The Internet. Big. Bold. Brash. Fullashit. This is my town, baby -- lemme show ya around.
Yeah, as if. I know about as much about the Internet as an ant knows about the sequoia she's crawling up. As the saying went about eight years ago, "The good news: Millions and millions of websites. The bad news: millions and millions of websites." O'course, now we're getting into ten or eleven digits there, lots of em in foreign languages.
That's why I read blog sites like Metafilter. They give me something remotely resembling a core sample of the net, a way of seining for interesting tidbits without catching my net on every sunken wreck or scuba diver in the sea.
Better still, they give me a skewed-but-miscellaneous sample of viewpoints from idiots just like me, stashed away in those innocent "29 comments" links. It's the new democracy, folks -- let a hundred opinions be posted.
But it's frustrating to be a lurker in the turbid waters of reader lists. I always seem to get to the juicy discussions after the parade's gone by, a parade seemingly composed of people with nothing better to do than comment on each other's comments on whatever might still remain of the topic after umpty odd interjections of attitude. M'gawd, don't these people have a life?
And my own unposted responses are no better. I want to correct these people. I want to cure them of the error of their ways. I want to -- gwar, never mind. Most of the time, my quibbles are with their entire approach to the problems they're parsing. It seems that an awful lot of disagreement can be laid at the feet of inadequate definition.
My most recent foray into this realm was a somewhat cursory scan of a somewhat predictable battle royal about capital punishment, involving some heinous child-molesting case in Utah, where the guy was caught redhanded beating the victim with a hammer and was chased three blocks before being brought down by a police dog (sic 'em, puppy!). The guy said he didn't remember what happened. Drama! Responses ranged from the Dirty Harrys (no trial, no reports to file...) to the Bleeding Toms (po-o-o-r little rapist), but for the most part the notion of punishing the guy was unquestioned in one of its most fundamental portions: the validity of punishment as a process of law.
What is the purpose of Law? Why do we have rules and regulations and courts and cops and jails in the first place? The common answer seems to be, because we want to punish the wrongdoer. I've seen plenty of big suits proclaim punishment as a valid aim of criminology. One big punish-fest, that's the law.
This makes about as much scientific sense as saying we have sewage systems to mask the smell of shit. Why? Because punishment doesn't work.
Okay, time for the Digression of the Essay (the Thaddeus Gazette: Preventing Alzheimer's Since 1996). Back in the early 70's when Young Thaddeus was traversing the slippery slope of higher education at Reed College, a titanic battle was being fought between the forces of -- okay, maybe not good and eeville, but say Befuddled and Reductionist -- in my chosen (not exactly chosen, really, but that's another essay) field of psychology. The behaviorists and the humanists were fighting for the crown, and at Reed the behaviorists broke their boots off in the humanists' rumps and escorted them off the grounds. A significant ornament of my freshman year was the methodical torment of rodents and pigeons in the name of the great god Skinner.
Despite my lack of a prep-school education or any semblence of a clue about the organization of research materials, I also got to participate in a teeny tiny paper that was later published in a Genuine Scientific Journal -- it even received a notice in Nature. Whoo hoo! Lookie Ma, I'm a scientist!
The paper concerned a phenomenon known in behaviorism as extinction. In simplest terms, extinction is what happens when you don't keep rewarding the bird for pecking the dot. Uh, it stops? Riiight, Sparky! Another gold star for you! You can plot on a graph the reduction of a behavior over time through extinction -- it's roughly linear with a little tail at the end, just like a reverb ringout. Thoroughly predictable -- and prediction of the future, as my brother Don the family PhD once said, is what science is all about.
How appropriate is behaviorism to humans? I used to entertain my paranoia by imagining behaviorists hired by the government to control us all. Probably not a problem. Skinner himself wrote a thoroughly ludicrous utopian novel, Walden Two, with the tagline of the noble psychologist-dictator, "Behave as you ought!" Yeah, make me, rat boy.
