Category: Cyberculture

Only in teh intarwebs!

Reddit worked despite reddit.

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I visit Reddit all the time. And I visited Digg before that. In fact I was hooked to this mode of operation since Digg. Suffice to say, something about link aggregation tickles my ADHD brain just right.

However with the recent blackout of a big part of reddit, I decided to start my own Lemmy instance and use Lemmy primarily instead through it. Since I’ve started this experiment, I feel any urge to visit Reddit for my “fix” less and less. I have some thoughts about that.

In Twitter Vs Mastodon AKA “micro-blogging”, The value was in the specific people one followed which made it way harder to switch services because one was help back by other people. I.e. the people kept each other locked-in. Similar to how Facebook keeps everyone locked-in their walled garden because it’s the only social media their parents and grandparents managed to learn to use.

In Reddit however, the value is all about the specific forums, or “subreddits”, in lingo. The specific people one was talking to, never really mattered. What was important was the overall engagement general sense of shared-interest. This has always been the core strength of Reddit, and its early pioneers like Aaron Schwartz understood that.

This is why the minimalist reddit of old, managed to dethrone Digg when the latter decided that its core principles wasn’t user-curated content, but linkspam. The people who migrated into Reddit made what it is today, by creating and nurturing their communities over years.

Any beneficial actions by reddit itself have been either following what the community was already doing (such as adding CSS options or on-boarding the automoderator bot), or forced by bad optics, such as when they were forced to finally ban /r/coontown, /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/jailbait (which their current CEO moderated btw) etc.

The community and the people who run the subreddits have always had to make the minimalist options allowed to them work. They had to develop their own tools and enhancements, such as RES, and Moderator Toolbox, while Reddit couldn’t even provide much requested functionality to counter the known abuses of cross-subreddit raiding.

Instead, Reddit focused on adding useless features nobody asked for like NFT. On the usability, the new look was their push to take the site more towards generic social media network, with friends, follows, awards and avatars, and instead of focusing on their core product: Link aggregation and discussions.

In fact, any action they took, was laser focused on social-media lock-in and extracting wealth and adding features which people didn’t care for, which is why most third party apps simply ignored all that stuff.

Through all this, their valuable communities kept fighting against reddit management’s pushes so that they could do what was right, even if some lost that fight, like /r/AMA which became but a shadow of its former self when the cowardly owners fired their low-level employee leading its success, and scapegoated their then female CEO for it.

Eventually though something had to give, and reddit seems to have realized that their users are too stubborn to simply accept the new paradigm they designed for them where they watch more ads, buy more reddit gold and get addicted to NFTs. And 3rd party apps enabled users to use the valuable part of reddit and skip the enshittification all too easily.

So they had to go. And here we are.

Unfortunately for reddit, since the core value of reddit has always been the links, and the discussions around said links, instead of specific people and a social network around them, it is stunningly easy to jump ship. It doesn’t take a lot to keep a community going on Lemmy instead of Reddit. All it needs is a handful of dedicated people to keep finding and posting links, and the discussions and memes will easily follow.

I don’t need to know that I know the links are coming from Gallowboob, in fact, I never cared who posted the links or started the discussions. Reddit has had the “friends” feature for close to a decade now, and I have “friended” less than a handful of people. There’s literally nothing holding me and most people back except our existing routines.

There is of course still a lot of momentum in reddit communities, and a lot of mods who really don’t want to lose their status. Nevertheless, I’m finding I’m not actually missing much by staying exclusively on lemmy atm and I see a lot of people are realizing the same thing increasingly fast. The finality of the loss of major apps like Apollo, RIF and Sync has already been the final nail for a lot of people.

This exodus might already be unstoppable unless reddit completely capitulates and goes back on their API plans. But I don’t hold my breath on this.

Feel free to come and hang out at the Divisions by zero lemmy instance btw. We’ll do fun things!

What About Paid Services on Top of the AI Horde?

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While the AI Horde will always be free for all, anyone can develop frontend for it and ask their users to pay for its use. This blogpost explains why this is OK so long as they give back as much as they take and how this is enforced.

Recently, a paid service built on top of the AI Horde was announced on reddit’s /r/stablediffusion and a big discussion opened on the ethics of charging people for money for access to the free compute provided by the AI Horde. I’ve talked about this in my discord with some users who were concerned, but I foresee it’s a subject that will keep coming up. So It’s a good time to clarify my position on this subject, “officially” as they say.

