| :: | "Sharing and giving are the ways of God." |
| -- from the Sauk Native American tribes |
In this new millennium we are presented with a novel opportunity, a fresh new chance for progress and for the advancement of a greater harmony amongst the Earth's peoples.
This opportunity, made possible by the global reach of the Internet, is for us to redesign our concepts of value and the mechanisms for its exchange. But opportunity dictates a course of action and the transformations implied by such a re-evaluation are not only imperative in our world but imminent and with manifold implications for our prosperity, our lives, liberties and pursuits of happiness.
Doubtless, to any modern-day observer our world would appear in agony as it seeks a new way of living. The Native American Hopi race had a word for just such a state:
ko.yaa.nis.katsi (from the Hopi language), n. 1. life in turmoil, life out of balance. 2. a life disintegrating. 3. a state of life that calls for another way of living.But to make the transition we need first understand our origins and get a sense for the longer context in which we live.
But implicit in this arrangement, which has survived to our present era, are two other concepts: property, and its sine qua non, enforcement. ...which brings us to what we've come to call the bread-and-pistol paradigm. a man needs to eat and to barter the value he can produce, he is beholden to exchange rates that others define - a situation that gives rise to the consolidation of power and to such monopolies and elite groups as we have come to know too well.
But wherefore this power to set rates? The power ultimately stems from brute force, for as the left hand of the elite holds bread before our salivating specimen, the right holds a pistol.
But why force? Because despite the likely protestations of those who live in so-called free, democratic societies, the potential transaction bears only a superficial resemblance to free commerce. In fact, more in line with taxation, from which our subject cannot walk away, this situation is more akin to extortion in that a closer look reveals the elite to hold the only bread.
| The History of every major Galactic Civilisation tends to pass through three distinct and recognisable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterised by the question "How can we eat?" the second by the question "Why do we eat?" and the third by the question "Where shall we have lunch?" |
| - Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 1981. |
While a large majority of our world has not yet made a successful transition from the Dark Ages, the proliferation of our Occidental technologies is accelerating this progression at an astounding pace. Today one can much more realistically envision a Smithian-type utopia wherein labour costs reduce to zero on account of the mechanisation of goods production.
So, what does happen in this stage of Sophistication when the things that we need become free? The answer is that the old power structures the elite has struggled so much to build, give way to a different arrangement; wealth disappears. Why? Because our notions of value and the mechanisms for its exchange metamorphose into something else, something likely to eradicate our ideas of property and its attendant culture of enforcement.
In this third millennium of our Christian Era, the evidence of our shifting values is already visible to the discerning eye. Ask any teenager what is cool (read: valuable) and the unequivocal answer is mp3, divx, Morpheus.
While these systems embrace a dynamic vilified by the establishment as piracy and thievery, the remarkable fact here is that our youth clearly does not recognise digital content as property, and that the things we value are no longer related to survival but to quality of life. Food and shelter are now taken for granted, whilst our focus centres around those things that enrich our lives.
Such things increasingly come in digital form and while the establishment struggles to catechise our societies into believing the absurd concept it calls "intellectual property" (IP), the truth is that this relatively recent notion has basis neither in law, nor in social tradition, but only in the greed of now worthless middlemen. To further aggravate the dilemma faced by the RIAA(1), the MPAA(2), and the alphabet-soup of other McCarthyistic organisations, technology has also nearly evaporated both production and distribution costs.
Just as the humble IBM PC empowered millions to exercise the written word as never before, the powerful and ever popular Macintosh now enables whole new generations to rip, mix 'n burn music, video and other forms of expression. Combined with the frictionless cost structures and world-wide reach of the Internet, this creative power has resulted in a truly colossal selection of content.
All of which further erodes any basis for applying the idea of property to this timid ray of sunlight that is digital content. Ask any economist and he'll explain how increasing supply in the face of a constant demand lowers price.
Today, the price of digital content is already zero. And this is as it should be.
Verily, it is fortunate that as the world awakens, their power wanes.
| "Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force like fire is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." |
| - George Washington |
But the situation also presents a grave danger: that desperate to protect what they have so laboriously built, these powerful men (and we no longer refer to the Hollywood thugs who in the greater order of things are of little consequence) would unleash unconscionable forces on humanity from which we may not recover.
We all accept unquestionably the need for law and order; the paradigm has served us relatively well and the comfort of the known is hard to abandon in favour of the unknown.