But some of Skinner and his pals' ideas hold a lot of predictive water, and the one that follows me around like a stray cat looking for a meal is the contrast between extinction and punishment.
When you seek to extinguish a behavior, you remove the reinforcer -- whatever it is that increases its frequency. This might not be all that easy. Skinner fretted that humans have internal reinforcements -- hopes and dreams and fears and prejudices and such -- that were deucedly hard to get at. Remove the reenforcer and the behavior goes away.
But in the case of punishment, all you're doing is associating the behavior with The Bad Thing. And this does nothing to remove the cause of the behavior: the reinforcer. Skinner's classic example of this was slapping a child's hands for reaching for cookies. The next time, he keeps his hands behind his back -- and snags the cookie directly with his mouth.
Our teeny tiny experiment didn't involve punishment. What we did was give pigeons an alternative source of food to the peck-dot-eat-from-bin side and chart their peck activity. Predictably, when allowed to eat all they wanted for "free," the little peckers ignored the dot and gorged themselves. The activity graph went down like a rock. But even in their bloated state, the birds would still show a little of the previously instilled behavior. Just for sport, you might say. Just because they "wanted" to.
But when the free chow was taken away? Back to the dot, boys, vacation's over. The behavior came roaring back to pretty much the rate it was at before the free food came in. Our prof concluded that the behavior had a life of its own, a reservoir of persistence somewhere in the little featherhead's brain that only time and lack of reinforcement could drain.
And this is an example of a positive diversion. Negative diversions -- punishment -- were already widely studied by the time I wandered into the picture. The prevailing opinion was that punishment never did anything to control the behavior of a subject. It could suppress a behavior temporarily, but in the presence of the reinforcer, the behavior would come back, sooner or later.
For anecdotal human evidence, we have only to look at the rampant pickpockets working the crowds that gathered to watch convicted pickpockets get hanged. Wow, big deterrent there.
But Skinner argued that punishment does serve a real purpose, albeit an indirect one: it is very reinforcing to the punisher. While it might take weeks or months to ween a child off sweets, enduring constant whining and requiring endless patient policing, one swat stops the behavior immediately, even if only temporarily. The faster the reinforcement, the stronger the reinforcer. Punishers, in other words, become punish junkies -- sadists.
"Punish" the wrongdoer? What possible value is obtained from temporarily suppressing an unwanted behavior, whatever its real source? Besides stroking your own warm sense of fulfillment, that is. Punishment doesn't work. Get over it.
The moral conservatives maintain that this is a Christian nation. They're right -- and that's the problem. Christianity's morality is specifically and insistantly based on them ol' Zoroastrian pedestals of Absolute Good and Evil, with the corollary that Good is to be rewarded and Evil punished and no more sophisticated a theory of management of complex social systems than Nail the Bad Guy. Which also leads directly to the Spank'em (TM) Brand Broken System Of Justice.
Any discussion of jurisprudence as it stands is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The flaw isn't just cosmetic, it's fundamental and virtually intractable.
Which is kinda hard to express in a 50 word post in a capital punishment discussion. So I lurk, and grind my teeth.
Fine (I hear you mutter) (yes, I can hear you -- I've got The Ears). So what's your great idea for government? As far as alternatives go, I've always liked Washboard Billy's Three Rules of Life myself:
1) Everybody eats
2) Nobody hits
3) There is no third rule.
"A virus ate my homework."
Idiot sticks sue for defamation.
Police apprehend pursesnatchers using focused EMP weapons to crash their smart sneakers.
Plumbers are trained in psychotherapy.
The walls have ears. And the ceiling has eyes. Don't even ask about the floor.
Pantheists switch their allegiance to microprocessors.
You're a musician? What instrument plays you?
Classifications for new perfumes include "weapons grade."
Tell your pajamas a naughty bedtime story.
The little voices in your head gets 150 channels in surround sound.