When I initially envisioned the AI Horde, this sort of question was foremost on my mind. “How to I prevent abuse of a crowdsourced system with unrestricted access for everyone?” My answer to this question was the Kudos system, which is baked-in on every usage of the AI horde.

Due to the “protection” of the kudos system, we can offer the AI Horde service as an open API for everyone, for any purpose. Knowing that whatever they do, they’ll have to either support the health of the service, or go back to the end of the queue. This allows us to not worry about who or how they’re using the service, because the kudos requirements are inescapable. This bears reiterating:

WE DO NOT CONTROL HOW OTHERS INTEGRATE WITH THE AI HORDE

Because we cannot control people, I am cognizant that people might try to charge money for their services based on the horde (which again, we cannot stop!) or even other technologies we wholly reject (like blockchain). But It doesn’t matter how someone uses the AI Horde; so long as they remain within the limits of the Kudos system, they will have to provide more to the AI Horde than they take out, which balances things out for everyone.

This is the practice of all open paradigms out there. They all rely on volunteer effort but allow people to find business models which can make them money, so long as they respect the open paradigm.

For example, the AI Horde is modeled after BitTorrent. It would be just as absurd to claim that the BitTorrent protocol itself is flawed because a Torrent client is charging money to their users, adding malware or integrating blockchain. Those users still have to play by the BitTorrent protocol and by whichever tracker rules they’re based on.

Likewise, even the most hardcore copyleft licenses like GPL explicitly allow commercial use of the software. Because people need to eat! It would likewise be absurd to say that the Linux kernel is unethical, because companies are making money selling stuff built on top of the Linux Kernel!

So knowing that open systems cannot control how other use them, and that the actions of integrators do not represent flaws of open system itself, we instead ask people to act in good faith. We request people to give back to he AI Horde as much, or more than they take. This means that everyone benefits. We likewise block registrations outside of the AI Horde and inform anyone registering that they can always use the AI Horde for free. This ensures that the owner of each service competes with every other free AI Horde UI out there. If their users still want to give them money after that, then they are obviously bringing something valuable to the table for those users. And again, that is OK with us, so long as they give back to the AI Horde according to their usage.

Finally, whatever one does, remember, they cannot escape the kudos system. A super popular front-end to the AI Horde which does not have at least a net zero consumption, will quickly find itself with such high queue times that will drive everyone else off their service.

The AI Horde is absolutely built to combat corporate influences and enshittification, however it is still an open service, and therefore it cannot control who uses it, without sacrificing that openness it is built on, or adding moderation overheads so massive that it would shutter the service.

Does that mean that everything goes? No of course not! As with the anti-CSAM filter, there’s a few rules that are of existential importance to the health of the AI Horde. For example another one is how one treats kudos themselves: I routinely remind people to not consider them a currency and to not assign any monetary value to them. The reason being that the exchange of kudos for money would introduce such immense perverse incentives into the equation, that it would cause the AI Horde development and moderators to switch full-time to countering scams and exploits instead of trying to improve the service. This is such a thick red line that I’m prepared to go to extremes to enforce it, even up to disabling kudos transfers altogether!

Fortunately until now people are following these directives, but what if tomorrow a service appeared whose business model relied on selling kudos they generated to their users, or which allowed people to bypass the anti-CSAM filter somehow? Well that would force me to take active means to counter such a service explicitly, which would easily escalate into an endless cat&mouse game at the detriment of the service. But it would be a necessary course of action. But the existence of a generic paid service however, outside of the violation of those rules for the AI Horde, does not necessitate it, precisely because it’s not an existential concern which would warrant the massive amount of resources that would have to be assigned to counter it.

All that said, I know people are still going to oppose the mere existence of integrations which found a way to make money using the AI Horde as a backend, even if those give back more than they take. Even if they help pay for the development and infrastructure of the AI Horde for the benefit of all. That is OK. Everyone should follow their conscience and values. I have even provided tools and controls for Workers to limit their exposure to practices they do not support, but even if those are not enough, then it is OK to not be part of the AI Horde.

This is also a reason why the AI Horde is Free/Libre Software. If someone else has a different ethical system on how crowdsourced compute resources like these should be handled, they are always welcome to host their own version of the AI Horde, in the same sense that anyone can host their own BitTorrent tracker, with any rules they want! I do honestly believe the current approach of the AI Horde, with unrestricted access is the way to go to democratize AI, but maybe I’m just wrong. It remains to be seen.

