OK, to be fair, it seems that it is mostly the BBC’s interpretation of a warning from the International Fund for Animal Welfare concerning animal trade facilitated by the Internet.

“The internet is becoming the dominant factor overall in the global trade in protected species,” said Paul Todd of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

We fall very easily in this personification of technology. We give it agency, as it were a life being, with will and capacity of action. The Internet doesn’t threaten anything. The use of the Internet might make easier the illegal trading of protected species, but it is human beings doing it. It is the human being that threatens endangered species. Do not forget that!

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Compartism, from the latin verb compartire (to share), is based on the idea that we are better off when we share, and not when we accumulate as in capitalism. In his book We-Think: Mass innovation not mass production Charles Leadbeater says that

In the 20th century we were identified by what we owned; in the 21st century we will also be defined by how we share and what we give away.

This is what in a nutshell compartism is about. The Internet has broken old barriers that did not allow us to collaborate, but instead brought us towards individual competition for property of limited resources. Today, we have a new environment – determined by technology, politics, culture and environmental issues – and new tools that give collaboration, sharing and giving away a new role and become instrumental in being successful as individuals and as a whole. Winners are not those that work with capitalist rules of accumulation and greed, but with sharing and generosity. As it was with capitalism, this new ideology of compartism materializes as a need for our future and not only an ideal construction of a few. But don’t be fooled by the generous ideal of compartism, for a compartist society won’t be an egalitarian society, for those that will know and share better than others will have an advantage, which they will certainly use. How fair this future society will be, will still mainly depend on our actions and not only on our ideology.

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It does exactly what she needs. It will let her watch movies and listen to music and read books on long flights. It will make using a computer fun instead of an annoying chore.

This year I struggled with my mother’s Christmas present. I ended up buying her a very useful (and not expensive) Brita water filter jug. Yes, I know it is not a conventional present, though she really liked it! But now, I know what she will totally love and change her life: an iPad. It will also change my life: I will finally be free of teaching my mother how to use a computer…if ever that’d be possible.

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What do I think of it? I must admit that while following the presentation online from different sources on the web (engadget, gizmodo…), I felt disappointed. But after I saw yesterday night the keynote video, I became more positive about it, not entirely, as when the iPhone was released, but I saw its good things, for it has many.

Why do I want an iPad? This is the first question I ask to myself before buying any technology product. They need to have a function, not just being fun. When I was 13 they released in Spain a video recorder that had wonderful features: image effects, multi-image selection of channels and other eye candy functions. The ad of the device said something like “you will have so much fun with your VCR!”. I went to see it in the El Corte Inglés (a big chain of department stores in Spain). There I met a couple of 30-40-year-old guys trying it. Pretty quickly the conversation derived towards its “fun features” until one of them said “I don’t care where it does and how much ‘fun’ you can have with it, at the end what you want is to record movies. If it does it better than others, I’ll buy it, otherwise I’ll buy another one that’ll cost me half the price.” Since then, I buy technology according to my practical needs and how well they satisfy them.

What about the iPad then? I travel frequently. And when I travel I need 7 essential things from my computer: web, email, books, music, video, word processor and presentation software. A 250 GB hard disk, 4 gb RAM, 13-inch screen, 2 kg Macbook is far too much for my mobile needs. A 8 GB, slow processor, 3.5-inch screen, 150 gr iPhone is far too little. So for some time, I’ve been wishing to have a device that’s between a Macbook and an iPhone that frees me from the weight and cumbersomeness of a laptop and the limitations of an iPhone. The iPad seems to be a great answer to my needs.

Why then did I feel disappointed when I saw it?


Nice & Ugly
The iPad looks good, but it is not beautiful. It looks like a fat and big iPod touch with a wide black bezel. The bezel might be necessary to avoid accidental input with your fingers when holding it, but does it need to be so big? Why did they have to copy so much the iPhone/Touch design, including the home button? My guess is that they want to capture the iPhone market, and for that they need to offer a familiar product that works and looks as the iPhone does. Yet, I think the design of small mobile device like the iPhone is not necessarily the best design for a multimedia mobile device like the iPad.

