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I started thinking a few days ago about how the digitization and networking of so much of what we hold dear has changed things. I see that in my lifetime I will witness the end of books, or most of them, physical copies of recorded music and probably physical newspapers too. Stuff that’s been around for a thousand years will be gone in my lifetime! Film based photography is pretty much a remnant, an art form, an artisanal craft used by fine artists and high-end fashion photographers. And writing letters to one another? On paper? And dropping them in the mailbox? When was the last time I wrote and mailed a physical letter? All those academic books filled with Auden’s or Jane Austen’s letters — it’s hard to imagine a collection of someone’s text messages, tweets and e-mails. I suspect that television as we know it will be gone soon as well. All right, film and recorded music have only been around a hundred or so years, but books! All of which led me back to wondering — how did this get started?
The Internet, the World Wide Web, as much of a boon as it has been, has left an awful lot of wreckage in its wake, beyond just the elimination of those formats we thought of as eternal and the industries that produced and delivered them. Interconnectivity has facilitated the loss of privacy of many of the world’s citizens. We’ve been liberated and captured at the same time. I sense that the loss of privacy — which to me seems inevitable — is part and parcel of the whole project. You can’t have efficient search algorithms, cloud computing and digitized everything and anything and expect to retain the anonymity of the past.
Security races to keep up, but I wonder if the dream of unlimited access and personal and corporate data security aren’t simply incompatible. Maybe we just can’t have them both. Maybe we need to throw up our hands and give in. Stop resisting and surrender. Live totally and completely in public. The world would truly be the village that McLuhan predicted — a small town where everyone does know your business. Maybe that would keep us honest, and push the realization that as custodians of the planet we really are all in this together.
This “creative destruction” began in the ’60s, as did many things that we now both love and regret, and it was initially a spinoff of a project funded by US military agencies. The military (along with the space agency) gave us Velcro and (I believe) cheap integrated circuits (i.e. gizmolandia), as well as the blowback that helped nurture the current mess in the Middle East, South America and Afghanistan. The Internet’s connection to the military, as much as I would love it to be a big secret conspiracy, seems a lot more benign than that. Mephistopheles came to Faust in the form of a poodle. After all…in some versions of the story, he cannot enter your house unbidden — you have to invite him in, like a vampire.
One man foresaw a global network before any such thing was close to being possible. J. C. R. Licklider (sounds like a character in a Coen bros movie!) envisioned, in a 1960 paper called Man-Computer Symbiosis, "A network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines…[which provided] the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic functions." [Source]
In other words, he saw it all coming.
[Source]
Is this man the antichrist? Or merely a prophet?
In a weird coincidence, Licklider began his career studying psychoacoustics (more on that later), and wrote a paper called “Duplex Theory of Pitch Perception” in 1951 that forms the basis of contemporary concepts of how we perceive pitch, even though it sounds like it might be about two-story apartments with uneven floors. That the man who predicted a worldwide information exchange network was initially interested in how we perceive music is slightly uncanny.
More about Licklider from Wikipedia:
“His ideas foretold of graphical computing, point-and-click interfaces, digital libraries, e-commerce, online banking, and software that would exist on a network and migrate wherever it was needed. He has been called ‘computing's Johnny Appleseed’ for having planted the seeds of computing in the digital age.”
Now, it’s been pointed out that he didn’t actually invent any of this stuff — he merely “planted the seed.” But often it seems that putting out the idea that something might be possible encourages others to actually make it possible. In a way, to imagine is to create.
In the ’50s, Licklider “worked on a Cold War project known as Semi Automatic Ground Environment (better known by its [weirdly appropriate] acronym ‘SAGE’) which was designed to create a computer-aided air defense system. The SAGE system included computers that collected and presented data to a human operator, who then chose the appropriate response. In 1957 he…conducted the first public demonstration of time-sharing,” [Source] which is when multiple parties can share the use of a single large computer. And in 1958, he became president of the Acoustical Society of America.
“He played a similar role in conceiving of and funding early networking research, most notably the ARPANET [acknowledged to be the predecessor to the Internet]. His 1968 paper on The Computer as a Communication Device predicts the use of computer networks to support communities of common interest and collaboration without regard to location.” [Source]
“Without regard to location”— the phrase resonates for me. It implies disincorporation — an out-of-body experience. In this case, it’s data that has no fixed place, no physical manifestation. But I sense it’s happening to us, too.
I had thought that the Internet began with the linking of some military computers in the Pentagon (ARPANET) in 1969, and that this network was an experimental project to create a system which was specifically designed so that its data could survive a nuclear attack. It turns out my hunch was wrong, although the military were indeed involved in funding the research. ARPANET (which Licklider was involved with) did give birth to internet protocols — how computers “talk” to one another — sometime later in the 1970s, but it was not, it seems, all about securing secret data from the electromagnetic pulses associated with nuclear weapons.
Bob Taylor, the Pentagon official who was in charge of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (or ARPANET) program, insists that its purpose was not military, but scientific. Though we might take whatever the Pentagon says with a big grain of salt, he could be telling the truth. Larry Roberts, who was employed by Taylor to build the Network, states that ARPANET was never intended to link people or act as a communications and information facility. So, the evolution into the Internet was completely unintentional, though Licklider foresaw it. ARPANET was primarily about finding a more efficient way of time-sharing.
Those were the days when computers looked like this:
They were extremely expensive, and there weren’t a lot of them, so many people, like my friend C’s brother, made a good living managing access to them. Time-sharing was a big issue. If however, access could be accomplished remotely, through a network, then the efficiency of the time-sharing would be increased. Time-sharing via these networks was focused on making it possible for research organizations (and the military) to use the processing power of other institutions’ computers when they had laborious calculations to do, or when someone else's facility might do the job better.
Because this research (used to develop ARPANET) was government-funded, its use was restricted to the military and university research facilities — C’s brother couldn’t use it to create or enhance the commercial enterprise he had established to manage computer access, for example.
“During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational institutions, and even to a growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects or providing services to those who were.” [Source]
We can see by the involvement of these companies that the line between non-commercial use and commercial and public access was already getting fuzzy.
“Several other branches of the U.S. government, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy (DOE) became heavily involved in Internet research and started development of a successor to ARPANET. In the mid 1980s, all three of these branches developed the first Wide Area Networks based on TCP/IP.