Your car = your boss.
"I met her at the cybercafe I wanted to interface but she forgot the password to her undies so the fleshtime could not take place..."
"A nanomachine ate my homework." (Holds up piece of paper full of tiny holes)
Booting your dog takes on a whole new meaning.
"Sorry, I can't -- I have to stay home and defragment the refrigerator."
Your wife's personality agent suspects your personality agent of simulating deep personal feelings for the advertising agent from the local online virtual sex service. And everyone blames you.
I'm no fan of tv. Let me restate that: I hate tv's solid state guts. Passionately.
This is not to say I don't watch it. I'm not one of those brainbloated snobs who turns a languid middle digit upward at what their refined palate finds too beneath them to actually partake of -- when I diss something, I've had some serious facetime with it first. How better to know what to micturate on? I partake of the luminous tit when I need to stop and let the dead weight of my own body sag into my side of the bed, parking my brain while seething at the networks' lack of even mediocre consistency of narrative values. If I get too incensed, I can always get up and stare at my computer screen instead.
Sandahbeth, on the other hand, is not so choosy. She can't afford to be. One of the serious trials of the invalid lifestyle is finding something to do when you're hurting enough to want to disconnect your nervous system, and are forced to settle for the next best thing, distracted quiescence. I once heard an interview on NPR with a longterm care patient pondering "What did people in hospitals do before television?" He extolled the virtues of the cheapest Hawaii 5-0 rerun over the prospect of yet another day staring at the same blank wall, with no recourse except to roll over -- if you can roll over -- and stare at the other one.
San watches a lotta tube. Good, bad, happy, sad, afterschool special or midnight creepshow, she's racking up the frequent-eyeballs miles. But even for her, it gets old.
One of our most frequent passtimes, back before we had a television or anyplace to put it, was reading out loud. My own penchant towards funny voices made it entertaining for me to try bringing cheap sci fi or beloved classics to life, and S was a steady and tolerant audience for my interjections, deconstructions and explanations. I read her The Lord of the Rings, Watership Down, the Neuromancer books -- twice.
With our recent mutual case of broadcast hives reaching a distinctly unamusing height, it was incumbent upon me to come up with something to read out loud. My choice was slightly off the main stem of our verbal heritage, but had, I hoped, some possibilities: Stephen Jay Gould's book of essays, Bully for Brontosaurus.
Not for this brief epistle even a modicum of the kind of bravo SJG (RIP) could and should be afforded. Look him up in the library yourself. Say only, a master of the essay form and the most eloquent expositor of the processes of scientific enquiry of his lifetime, and perhaps farther. One of the good 'uns, as our pal Eldri would say.
I soon found that Gould's essays, enthralling though they might be in an armchair with a cup of tea and soothing music, were not the stuff of which great bedtime stories are made. Gould liked his vocabulary and grammar and did tend to show off a tetch in the research department -- he was, after all, writing for the readership of Nature magazine, a most studied and critical audience. After I ground my way through his exposition of the true origins of baseball as a rubric of the process of mythmaking, S grunted, "Talks good, don't he?" But it's the mark of his ability to find essential truths in the most peculiar backwaters of academia that one of the chapters I recited contained an unexpected correlation of one of my own pet theories of human behavior. That theory can be summarized as a homily: The only good ape is a scared ape.
It's been my experience, both personally and by the reports of others, that people are for the most part pretty doggone mean. We seem to follow with eager loyalty that observation of Hobbs (quoted by Gould on more than one occasion and absorbed seamlessly into my own spiels) that the natural state of humanity is "The war of each against all." The exception to this, apart from the behaviors of humans who have taken on one or another system of moral rectitude that precludes such unpleasantness, is during disasters. When some natural catastrophe or external threat presents itself, most people behave as though every neighbor were family and every injury a personal challenge, one for all and all for one. A few may loot and pillage, but the majority pitches in and does the funky social duty. And the worse the chaos is, the better they act. As soon as the carnage is cleaned up, of course, everyone goes right back to Bowb Your Buddy Week. How can the same people be making nice one day and busting each other's chumps the next?