However, I do want to ask that people to do not share FUD about who we are affiliated with and what practices we support. The exact stance that we have, is what I have explained above.

At the end of the day, thousands of people are getting free Generative AI output currently and we do not plan to stop this access, ever. No matter who, or how they integrates into us. The AI Horde will always have a way to use it for free without restrictions!

Fantasy.ai is how the enshittification of Stable Diffusion begins

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Fantasy.ai has gotten into hot water since its inception, which for a company which is based on the Open Source community, is quite impressive feat on its own.

For those who don’t know, basically fantasy.ai goes to various popular model creators and tempts them with promises of monetary reward them for their creative work, if only they agree to sign over some exclusive rights for commercial use of their model, as well as some other priority terms.

It’s a downright Faustian deal and I would argue that this is how a technology that begun using the Open Source ideals to be able to counteract the immense weight of players like OpenAI and Midjourney, begins to be enclosed.

Cory Doctorow penned an excellent new word for the process in which web2.0 companies die – Enshittification.

  • First they offer an amazing value for the user, which attracts a lot of them and makes the service more valuable to other businesses, like integrating services and advertising agencies.
  • Then they start making the service worse for their user-base, but more valuable for their business partners, such as via increasing the amount of adverts for the same price, selling user data and metrics, pushing paid content to more users who don’t want to see it, and so on.
  • Finally once their business partners are also sufficiently reliant on them for income, they tighten their grip and start extracting all the value for themselves and their shareholders, such as by requiring extravagant payment from businesses to let people see the posts they want to see, or the products they want to buy.
  • Finally, eventually, inexorably, the service experience has become so shitty, so miserable, that it breaches the Trust Thermocline and something disruptive (or sometimes, something simple) triggers a mass exodus of their user base.
  • Then the service dies, or becomes a zombie, filled with more and more desperate advertisers and an ever increasing flood of spam as the dying service keeps rewarding executives with MBAs rather than their IT personnel.

Because Stable Diffusion is built as open source, we are seeing an explosion of services offering services based on it, crop up practically daily. A lot of those services are trying to discover how to stand out compared to others, so we have a unique opportunity to see how the enshittification can progress in the Open Source Generative AI ecosystem.

We have services at the first stage, like CivitAI which offer an amazing service to their user-base, by tying social media to Stable Diffusion models and fine-tunes, and allowing easy access to share your work. They have not yet figured out their business plan, which is why until now, their service appears completely customer focused.

We have services, like Mage.space which started completely free and uncensored for all and as a result quickly gathered a dedicated following of users without access to GPUs who used them for free AI generations. They are progressing to the second stage of enshittification, by locking NSFW generations behind a paywall, serving adverts and now also making themselves more valuable to model creators as soon as they smelled blood in the water.

We do not have yet Stable Diffusion services at the late stage of enshittification as the environment is still way too fresh.

Fascinatingly, the main mistake of Fantasy.ai is not their speed run through the enshittification process, but rather attempting to bypass the first step. Unfortunately, fantasy.ai entered late in the Generative AI game, as its creator is an NFT-bro who wasn’t smart enough to pivot as early as the Mage.space NFT-bro. So to make up the time, they are flexing their economic muscles, trying to make their service better for their business partners (including the model creators) and choking their business rivals in the process. Smart plan, if only they hadn’t skipped the first step, which is making themselves popular by attracting loyal users.

So now the same user-base which is loyal to other services has turned against fantasy.ai, and a massive flood of negative PR is being directed towards them at every opportunity. The lack of loyalty to fantasy.ai through an amazing customer service is what allowed the community to more clearly see the enshittification signs and turn against them from the start. Maybe fantasy.ai has enough economic muscle to push through the tsunami of bad PR and manage to pull off step 2 before step 1, but I highly doubt it.

But it’s also interesting to see so many model creators being so easily sucked-in without realizing what exactly they’re signing up for. The money upfront for an aspiring creator might be good (or not, 150$ is way lower than I expected), but if fantasy.ai succeeds in dominating the market, eventually that deal will turn to ball and chain, and the same creators who made fantasy.ai so valuable to the user-base, will now find themselves having to do things like bribe fantasy.ai to simply show their models to the same users who already declared they wish to see them.