“In 1984 the NSF…supported departments without such sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange. [For those who don’t remember or are too young, one used to access the Internet and send e-mail by modems that would “dial-up” using regular phone lines…a web page in this era would take many minutes to load; these were NOT the good old days in that sense.] This grew into the NSFNet backbone, established in 1986, and was intended to connect and provide access to a number of supercomputing centers established by the NSF.
“In 1992, Congress allowed commercial activity on NSFNet with the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act, permitting NSFNet to interconnect with commercial networks. University users were outraged at the idea of noneducational use of their networks. Eventually, it was the commercial Internet service providers who brought prices low enough that junior colleges and other schools could afford to participate in the new arenas of education and research […and soon the rest of us].
“By 1990, ARPANET had been overtaken and replaced by newer networking technologies and the project came to a close.” [Source]
The mother, seed or egg that gave birth to the Internet was gone, and the floodgates had opened.
By the mid-’90s, access became easy enough that the commercialization of the Internet proceeded rapidly. I wondered to myself if the military kept a parallel World Wide Web, inaccessible to civilians, since they were so involved in the early stages of its development. They do, or did — it was called MILNET.
[Source]
A quarter of the earth’s people now use the Internet and the World Wide Web. We don’t know how many use MILNET. Finland and France are about to make Internet access a right, like a legal right to a trial, free speech or health services (well, these rights exist in some countries). The Finns want everyone in their entire country to have broadband (5mb) in a few years. (FYI, 5mb allows streaming video like most of us can see now, 10mb would allow HD streaming video and 100mb, which the Finnish government proposes offering by 2015, would, well, increase not only ease of access to information, but interactivity on a level and with repercussions we can hardly imagine.)
In the Meantime
While these networks were evolving, there were simultaneously a number of innovations and technological breakthroughs that allowed for the digitization of all sorts of media — the stuff that would soon be flying around those same networks.
The technology that allowed sound information (and soon all other information) to be digitized was largely developed by the phone companies. Bell Labs, a research division of AT&T, wanted to find more efficient and reliable ways of transmitting phone conversations. Phone lines up until that time were all analog, and with that technology the only way to squeeze more calls through a line was by rolling off the high and low frequencies, and turning the resulting lo-fi sound into waves that could run in parallel without interfering with one another — like terrestrial radio transmissions. TV and radio communications had the same problems.
Bell Labs was huge, and they had branches in many states, most of which are closed now. They invented the transistor and the semiconductors that made the integrated circuits in our tiny devices possible, they developed the laser — the list goes on and on. Their scientists won a lot of Nobel prizes.
When Bell Labs figured out how to digitize sound — to, in effect, sample a sound wave and slice it into tiny bits in a way that was not prohibitively expensive and that still left the human voice recognizable — they applied it to long distance calls, switchers and all manner of phone technology, allowing more calls to be made simultaneously, especially considering the limitations imposed by underwater cables. Much of the research regarding what makes a sound understandable (like a voice, in AT&T’s case) involves applying lessons from the science of psychoacoustics — how the brain perceives sound in all its aspects. We’re back to Licklider!
Out of this combination of psychoacoustic and technical research emerged digital equipment that was used in, among other places, recording studios — where I saw this technology. In the ’70s, the Harmonizers and digital delays that appeared little by little were in effect primitive samplers — the samples were usually less than a second long. These were quickly followed by machines that could hold longer samples of greater resolution, and manipulate those “sounds” more freely (clumps of data more than sounds, technically). All sorts of weirdness resulted. Bell Labs was involved in manufacturing a sound processor called a vocoder that would preserve certain aspects of talking (or singing), like speech formants — the shape of the sound apart from its pitch. Using this machine one could transmit these aspects of the voice separate from the rest of the vocalization in ways that rendered them unintelligible. One use for this was a sort of cryptology for the voice — a garbling that could be “decoded” at the other end. These machines were also adapted for music production. Here is Kraftwerk’s vocoder, made especially for them:
[Source]
I once used a vocoder borrowed from Bernie Krause when Eno and I did the Bush of Ghosts record. It was beautifully made, but rather complicated and very expensive.
A Harmonizer cost thousands of dollars, a digital reverb set a studio back maybe 10K, and a full-fledged sampling device like a Fairlight or later the Synclavier cost much, much more. But soon the price of memory and processing dropped, and the technology became more affordable. Inexpensive Akai samplers became the backbone of music like hip hop and DJ mixes, and sampled or digitally derived drum sounds took the place of live drummers in many recordings. And we were off to the races, for better or worse. With the digitization of sound, digital recording and eventually the CD became possible — and not too long after that, the capacity and speed of home computers was sufficient to record, archive, and process music.
Some years ago I visited Bell Labs and was shown the famous anechoic (perfect, sound absorbent) chamber. This was where John Cage claimed that he could hear both his heart pounding and the high-pitched whine of his nervous system. His insight was that true silence doesn’t exist — even if we can block out everything else, we can’t stop hearing ourselves.
Here is one such chamber:
[Source]
They also showed me a processor that could squeeze what seemed to the ear to be CD-quality sound into a miniscule bandwidth. I’m not sure, but I believe encoding music as MP3s had at that date already been invented in Germany, so this compressing/encoding was not a big surprise — but like most people, I worried that something in the quality of the music might have been sacrificed in this rezzing down process. I was right, but MP3s have improved quite a bit since then, and now I listen to most of the music I own in that format. I believe what Bell Labs was working on is used for satellite radio — getting more hi-fi sound into smaller transmissions.
In 1988 I went with designer Tibor Kalman to visit a printing studio on Long Island. It had a machine that could digitize and then subtly manipulate images (we wanted to “improve” the image on a Talking Heads record cover). This machine was, like those early computers, incredibly expensive and rare — we had to go to it (it couldn’t be brought to the design studio), and we had to book time in advance. Sytex I think it was called. This was exciting, but its cost and rarity meant we didn’t think much about incorporating its talents into more projects at that time.
After a while, though, the price of scanning dropped, and manipulating scanned images using something called Photoshop became common. Who would buy a film camera these days? Who buys film for their old camera? There are some holdouts, and I have no doubt that there is a richness or at least some special qualities that have been lost, but, well, for most of us, the trade-off seems fair — and inevitable. Needless to say, as these images became digitized they could enter the river of networked data.