So much space!
The first image of the iPad I saw it was of the home screen. It looks exactly like an iPhone/touch home screen but with much more space! There is so much free space around that it looks strange, weird, like something is missing. It is the representation of the close-nature of the device (more below). Unlike a Mac (or a PC), you cannot put your icons wherever you want on the desktop, add as many as you want, change the size of the icons, put files, shortcuts, etc. You are constrained by Apple designers to have your applications (only applications and “webapps”!) within the frame determined by the device, just like the iPhone. You can only do two things: change the order of your apps or click on them. That’s it. A solution to the excess of space could have been to make the icons a bit bigger, would that look better? I doubt it, for the problem at the end is not the space, but the restrictions imposed by closing this technology.

The wonders of doing more than one thing at a time
Like his brothers iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad seems not to allow multitasking between third-party applications, only core (Apple’s) apps can multitask. Justifiably, geeks, pundits, Apple fans and many other tech-lovers are up in arms for this missing feature. This is a direct consequence of closing the iPad. Without multitasking one cannot listen to Pandora or Last FM, tweet and write a document on Pages. Without more than one application open at the same time, one cannot listen to the streaming of Tony Blair giving evidence to the UK’s Iraq war inquiry, while writing this blog post and checking emails, as I am doing right now. This is a serious limitation that I reckon will be quickly corrected by Apple in the near future. Yet the main problem will still subsist…

It’s the openness, stupid!
Three years ago, in 2007, Steve Jobs said in an interview after the presentation of the iPhone:

We define everything that is on the phone…You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.” (taken from a reference to NYT article in J. Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It)

The logic is very clear. An iPhone is primarily a phone, thus it needs to work as a phone, without risk of being disrupted like a computer can be sometimes. I understand (and, up to a limit, accept) the argument. But what about the iPad? What’s the argument in favour of making and keeping it closed. I am afraid, the argument is twofold: (1) Jobs likes all machines to work as they are originally designed for, at the cost of limiting (and even killing) their ‘generativity’ (using J. Zittrain’s terminology), (2) commercial reasons: by keeping it closed, Apple can controlled the distribution of software and content, getting a good share of the benefits generated.

In my opinion, this is the main problem with the iPad. Jobs said during the presentation that it was between a Mac and an iPhone, but actually it is much closer to the latter than to the former. Limiting its use and development will stop people from using it in innovative ways that can bring the same benefits that the main two open technological platforms have brought us: the computer and the Internet. Until Apple sees the logic of this argument, the solution will be ‘hacked generativity’, the one that it is produced against the wishes of the owner of the technology, as it has happened with the iPhone from day one, which forced Apple to open it to applications (remember when Jobs wanted the iPhone to just run webapps?).

***

Reading all the reasons behind my disappointment, you may wonder how I became more positive after watching the keynote. The answer comes from replying to another question:

What’s the iPad for? In disappointment I twittered that “1 buys a Mac because 1 needs a computer. 1 buys an iPhone because 1 needs a phone. What the hell do u need 2 buy an #ipad? #fail #apple”. At that moment, I couldn’t figure out why someone would buy an iPad. Yet I didn’t realise that what Apple was doing was to define a need that’s been shaping for the last decade: personal multimedia. The iPad is the first truly personal multimedia device. As such, it has a huge potential.

Now, I am not with those that loath the iPad by the same reasons I explained above and more. I am still not, however, with those like Stephen Fry whom, citing the precedent of the iPhone, are accepting the success of the iPad unconditionally. Its success, and any positive change that the iPad can help realise in the future as habilitating technology, depend very much on how it develops and not entirely on its present or past. Opening it will be a good step in the right direction.

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Ulysses and the Sirens (Herbert James Draper)

Ulysses knew how to pass safely by the coast of the Sirens. In the Odyssey, we are told how he instructed his sailors to put wax in their ears, bind him tightly to the mast, and by no means release him until they had passed the Sirens’ island. Ulysses knew that the Sirens’ temptation was such that he won’t be able to resist it without restraint. He knew that the wonderful Sirens’ song meant in truth destruction. It had, therefore, to be resisted.

Technology has a sweet, melodic and very attractive singing. It promises humans to do, make and achieve the impossible. It wonders us at all ages, and we fall quickly for its wonders. We imagine new perfect worlds that will bring us happiness and plenty, all thanks to our technological advances. Yet the Sirens of technology, if not resisted, can easily bring us to destruction. History is witness of this danger.

