling on a tour bus with wi-fi (pretty good that we had wi-fi!) that when some band members began using video Skype to chat to their loved ones, pretty soon the rest of us couldn’t get even an email in or out. Does Net Neutrality mean whoever gets to the table first gets the whole pie? I realized that with all these companies that are making a business out of the — up til now — unlimited use of high bandwidth media (YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo, Pandora, Spotify, Netflix, Apple TV…well, you get the idea), all that data sucks up most of what is in the pipeline. HD streaming movies soon to come? Forget it.

Does anyone remember the days when you’d yell out, “Don’t wash the dishes, I’m going to take a shower!”? (For those who don’t, it was because a typical residential hot water heater didn’t hold enough hot water to provide for both usages simultaneously.)

I’m not sure the two-tiered model is the best idea — but I’m glad they are beginning to face up to this inevitability. More and more businesses are emerging based on an assumption that consumers will be able to upload and download limitless amounts of data for a fixed monthly cable fee to their heart’s content. It’s like charging a flat fee for water, and then one day some segment of the population decides they’re going to water their golf course-sized lawns and also add a pool. The reservoirs, the farms and local industry would dry up and shrivel instantly.

Phone companies have tiered data plans — if you watch a lot of TV using a mobile network on your phone, you will pay for it. I’m not sure why the same sort of idea isn’t acceptable for regular Internet. Not that the phone companies should charge if you use wi-fi on your phone — but a kind of metered data use for Internet might be reasonable. Maybe wi-fi should be free for the whole country in a capacity that allows for basic emails and some browsing, but for heavy media usage and data transfer a meter could start clicking?

Danielle Spencer, Todomundo Studio Manager, responds:
Net neutrality is primarily about whether the Internet Service Providers can prioritize different types of data. The issue of tiered pricing for consumers' bandwidth usage is related but that's not the main question right now. You ask, "Does net neutrality mean whoever gets to the table first gets the whole pie?" But in fact without net neutrality it's the large corporations who are already at the table who will get the whole pie and then some. When the Fox News website streams to your household twenty times faster than the local TV station's, it'll be because Fox has paid Verizon to give consumers faster access — and that will be a barrier to entry for smaller and less wealthy corporations.

DB:
I still feel that some sort of tiered system is inevitable…but yes, one hopes it doesn't prioritize Fox or anyone else. Maybe the answer is a pricing tier for customers (not providers) in which access to content is equal at each level? Then the customer decides to pay for extra speed, not the provider. That preserves neutrality, in the sense that big companies don't have an unfair advantage.

DS:
We already have tiered pricing for consumers. For wired internet (dialup, cable, DSL, fiber optic) we pay very different rates based on maximum bandwidth usage. For mobile phones, we tend to pay based on total data usage. Now, we could implement plans for wired internet based on total usage rather than bandwidth, and it wouldn't violate the principles of net neutrality. Indeed what you describe — that at a given level everything is equal — is the fundamental principle of net neutrality. The key distinction is whether you the consumer are paying more for more speed/data, or are you paying more for the same amount of data coming from Wikipedia than from Fox because RCN Cable has decided to charge different rates?

See also: "You Get What You Pay For"

08.09.10: The End of News, Part II

We’ve seen way too many articles recently about newspapers in financial trouble: closing bureaus, cutting back on commissioned pieces that require in-depth reporting, and erecting paywalls for their online editions in an attempt to reverse the exodus of subscribers expecting to get all their news for free. While the physical print model of news journals might disappear relatively soon — which will instantly eliminate any such news source from the 1/5 of Americans who rarely use or have access to the Internet, and don’t use smart phones — it doesn’t mean that what they do also needs to end. As the future of these institutions seems increasingly in peril, I recently began to notice some of the incredibly important things they do and have done.

In the midst of further research for Here Lies Love (someday it will see the light of day as a performance!), I read that it was the San Jose Mercury News that exposed the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth. (This would have been in the ’80s.) The Philippine press was, of course, heavily censored at the time, so they couldn’t research or write about such things. This story, which of course filtered back to the Philippines, wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back over there, but it was significant in opening the eyes of the Philippine populace to what was going on behind the curtain of the New Society.

In July there was a massive series in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America” (it sounds like a Team America sequel, but it’s real) detailing the massive spending and expansion of a big-beyond-belief series of agencies and outside contractors all engaged in “anti terrorist” activities. It’s hugely expensive, out of control and unaccountable. Also ineffective. It’s a huge exposé, and all the information was already public knowledge, though it required years of digging and organization to assemble a collection of coherent articles.

Just today The New York Times ran a piece about little Portugal managing to power 45% of its grid using sustainable energy after only 5 years of work (on solar, wind arrays and restructuring state utility companies). The obvious implication, to me — from the almost editorial-like nature of the article — was, “Why can’t we, the richest nation on earth, do this?” (Sustainable energy use in the US is barely 5%, and at present rate and with present policies might not catch up to Portugal in our lifetimes.) The article, as I see it, is a goad, a prod, a provocation — and proof that yes, it can be done. But not when you give oil companies massive tax breaks and offer them huge financial incentive programs; not when you don’t enforce the off shore drilling regulations that exist; and certainly not when oil guys were running the government.

