Noam Chomsky — political critic, education anarchist, father of modern linguistics — has described the Occupy movement, which began on September 17, 2011, as “the first major public response to thirty years of class war.” His new book, simply titled Occupy (public library), is at once a vivid portrait of the now-global movement and a practical guide to intelligent activism, infused with Chomsky’s signature meditations on everything from how the wealthiest 1% came to steer society to what a healthy democracy would look like to how we can separate money from politics. Alongside Chomsky’s words are some of the most moving and provocative photographs from the Occupy movement.

From the very dedication, Chomsky’s stance and conviction reverberate:

Dedicated to the 6,705 people who have been arrested supporting Occupy to date, from the first 80 arrested in New York on September 24, 2011, to the woman arrested in Sacramento on March 6, 2012, for throwing flower petals. May our numbers swell and increase.

Chomsky peels away the many sociocultural layers of what culminated in OWS, examining the history of the American economy, the ecosystem of the working class, the osmosis of politics and money, the environmental catastrophe, and much more.

From his Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture on October 22, 2011:

I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s — although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today — nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that ‘we’re gonna get out of it,’ even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that ‘it will get better.’

[…]

It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a kind of pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

Along with the historical context, Chomsky also offers some practical points on engaging with protest in a way that wouldn’t jeopardize your freedom. For instance, some laws to be aware of:

You have First Amendment rights to protest lawfully. You have a right to hand out leaflets, rally on a sidewalk, and set up a moving picket line, so long as you don’t block building entrances or more than half the sidewalk. The law requires a permit to march in the street, rally in a park with 20 or more people, or use electronic sound amplification. In New York, a “Mask Law” makes it unlawful for three or more people to wear masks, including bandanas: the NYPD aggressively enforces this law. Police will seize signs on wooden sticks, metal, or PVC piping — it’s OK to attach signs to cardboard tubing. The police will not allow placing signs on fences or trees. If you hang a banner from a bridge over a highway, you risk arrest for Reckless Endangerment.

And some advice on what to do if the police try to talk to you:

You have a constitutional right to remain silent. If the police try a friendly conversation, you can say nothing and walk away. If the police say, ‘MOVE!’ or give some other order, you may ask, ‘Why?’ but you are advised not to say anything more. Notify a Legal Observer about the order. If the police ask to search you or your bag, you should say, ‘NO, I do not consent to a search.’ If the police search anyway, you are advised to continue to say, ‘I do not consent to a search.’ If you physically interfere with the search, you risk arrest. If the police question you, including asking your name, you may say nothing and walk away. If the police prevent you from leaving, ask, ‘Am I free to go?’ If they answer ‘YES,’ you may say nothing and walk away. If they answer ‘NO,’ say, ‘I wish to remain silent. I want to talk to a lawyer,’ and wait for the police to arrest or release you.

So there you have it, a What-Would-Chomsky-Do for the modern revolutionary.

Occupy comes from Zuccotti Park Press as part of the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series and is a fine addition to these 10 essential books on protest.

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UPDATE 2: This segment from NPR’s On the Media articulates the project well — give it a listen.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.” ~ Ray Bradbury

You are a mashup of what you let into your life.” ~ Austin Kleon

Chance favors the connected mind.” ~ Steven Johnson

As both a consumer and curator of information, I spend a great deal of time thinking about the architecture of knowledge. Over the past year, I’ve grown increasingly concerned about a fundamental disconnect in the “information economy”: In an age of information overload, information discovery — the service of bringing to the public’s attention that which is interesting, meaningful, important, and otherwise worthy of our time and thought — is a form of creative and intellectual labor, and one of increasing importance and urgency. A form of authorship, if you will. Yet we don’t have a standardized system for honoring discovery the way we honor other forms of authorship and other modalities of creative and intellectual investment, from literary citations to Creative Commons image rights.

Until today.

I’m thrilled to introduce The Curator’s Code — a movement to honor and standardize attribution of discovery across the web.

One of the most magical things about the Internet is that it’s a whimsical rabbit hole of discovery — we start somewhere familiar and click our way to a wonderland of curiosity and fascination we never knew existed. What makes this contagion of semi-serendipity possible is an intricate ecosystem of “link love” — a via-chain of attribution that allows us to discover new wonderlands through those we already know and trust.