Technology and ethics are intimately related. How we approach and use technology is very much conditioned by our ethical values. Therefore, the construction of a society based solely on technological disruption is a dangerous evolution. For our behaviours, as individuals, groups and as society as whole are transformed unknowingly by these new technologies without the restraint of ethical principles that would, otherwise, guide our conduct in more beneficial directions. When Ulysses ordered its sailors to bind him to the mast and keep him there, he was imposing on himself an ethical principle to resist the temptation of the Sirens. He was telling his sailors not to follow his orders in any circumstances; he was innovating to resist a path he knew will bring him destruction.

Since the enlightenment and particularly since the XIX century, Western civilization has based great part of its social, economic, scientific and political development on technological advance. Despite all technological revolutions it has gone through, there hasn’t been an equivalent ethical revolution to help us cope with the transformations that they implied. Instead, we are now living in-between a conservative Christian ethic, which did indeed suffer a great transformation during the Reformation, and a materialist ethic based on external impulses of consumption and accumulation, ignoring other principles and values that form the complex nature of a human being, creating therefore what Durkheim called “anomie“: a lack of social ethics that produces “moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspiration.”

The Internet is the technological revolution of our era. At the same time, it is by and IN itself a social revolution. There are those, many, that want to see mainly its positive aspects. Or those that mostly focus on its negative consequences. Yet the nature of the disruption and revolution of the Internet depends not in the technology itself, but in the context where it is immersed, and how this context changes accordingly or not. A very important part of this environment is our ethics. If we use the Internet within our current ethics, I am afraid it won’t be as good as the optimists want us to believe. It is urgent, I believe, that we discuss seriously our values and principles that should drive our lives, and that we spread them in dialogue with the people. And it is in this need where we see the complexity of social phenomena; for the Internet is, at the same time, the perfect instrument and space to do so. In fact, I think it’s already happening at a small scale. How successful this ethical disruption and revolution in the making can be won’t be determined by a technological feat, but by many other factors that organize our human lives, among them our own will to bind ourselves to the mast.

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The American model democracy is at its best in the world when it can predicate with the example. Its influence does not come mainly because it has big and powerful missiles, amazing military technology, or the biggest economy in the world. It comes through soft power. Is this new link between technology and democracy a new US export?

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In the book she says:

In devising these practices [open and collaborative consultation of experts online], we have to remain open to all forms of technology, even those that initially seem trivial or irrelevant. Potentially, ubiquitous social networking technologies like Facebook and MySpace, in which participants “friend” and “poke” those in their personal networks, can teach us more about the idiom of participation than the legalistic practices in which so few of us actually participate (page 143, stress added)

We not only have to remain open to these technologies, but we may be relying on them much more than on any other. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter (and others) have developed a set of social networking technologies that are applicable not only to making and keeping friends, but also to a diverse variety of activities, including government. Socialisation is a human constant. Very rarely what we do is isolated from our social environment. Our actions are fed by it and we feed it in turn. Therefore, the change in the dimensions of socialisation by new technologies has consequences beyond our friendships. Using these same technologies for citizen collaboration in government may be a solution to many of the problems we have experienced in participative platforms until now (e.g. low participation, spam, trolling, redundancy, low quality…). For this we’ll need that those that have developed and implement them understand that there might be a business opportunity here.

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The big news for me are that while I was in Russia, I could do politics in Spain. I could participate as a blogger and citizen in the massive online protest against the surreptitious provision included at the end (and some say in the last minute) of Prime Minister Zapatero’s new Ley de Economía Sostenible (Law for a Sustainable Economy), currently being read by the Spanish Parliament. This provision modifies the Spanish Information Society Law passed in 2002. It creates a new Commission for Intellectual Property (Comisión de Propiedad Intelectual) in the Ministry of Culture. And, according to the interpretation I concur with, it gives to this Commission powers to shut off a website or online service infringing intellectual property rights without judicial intervention. This set off a viral fire on the web in a matter of hours. Twitter was the main conduct through which this increasingly candescent political momentum ran. The morning after the law proposal was presented to the Parliament, a (still) unidentified group of “journalists, bloggers, professionals and creators” had written a Manifesto for the defence of the rights of Internet users (Manifiesto en defensa de los derechos fundamentales en Internet).

When I woke up here in Moscow, it was still early in the morning in Spain. I saw the tweets and retweets of some people referring to the manifesto (#manifiesto). I read it. And I decided to post it on my blog (I also posted a Catalan translation made by @mapallares. and an English translation posted by Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing). In a matter of hours, thousands had done the same. Literally thousands. The next morning the Spanish Minister of Culture, the scriptwriter Ángeles González-Sinde, invited a group of “online representatives” (ehem) to talk about the provision and the manifesto.