Photojournalism went digital a number of years ago. In the beginning, the photographers, realizing that their images would be reproduced in newspapers no larger than 8x10 (if that), didn’t need to shoot at the highest available resolution on their new digital cameras, allowing them to squeeze more images onto their data chips — and giving them fewer problems with storage and developing in the field. To compare these low-res images to video, it’d be like if movies past a certain date were all captured at the quality of YouTube files. While researching archival news footage at some point, I discovered that when it migrated to videotape from 16mm film, the quality went way down.
The confluence of digitized media and the capability of digital information to be shared, transmitted and stored anywhere in the world — this volatile, disembodied mixture that Licklider predicted and whose seed he planted — has, duh, had a huge effect on countless institutions. Many that deal with physical objects — newsstands, record stores, bookstores — will all go away, along with their support structures: trucks, warehouses and all the people that worked in those places. For many of us this is not all bad. The record stores like Sam Goody or Coconuts were never great experiences.
Maybe the first institution to disappear almost completely as a result of this process was the letter. Conventional mail still exists — I get bills, junk mail and announcements — but communication related to my work and between my friends and me is almost all by e-mail or text, as has been for a while.
Television, not a big part of my life for quite a number of years anyway, is bound to migrate online and become something very different.
It’s not so surprising to witness the end of many of the delivery systems for recorded music — vinyl, cassettes and CDs. Somehow those changed from one form to another so rapidly over the decades that to see them all go away isn’t that much of a shock. I don’t really miss them all that much, to be honest. But to imagine that I might live to see the end of print — books, newspapers and many magazines — is mind-boggling. Publishers and news organizations might argue that they are not like the music business, but the patterns are too similar to ignore, except by those who don’t want to see them. Print and books have remained more or less unchanged since Gutenberg, but all that seems about to become history.
I’m not advocating trying to stop this — it all seems inevitable, and the access to information and convenience will be unprecedented — although without newspapers as a Fourth Estate, a check and balance, democracy as we were taught it, will not be, um, the same. We can’t rely on bloggers to police the entire government. Danielle comments, however, that the death of physical newspapers isn’t the same as the death of journalism — if the NY Times can find a way to make money as with digital distribution, it will continue to provide a similar function in society. Whether that will be possible is still an open question — but digitization doesn’t necessarily equal death, at least not yet.
The End of Privacy
Now that the Internet and the World Wide Web have enabled data, content and information to be shuttled anywhere in the world — even around China, sometimes — it seems inevitable that the flow goes both ways, or actually in many ways. The ability to access the Internet is incredibly useful to us and we can’t imagine life without it, so we don’t seem too bothered that as a result of this interconnectedness, the National Security Administration, for one, has access to our web lives and loves — and we don’t seem all that nervous that cloud computing will eliminate any real sense of privacy (despite assurances), or about the massive amounts of information Google and other commercial enterprises have about us.
Danielle points out that many people are in fact very nervous about this — that privacy & the Internet is a huge topic of concern. Google data mining, the ownership and confidentiality of social networking data, security of financial data, etc. — these are all topics that are regularly reported on in the press and about which people have very strong feelings. However, the sense I get on the street is that most ordinary folks are happy (so far) to give up some personal security for all the convenience they’re getting.
Google’s batteries of server farms allow us to search, so, naturally the NSA can also search, dredge and process. I typed in someone’s name yesterday and found that for a small fee, I could see how much they paid for their house, who their neighbors are and what their credit rating is! I was flabbergasted. That’s me, a private citizen, who can know stuff I’d sort of rather not know, not some corporation or governmental agency.
Here’s an NSA data mining facility in Yakima, Washington. (A massive one is being built in Utah.)
[Source]
So far I’m not aware of malicious use of all that information, not on a large scale anyway — though identity thieves and guys sucking up US credit card numbers by the truckload in Ukraine are a start.
I recently read an article regarding the security of so-called “scrubbed” data. Netflix or some other company wanted to employ a third party to analyze some of their customers’ patterns of purchase — but as a precaution they removed (scrubbed) the customers’ names off the data. So theoretically, the people being analyzed were now abstract entities. However, out of curiosity they hired another company, to see if any of those unidentified customers could possibly be re-identified. It turned out they could. Not due to a fault of the scrubbing, or some security or software malfunction, but because other data and patterns of customer and citizen behavior were available online, and correlating these with the patterns of the anonymous customers led to conclude, beyond a reasonable doubt, the re-identification of many.
To me this means that, yes, information already flows both, or rather all, ways. Privacy and security, as much as we might strive for them, are phantoms that we chase but can never truly catch. As much as we love getting information, data, media and connections, so we ourselves become available as data. Social websites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter seem to use these conflicting urges — the urge to reveal oneself to the world, in all one’s intimate details, and yet simultaneously maintain some kind of privacy. Good luck with that.
The end of privacy in parts of the world is near. It will be traumatic for some, and a comfort for others — for to relinquish one’s privacy is to become a part of the hive and the herd, and there is a certain reassurance there. How our corporate culture and its twin, the government, make use of this process and this massive change in society leads one to imagine something closer to a paranoid Phillip K. Dick scenario than a return to the nurturing tribe (or the Global Village) that it will be for some. I suspect it will be both — liberating and restrictive. Conflicting and opposite tendencies, operating simultaneously.
So, there it is. The free flow of information, and the ability to digitize all media as it enters the river, has a lot more repercussions than the end of books, newspapers and CDs — it portends a massive social and political shift. Licklider may have seen this coming as well, but he didn’t let on about it.
Reading the morning paper here in Seattle, I was struck by the mood of what appeared to me to be propaganda. I didn’t begin ranting, foaming at the mouth or spraying my yogurt across the hotel dining room. At It Again A front-page photo/graphic in today’s NY Times shows what is rumored to be an Iranian nuclear facility of some sort. Maybe it’s just the graphic style of these things, but it looks exactly like the various photo-graphics we were inundated with before the invasion of Iraq. Pictures of buildings where WMDs were being stored, hidden or manufactured…all of which were proven to be merely rumors spread to lead and lure us into the morass we are in now. Folks fell for it then, and given everyone’s short memories they might go for it a second time. Now I’m not saying this is definitely NOT a nuclear facility — only pointing out that the manner of presentation of alleged facts is the same. Perspective On the same front page we are told that socialism is collapsing in Europe because a number of countries have elected center-right politicians. I beg to differ. As the article says, the center-right accepts as a given “generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, [and] sharp restrictions on carbon emissions.” Those three ideas would place them on the left in the USA, though the writer says, maybe correctly, that in Europe the left traditionally goes further. That those givens are still not generally accepted in the US, and are currently the yelling, screaming indications that politicians are “socialist” (and therefore un-American), puts this supposed “collapse” in perspective. Resurgence Another front-page article brings the good news that the economy is rebounding and getting bullish again. While in some ways that might not be surprising (no serious regulation has been put into place to prevent a recurrence of the meltdown, or to restrain the hubris and greed of the bankers), it seems sort of like good news just for the sake of good news — feel-good stuff. The economy has been out of whack for so long that to cheer its “return” and resurgence to what is essentially a misguided and broken system is maybe not the best idea right now. That much of the country is living unsustainably means that while Goldman Sachs and some others might be raking it in — profiting from the downturn, some have claimed — that isn’t the real world.