The Curator’s Code is an effort to keep this whimsical rabbit hole open by honoring discovery through an actionable code of ethics — first, understanding why attribution matters, and then, implementing it across the web in a codified common standard, doing for attribution of discovery what Creative Commons has done for image attribution. It’s a suggested system for honoring the creative and intellectual labor of information discovery by making attribution consistent and codified, celebrating authors and creators, and also respecting those who discover and amplify their work. It’s an effort to make the rabbit hole open, fair, and ever-alluring. This not about policing the Internet from a place of top-down authority, it’s about encouraging respect and kindness among the community.

Together with my design and thought partner on the project, the infinitely brilliant and hard-working Kelli Anderson, and with invaluable input from my wonderful studiomate Tina of Swiss Miss fame, we’ve devised a simple system that any publisher and curator of information can use across the social web and on any publishing platform.

The system is based on two basic types of attribution, each shorthanded by a special unicode character, much like ™ for “trademark” and for © “copyright.” And while the symbols are a cleaner way to do it, you may still choose to credit the “old-fashioned” way, using “via” and “HT” – the message here is not about how to credit but simply to credit.

ᔥ stands for “via” and signifies a direct link of discovery, to be used when you simply repost a piece of content you found elsewhere, with little or no modification or addition. This type of attribution looks something like this:

↬ stands for the common “HT” or “hat tip,” signifying an indirect link of discovery, to be used for content you significantly modify or expand upon compared to your source, for story leads, or for indirect inspiration encountered elsewhere that led you to create your own original content. For example:

In both cases, just like the words “via” and “HT,” the respective unicode character would be followed by the actual hotlink to your source. For example:

ᔥ Brain Pickings

One reason we’re using unicode characters is that we we wanted the symbols themselves to be a kind of messenger for the ethos of the code — the character is hotlinked to the Curator’s Code site, which allows the ethos of attribution to spread as curious readers click the symbol to find out what it stands for.

This is where it gets interesting. With generous help from my studiomates Cameron and Jonnie, we’re offering a bookmarklet that lets you easily copy-paste the unicode characters for use in any text field, from a tweet to your blog CMS. Just drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar and click it every time you want to attribute discovery, then click your preferred type of attribution and watch the unicode magically appear wherever your cursor is in a text field. Add the actual hotlink to your source after it like you normally would.

See it in action:

If you’re a publisher, you can also grab the Curator’s Code badge pack to display your support, and sign the public pledge to join the ranks of supporting sites.

As for the design, Kelli — as much a designer as a visual philosopher — came up with this beautifully meta concept, where we display famous quotes related to attribution in a parallax rabbit hole of sites on which they actually occur, layered in the order of source attribution. Hovering over the hole makes the parallax shift before your eyes, as if the Internet is burning a hole of discovery through your very screen. In Kelli’s words:

Maria spoke about attribution less as an obligation and more as an enabler of deep, surprising (and perhaps infinite) voyages through information. Through linking, the Internet connects disparate sources in a way that no other medium has before — effectively creating these meta-narratives of discovery. Maria called them ‘rabbit holes.’ With that one phrase, I knew that the site should demonstrate pathways of attribution by (literally) poking a hole in the Internet to glimpse the pathways of attribution beyond.”

Here’s to a new dawn of keeping the Internet’s whimsical rabbit hole of information open by honoring discovery like the creative and intellectual labor that it is.

Questions? See the FAQ section.

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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who recently made a chill-giving case for the whimsy of the Universe, is among our era’s most articulate advocates and storytellers of science. On March 7, Tyson testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on the economic, social, and cultural benefits of space exploration — an urgent message at time when space funding is at an all-time law and Carl Sagan’s vision lives on only as a poetic lament.

Tyson opens with a beautiful quote from French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, better-known as the author of The Little Prince — a philosophy treasure chest all its own:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Any nation, any time, has the capacity to create a hero. It just has to have ambitions with goals set.

[…]

If people see NASA as a charity agency for the satisfaction of some engineers and scientists, they are not understanding the actual growth NASA has played in the growth of this nation — and the economic growth of this nation.

[…]

The pathway from the investment to the return on the dollar takes a little longer than an elevator ride to explain… Innovations take place, patents are granted, products are developed, the culture of innovation spills over. Everyone feels like tomorrow is something they want to invent and bring into the present. That’s the culture that so many of us grew up with, and that’s the culture that so many of us who read about it want to resurrect going forward. Without this, we just move back to the caves.”