It’s a trap and it’s surprising and a bit disheartening to see so many creators sleepwalking into it, when we have ample history to show us this is exactly what will happen. As it has happened in every other instance in the history of the web!

Dear Totalbiscuit…

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Dear Totalbiscuit, we just had a small chat in twitter when I took exception to your claim that Tone Policing is “made up”. This was all in response to your lengthy blogpost on the recent brouhaha in the gaming sphere, first started with the Zoe Quinn “scandal” ands latter inflamed by Anita Sarkeesian daring to post another Tropes VS Women in Gaming video.

Once I provided one of your followers an accessible link to explaining what Tone Policing is from the geek feminism wiki, you decided to directly challenge me to provide “academic evidence” that Tone Arguments are actually a thing. Eventually you declared that you would only engage me further if I discussed your blogpost itself in a length counter-argument, which given your status as an internet celebrity and mine as a virtual nobody, was intimidating to say the least.

So I’m going to use this opportunity and attempt to do exactly that. Even though I’m not the most knowledgeable on the subject and in fact I feel woefully inadequate to fully express the issues as those actually oppressed. Only I’m not going to talk about Tone Arguments. Because you see, while your blog has some issues with gross false equivalence and many aspects of tone policing, the biggest flaws in it lie elsewhere.

They lie in intellectual laziness and the arrogance by which you wield it. So let’s talk about two-player games.

By far the biggest issue I have with your blogpost is how little research you did before you wrote it. In fact that seems to be a chronic problem with your approach to sensitive issues that have been affecting the industry you’re part of. Reading your original foray into these issues, it was obvious you were caught proudly unaware, but rather than do due diligence and explore what is the issue, you had your followers feed you the info they felt you needed to know, and then you wrote about that. As a result, in the midst of one of the most massive and brutal campaigns of harassment against a woman and feminist allies, the best you could find to talk about was corruption in games journalism and an alleged DMCA violation. Talk about having perspective!

And then today, came your secondary opinion piece on this issue, in which you start talking about some nebulous MRAs and SJWs who might or might not be caricatures and they’re really surely just as bad as each other. You promote “non-extremism” without explaining what exactly it is. You’re talking about “your perspective” on what bro-gamers probably think, about what feminists think. You assume and interpret what people on both sides of the debate are thinking and doing. But you don’t actually bother to go and find out by talking to them directly!

Dear Totalbiscuit, ignorance is not a virtue. If you want to discuss a very charged issue with the people  who are on various sides of the subject, you need to understand their actual positions. Do you know why those extremists labeled as “SJW” are even upset, or did you just dismiss them because they are? Are they as bad as MRAs ((Note, I am not implying that everyone on one side is an MRA, merely making a point)) because they use the same tactics (they don’t), or because MRAs are angry as well? Did you ever even bother to find out what an MRA is and what they stand for, or is the acronym’s meaning good enough? Did you investigate to see if any side has an actual merit, or did you just assume the answer lies in the middle?

And since we’re at this, let’s put something into perspective. The fact that one or both sides of this argument are angry, does not invalidate their position, or make them “extremists”. There are reasons why people will absolutely not engage with people from the other side and this doesn’t automatically make them “destructive elements”  as you’ll liken them in your post. Victims have no duty to be nice to their abusers. The marginalized do not owe respect to their oppressors. This is the essence of the Tone Argument by the way, and sorry, but I still couldn’t be bollocksed to go and academically prove to you  that it is not “made up”

But do not misunderstand me. You have every right to be in the middle of this subject. Feel free to partly agree with Anita and partly agree with the criticisms against her. But just because you find yourself in the middle doesn’t make everyone else an extreme. Your point of reference is not the anchor of the discussion. If you are willing to be as open minded as you claim, you need to engage with the primary sides of the argument and actually make up your mind if their reaction is warranted or not. And let me tell you, given your reaction when you caught a fraction of the fraction of the abuse that women in gaming are receiving, it looks to me that you’d be reacting far worse in their shoes.

Your laziness to actually take the time to explore these issues became infuriatingly obvious when we started talking about it on twitter. Clearly you have not actually bothered to read about feminism or understand some of its basic arguments, and yet a quick google search was all that you needed to declare that Tone Policing is not a thing. You expected everyone else to feed you the info (at an academically-sourced level no less) rather than making a rudimentary effort to educate yourself. Not for me or anyone else talking to you, but for your own damn benefit! You know, to be able to make an educated evaluation of the criticism levelled against you and either counter it, or fix the issue.