I stayed an extra day to record another singer on the Here Lies Love project. It’s almost done — the double CD, that is.
The hotel I’m staying in gives out two newspapers in the mornings for free — The Daily Telegraph and The Irish Independent. I am reminded just how many newspapers there are in this relatively small country. It’s staggering how the population here can support so many papers, tabloids and broadsheets. Newsagents must lose their minds occasionally.
The Daily Telegraph
London Evening Standard
Yorkshire Evening Post
The Birmingham Post
Bristol Evening Post
Hull Daily Mail
Liverpool Daily Post
Shropshire Star
Stoke Sentinel
The Times
The Guardian
News of the World
Belfast Telegraph
News Wales
Daily Express
Daily Mail
Daily Mirror
Daily Star
The Sun
The Independent
The Irish Independent
The Scotsman
The Dundee Courier
The Glasgow Herald
Scotland Today And more… !!!! Unbelievable! How is this range possible in an age when most newspapers are watching their sales dwindle daily, and are desperate for some survival strategy? My guess is that two factors allow this plurality to exist in the UK, at least for now. The country is proudly regional — the Welsh, the Scots and the Londoners all see themselves as very different, and not just in class (though that factors in too), but also in their specific local interests and sensibilities. Then there is class. It’s never gone away here — don’t believe what they tell you — and the paper you read obviously says a lot about your class, personal interests, politics and aspirations. That’s true everywhere, but what’s different here is that there are more distinct class subdivisions — you can be identified by your job, accent, dress, football team and what paper you read. The subtle distinctions escape me — though the tacky scandals and topless girls of the Murdoch-owned Sun scream lower class, and the redesigned Guardian shouts middle class smartie. Given the number of papers, you can imagine the competition is fierce for stories that will attract readers — so it comes as no surprise that News of the World reporters (another Murdoch paper) have tapped into the cell phone lines of celebrities and royals. They will indeed stop at nothing. In my opinion they’re also skilled at turning on the charm when they meet you, then making outrageous comments about your appearance and personal life when they turn in their copy. Everything needs to be embellished just a little more than what the competition might write. There are also plenty of headlines about fat celebrities, cheating footballers, drug addled singers and poor sods who beat their kids to death (this week). A cat stuck in a tree would make headlines if it could be spun in some sexy way. Any story makes the rounds like a house on fire — which is why bands shoot to popularity so fast here and similarly disappear almost as fast. Oddly, there is no daily or even weekly paper for the left wing bohemian class, like Libération in Paris, The Village Voice in NY, or other alternative weeklies elsewhere. Members of that demographic, who fancy themselves as being beyond class, have been suspiciously left out. Time Out, which originated in London, doesn’t really count, as it and others are more listings mags than news and reviews. Private Eye is unique here… a newsprint political humor weekly that requires a lot of knowledge of the players in order to get the jokes. Don’t know if anything like that could survive elsewhere.
I loved many of the Jackson 5 tunes — Get It Together was an LP I listened to nonstop along with Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall record. Quincy Jones’s production on the latter LP was impeccably precise — it is as shiny a pop product as an aspiring superstar could wish for while still containing funky African-inspired grooves and textures. Significantly, though, the records that followed had fewer of these elements, but sold more copies. I didn’t like Thriller or Bad — they seemed to me like pure pandering to the mass (white) pop audience. But the coda of “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” on Off The Wall is pure intersecting overlapping lilting Africa. (Later Michael would “quote” the great Manu Dibango song “Soul Makossa” and “forget” to give credit.) That same song’s reference to The Force was a corny “Hey I’ve got a great idea for a pop novelty song! Let’s reference Star Wars!” kind of idea that a 13-year-old boy might have — but the groove and Michael’s singing transcended much of that silliness. At that point Jackson was still a young black man — he had yet to transform into the androgynous eccentric that he would become. He claimed his skin bleaching was the result of disease, but most of us who know about the lightening creams that sadly abound in black neighborhoods and throughout the Third World suspected differently. The shock, to me, was that a young black man who was conquering the world of white pop (and video! He was the ONLY black man on MTV!) was simultaneously ashamed or very mixed up about his blackness. What kind of example does it set for black adolescents watching Michael get whiter and whiter every year? How’s a Brother supposed to get further with this shit going on? From the NY Times: The night that news of Mr. Jackson’s death came, Ingrid Deabreu, 49, a patient care and dialysis technician from Guyana who lives in Brooklyn, stayed up watching a marathon of his videos with her 7-year-old daughter Kimberly. When the video of Mr. Jackson’s “Black and White” came on, her daughter turned to Ms. Deabreu and asked: “Mommy, he said it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white. So why’s he trying to make his skin white?”
A life in the pill bottle tied Michael to Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and too many more. The surreal chemical universe these stars create for themselves is hard for me to fathom — when I have some success (at least recently), I’m very happy about it. Of course, my success is nowhere near what theirs was — I can live a normal life and buy toilet paper and OJ at the corner deli. In a way it seems a retreat to origins, to the womb of poor beginnings in Gary, Indiana or Tupelo, Mississippi — where, in a kind of weird link between distant galaxies, poor folks also pop painkillers like OxyContin if and when they can.