So what happened between the golden age of space exploration, when the design of the spacesuit was a feat of cross-disciplinary ambition and excitement oozed even from the ad pages of science magazines, and today? When did we forget that infinity beckons? Perhaps Muriel Rukeyser was right when she said that the universe is made of stories, not of atoms, but the stories we tell about those atoms are the fabric of our understanding, our culture, and our society. Without cosmic storytellers like Tyson, the universe would contract into a ball of anthropocentricity — next thing we know, we’re back to believing the Earth is the center of the universe.

Tyson’s new book, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier, isn’t merely an eloquent case for space exploration — it’s an intelligent and necessary manifesto for rekindling an infinitely important torch of human curiosity.

↬ MetaFilter

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Documentarian Adam Curtis is among our era’s most influential cultural storytellers, with a penchant for debunking the established order of beliefs and ideologies. In The Century of the Self (2002), he traces the origin of consumerism and how Freud’s theories shaped twentieth-century manipulations of public opinion, from politics to marketing; in The Power of Nightmares (2004), he explores the rise of the politics of fear; in The Trap (2007), he examines the concept and evolution of freedom and the simplistic models of human nature on which it is based. His latest BBC documentary, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, premiered last May, mere months before the global Occupy movement erupted, and paints an infinitely intriguing, though in my view wrong on many counts, portrait of technology as a limiting, rather than liberating, cultural and political force. The title of the series comes from a 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan, in which he envisions a world of cybernetics so advanced that the balance of nature is restored and there is no need for human labor.

Though the film has strong techno-dystopian undertones akin to the Orson-Welles-narrated Future Shock series of the 1970s and neglects how technology enables such powerful phenomena like networked knowledge and crowd-accelerated learning, it offers a dimensional context for many of our present political, economic, and technological givens. Coupled with Curtis’s signature immersive storytelling and exquisite use of historical materials, rare footage, and revealing soundbites, the series is an invaluable primer for much of today’s most pressing sociocultural issues.

The first part, titled Love and Power, deals with how Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism shaped the ethos of Silicon Valley in the 1990s and, eventually, the global economy as Alan Greenspan and Bill Clinton set out to create the New Economy, based on the premise of a dramatic rise in productivity thanks to emerging information technology. Curtis, however, goes on to argue that instead of creating market stability, these Randian ideals constricted people into a rigid system with little hope of escape.

We are now living through a very strange moment. We know that the idea of market stability has failed, but we cannot imagine any alternative. The original promise of the Californian ideology was that the computers would liberate us of all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes in control of our own destiny. Instead, today, we feel the opposite — that we are helpless components in a global system, a system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge or to change.”

Part two, The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts, explores how technology cornerstones like cybernetics and systems theory were, Curtis argues, falsely applied to natural ecosystems and used to develop unrealistic models for human beings and societies. The episode has particularly timely resonance, in light of the recent global Occupy movement, as Curtis argues that such self-organizing network models without central control might be good at organizing change, but are less effective in what comes after.

The failure of the commune movement and the fate of the revolutions showed the limitations of the self-organizing model. It cannot deal with the central dynamic forces of human society: politics and power. The hippies took up the idea of the network society because they were disillusioned with politics. They believed that this alternative way of organizing the world was good because it was based on the underlying order of nature. But this was a fantasy. In reality, what they adopted was an idea taken from the cold and logical world of the machines. Now, in our age, we are all disillusioned with politics, and this machine-organizing principle has risen up to become the ideology of our age. And what we are discovering is that if we see ourselves as components in a system, it is very difficult to change the world. It is a very good way of organizing things, even rebellions, but it offers no ideas as to what comes next. And, just like in the communes, it leaves us helpless in the face of those already in power in the world.”

The final part, The Monkey In The Machine and the Machine in the Monkey, examines the selfish gene theory of evolution, developed by William Hamilton in the 1960s and made famous by Richard Dawkins in 1976. Curtis traces how this applied to everything from the civil war in Congo and the Rwandan genocide to George Price’s quest for the origin of altruism to Dawkins’ atheist reformulation of the religious idea of the “immortal soul” as a computer code in the form of genetic patterns. Curtis concludes by asking whether, in accepting these views of humans as machines, we as a culture have disempowered the human spirit.