So this is the biggest flaw in your post. It’s lazily researched and has only the flimsiest of understanding of the dynamics of the situation. Tim VS  JonTron, Zoe VS 4chan, whatever. Everyone must be a little bit right and a little bit wrong, correct? No. It doesn’t work that way. If you want to express an opinion on each of these situations, have the moral fortitude to actually stick your head out and argue your case on the actual issues being debated. Figure out where you stand and tell us! You disagree with Anita’s videos? Why? You agree? Why? This is what the rest of us are doing, and why (women primarily) are taking flak for it. Show us that you actually understand the issues at hand and why people on either side are wrong, or not.

If you want to have the discussion, then have at it. But do not attempt to dismiss or minimize those who don’t have the privilege of a huge following to buffer and protect them from the internet hate machine. The marginalized would like nothing more than to have a polite discussion, but as the reaction to Anita’s very polite videos show, this is not going to happen any time soon. So please do not equate the defence of the abused with the offence of the abuser.

Rest assured, I do not hate you for your opinion. I do not even dislike you. I am disappointed because, as one bullied PC-gamer to another, dear Totalbiscuit, you’re in the wrong in this. Not because you’re moderate, but because you’re not putting the effort required to do intellectual justice to the issues at hand. Not because you don’t know feminist concepts, but because you don’t want to know. Because you prefer to talk about the form rather than the content.

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Fedora Shaming

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So, fedora shaming is an interesting thing for me to watch grow in popularity. Especially because of all the people associated with fedoras or hating on them. It’s double interesting because I happen to own one.

I bought a fedora back in early 2007 on a lark, as a cheap accessory to my outfit, for my escapade to the night at the local goth dive. I don’t remember anyone wearing hats in there, especially not fedoras and I certainly never saw it outside during the day. So I thought it would be fairly unique while I was using it in the dark and foreign environment of a gothic club (to look more mysterious I guess).

I kinda liked the look. I wore it in Wacken Open Air 2007, where I met my future wife (who liked it more than I did 😀 ), and wore it on occasion, such as the occasional night club outing. But I kinda stopped once I stopped going out so much, since I was using a bicycle most of the time, which doesn’t really fit the look (not to mention that wind is inconvenient).

Still, when I don’t have to use my bicycle, I would now and then like to wear it ((currently it’s sitting in my cellar, fighting for its life against a moth infestation)),  but the recent blowback against fedora wearing makes me very cautious about doing so. Not so much because pop culture tries to shame people using it,  but more because wearing one seems to mean that you’re a particular type of person.

And don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I don’t want to be seen as an asocial dorky white guy, world knows I used to be one long before I ever even knew what a fedora was, it’s more like, I don’t want people to think I’m a MRA/PUA creeper using the hat like a plume to attract attention.

But is it that the people who would like the hat, are that sort of people? Or are people who like  the hat avoiding it, much like I am, because of the negative connection?

To an extend I blame internet culture for all this. There’s a strong element of shaming of everything that is not “normal”. Instead of celebrating new trends, we do the opposite. The impression I get from lurking in popular online communities feels very similar to a high school social ostracism of the aberrant.

And the frustrating thing is, you see this on all sides. People are as quick to shame the nerdy, the asocial and the fedora, as they are to shame the fat, the queer and the women. “Only jocks allowed” so to speak. Which is weird to see since the internet used to be the bastion of the nerd.

And the fedora-bashing theme is kinda interesting because it’s become like a universal thing to shame. Jocks shame it, tumblr social justice warriors shame it, hipsters shame it, horrible anonymous communities shame it. I don’t think it’s possible anymore to upload a picture of yourself of wearing a fedora, without becoming an instant object of ridicule by many people.

I get that many people are shaming some common archetypes among fedora-wearers, such as the “nice guy”, the “creeper”, the “libertarian scumbag” etc. But does it make sense to shame the hat instead of  the behaviour? Because other than that, I don’t think it’s bad at all that some people choose this particular accessory to experiment with. Sure, many may look ridiculous in it, just as many look ridiculous in 3-piece suits, or shorts.