My puzzlement over this seeming discontinuity in human behavior received a major kick in the smarts from Gould's essay on Kropotkin's book Mutual Aid. Yes, that's Kropotkin the Russsian anarchist -- the boundries between the political and the scientific weren't as heavily patrolled back then. Gould's investigation, Darwinian warrior that he was, shed light on my own conundrum.
Gould evinced considerable skepticism at theories suggesting that organisms behave more nicely than classic evolutionary dogma dictates. He fears the distorting influence of hope or moral preference. But his initial leeryness at Kroptkin's basic premise, that natural selection is just as possible in a dynamic of cooperation against a hostile environment as it is through mano-a-mano competition, is mitigated when he learns that Kropotkin, far from being an isolated coocoo clock, is actually a mainstream thinker in a distinctly Russian school of evolution. That school observed nature in the extreme environs of Siberia and found compelling evidence of cooperation within species in the face of the harsh winters and scarce resources. Darwin and other champions of the competitive model of evolution had done all their research in the resource-rich, species-choked tropics.
In the words of the prophet, Bingo. Sophisticated and volitional though they may be, when the going gets tough, the apes get cooperative. Just as the theory predicts, we hoo-man beans are cutthroat snakedirt when times are good and, presto chango, selfless cooperative saints when the fecal substance impacts the rotating ventilation equipment. As the bloggers would say, Advantage: Evolution!
So what fo dis little coincidence? Just chance? Is it an inbred temperamental trait increasing the likelihood of individual survival when the poolpah strikes? Or are we sophisticated enough to turn our entire evolutionary strategy on a dime just out of sheer intelligence? Who knows? Not me -- but I'm glad to see that once again, my blind intuition had something going for it. And hey -- Gould's not bad evening entertainment after all.
Musicians of the world! Rejoice! I bring glorious news! Your liberation is at hand!
Remember all those hideous heinous international media conglomerates? Sure you do -- the Big Five companies that have slowly but surely devoured the entire spirit of indie record production and distribution? The ones who've formed a vertical monopoly along with their evil counterparts in the radio station consolidations that came down after those wonderful folks in Washington deregulated local media markets? Yeah, now it all comes rushing back, those dirtbags.
Well, guess what? Despite the failure of every single attempt on the part of grass roots DIY type artists to topple these crapulous cretins, these mountains of manure, they're coming down. Get out from under, kids, it's gonna be a big mess.
And who, you may well ask, is responsible for this, the fall of the ignoble titans of drooling lowest-common-denominator pop swill? Oh, this is rich. This is the best. They're doing it to themselves.
Boowah!
But first, let us pause, just for a moment, and contemplate the pitiable fate of Carcharodon megalodon.
Oops -- coming up with pocket lint on that name-check? Don't be too concerned. Otherwise known as the megatooth shark, C. megalodon had its heyday back in the Neogene, fifteen million years ago or a couple. Ranging up to 60 feet in length, it was the largest meateating fish that ever swam the bounding blue, swallowing baby whales and volkswagens whole. Alas, for all its semi-truck-with-teeth charisma, it didn't last. Its nearest descendant, C. carcharias (you may call him Mister Jaws, sir) only maxes out at 15-20', hardly more than a handy snack next to its bigmouth ancestor.
So what happened to the Baddest of the Bad? Simple. Bowsers of that size need a whole mess of provender, and if they fish out their local region, it's lights out for the tooth fairy.
And this relates to the Five of Blowholes how? Patience, little donkey, patience.
Behold now the captains of the Entertainment Industry, sturdy knights with banners rippling from their battlelances, setting forth in their fell armaments to do battle with -- who, exactly? Why, those fiendish godless heathen swine, the media thieves. Those property-rights flouting scoundrels with the temerity to believe that all electronic data should be free, free to wander where it will, to be exchanged like pleasantries on a sunny morn with any passing acquaintance. Monsters!