Hamilton’s ideas remain powerfully influential in our society — above all, the idea that human beings are helpless chunks of hardware controlled by software programs written in their genetic codes. But, the question is, have we embraced that idea because it is a comfort in a world where everything we do, either good or bad, seems to have terrible unforeseen consequences?… We have embraced a fatalistic philosophy of us as helpless computing machines to both excuse and explain our political failure to change the world.”

Curiously, Brautigan’s original collection of poems, which inspired the film title, was intentionally distributed for free. The Curtis documentary, on the other hand, remains largely (legally) unavailable online and nearly impossible to legally see outside the U.K., as if a stubborn and enforced metaphor for the very thing it argues.

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The psychology of conformity is something we’ve previously explored, but its study dates back to the 1950s, when Gestalt scholar and social psychology pioneer Solomon Asch, known today as the Asch conformity experiments. Among them is this famous elevator experiment, originally conducted as a part of a 1962 Candid Camera episode titled “Face the Rear.”

But, while amusing in its tragicomic divulgence of our capacity for groupthink, this experiment tells only half the story of Asch’s work. As James Surowiecki reminds us in the excellent The Wisdom of Crowds, Asch went on to reveal something equally important — that while people slip into conformity with striking ease, it also doesn’t take much to get them to snap out of it. Asch demonstrated this in a series of experiments, planting a confederate to defy the crowd by engaging in the sensible, rather than nonsensical, behavior. That, it turned out, was just enough. Having just one peer contravene the group made subjects eager to express their true thoughts. Surowiecki concludes:

Ultimately, diversity contributes not just by adding different perspectives to the group but also by making it easier for individuals to say what they really think. [...] Independence of opinion is both a crucial ingredient in collectively wise decisions and one of the hardest things to keep intact. Because diversity helps preserve that independence, it’s hard to have a collectively wise group without it.”

Perhaps the role of the global Occupy movement and other expressions of contemporary civic activism is that of a cultural confederate, spurring others — citizens, politicians, CEOs — to face the front of the elevator at last.

HT Not Exactly Rocket Science

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Since 2004, literary and cultural magazine n+1 has been a flare of hope for intelligent print media. This fall, they embarked upon an effort to capture the dimensionality of the Occupy movement with equal parts awe and analysis (with a dash of healthy skepticism) in an Occupy!, an “OWS-inspired” print gazette, the third and final issue of which dropped last week. Gracing its cover is a wildly intelligent graphic by my wildly talented friend Kelli Anderson, visualizing wealth inequality in America through an unexpected, revealing lens that examines OWS as a physical occupation that unfolded in physical space.

The graphic is inspired by the familiar scales of the universe maps, plotting the relative distances between planetary bodies onto a local map that encourages an embodied understanding of celestial distances by walking local routes. Kelli transposed income inequalities using Wall Street Journal data onto the geography of New York City itself. Zuccotti Park, the center of the map, represents the income of the average wage-earner. Other percentiles’ average incomes — of the top 1%, the top 10%, the top 50% — appear longitudinally from there, with the bottom-earners (the bottom 0.01%) falling somewhere around Red Hook Battlefields and the highest earners (the top 0.01%) bleeding off the map, almost into the Arctic Circle, in Canada’s Prince Edward Island. Walking from Zuccotti park, or the average person’s income, to the bottom of the income scale will cost you a couple of hours, and trekking to the very top of the scale would take more than 18 days of continuous walking — a powerful manifestation of just how imbalanced and skewed our wealth scale is.

Kelli observes in an email:

The scale of the solar system (which is reigned-in by the gravity of the sun) is far less dispersed than the the scales of wealth in the US—which illuminates the propensity for wealth to skew wildly to the top when the financial system is not effectively regulated. Note that almost everyone in the top 1% works in banking or finance.

Also note that the income discrepancy within the levels of the top 1% are vastly greater than the gap between the top 1% and the bottom 1% of income earners. The proportions of wealth in the upper echelons of income are of a scale to which we have no comparable metaphors— the proportions are far beyond what we can see in the physical reality of our solar system.”

All three parts of the Occupy! gazette are available as free PDF downloads. Also highly recommended: n+1′s Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America — a fantastic collection of essays, featuring Astra Taylor, Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, Rebecca Solnit, and other cerebral acrobats well worth your time and dime.

Donating = Loving

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William Powhida is one of my favorite contemporary artists, but his latest gem seals him as one of today’s most compelling thinkers, too. Titled Dear Art World (Derivatives), it’s an unfiltered yet incredibly intelligent and articulate critique of today’s many sociocultural, economic, and political paradoxes, including the economy, slacktivism, remix culture, war, the Occupy movement and, of course, the art world.