I just wish we would let people express themselves in any way they choose and constructively help them improve their looks, rather than making them feel ashamed for trying and give up. I’d much prefer a world where fedoras, punks, hipsters, flamboyants  etc, as well as intermixes of all of the above, can get along with the currently acceptable “normal” looks, rather than force everyone into the same cookie-cutter appearance.

But if we’re going to keep shaming, can we at least do it to the “suit & tie”, AKA the most boring and uninspired look in all of human history?

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A look into the mind of a monster

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[TW] A serial rapists comes anonymously on reddit to explain his motives and methods.

[Warning: Massive Trigger Warning for Rape!]

So reddit recently had a post asking for the stories of rapists. I won’t go much into that clusterfuck (hint: Nuke it from orbit) but I was linked to one particular thread, where a serial college rapist explains how he thought when he did it, how he managed it and how he avoided justice. The whole thing is just disturbing but if you can stomach reading it, it will give you an insight not only on how these kind of rapists trap women but also how they get away with it.

"You deign to reply to me?"

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“I’ve got more knowledge in my left testicle than you’ve got in your whole brain.”

Oh Gawds, the arrogance is over nine thousand!

The title quote from a right-libertarian redditor named “Libertarian Atheist” who fancies themselves as some kind of anarchist. They got a bit upset that I declined to include /r/agorism in the confederation of anarchist reddits and apparently tried to educate me on their personal ideology. The discussion soon after degraded, until they said this particular sentence, and I just had to bow out. What more can you say to that, that is not said by itself.

For posterity, I’m going to quote in full their latest reply. It’s that amazing.

You mistake arrogance with intelligence, knowledge, and an ability to convey ideas in an effective manner. “Arrogance” is a term dumb people with false ideas and impressions use to describe other people with better ideas. A smart man with false ideas and impressions who comes across another person with better ideas will not call that person “arrogant,” he will try to better understand what the other man is saying and be on the ready to throw out his own follies. What you laughably call a “combin[ing]” of “ideologies” is not so, it is the end result of years of study and reading, throwing out weak ideas (like “gift economy”) and championing the strongest. This is what I have been doing all my life and it does not bother me in the least that you (or anyone else, anarchist or otherwise) can’t understand. Luckily opinions are not measured by how many people “take [it] seriously” (if that were the case Christian and Muslim opinions would be the best) and a man seeking the best opinions does not care who “takes [him] seriously”, what matters is reaching as close an approximation of the truth as is humanly possible.

The funniest part is where you claim to be able to teach me anything. I’ve got more knowledge in my left testicle than you’ve got in your whole brain. You’re barely fit to teach a dog. You deign to reply to me? What a laugh! This back in forth with you is the greatest waste of my time this year so far. . . we’ve got quite a bit to go but you’re in a very high running at this point.

I just love that they also italicized the “me”, making that phrase totally sound like Invader Zim. Adorable!

Missing the point: The Megaupload takedown is about scaring the competition.

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Megaupload was taken down, but there’s no point in discussing how justified this was. That wasn’t the goal of the act.

Logo shown on The Pirate Bay homepage after th...

I just saw this article on Torrentfreak where it reports on a recent Kim Dotcom interview, where he is dismayed that the law went against Megaupload so aggressively, even though they were co-operating so much with content owners and paid a lot of lawyers to confirm that they were within the letter of the law.

Towards achieving this protection, Dotcom told us that the company had developed relationships with 180 takedown partners – companies authorized to directly remove infringing links from Megaupload’s systems – and between them they had taken down in excess of 15 million links. Those companies included the major studios of the MPAA who, incidentally, in 7 years of the company’s existence had never tried to sue Megaupload for copyright infringement.

On the advice of Megaupload’s legal team, the company believed it had the same rights as YouTube in its case against entertainment giant Viacom. In that 2010 case U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton said service providers can not be held liable for infringement as long as they remove links upon copyright holder request – even if the provider knows that parts of their service are being used to host illicit content.

“[YouTube] won their lawsuit and I’m sitting in jail, my house is being raided, all my assets are frozen without a trial, without a hearing. This is completely insane, is what it is,” said Dotcom of his predicament.

This shows how naïve Kim Dotcom is about the causes of the aggressive raid on Megaupload. It wasn’t really that Megaupload was hosting infringing content. It wasn’t that Kim Dotcom is extravagant and an easy target. It wasn’t that the judges were misled by the content industry.