Some Internet providers in the US are considering a tiered pricing system — charging more to customers who use a lot of bandwidth. There has been a hue and cry from the public regarding this proposal. By now, everyone is used to paying a flat fee, and then assuming that they can use as much bandwidth as they can get away with for that fee. The providers have even abandoned the tiered proposal trials in some cities — they are that unpopular. We’ve all become accustomed to overlooking how much bandwidth we use — without thinking about it, we go from low bandwidth usage, like emailing, browsing websites and surfing, to fairly high bandwidth usage, like video Skyping, uploading audio and photo files, or streaming a movie from Netflix or iTunes. Internet users presume that high bandwidth usage, like Skyping or video and audio streaming, is their right. This struck home today, when someone offered our group a password to a wi-fi network he had established, but didn’t offer it to those who habitually Skype. Initially, this seemed mean, but I had noticed that as more folks hop on a network, especially Skypers, the speed of the whole network goes down — especially for the rest of us. Even simple emailing becomes sluggish or intermittent. Bandwidth hogs take 80% or more of the bandwidth, and everyone else is left with slow or sometimes non-existent connections. Here then is the hidden cost of “free” services like Skype — they’re only “free” when the resource (the information highway) is limitless and infinite — which in this case, it is not. The same thing happens in hotels — the more people log on to the hotel server, the slower the whole thing goes. Sometimes it slows to a crawl, and after you’ve paid 5 Euros for an hour’s use, that can be pretty frustrating. The information highway can have traffic jams, just like any other. We tend to think of bandwidth as a God-given right, but it’s too finite, and its limits become apparent as the highway gets more crowded. So, should access be tiered? If the tiers are partitioned in chunks, should only those with more money have access to higher bandwidth connections? This would eventually lead to an information and Internet hierarchy — streaming movies, music and TV will only be available to those who can afford it — and the rest will have to watch in low-res or be content to miss that kind of web experience, forced to settle for basic emailing and web browsing. The whole Internet mixed media experience — Flash sites, video clips, audio clips, slideshows etc. — would become less available. As it is now, I don’t think twice about watching a video clip, or listening to some streaming audio if I’m curious — but I might hesitate if I knew that a meter was running. I could envision the idea of a meter that monitors bandwidth usage and charges accordingly. It might be a fair system — leaving the choice up to the user in each instance, rather than segregating users into discrete tiers. The proposed tiered plans sound less flexible. They seem to want to establish completely separate pipelines — gated Internet communities, in a way. Likewise, I just read that for centuries, fishing was relatively unregulated. There were limits on excessive catch, but the fishing grounds were more or less a free-for-all. Chesapeake Bay and other fishing grounds were public property. Anyone with a boat — a commercial fisherman, or a kid in a rowboat — was allowed to pull up oysters or crabs. It would have been all well and good when supplies seemed unlimited and plentiful, but they’re not anymore — in some places, there are no oysters or crabs left at all. Most, of course, were not taken by kids in rowboats. One proposed solution has been to privatize the oyster beds — allotting each fishery a designated area — with the assumption being that if fishermen realize that their stock is limited, they will self-manage and regulate their own consumption and fishing. Little Johnny on his rowboat will be pretty much out of luck, as the “public” fishing zones will have been fished out, and the private areas will be off limits. As our oceans and waterways become fished out and depleted, it’s fairly easy to justify some sort of fee, management or enforced regulation system — but shouldn’t that apply to anyone who uses limited natural resources? For years, mining companies have been digging out underground resources while paying a minimal cost for access — and they often leave environmental disasters in their wake. Weren’t those resources in some sense “public”? Ditto for oil and natural gas companies — shouldn’t they pay their host nations a hefty fee for access to finite resources that are, in a way, the patrimony of humanity? Someone once asked me, rhetorically, if an overweight person should pay the same amount for a plane ticket as someone of “normal” weight. It’s a rude and uncomfortable question, but not totally unreasonable when you consider that someone twice my weight requires twice as much jet fuel to get them airborne. Their carbon footprint is higher as a result. In effect, I’m subsidizing their excess — at least if all seats except first class are priced equally. Similarly, should kids and babies fly for less? Should tall men and women pay more? What about those whose above-average weight isn’t a result of overeating or poor diet? That seems unfair. Who’s to say why someone is overweight? And if you’re tall, it’s not your fault — you were born that way, so why should you be penalized? The tiered or metered way of charging for resources — how would that work? Can bandwidth even be considered a resource? Is it like the electromagnetic spectrum — a government-managed “public” resource, with various frequencies allocated to broadcast TV, mobile phones and police transmissions? We accept that not just anyone with a transmitter can usurp part of the broadcast frequency, start a radio station or blast their TV network to everyone in town — chaos would result. We accept that even though the airwaves might be “public,” they do need to be regulated. But cable and fiber optics aren’t God-given — someone paid to lay them down. For some strange reason, we presume that our health is a crapshoot. Most public health plans don’t tax people according to a tiered plan dependent on their propensity for getting diseases — though some folks, due to lifestyle, addiction or bad parenting will require more frequent and expensive treatment than others who live healthier lives. The folks who pay higher taxes, and those who are less prone to illness, are paying for those who are reckless with their health, or (it is presumed) just plain unlucky. Every industrialized country submits to this, apart from the US, where insurance companies fulfill this function — and they aren’t quite as altruistic, though they still maintain the crapshoot model, at least in the public’s eye. Anyway, the built-in unfairness of this system — that some per chance pay more than their share — is justified by the idea that a health disaster could randomly happen to any of us. We know this isn’t quite true — besides the lifestyle and social context factors that affect our likelihood of getting ill, there are genetic factors that are becoming easier and easier to assess. It seems inevitable that as genetic profiling becomes common, many will balk at paying for those who have a much greater propensity for getting serious diseases. Insurance companies will probably begin to adjust to that information before public health plans do — the companies themselves are taking on the risk, so if they can better their odds by charging so and so more because addiction, MS or Alzheimer’s runs in their family, they will. To many people this will seem unfair, since they might be as healthy as anyone else when the insurance company determines their rate — so, they will argue, why should they pay more? Auto insurance companies already do this with drivers — those who live in high-risk areas or have had accidents pay more. We don’t mind paying — via taxes or insurance — for the other fellow if we believe our risk is more or less the same as his, but we might be reluctant to pay medical bills for a junkie. In the long run, and from a wider perspective, health care does more than just insure against sudden medical costs — that is, public health care, not insurance plans. Public health care ensures that everyone lives without the fear that the bottom of their world will suddenly drop out. In the US, people with medical emergencies suddenly can’t pay their mortgages, college tuition or for their kids. They often end up on skid row, or at least in bad shape, because their financial situation is precarious (since there is no safety net) and a medical emergency knocks the whole thing down. In those countries where these worries are not as pressing, the people’s lives are different — they're less desperate, less on the edge, and therefore everyone, even those who are paying more than their share, benefits. It’s hard to quantify that benefit, I would imagine — but anyone with eyes and ears can sense it. So, back to the Internet. Is there a parallel with health care, insurance, fishing? Should I pay more, or receive less for what I pay, because my neighbor wants to stream movies, or video Skype to his or her pals night and day? Not sure. Maybe the question is how much we are willing to give up in order to share, and be equal… and what are our rights, if any, as far as resources go?