For the copy-pasters and the search engine bots:

Dear Art World,

I feel you sitting there trying to process the CRAZY shit going on. I’ve been there for months, and it’s driving me INSANE. Fuck it, it seems counterproductive to EVEN talk about this shit, because EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS WHY “SHIT is REALLY FUCKED UP,” or why I’m wrong.

BUT, I’ve come to some conclusions about shit. One is that we spend A LOT of time BLAMING each other for not understanding WHAT the problem actually is — TRANSPARENCY, Barack Obama, mandates LOBBYISTS, immigrants, RESPONSIBILITY, FREEDOM Truth, LIZARD PEOPLE, FLUORIDE in the water… TOO MUCH OR TOO LITTLE OF ANY OF IT.

I mean, everyone ALREADY has the Answer, it’s just that every ELSE just has ‘it’ all wrong. It’s really simple, apparently, to fix everything by applying some JESUS™, REGULATION®, or CONSTITUTION™ to it. If only we’d just free the Market, convict some bankers, spiritually channel the Founding Fathers, regulate derivatives, STOP eating GM corn syrup, spend more…time with your Family OR LEGALIZE DRUGS.

EXCEPT WE don’t do shit*, because this is AMERICA, Land of the Mr. Softee® and home of the BRAVES® where we are FREE to ARGUE about the CAUSES of social and ECONOMIC inequalities until the grass-fed cows come home. We argue in comment threads, on Facebook™, and twitter™. AND, when we aren’t arguing, We agree with our favorite ‘experts’ on FOX®, CNBC™, and CNN™ as we slide into RECESSION 2.0.

One of the OBVIOUS conclusions I’ve arrived at is that a very FEW people LIKE it that way. WHILE SHIT is bad for MOST of us — 9%+ unemployment, $14 TRILLION+ debt, and a perpetual War on Terror® — *THEY* hope we’ll all just pull a lever next fall ‘PROBLEM SOLVED’ and argue some more about the INTENTIONS of the CLIMATE, BECAUSE the 1% is doing fine.

The only FACTS worth stating are that 20% of the population controls 85% of the net worth and earned 49.9% of the income last year. IN the AMERICAN SPIRIT™ of BLAME and recrimination I’m going to point the finger at…deREGULATED CAPITALISM®! IT is in the very spirit of Capitalism to ACQUIRE MORE CAPITAL. To quote @O_SattyCripnAzz, fellow citizen and member of #Team #1mmy [?], “Money is money no matter how u get it.”

Unfortunately, the same 1% also supports the rest of us by BYING shit and funding almost everything else (museums, residencies, grants…) putting some of us in an awkward position (YOU TOO NATO and Pedro), BUT that doesn’t mean we should SHUT THE FUCK UP, take their MONEY, and say ‘Thank you!’ The Art World is NOT separate from SOCIETY and THIS is how SHIT gets all FUCKED UP — PLUTARCHY, motherfuckers.

So, in my useless capacity as a tool artist, I’ve made some pictures about this SHIT that are FREE to look at**, and they’re ALL DERIVATIVES.

Sincerely,

[signed William Powhida]

*#OWS?
** Bring a chair

The work was part of Derivatives, Powhida’s solo show at Postmasters Gallery, which ran through November 26. Also from the show:

For more on the implicit and enduring tensions of art in the age of commerce, see BBC’s excellent documentary, The Mona Lisa Curse.

HT this isn’t happiness; images courtesy of William Powhida / Postmasters Gallery

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From Molly Landredth’s tender vintage portraits of modern queer life to 19-year-old Iowan Zach Wahl’s brave message for marriage equality to Dan Savage’s paradigm-changing It Gets Better project, it’s a time of heartening change for the mainstream’s growing awareness of just how faceted and diverse LGBTQ culture is. It is precisely this faceted humanity that photographer Scott Pasfield, a gay man himself, sought to capture in Gay in America, traveling 54,000 miles across 50 states in 3 years to weave a powerful, profoundly human tapestry of 140 fathers, brothers, sons, and friends from all walks of life, religions, ethnicities, and backgrounds, who happen to be homosexual males. From lawyers to artists to teachers to farmers, his perceptive, deeply personal portraits paint a layered picture of contemporary gay (male) life, the first-ever large-scale photographic survey of gay men in America.