Is is because of this

Megaupload did something that scared the bejeesus out of the dinosauric content industries. It developed a new business model and got it endorsed by popular names of contemporary content culture. It was about to show the world that ad-supported content creation is viable and in the process steal some of their best-known names.

If it succeeded (and it would have if left unattended) it would have served as the first domino to fall, urging other companies to follow suit and more artist to bail the sinking ship that is the RIAA. This clearly had to be nipped in the bud.

It is no surprise that the content industry went from calling Megaupload a “rogue site” (even though it co-operated fully with them), to strongarming the New Zealand state to take action with such ferocity that they called anti-terrorist groups to raid the house of a non-violent citizen. The immediate action and the excessive response is not random. It is in fact perfectly planned.

The point is to make an example out of Megaupload, not as a detriment to pirates, but as a warning to anyone seriously thinking of challenging the obsolete business model of the RIAA without playing by their rules. The response was there to remind everyone that the law jumps at the behest of the plutocracy and publicly snubbing your noses at them is a recipe for pain.

In fact, the similarities with The Pirate Bay takedown of 2006 are not few. Both sites were considered legal in their respective countries until the moment that they were raided without warning. Both times the response was unheard of compared to the nature of the crime. Both sites mocked the old content industries and openly agitated people to embrace the future of content creation and sharing. Both sites were not the largest available. The takedown of both sites was hailed and promoted by the content industries as a bloody warning to others.

In the case of the Pirate Bay, it quickly surfaced that state officials had been strongarmed by US diplomats to “Take immediate and definite action or else…” and they followed suit. It will not surprise me in the least to hear that New Zealand state officials had been pressured off the record by the US via economic sanctions if they did not immediately take action against Megaupload, legal precedent be damned.

The point is not really to defeat Megaupload in court – even though given the farce that was the Pirate Bay kangaroo court, it’s not unlikely – the point is first to scare all sites like Megaupload into shutting down or toning down their business, regardless of how legal it seemingly is. This is why such excessive force was used by the police, to give nightmares to site admins. Secondly and most importantly, it was to disrupt Megaupload enough so that they won’t be able to proceed with their plans to try out a new business model.

Both seem to have been successful. Already many other large uploading sites have taken measures to prevent their users from effectively sharing files or closed down altogether. Furthermore even if Megaupload wins the trial, the time it will take and the disruption it will do to them due to their frozen funds and burnt clients (those who lost their subscription money) will most likely ensure that Megaupload won’t be able to recover its former glory ((Naturally, I hope I’m wrong on this.)).

The distributed and free nature of the The Pirate Bay network/community helped them to quickly come back up and quickly resume services. As such, their takedown served actually as huge advertisement for them, and their popularity skyrocketed since then, making them one of the largest, if not the largest and most influential torrent site available, and a continuous trolling thorn in the content industry’s side.

Unlike them, Megaupload is centralized and concentrated in the hands of one leader figure, Kim Dotcom. As such, it is far easier to kill the beast by cutting off its head, which is exactly what happened in this instance. Megaupload cannot as easily be moved and brough up by allies, it cannot go rogue, and without the running accounts, it cannot function. It doesn’t matter if they are absolved in 5 years. By then it will be too late.

This is the weakness of centralized disruptive models I’m afraid and I doubt that Megaupload will recover from this, even though I’ll be pleasantly surprised if they somehow manage it. But until then, lets not delude ourselves that the takedown has anything to do with legality or proper procedure. We know it isn’t and so do they, but they do not care.

All they need to achieve is to convince everyone watching that when you go against them, the law will not protect you and even success in court will only be a phyrric victory.

 

How Kickstarter allows companies to "double-dip" their fans.

Db09 Comments
The Double Fine logo, consisting of a two-head...

The recent monumental successes of both the Double Fine and the Order of the Stick crowdfunding has also kickstarted (Beware the puns!) some heated discussions between my group of friends and myself on what the ethical thing to do is, once the project exceeded the requested amount by that much.

Regular readers (with amazing memories) might remember me writing on this issue a while ago, but the recent heated discussions prompted me to explore this issue once more and perhaps go into more depth into how this applies to non-software projects such as the Order of the Stick comic.

First of all, I should explain what my criticism is:

I believe that the only ethical thing to do, once you decide that you want your project to be funded by the public, is to make the end result public as well. The reason I find this the fair thing to do, is because by crowdfunding your project you take away the actual risk of developing a new product, and thus it makes no sense to take advantage of a system which rewards you based on the expectation that you took such a risk.