It seems the proposed bailouts of GM, AIG and a host of others are not all that popular right now; many in the US feel that the law of the jungle — of the free market — should prevail no matter how big the company. If you can’t survive, then you will justifiably become extinct — repercussions be damned. If Detroit and the surrounding cities turn into a 3 million strong refugee camp (there are camps in Fresno already), then so be it — at least that’s the current vibe. (Thing is, those refugees won’t stay put in Flint, if the Dust Bowl and Katrina were any indication.) This sink or swim attitude was reinforced when the executives of AIG gave themselves bonuses this week — $165 million (or more) in bonuses — and GM executives flew on private jets to ask Washington for taxpayer money. These guys are all unreformed bubble heads — they claim that only they know how best to run their companies, and are therefore essential to keeping them afloat... but weren’t they the ones who drove their companies to bankruptcy? (Of course they’ll blame it on the credit crisis.) Besides, some of those who received these bonuses have already left for greener pastures — so much for the argument that the bonuses are incentives to stay. It’s human (and often animal) nature to help those in one’s group who have fallen behind — and we instinctively look after those close to us. Occasionally we allow our friends and family to fail — maybe not too frequently, but once in a while — but more often we come to their aid, at least some of the time. But somehow this seems different. For one thing, these guys have proven that they aren’t likely to change their behavior. They’ll drive their companies right back into the ground, because that’s their modus operandi. They’ve made no serious statements about changing their ways. None have said they’re sorry, or that they were wrong. Most of us say we should get rid of the bums and let someone else try to keep these behemoths afloat — if they deserve to be kept afloat at all. The new head of AIG says in the NY Times: “We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury.” [Link] In other words, his type of executives will leave to work for the highest bidder — the implication being that they have no loyalty to either AIG or to the taxpayer. They don’t really love their work — they just love the money and perks. They’re not even accepting bonuses based on performance! These guys don’t believe their own “market forces” bullshit when it comes to their pay — they expect a bonus no matter how bad they are at doing their jobs! Can I get a job like that? One of the AIG execs recently wrote a resignation letter, reprinted in the Times, claiming that his department didn’t lose money; his department didn’t engage in questionable creation of assets; and his group worked really hard for years and deserves their bonuses. He felt they were being unfairly lumped in with the bad apples across the hall. They’re all being forced to pay for the unscrupulous behavior of some rogue departments. I’m tempted to agree, but that kind of behavior was tacitly encouraged in the banking world. There were no reins, and anything that made money was OK; just like at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, that reckless culture and behavior was part and parcel of the whole deal. If this guy knew a while back that others in the company were engaged in rash and risky behavior, why didn’t he blow the whistle or resign then? Here in Europe, there will be a G20 conference in London in a couple of weeks. Like the AIG execs in Connecticut, London bankers have been warned that demonstrators may not take kindly to their strutting about in public. Therefore they might consider dressing down — in disguise, as it were — or not going out at all. It was suggested that AIG employees go out in pairs, and only in daylight hours. Bankers incognito — what a concept! That guy might look like a homeless person or a rent boy, but he’s a billionaire. The Masters of The Universe may think that going tie-less in khakis will do the job — but the internal memos also suggested that they think again and try harder, because people can still recognize a “dressed down” banker. Get your glam and punk gear out of the closet — now’s the time to sport it one last time.
I bike to the local mega contemporary art museum. There is a major Degas show, which I skip — I see dancers and tutus every day — and opt for the show of more recent work — the theme of which is Charlie Manson. Charlie Manson! Bad timing, as a young German boy has just gotten hold of a gun and massacred a bunch of his former schoolmates. Most of the work was by German and other European artists, many of them unfamiliar to me — a testament to how parochial the NY art world is. I have to admit the most riveting pieces were the ones closest to the source: the first, a hallway with some Bobby BeauSoleil paintings (which may have been collaborations with his wife Barbara), that were very cool, mythic and slightly creepy — like Mike Kelley or Jim Shaw, but for real. 
BeauSoleil was in the 60’s band The Grass Roots, which later became the band Love. He also did the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising. The second piece was a TV playing an interview with Charlie done a number of years ago — the Devil is an old man now. Anyway, every (obvious and) pointed question aimed at Charlie was deflected — brilliantly, and often in an unexpectedly philosophical way. When asked about how it feels being in prison much of his life, Charlie responds by saying, “I’m not in prison, you are.” I’m not sure how or if he elaborates, but he obviously means that we’re all prisoners of our preconceived ideas and the limiting social worlds we’ve constructed — no one is truly free. Anyway, it goes on like that, his response to every question spun out to infinity.
At the Düsseldorf airport, an young man seeks solace and confides in a friend:
Some say Cuidad Juárez is now the most dangerous place in the world — it beats Baghdad. Most of its arms come from the US, and the US buys most of its drugs as well.
An accounting firm that’s been analyzing GM says that even with the $30 billion bailout they’ve requested, GM won’t stay afloat. Pragmatically, it would be sheer lunacy to throw $30 billion at GM executives — who still ride around in their town cars and fly on company jets — only to see them allocate it for their own golden parachutes before their company, and the cities of Detroit, Flint and a few others, become giant ghost towns. I have a feeling there will be a knock-on effect, and other ghost towns will arise in the wake of those Rust Belt towns’ demises. GM’s management has made few comments re: altering their course; there has been little mention of producing green cars, or building public transportation systems or infrastructure. They talk mostly about closing plants, cutting divisions and firing workers — but not about rethinking what they make, or their role in the world. It seems they basically want to stay the course — but in a smaller boat. The passengers who can’t fit get thrown overboard. The boat is headed for Niagara Falls, so as far as I can see, it doesn’t really matter what size it is. There are options. Workers could take over the factories and start producing stuff that suits the world as it really is. Or the factories could be nationalized, and the government could force the factory infrastructure and manpower to begin making stuff that benefits the population. Assembly lines would have to be altered, refitted and modified — but it’s either that, or sell the machines as scrap steel. Or the companies could make changes voluntarily — re-jigger themselves to build trolley cars, high-speed rail systems, and hybrids. Some of these, being public works, would probably receive a large amount of government financing — funding for work, NOT a bailout.