People always tell you to shoot what you love, and that objective led me to this project. I knew I wanted to photograph a subject that I cared deeply about, and to create a body of work that would make a positive difference in people’s lives… I decided that I would find and meet a gay man from every state, listen to their stories, and photograph them in the hope that I could turn that material into a book that would change people’s opinions and educate — the book that I wish had existed when I was a lad. I wanted to produce a profound collection of ordinary, proud, out gay men who would otherwise never find the spotlight.” ~ Scott Pasfield

Alongside each portrait is the subject’s first-hand story — sometimes joyful, sometimes solemn, always earnest.

Alex, Seward, Alaska

Josh & Joseph, Eugene, Oregon

Mudhillin, Newark, Delaware

Michael & Allen, Delta Junction, Alaska

For Pasfield, the project was as much a public service as it was a personal journey. He writes in the preface:

A year before my father’s death [from lung cancer], I started going to a regular group-therapy session for gay men in New York City. That is where I met my partner, Nick. When I was struggling through my father’s illness, he was there for me, calling me in Florida, making sure I was okay. When I came back to New York, we both realized we had fallen in love over the past months and we couldn’t ignore it anymore. The hard part was, Nick was with someone else, and he still wasn’t out to his family. He had two major hurdles to jump before our relationship could begin, and he did so, with grace and with courage. This year we celebrate our thirteenth anniversary together.”

Dallas Voice has a fantastic interview with Pasfield, in which he reflects on the role the Internet played in painting a truly dimensional portrait of gay culture.

The Internet played a big part in how I found people. It would have been much more difficult to find them [10 or 20 years ago]. The thing that surprised me the most is the regularness of all these guys. I think most outspoken gay men and all facets of the LGBT community are those people who defined themselves very much by being gay and they have that issue that they really want to share with the world. They’re very outspoken. I think the type of men I was looking for aren’t as outspoken as a lot of those advocates are. That difficulty in finding them was made so much easier by the Internet. Ten, maybe 20 years ago, I’m not quite sure how I would have found the same men because they’re not going to gay community centers, most of them. They’re not out at a lot of gay bars or clubs in urban areas. I think that that’s one of the major differences doing it now. That I was really able to connect with a lot of gay men that are for the most part under the radar and what most see of the gay community.”

Thoughtful and perspective-shifting, Gay in America reveals the dimensions of humanity well past sexuality, a powerful step towards a culture that no longer conflates sexual orientation with human identity and a worthy addition to the best photography books of 2011.

Images courtesy of Scott Pasfield

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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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2011 has been the year of protest. From the Arab Spring to the London Riots to the global Occupy Wall Street movement, civic unrest and sociopolitical dissent have reached a tipping point of formidable scale. This omnibus of ten nonfiction books that illuminate protest through the customary Brain Pickings lens of cross-disciplinary curiosity, spanning everything from psychology and philosophy to politics and government to art and music, extends an invitation to better understand the art, science, and psychology of protest, both in our present reality and in the broader context of our civilization.

33 REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE (2011)

Since the dawn of modern history, song and poetry have been tightly woven into movements of social change. In some cases, singers have been censored, arrested, beaten, or even killed for their vocal bravery. (Just recently, the Occupy Wall Street movement attracted such legends as Willie Nelson, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie.) In others, they have unscrupulously exploited the protest ethos to garner publicity for mediocre pop songs. In 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day, British rock critic Dorian Lynskey digs deep into the underbelly of 20th-century protest songs to explore why the best of them give you chills and goosebumps, even decades later.

The best protest songs are not dead artifacts, pinned to a particular place and time, but living conundrums. The essential, inevitable difficulty of contorting a serious message to meet the demands of entertainment is the grit that makes the pearl.”

And, lest we forget, music is particularly engrained in America’s present political reality. When Barack Obama was elected the first black president of the United States, he stood up in front of one hundred thousand supporters and channeled the exhilaration of his inauguration by paraphrasing the lyrics of soul singer Sam Cooke’s iconic anthem. “It’s been a long time coming, ” Obama proclaimed. “It’s been a long, long time coming,” Cooke sang. “..but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.” “…but I know a change gonna come.“

Obama is, in a sense, the first protest song president. He grew up on the politicized soul of Stevie Wonder and used Curtis Mayfield’s civil rights anthem “Move on Up” at his election rallies. During the campaign, a list of his ten favorite songs printed in Blender magazine included “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye, “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones, “Think” by Aretha Franklin, and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can,” which was written around a recording of his own speech, thus making him the lyricist of his own protest song.”