Their lawyers' sturdy tread is heard in the halls of justice. Their lobbyists spread unguent arguments and promises of monetary support amongst officials elected and appointed, invoking arcane and convoluted legislation to delight the heart of an ajudicant. Any visible stronghold of the file-sharing vermin is ridden down and reduced to smoking, bankrupt rubble. They are at war, and in war no quarter is given or asked.
And in the end, banners ripped and mudspattered, helmets dented, pikes blunted and lances broken, they are achieving success: it seems likely that in the future, more and more electronic media methods will be crippled, limited or even functionally destroyed in the name of holy copyright, for God, country and Mickey Mouse. Then, calm in their certainty that their borders are secure, the knights will retire to their manses and their castles, their country estates and lacquered lackeys, to reap the harvest they have sown: calamity, collapse and, ultimately, obsolescence.
The problem with the Big Guys of the media biz is that they ignore anything smaller than themselves. Their size is a product of competition with rivals, not any true economy of scale. Their perceptions are geared to prey and threat, both xtra large with fries. But the real danger is coming in under their radar.
Several years ago, S and I were invited to play at a concert series in a tiny town near Mt. Rainier. ASCAP had been running one of its episodic shakedowns on the poor little thing, so one of the strictures on the event was that we had to play nothing but original or traditional material. Naturally, we were heartbroken. "What? Forced to play nothing but the music nearest to our hearts, our own compositions? Oh deewee me!"
At that time, I postulated the ASCAP Exclusion Principle: Any time a monopoly seeks to police its territory of control, it creates untold opportunity outside that territory.
So now we see the aforementioned Blowholes industriously attempting to stomp out the most efficient, energetic and potentially profitable breakthrough in distribution since the invention of radio, namely internet filesharing. Perhaps they can succeed, in a way. They may actually force big companies, big acts and big middlemen of all gauges of slime to toe their line. They may even get some byzantine deconstruction of copyright law enacted forbidding any further developments in the filesharing arena.
But the cat is already out of the bag. Heck, the cat's out knocking up every queen in the neighborhood. Can't modify new mp3 players to decode commercial releases? No problemo, there's only a zillion old ones already out there. Can't play the latest dreck from Celine? Who needs to? Knock down one filesharing protocol? One down, oodles to go.
And the real opportunities aren't just for rehashing memory makers. With the distribution system in place, it's goldrush time in Digital City to see who's gonna be the new king of the virtual hill. Already, one fair-sized indie record company (yes, there are a few of them left) has offered a blanket license for their material (including the likes of Steve Earl) to any and all internet radio stations -- free. Can you say "exposure"? And every scrawny lead paint fed band and their cockeyed nephew has an internet strategy too. Much sooner than later, one of them is going to have a hit. And then it'll be like the mouse in the stew -- everyone'll want one.
Meanwhile, the dodos of the old guard are doing their best to aid the whole process by alienating the entire foundation of the big stupid music industry, the people who actually buy the music. Given the choice between free music and music you have to go through some idiot registration process to get, let alone pay for, one guess which one the public is going for.
But the big stupid music industry can't see its way clear to doing anything else. They need bulk to survive, and their only method of control is to attack. But how do you attack your own financial base? And live, I mean -- suicide is dumb, but certainly possible, even for international cartels. And if they want to rot in peace, they're going about it the right way.
Perhaps I am too optimistic. Perhaps humankind is ready to have its culture spoonfed to it in manicured pablum form by glittering machines of greed and tedium. Perhaps the eternally ornery artistic spirit can't maintain the momentum to actually break free of the indentured servitude of The Big Record Deal, the mink-lined gold-plated handcuffs of tour and limo and sometimes even a little respect. Perhaps. But just maybe...