We Live in a Virtual World French public health officials are considering laws that would ban the promotion of eating disorders — including a requirement that magazines reveal the extent to which their images have been artificially retouched. It’s viewed as a public health issue because girls and boys (and men and women) are feeling increasingly ashamed of their bodies as they compare themselves to what they see all around them — images of bodies that are not real, that have been photoshopped, digitally airbrushed and heavily modified.
[Source] Of course, ever since the birth of the movie star early last century, their images have been cleaned up, improved and controlled. Celebrities and pin-ups have been with us for a long time, and the fairytale world of far-off Hollywood was always infinitely better than whatever small town reality you were living in. But it was just that — a fairytale kingdom that existed far away, with relatively few inhabitants. The difference, I suppose, is that of quantity, not quality. These days, altered images are ubiquitous; the fairytale world threatens to engulf our own. The illusion is more complete, too — with digital technology it’s harder to see the smoothing. Stalin would have drooled at the possibilities. Almost nothing one sees in print or advertisements hasn’t been “improved” in some way, except maybe some journalistic news photos — and even those are suspect. There’s the visual field that consists of us and our friends, and then there’s the print world — certainly more dramatic, and often more physically perfect. We live in a parallel universe, slightly more drab and definitely more pudgy. One can’t legislate the heavenly world out of existence — people need fairytales, after all — but maybe a more constant reminder to not believe everything we see would help us to retain some tenuous connection with our pathetic reality. The thing is, we can’t help believing what we see. When I look at an impossibly sexy woman on a billboard, I can tell myself that she’s been sculpted and smoothed to death, but I’m riveted and transfixed nonetheless. Instinct triumphs over intellect. Pascal Dangin, a well-known retoucher who works on a lot of the images in fashion magazines (and for some fine artists as well), naturally doesn’t see it exactly that way. He makes photos that “improve on life,” in his words. But if I can paraphrase, he might say that he makes an image more like what it wants to be — and therefore it ends up being closer to what we desire to see. That doesn’t necessarily mean perfect — he is careful to avoid airbrushing the personality out of a person — but it does mean he’s certainly not against making quite a few (what he has determined are aesthetic) improvements. The health departments are alarmed at the effect all this is having on young people. Boys hanker for steroids, and girls, a session with the knife, in order to look more like what they see in the magazines. Unfortunately, the magazines don’t just feature physically enhanced people — they’ve been heavily retouched as well. We would have to hand out some kind of high-tech, rose colored, photoshopping glasses in order to achieve a visual simulation of the media population.
The Tribune Company owns the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Cubs, a bunch of TV stations and some other regional newspapers. They’re just barely holding on since being acquired in a takeover a year and a half ago by Sam Zell, a real estate billionaire. After the buyout, the Tribune’s editor left, as did a lot of its journalists and columnists. They reportedly weren’t happy with some of the changes that Zell had instituted. The paper had also acquired a relatively large debt. My guess is that after Zell bought the paper, his purchase price saddled the paper with debt; or rather, the paper’s employees — since its board members, like Zell, managed to avoid any personal debt. I saw similar things happen in the music business in the early 80’s, as record companies merged and were taken over by other companies (Warner Bros. was absorbed by Time and then later, AOL). The result was that the companies suddenly ended up in debt, and, in order to show a profit every quarter, had to forget about their standards and musical instincts. Long-term thinking became a thing of the past. They had to cut back here and there, which often meant cutting out middle-level employees. Bosses weren’t likely to thin their own ranks, and from their perspective, losing middle-level employees who had accrued decent salaries would help shore up the bottom line — temporarily, at least. New middle-level people could be hired at lower pay, or lower-level employees could be bumped up. The thing is, it was the middle-level people who actually knew and essentially ran the businesses. “‘From an informed public standpoint, it’s alarming,’ said Representative Kevin Brady, a Republican from the Houston area, who has seen The Houston Chronicle’s team in Washington drop to three people, from nine, in two years. ‘They’re letting go those with the most institutional knowledge, which helps reporters hold elected officials accountable.’” [ Link to NY Times article] The Houston Chronicle is not alone. Almost every newspaper in the US, except the Times and the Wall Street Journal, has drastically cut, or in many cases entirely eliminated, their Washington contingent. “‘We used to cover the Pentagon, combing through defense contracts, and we’re covering some of that out of Dallas now, but basically we don’t do it anymore,’ said Carl Leubsdorf, chief of The Dallas Morning News bureau, which had 11 people four years ago, and now has four. ‘We had someone at the Justice Department, but no longer. We can’t free someone up for a long time to do a major project.’” [ Link] As one of the Baltimore Sun reporters, who appeared in the HBO show The Wire, mentioned, you just can’t cover with 4 people what you used to with 11 — or 30. Despite management trying to squeeze more blood out of that stone, it’s just not possible. Less gets reported. Likewise, these newspapers have dumped most of their foreign bureaus, food critics, and film critics, and are loathe to assign reporters to stories that will take months to research and write. In doing so, they are eviscerating that which makes newspapers different from online reviews, blogs and websites. When papers end up like USA Today, there will be no reason to read them. “The much greater loss, the journalists say, is the decline of Washington reporting on local matters — the foibles of a hometown congressman or a public works project in the paper’s backyard. One after another, they cited the example of the San Diego paper’s Washington bureau for exposing the corruption of Representative Randall Cunningham, who is known as Duke. In accepting a Pulitzer Prize for that work in 2006, ‘we were bold enough to hope that it would be the first of many, but it turned out to be the high point,’ said George E. Condon Jr., the last bureau chief. ‘No matter how much great journalism is done by national organizations, they’re simply not geared to monitor closely a member of Congress from, say, San Diego, who’s not a national leader.’” [ Link] Second to the NY Times, the Tribune Company owns some of the country’s most widely circulated newspapers. Though I tend to think of the LA Times as more a community paper than a national one — a paper that covers mainly the intrigues and dramas of their local industry (movies, music and TV mixed in with coverage of local politics and crime) — there’s nothing wrong with in-depth reporting of one’s own city. TV sure ain’t gonna do it. Do we really need in-depth reporting, investigative journalism and foreign news desks? Can we manage without them? I am as guilty as most in that I often (though not always) read the morning papers online, for free. I jump between different publications, as their angles, points of view and interests are varied. Yeah, sometimes it’s the wacky human-interest story that grabs my attention — the sort of thing fit for web reporting — but just as often, it’s a story that is thoroughly researched and gives background and context on the topic. How does a democracy work without (in-depth) news? It doesn’t. While most of the population will not care about access to high-quality news, there are always some who read to find out what’s really going on, and why. Dictatorships, totalitarian regimes and underdeveloped countries don’t have the luxury of investigative journalism, and the news-as-entertainment in highly capitalist regimes isn’t really informative either — it’s bread and circuses. An informed citizenry, said Jefferson, is necessary for a democracy to function. He also said: “Advertisements... contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”
