Laconia: An Architecture of Thinking

Multimedia landscape as a language pattern, or what Ezra Pound has to do with Twitter.

In LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film, Masha Tupitsyn explores the curious intersection of the print tradition of books and the micronarrative model of Twitter. The project is essentially an experiment that appropriates the forms of social media — soundbites, fragmented commentary, quotes, condensed reactions — in a work of film criticism that preserves the cultural purpose of the genre but divorces it from its traditional medium of essayistic narrative. What makes Tupitsyn’s project exceptional, however, is that it reverse-engineers the now-familiar frameworks of Twitter anthologies — unlike Tweets from Tahrir, for instance, which sought to capture of a slice of the social narrative about the Egyptian revolution by culling tweets after the fact, Tupitsyn’s approach put the intention of the book before the composition of each tweet, so that every tweet was deliberately crafted with the larger narrative in mind. Rather than a cohesive analysis of one idea at length, however, that narrative instead connects dots across diverse sources and constructs a mosaic of cultural patterns that explore the relationships between films.

LACONIA is, in essence, an architecture of thinking. It is also a book that shows its skeleton. That tackles the multi-media landscape as a language pattern rather than a material phenomenon.” ~ Masha Tupitsyn

At its heart, the book is as much about film itself as it is about how Tupitsyn thinks about film in the age of infinite connectivity and on a platform that has more in common with poetry than with prose. In Tupitsyn’s own words:

In some ways, I think I was born to write this kind of book because for me writing always starts with: a line, a phrase, a fragment. Modeled on the aphorism, while updating and tailoring it to film and pop culture, the goal in LACONIA was to zoom in rather than to zoom out, to write in close-ups, so that every word, to quote Ezra Pound, could become ‘charged with meaning.’ Like the aphorism, which according to James Geary in The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, must be ‘brief, definitive, personal, philosophical, have a twist,’ and reveal some larger truth, each tweet in LACONIA is a miniature exegesis; an appraisal of the world through film and media since our understanding of the world has become increasingly, if not entirely, shaped and mediated by both.”

In a way, LACONIA is akin to John Chris Jones’s classic, The Internet and Everyone, substituting tweets for Jones’s lengthy letters to piece together a dimensional meditation on a medium through thoughtfully engineered fragments.

Spotted via The Millions, who have a wonderful piece on the future of fragmented reading.

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The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption

Why “information overload” is the wrong lens on the issue, or what sugar and fat have to do with Hollywood.

“You are a mashup of what you let into your life,” artist Austin Kleon recently proclaimed. This encapsulates the founding philosophy behind Brain Pickings — a filtration mechanism that lets into your life things that are interesting, meaningful, creatively and intellectually stimulating, memorable. Naturally, I was thrilled for the release of Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption — an intelligent manifesto for optimizing the 11 hours we spend consuming information on any given day (a number that, for some of us, might be frighteningly higher) in a way that serves our intellectual, creative, and psychological well-being.

Johnson — best known for managing Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, then directing Sunlight Labs at government transparency operation Sunlight Foundation — draws a parallel between the industrialization of food, which at once allowed for ever-greater efficiency and reined in an obesity epidemic, and the industrialization of information, arguing that blaming the abundance of information itself is as absurd as blaming the abundance of food for obesity. Instead, he proposes a solution that lies in engineering a healthy relationship with information by adopting smarter habits and becoming as selective about the information we consume as we are about the food we eat. In the process, he covers the history of information, the science of attention, the healthy economics of media, and a wealth in between.

In any democratic nation with the freedom of speech, information can never be as strongly regulated by the public as our food, water, and air. Yet information is just as vital to our survival as the other three things we consume. That’s why personal responsibility in an age of mostly free information is vital to individual and social health. If we want our communities and our democracies to thrive, we need a healthier information diet.”

(For a piece of timely irony, consider the fact that the book came out at a time when the U.S. government is considering a policy that not only attempts to regulate access to information, but does so for the purpose of force-feeding the public Hollywood’s entertainment lard.)

Johnson begins with a familiar quote from Steve Jobs:

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”

He builds on the analogy between food and information by arguing that just like we know we’re products of the food we eat, we must understand just how much we’re products of the information we consume — and consume accordingly. Yet the sheer amount of information available to us — 800,000 petabytes (a million gigabytes per petabyte) in the storage universe and 3.6 zettabytes (a million petabytes per zettabyte) consumed by American homes per day, expected to increase 44-fold by 2020 — is mind-boggling.

Using Google’s n-gram viewer, which searches the occurrences of a particular phrase in a corpus of English books from the past 150 years, Johnson points out that the term “information overload” became popular in the 1960s, surging 50% by 1980 and then again by 2000.