From Billie Holiday’s 1939 “Strange Fruit,” the first openly anti-racism song and the tipping point at which pop music fully embraced politics, to John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” and other anthems of the 1970s anti-war movement to contemporary songwriters addressing everything from nuclear energy to corruption, Lynskey lays out a layered and fascinating study of the intersection of music and politics.

Billie Holiday recording 'Strange Fruit,' 1939

Charles Peterson/Associated Press, courtesy of Don Peterson/ITVS via The New York Times

For a while, in the dizzying rush of the 1960s, it was thought that pop music could change the world, and some people never recovered from the realization that it could not. But the point of protest music, or indeed any art with a political dimension, is not to shift the world on its axis but to change opinions and perspectives, to say something about the times in which you live, and, sometimes, to find that what you’ve said speaks to another moment in history, which is how Barack Obama came to be standing in Grant Park paraphrasing the worlds of Sam Cooke.”

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE (1849)

Even though Henry David Thoreau’s beard ranks rather low on Underwood’s Pogonometric Index of poetic gravity by beard weight, his legacy as a poet, philosopher, abolitionist, historian, and transcendentalist makes him one of the most important thinkers in modern history. In his seminal 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, Thoreau made a compelling case for individual resistance to civil government that would inspire generations of revolutionaries and ordinary nonconformists alike to engage in moral protest against being made unwitting accomplices in the injustices perpetrated by the state. The essay, considered one of the greatest masterpieces of the form ever written, was inspired in part by Thoreau’s outrage over slavery in America and the Mexican-American War, and was based on his 1848 lecture “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government.” Insights and elements from it have inspired some of the greatest social change agents of the 20th century, including Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no con­science; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a con­science.”

FREEDOM ON THE MENU (2005)

What’s a Brain Pickings omnibus without a proper children’s book? In Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-Ins, a fine addition to our favorite children’s nonfiction, author Carole Boston Weatherford and painter Jerome Lagarrigue tell the story of 8-year-old Connie as she observes the spark of the African-American civil rights movement from the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina at the time of the infamous Greensboro sit-ins.

Just about every week, Mama and I went shopping downtown. I loved having her all to myself for the afternoon. Whenever it was hot or we got tired, we’d head over to the snack bar at the five-and-dime store. We’d stand as we sipped our Cokes because we weren’t allowed to sit at the lunch counter.”

For a grown-up take on these seminal events and times, see The Movement and The Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee.

THE ART OF MORAL PROTEST (1998)

One thing this year’s unrest and its treatment in the popular media have exposed is the tendency of today’s scholars to reduce protest to “objective” factors like resources, evolutionary biology, and political structures. More than a decade ago, prominent NYU, Columbia and Princeton sociology professor James M. Jasper channeled his frustration with this conflation in The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements — a thoughtful and provocative treatise on the creative, subjective side of social and political protest. Since Jasper’s central focus is on mental life, his inquiry extends not only to culture but also to the role of the individual in the dynamic of social movements, something often ignored in theories of collective dissent.

Culture is everywhere, but it is not everything. We can only see it clearly by contrasting it with biography, strategy, and resources. At the same time, we cannot understand those other dimensions of protest without defining culture crisply.”

Jasper examines how issues of innovation, creativity, and change relate to culture and biography, converging to produce powerful social shifts.

Individuals often initiate small changes, many of which become widespread, and it is through cultural learning that they spread. People learn from the interaction between their existing cultural or biographical equipment and new experiences — a preeminently mental process.”

PERFECT HOSTAGE (2010)

Burmese opposition politician, intellectual, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi is one of the most inspiring figures in modern political history. Between 1989 and 2010, she spent nearly 15 years in house arrest for her political convictions and persistent whistle-blowing around the country’s undemocratic elections. In Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s Prisoner of Conscience, Justin Wintle peels away at the reserved demeanor, Oxford education, and gentle femininity of Burma’s Iron Lady to reveal the rugged fabric of her tireless dissent in what’s as much a rigorously researched biography as it is a deeply reverential homage to her bravery and character.

Thus has been created the best-known prisoner of conscience presently alive. In the narrow gallery of modern saints, her images stands out, and it is commonplace to hear Aung San Suu Kyi likened to Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, even Mahatma Gandhi, whose philosophy of non-violence she assiduously espoused.”