These are just three examples. None of this information — or rather, the organized presentation of this information — would have come through other institutions. They simply don’t have the resources that print or TV have.

So, as we watch print media and the press struggle financially, I wonder what is to become of this segment of our democracy that is sometimes referred to as the fourth estate. This country and many others were founded on the idea that a free and open press constitutes, effectively, a separate wing of the government — keeping the other branches honest, and exposing stuff that the government, lobbyists, the military or large corporations would prefer to keep hidden. Checks and balances.

Not everyone agrees that the fourth estate is a positive force. Sometimes it’s likened to a mob, sometimes to a pack of gossips, muckrakers and scandal mongers who simply stir things up for their own pleasure, and throw their critical weight around as a way of exorcising personal psychological demons. As a performing artist I’ve had moments of agreeing with this latter assessment. But what if no one, no agency or medium, had enough popularity, readership or weight to expose situations or inform the public about some of this stuff? — never mind biased music writers. An ignorant public is a gullible public, a bunch of suckers, ripe for plucking.

The broadcast press — radio and TV — who could have picked up the slack have mostly imploded as far as serving this function. (NPR and PBS don’t have the budgets, and PBS was also under politically motivated attack.) The provocations and lies of Fox, and the celebrity focus and lack of investigation of most of the rest, render what could have been a real alternative to print invalid.

Where there used to be the occasional in-depth series on TV news shows, now there is rumormongering, inciting fear and outright lies. Most Americans get their news from TV, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they think all Muslims are somehow guilty for 9/11 or that Saddam Hussein was connected to al Qaeda.

Although we emphasize freedom of the press, shout about it and hold it up as something worth fighting for, that freedom is worthless and irrelevant if it’s rendered nearly invisible and virtually inaudible. As they used to say in Soviet Russia: when nothing was permitted, everything was important, and now that everything is permitted, nothing is important. In the Soviet days of samizdat pamphlets, “news” carried weight, and people met and talked about what they’d heard or read. But with Russia approaching Italy’s standing as a land of media awash in bimbos, game shows and corruption, most serious news that isn’t propaganda is next to invisible in the capitalist fog of anything for entertainment.

It’s not exactly true that everything is permitted anymore, what with Putin’s crew assassinating any dissenting politician or critical journalist, but you get the point: freedom of the press approaches meaninglessness as any serious work increasingly becomes discouraged because it doesn’t sell, and the lowest common denominator of journalism takes over. Dictators don’t need to take repressive measures to silence criticism, they just need to be more entertaining.

What about the Internet? Are there web institutions or investigative sites that will step in when print journalism can’t afford to fund years of investigation and research anymore? Drudge Report? The Smoking Gun? Wikileaks? Huffington? It’s a running joke to think that you might threaten someone who had wronged you or who was harming others by saying, “Beware the power of the blogosphere!” — though we know the blogosphere has indeed righted some wrongs and uncovered injustices. But it’s not as powerful and doesn’t have the resources that the press once had.

I’m glad these online institutions exist, and the Wikileak of the Afghan material will speed the end of an invasion whose plan and purpose was never thought out in the first place. But sometimes it’s not enough to leak, cull and aggregate. Research and analysis that takes time (and money) can have a larger effect on the public and their representatives than the biggest mountains of data.

Once again though, if 1/5 of the country doesn’t or can’t or won’t use the Internet, then when and if these online alternatives become the main source for news, those people will instantly be completely disenfranchised. They will be like serfs who aren’t taught to read because, well, why bother?

If one accepts that a democracy without an informed citizenry isn’t a democracy and shouldn’t refer to itself as one, then do we need to rethink how a democracy can work in our culture the near future? Some think the hive mind and self-regulating social networks are a model — that when everyone can speak and everyone is connected then the intelligence and the checks and balances will emerge all by themselves — but I’m not sure I’m ready to believe that millions of people with very little insight and almost no information can somehow magically turn into one smart collective entity.

That said, our cells don’t know what we (think we) know — individual cells don’t all “know” how to make a whole person, for example — but in a structural sense, actually, they do. The DNA for a whole person is contained in every cell, but it’s maybe less a complete blueprint than a small (relatively, for what it accomplishes) set of rules. Like swooping, flocking birds, fish or thousands of other creatures, the behavior of some groups appears to be intelligent, but it’s not. Not in the sense of being self-aware. Is that the model for a future society of “idiots” — a kind of emergent evolutionary structure? Everyone would be given a few basic rules to follow — as if instinctively — and then a whole society eventually emerges from that? It’s more like an ant colony than what we have now. It works for them. Do we want to be more like the ants?

Part I: No More News