But, Johnson is careful to point out, the term itself is semantically broken:

The concept of information overload doesn’t work, however, because as much as we’d like to equate our brains with iPods or hard drives, human beings are biological creatures, not mechanical ones. Our brains are as finite in capacity as our waistlines. While people may eat themselves into a heart attack, they don’t actually die of overconsumption: we don’t see many people taking their last bite at a fried chicken restaurant, overstepping their maximum capacity, and exploding. Nobody has a maximum amount of storage for fat, and it’s unlikely that we have a maximum capacity for knowledge.

Yet we seem to want to solve the problem mechanically. Turn it the other way around and you see how absurd it is. Trying to deal with our relationship with information as though we are somehow digital machines is like trying to upgrade our computers by sitting them in fertilizer. We’re looking at the problem through the wrong lens.”

Johnson argues that instead of the lens of productivity and efficiency, which have become a false holy grail for our inbox-zero-obsessed culture, we should consider this through the lens with which we assess what we consume biologically: health. Because the problem is now larger than a mere matter of getting things done:

It’s a matter of health and survival. Information and power are inherently related. Our ability to process and communicate information is as much an evolutionary advantage as our opposable thumbs.”

Still, Johnson cautions that we’re wired to love certain kinds of information, most notably affirmation, so we seek out information that confirms, rather than challenges, our existing beliefs. (Cue in Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble.)

Just as food companies learned that if they want to sell a lot of cheap calories, they should pack them with salt, fat, and sugar — the stuff that people crave — media companies learned that affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they’re right?”

Ultimately, at the heart of The Information Diet lies an urgency to not only recognize, but also act upon, something we all intuit but have a hard time enacting:

Like any good diet, the information diet works best if you think about it not as denying yourself information, but as consuming more of the right stuff and developing healthy habits.“

To aid in that, Johnson has provided a toolkit of helpful (mostly) free software for a healthy information diet on the book’s site, ranging from productivity apps to ad blockers to various setting hacks to make your favorite services and social web platforms more conducive to info-wellness.

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Free Ride: Digital Parasites and the Fight for the Business of Culture

What the French ideology from 1791 has to do with creative meritocracy and the future of information.

As the editor of what’s essentially a public-service curiosity portal, ad-free and supported through reader contributions much in the way public radio and libraries are, I’m the first to cry “Wolf!” at any oversimplified insinuation that putting content behind paywalls is the way to make journalism and entertainment sustainable endeavors. I am a firm believer in content meritocracy and the pay-what-you-will model as the future of publishing, but I am also profoundly saddened by the way editorial and curatorial merit are being hijacked, regurgitated, and spat out as sellable commodities not benefiting the original creator or curator in any way.

(In fact, just this week, the Huffington Post took my recent piece on this Victorian map of woman’s heart and did with it what’s referred to as over-aggregation — reposting a reworded article with no substantive additional reporting and no prominent via-link for proper source attribution.)

So when I came across Robert Levine’s Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back, I was ambivalently intrigued. One one hand, it opens with such binary war cries as:

By making it essentially optional to pay for content, piracy has set the price of digital goods at zero. The result is a race to the bottom, and the inevitable response of media companies has been cuts — first in staff, then in ambition, and finally in quality.”

Implicit to this argument is the assumption that if we did indeed make it optional for people to pay, most wouldn’t. This needn’t be the case — the disconnect between price and value is as much about price as it is about value. Most people won’t pay for mediocrity but, at least in my experience, will gladly pay if they see value.

But Levine then takes a deeper look at the complexity of the issue, starting by correcting the popular misquotation of Stewart Brand’s infamous argument that “information wants to be free.” (That’s the same Stewart Brand, by the way, who in the 1960s campaigned to get NASA to release the then-rumored satellite image of Earth — something hard to imagine was a point of contention in the age of breathtaking satellite timelapses available to the layman online.) As Levine points out, the full Brand quotation is much more nuanced:

On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

Levine goes on to argue that the real conflict of the web is between the media companies slaving away at the true value-creating work of journalism and entertainment, and the tech companies racing to distribute their content, be it legally or not. But the idea that information will inevitably be free is based on the theory that the price of any good would fall to its marginal cost, and the marginal cost of digital distribution is exponentially approaching zero, bringing down the marginal cost of media along. Levine pokes two main holes in this argument: it’s not only a theory, but also one economists developed for commodity goods, and implicit to it is the admission that if the price of culture fell to zero, content creators like movie studios and investigative journalists would have no way of covering their production expenses. At the root of this paradox is a dangerous conflation:

Much of the enthusiasm for free media comes from mistaking the packaging for the product. If you believe people once paid $15 for silver plastic discs, it’s only natural to think online distribution will revolutionize the recording business. But if you realize people were paying for the music on those discs, it’s obvious that someone still has to make it — and that someone probably wants to get paid.”