But legislation is not agreement, and enforcement is not order. Today, Americans stand helplessly by at airports while their daughters' knickers get riffled through by uniformed orang-utans. At the same time, the cry to protect American business interests (read: property) around the world, all too often expounded on by US news media, evaluates to a complete disregard of other nations' sovereignties. From economic embargoes to the threat of military strikes, and from covert intelligence operations to bribes, blackmail and extortion, no course of action is deemed unwarranted if it seems to advance that monstrous abstraction that our national interests have become. Yesterday, it's privacy banking rules in the Caymans, or Jersey, or Panama. Today, it's copyright recognition with the Ukraine. Tomorrow, tax harmonisation, or extradition of foreign nationals, or back-door encryption, or whatever. One has to wonder exactly how much can be justified in the name of national security.
Unfortunately, as the Sept. 11 incident points out, such trespasses quite often have tragic consequences
"A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky which could burn the land and boil the oceans." - Translation from the Hopi prophecies, KoyaanisqatsiAnd so, as our leaders bully others into their psychotic ideas of law and order, the spectral finger of terrorism shifts across nations, eventually pointing inwards, towards our neighbours, our families and us - no one is immune - until there is no question that jails, armies, death and nuclear destruction are the only solution.
Now, my dear reader, if the above has begun to seem like the product of paranoia, may I bring to mind Hiroshima and Nagasaki: two Japanese cities where only half a century ago one quarter of a million civilians lost their lives at the hands of our leaders, and where the cankerous venom they spat still ails our Mother Earth.
With the above context in mind, we are now ready to state our aim plainly: we seek Gaia's awakening. But, how is this done? where do we begin?
We believe awakening to be directly related to experience, exposure, information, and awareness. The greater access humanity has to information, to music, literature, film and other forms of expression, the greater the exposure to new and different experiences and the greater its alertness... the greater its awaked-ness.
We thus begin by transforming what we already have: free markets.
Using a new p2p architecture as its platform, a novel business model will be explored based on our understanding of the current paradigms.
free = libre + gratis"Information wants to be free" - this maxim resonates throughout the Internet and the communities that built it. But free is a scary concept to many.To industry observers, it has become abundantly clear that the giant corporations that dominate the realm of information-based commodities, despite their marketing might and savvy, have been completely unable to find a successful business model around digital content distribution. The reason owes to their lack of understanding of both the new medium and our new world. The public is quite simply unwilling to pay for digital content, especially when it can be had for nothing. The course to date, reflective of outdated thinking, has been to waste tremendous effort to criminalise the new medium through legislation. This can, of course, only lead to more enforcement issues, to threats and intimidation of the public and to measures which not only create an environment of hostility within the potential market, but are like forcing a square peg into a round hole. The solution, is to relinquish the pistol and make the content both free of charge, and without limitations. Doubtless, the music industry will scream, but before we pay heed, let us keep in mind that the music industry no more represents the artist community than do the bureaucrats in D.C. represent the American peoples. These entities, so hell-bent on litigation and protecting "their" IP, represent only their own interests. When the RIAA cries theft, their concern is for who will pay to fuel the jets and lifestyles of all those executives whom the creative juices of the artist have so long maintained. For, as anyone who's not been sequestered under a mountain for the last 30 years can tell you, little of the money spent by the public on a CD actually recompenses the beloved artist. The artists make their money on performances, and these do best with lots of public exposure, a function most suitable for p2p networks. quid pro quoFree content however, is only half the picture. The other half has to do with the need to grow an awareness amongst the public, to give back.We do recognise the value of digital content in our lives and are willing, even desirous, of compensating the creators of the music we listen to, the movies we watch, the books we read. But in the world according to memiki, it is we who should set the price, we who should evaluate what something is worth to us. The memiki network thus features two important characteristics currently absent from any other p2p network or distribution system: 1) a scheme to build consciousness of the need to give back, and 2) a mechanism to do it. A small anecdote is in order here: before the closing of the 19th century, the composer Jacques Offenbach had the chance to visit New York. One of the things he was most impressed by was the fact that trains were run on the honour system i.e. it was assumed that people had the decency to pay for the service when they used it and there was thus no need to make an enforcement effort (incidentally, a century later I was equally shocked to find this assumption still valid throughout Austria). Today's world of efficiency has neatly done away with the need for decency. Try to board a bus in Los Angeles and you'll not only pay up front, but you better have exact change! In summa, my gambit is that given a chance, humanity will support the art it treasures, not because it is forced to, but out of love... and that for the artist the rewards will prove to be overwhelmingly greater, vis-à-vis the paltry percentages that can currently be had from the old-boys network of the music industry. |