and
“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.” [ Link] TJ may have presumed we’d get our information from other sources, or maybe, like many politicians, he simply distrusted the press. It wouldn’t be surprising if he did — imagine if the press reported heavily on his taste for Brown Sugar. Politicians are held in check by the press, for better or worse; that too is one of the ways in which the press allows a democracy to function. Without the threat of public exposure, well… you can imagine. Anyway, it will be strange if the USA becomes a large industrialized country with only one or two newspapers — the NY Times and The Wall Street Journal — practicing in-depth coverage; the latter, now owned by Murdoch, may find itself eviscerated, assuming its fate follows those of his other newspaper purchases around the world. There is no way the Times can afford all the foreign desks, local reporters and journalists that a country of this size requires. What will happen when most of the country has nothing but entertainment, gossip and sports as sources of information? It’s a country ripe for takeover, if you ask me. A place where public opinion can be easily manipulated, as long as the consumers keep buying. Blogs and Internet news sites can’t fill the gap, as they don’t have the resources to sustain a team of reporters working and digging into a story — sometimes for months before anything sees the light of day. They don’t have African or Southeast Asian bureaus either. Besides, most Internet news sites like Google News are aggregates of traditional print and wire service news gatherers. Without sources they’d be pretty much nothing. Local sites like Gothamist and national ones like The Smoking Gun are cool and up-to-the-minute, but they don’t assign staff to conduct long-term investigations into the how and why of a scandal or news item. They break stuff, it’s true, but mostly they rely on others to feed them information. I have plenty of beefs with the arts and culture coverage of many newspapers; I can easily spot the biases and lack of research. I’m of that world, so I have my own personal biases as well — which sometimes match those of the critics, and sometimes don’t. I myself have gone in and out of favor a few times, so I regard their reviews and reporting with what I feel is healthy skepticism. News, though, is another story. I imagine that cops, thugs, hedge fund dudes, politicians and bureaucrats all have their own beefs with the press, but from my point of view, I’d much prefer some seriously researched coverage in those areas — with a little bias — to nothing of any depth. I’ve been trying to imagine what this country would be like without a serious news source. Like Cuba with only Granma, the organ of the party — that and bootleg satellite TV broadcasts of American Idol. Or Russia, pre-Gorbachev, when the choice was between Pravda and some samizdat mimeographed publications. Iran under the Ayatollah or the Shah. The Philippines under martial law — when all press critical of the Marcos regime was silenced. We tend to get all holier-than-thou when we look at countries without free press. We think their lives must somehow be more pathetic or sad. Needless to say, this attitude makes us feel better. But people go on. They know, or at least suspect, that they are being denied something, but they maintain hope and optimism. They don’t go around moping. They get on with their lives, and sometimes, at least now and then, feel like maybe the censorship doesn’t matter all that much. There are still reasons to be cheerful. We might like to think of life in an oppressive regime as sheer misery, but from what I can tell, it’s rarely viewed that way. Life goes on and people make do with what they have, and they fall in love and get drunk and sing and dance. It takes a lot — a whole lot — to bring them to the flash point, like what just happened in Greece. Mostly, people adapt to the way things are — and to feel miserable about it is fruitless. And that’s what we will do when there are only two serious newspapers left in the USA.
A man in the audience in Wilmington, Delaware shouted out, “You rock like geology!”
Mattel, Bratz and creative rights
The toy giant Mattel has won its lawsuit against the makers of Bratz dolls, the slightly slutty “ethnic” dolls that have been selling well while sales of Mattel’s Barbie line have been dropping. The ruling states that since the designer of the Bratz line did the initial doll drawings while employed by Mattel, the rights to the Bratz line now belong to Mattel — whomph, the competition is eliminated in one fell swoop. 
Jeff Harris [Source]
I seem to remember reading about the Bratz dolls a year or so ago — the designer tried to get Mattel interested in the line, but with their traditional and long-standing emphasis on the All American Breasts of Barbie, they passed. So, the designer went elsewhere, and despite some initial resistance, the line of dolls caught fire and began to threaten Miss Barbie herself. The Bratz dolls, who look to be of indeterminate ethnic origin — but definitely not Anglo-Saxon — started to crowd out the tall white chick with pointy tits. Do we have a metaphor for immigration attitudes (and policies) here or what? The designer should have gotten Mattel to sign away their rights after passing on his idea, though I suspect Mattel would not have done so unless they had to. Just like record companies will often pass on an artist’s record and then prohibit anyone else from releasing it, they are scared of both being shown up and possible competition. Forget the lip service that competition is good for business — business will squash any competition if it has half a chance. Maybe the designer got a verbal go-ahead from someone at Mattel to seek interest elsewhere; maybe he thought they’d forget about his drawings; or maybe he thought they wouldn’t go so far as to claim the rights based on the drawings — but he didn’t get a proper release, so legally he’s fucked. Though it doesn’t seem fair. It seems to me that it would be nice if there were a fairer attitude towards passed-over creations. What if the law said this: if a company like Mattel turned down his drawings, then they would automatically revert back to him after some period of time — a couple of years, for example. Long enough for Mattel to reconsider, given an always-changing marketplace, but short enough that the creation, whatever it is, might still be relevant. This could apply to recording artists, screenwriters, designers, authors and photographers — where the same kind of proprietary nastiness happens all the time.
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