On the other hand, Levine points out the uncomfortable reality of the tools for extracting value — tools not of device drivers but of human drives:

Reporters can access online databases and interview sources by Skype, but they still have to read the documents and ask the right questions. In cases like this, ‘information wants to be expensive.’”

In criticizing the questionable and often outright illegal practices of aggregator sites, Levine scathes:

In Silicon Valley, the information that wants to be free is almost always the information that belongs to someone else.”

He wryly observes the predatory paradox of the early ecosystem that laid the foundations for today’s information value systems, including the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998:

For media companies, getting advice from technology pundits was like letting the fox lead a strategic management retreat in the henhouse.”

For my part, I started Brain Pickings more than six years ago as what’s commonly referred to as a “passion project” (though I don’t like the fleeting noncommittal relationship this phrasing suggests) and didn’t have a business model — but I did have a crystal-clear editorial model, which remains the same today: get people interested in meaningful cross-disciplinary things they didn’t yet know they were interested in, and in the process empower their networked knowledge and combinatorial creativity; break out of the filter bubble, if you will, though conceived long before we had the very vocabulary to articulate it. So when an aggregator like the Huffington Post, a business-model wolf wearing an editorial-authenticity sheep’s skin, takes my (ad-free) content and regurgitates it on its (ad-plastered) site, it lives up to the term “parasite” at the heart of Levine’s argument, derived from the Greek parasitos and used to describe “someone who ate at someone else’s table without providing anything in return.”

While Levine rightly recognizes the remarkable creative empowerment that affordable technology has effected, he also observes the flipside:

This explosion of creativity has enriched our culture immensely. But many bloggers face some of the same problems as newspapers: it’s hard to make money if half the people who read your stories do so on another site.”

Or, to put it more crudely:

How can any company compete with a rival that offers its products but bears none o the expenses? The free ride has become a road to riches.”

And while I have the luxury of not caring about the “traffic” such parasites are stealing — because I’ve made the choice not to measure the quality of merit of content and the quality of audience, you, in pageviews and ad revenue, the basic currency of the Internet and arguably the reason for the brokenness of it all — there’s still something to be said for the theft of creative and intellectual labor here.

In reassessing the vision for art and commerce thriving together, a vision purveyed at the dawn of the digital revolution, Levine laments that it’s time to acknowledge this isn’t happening and won’t “until we turn the online free-for-all into a free market.” (Cue in my faith in a pay-what-you-will meritocracy.) Levine drives the disconnect home:

Traditional media companies aren’t in trouble because they’re not giving consumers what they want; they’re in trouble because they can’t collect money for it. It’s the natural outcome of an online economy that transfers wealth from ‘each according to his ability’ to ‘each according to what he can get away with.’”

And parasites certainly try to get away with a lot. With their masterful search engine optimization — which produces what I call the HuffPostification of headlines, titles that sound like a fifth-grader or a caveman (or, in the most successful of cases, a fifth-grader caveman) composed them and frequently feature the word “awesome” — they have perfected the craft of giving machines what algorithms think people want, then collecting money for it. Never mind the cultural footprint.

Having just returned from the annual Futures of Entertainment summit for my MIT fellowship, where Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain brought back the now-infamous web-age adage, “If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product,” I was particularly taken with Levine’s thoughtful argument that this entire imperfect information economy, with its parasites and its promises, was “a choice of design, not a requirement of technology.” As editors, curators, and publishers, we choose how to measure our merit, collect our money if we so choose, and, most importantly, serve our audience. As Levine puts it,

Like TV, the Internet is only as good as what’s on it.”

Levine goes on to examine the many facets of information value and intellectual property, from the devastation of the music business to Google’s war on copyright to how Europe is handling censorship, and in the end reminds us the tough calls that shape the future of the Internet will not be made with technology R&D breakthroughs but with ethical decisions on how to use that technology and what to value. He offers a poetic reminder by citing the first French copyright law, circa 1791:

The most sacred, the most unassailable, and the most personal of all properties is the composition, the fruit of the writer’s thought.”

Ultimately, I completely agree with Tyler Cowen when he says, “Everyone who follows cultural economics should read this book.”

I, by the way, was happy to pay $13.99 for a Kindle copy of Levine’s book — and would’ve happily paid much more had he offered a pay-what-you-will option.

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