In this case, that system is copyrights and the capitalist markets. The expectation in the current world is that a creative project was started by a person or a group of people, who took a risk in creating something and then trying to make a living out of selling copies of it (I’m not going to criticise the expectations themselves ((I will only say that they are very wrong. Perhaps I will explore this in another post.)) but rather take them at face value for now.) This is where copyrights come in at their theoretical level. Copyright’s purpose is to incentivize new creative works, by giving a state-provided way for their creators to monetize them once they’ve been created.  Thus someone who took a successful risk in judging what popular demand is can get fabulously compensated for it ((while those who didn’t get to starve, but that’s another issue now isn’t it?)).

But if copyrights are supposed to be the incentive for creating new works of art, then it makes no sense to provide them for crowdfunded projects, since there that incentive has already been provided by the crowd “patrons” of the project. People have already provided a monetary incentive for the creator which has also taken away all the risk.

For the creator to now take the finish project and monetize it as if they took all the risk and required the incentive of copyrights to do so, is unethical.

What would be the ethical thing to do? Try to circumvent copyrights you did not have to rely upon and release the work into the commons, once all your costs have been repaid. Release it as free software if it’s software, or release it in the creative commons with the most permissive license if it’s anything else.

But what is happening here, is that the creators have to work with such lowered expectations from their audience, that they can easily get away with what see as straightforward double dipping. The creators not only get a significant part (if not all) of their costs covered, and once the project is finished, the get to keep any and all profits from the sales of copies the product as well. They get to have their cake and eat it too.

People criticise me at this point by reminding me that the fans knew what they were getting into when they agreed to fund these projects, and that makes everything OK. I do not think that’s a good excuse. First of all, people voluntarily give their money to many causes and projects, but that does not mean that every such cause is ethical. Not only do people act irrationally in most economic decisions, but I find that the moral imperatives also change when we’re talking about these amounts.

It is one thing not to expect a project to be released for free when you’re only funding just 5% of its total cost, but here we’re talking about projects who’ve been funded 100% and possibly more. When the crowdfunding success is that big, when the mutual aid sentiments are that great from your fans, the creators have a duty to modify what they give back to the community just as much. But instead what I continuously see happening is that the extra rewards are something that will make the creators even more money!

For example, the Order of the Stick (OotS) kickstart required something like 60.000$ to work. They got 20 times this amount last time I checked. The original result of the crowdfunding would have been one book being able to be reprinted. With 20 times the amount, it’s going to be 5 books and a board game. I.e. the cost and risk of these reprints is being taken over by the community, while the author gets to keep the profits. And everyone is too far caught up in the euphoria of the project’s success to notice that they just made the author practically a millionaire overnight and in return got the opportunity to buy some new books in the future.

I’m told this is a fair deal because they agreed to the original plan.

Now I have to clarify that I have nothing against rewarding the creators of such works, especially when people like Burlew have been releasing their comic for free online for a long while (which they monetized in other ways already, but that’s beside the point). I’m very happy for the success of these projects, but I can’t avoid seeing the reality of the situation just as well.

When there is such overwhelming support for the creators to create new works, to take advantage of an artificial monopoly granted by the state via threats of violence (copyrights) as if it was a required incentive as well is an abuse of the goodwill of your fans, even if those fans are too starstruck or privileged to realise it.  And I just can’t ignore this “double-dipping”.

I am cynical enough to fully expect that now that new roads have been paved by the pioneers and the indies of the creative world, the big companies will also start dipping their toes into the crowdsourcing pot. We’ll see giants like Activision offering carrots of classic and loved IPs such as Dungeon Keeper or Descent to crowdfunding, so that they can get some money upfront and only then start working on these titles, with either reduced risk, or completely risk-free. And why shouldn’t they? They will develop an IP with some money upfront and then sell it back to the people who already funded it.

And because the expectations of everyone for the rewards crowdsourcing will be for the public are so low, these companies may cynically abuse this concept, until the burn out the crowdfunding goodwill.

Alternatively, I hope that now that crowd funding is gaining momentum, we’ll see perhaps a sort of competition between projects for these funds, and eventually those projects which promise full ownership to the crowd that funds them will be seen as the better offer, while the others are ignored. This is my optimistic scenario.