For an even more personal perspective, see Suu Kyi’s own Letters from Burma, full of poignancy and urgency, published mere months before her release.

COMMON SENSE (1776)

On January 10, 1776, radical author, intellectual and revolutionary Thomas Paine published his pamphlet Common Sense. Though he did so anonymously, signing it “Written by an Englishman,” it gained immediate success, with the largest sale and circulation of any book in American history relative to the population at the time, and went on to become one of the most incendiary and important documents of the American Revolution.

Premised on the conviction that American colonists needed to attain freedom from British rule at a time of uncertainty around the issue of independence, Paine’s pamphlet resonated not only because of the candor and passion of its argument but also because it was written in a style that common people understood, a radical departure from the pompous style of Enlightenment-era writers, riddled with Latin references and over-intellectualized language. Instead, Paine borrowed from the structure of sermons and connected independence with the ethos of dissent fundamental to Protestant beliefs, ultimately crafting a distinctly American political identity.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.”

For another layer of added relevance, Common Sense is also a powerful case study in successful self-publishing and the viral potential of books, something particularly hotly debated today.

PARASTOU FAROUHAR (2011)

One November evening in 1998, Iranian intellectuals and activists Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar, supporters of the democratically elected Prime Minister, were savagely murdered in their home in Tehran. Their devastated daughter, Berlin-based artist Parastou Forouhar, channeled her grief in the language she spoke most fluently: art — powerful, poignant, subversive art that pulls you into its uncomfortable beauty with equal parts urgency and mesmerism. Parastou Forouhar: Art, Life and Death in Iran is a stirring chronicle of the artist’s protest against these most gruesome crimes against human rights, a commentary on both her painful private experience and the broader cultural tensions it reflected, exploring everything from democracy to women’s rights to her parents’ brutal murder.

With work that stands in stark contrast to the loud, conspicuous, explicit messaging of Iran’s street art, Forouhar uses soft colors and fluid shapes to draw you in, only to jolt you with the grave scenes of torture and tragedy they depict — living proof that art doesn’t have to be “street art” in order to be subversive and make compelling cultural commentary on even the most uncomfortable of subjects.

When I arrived in Germany, I was Parastou Forouhar. Somehow, over the years, I’ve become ‘Iranian.’ This enforced ethnic identification took a new turn with the assassination of my parents in their home in Tehran. My efforts to investigate this crime had a great impact on my personal and artistic sensibilities. Political correctness and democratic coexistence lost their meaning in my daily life. As a result, I have tried to distill this conflict of displacement and transfer of meaning, turning it into a source of creativity.” ~ Parastou Forouhar

Originally reviewed here.

STEAL THIS BOOK (1971)

As much a tongue-in-cheek survival guide for life in America (or, Amerika, as it were) as it was a serious piece of cultural commentary on the status quo, Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book inspired a generation of social revolutionaries to challenge the cultural and political mandates of the day. Brilliantly and often scandalously illustrated by the one and only R. Crumb, this classic offers insurgent advice on everything from starting a pirate radio station to how to making pipe bombs to growing marijuana. The title reflects Hoffman’s assertion that it isn’t immoral to steal from the state, which he infamously calls “Pig Empire,” calling for rebellion against authority, both governmental and corporate. A frequent rebel himself, Hoffman famously wrote the book’s introduction while in jail.

Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit. When all today’s isms have become yesterday’s ancient philosophy, there will still be reactionaries and there will still be revolutionaries. No amount of rationalization can avoid the moment of choice each of us brings to our situation here on the planet. I still believe in the fundamental injustice of the profit system and do not accept the proposition there will be rich and poor for all eternity.

Hoffman was also a fellow Marshall McLuhanite with a firm belief that “structure is more important than content in the transmission of information” — his modification of McLuhan’s iconic catchphrase, “The medium is the message.”

TRESPASS (2010)

Trespass: A History Of Uncommissioned Urban Art, one of our 7 favorite books on street art, explores the history and context of illegal art, from traditional graffiti to performance to design interventions, as a powerful form of urban protest. As a proper Taschen treat, this lavish 320-page volume features work from 150 influential artists across four generations of visionary outlaws, including Keith Haring, Os Gemeos, Barry McGee, Shepard Fairey, Blu, and Banksy.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.