Photo: Jesus Encinar

The online revolt, the manifesto and the meeting became quickly news headlines in the main media outlets in Spain. The effect of the online revolt was so momentous that even the Prime Minister had to answer questions about it in his first press conference (with, by the way, the President of the European Parliament who was visiting Spain with a group of MEPs). He said that the government is not planning to close any web or online service.

Thanks to Twitter and my blog I could be part of this revolt. Thanks to the Internet I could do politics in Spain from Russia. This is my first account about what happened last week in Spain in defence of net neutrality and online rights. It is a personal one, trying to show how the dimensions of politics are changing because of the Internet and associated technologies, allowing me to be 3,000 km away and still be present. Very soon, I’ll publish a different and more complete version. Including other interesting elements that emerged during the revolt (e.g. representativity online, regarding who wrote the manifesto and who went to the meeting with the Minister), and which will also be, obviously, updated with the latest developments. For it is an ongoing story: it was only 4 days ago when it all happened.

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For many, “online piracy” appears to be a bad thing. The music, film and software industries and governments want to convince us that IT IS bad. Bad not only for the poor artist or programmer, but also for innovation and for society as a whole. However, many practice it. Many copy songs, movies or software using the Internet. And I say, many do a good thing.

Before the Internet, people could indeed photocopy a book, copy a record on tape or duplicate a movie on VHS, these were possible, though somehow cumbersome and quality-reducing mechanisms of reducing the cost of our “intellectual consumption”. Without them, many people would have probably read less books, listened to less new songs and watched less stories on the screen. Nevertheless, the scale of it was small, thus its social effect tiny. Today, the liberty and usability feature of the Internet have opened unimaginable venues for these “unauthorized” reproduction of intellectual goods, the scale is, indeed, very, very relevant. Thanks to file sharing, hundreds of thousands of people have at their disposal a myriad of intellectual products that were unattainable before, be it for price or accessibility. Thanks to “piracy”, these people, adults and children, are expanding their intellectual scope, they are probably becoming more demanding, in search of more and more varied things.

I see in this a very good development. A society made of individuals that have much easier and cheaper (even free) access to intellectual products is a better society. Some would say, that people are all consuming the same, action movies with the same cliches, nothing to be proud of. I sincerely doubt it, there are some (probably many) that are finding new perspectives of life and expanding their knowledge thanks to the variety of books, courses, software, films, music easily available on the Internet. Others would say that with more piracy, companies will have less incentives to produce these products, so one day, it will end, production and innovation is gradually killed. I think the contrary is happening, more people are innovating and producing – e.g. podcasts -, because it is easier and cheaper to do it, you basically need good ideas. At the same time, when people like something they still buy the product on physical support – e.g. Radiohead new record that was donationware online until it was released on CD, selling very well. Production and innovation are not killed by sharing intellectual products on the Internet. The only ones that should be afraid of this should be those that produce the same over and over again, those that do not create an intellectual added value, to which a person can feel attached in ways that generate more consumption and revenue for the producer.

Overall, “piracy”, defined solely as file sharing (not for economic benefit), is a social good. It does produce clear benefits, it should be promoted it. The only ones that should be trembling are those that have been profiting for years of a captured market under oligopolic rules, in which the consumer was forced to swallow the small range of products that was offered to him/her for a very high price. Luckily, this is finished, or is it? I am afraid big companies and their captured governments will not concede defeat without a good fight. We shall see…

NB: This post was originally written on February 12 2008 on my previous blog (Blog of Change)

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1 .- Copyright should not be placed above citizens’ fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.

2 .- Suspension of fundamental rights is and must remain an exclusive competence of judges. This blueprint, contrary to the provisions of Article 20.5 of the Spanish Constitution, places in the hands of the executive the power to keep Spanish citizens from accessing certain websites.

3 .- The proposed laws would create legal uncertainty across Spanish IT companies, damaging one of the few areas of development and future of our economy, hindering the creation of startups, introducing barriers to competition and slowing down its international projection.

4 .- The proposed laws threaten creativity and hinder cultural development. The Internet and new technologies have democratized the creation and publication of all types of content, which no longer depends on an old small industry but on multiple and different sources.

5 .- Authors, like all workers, are entitled to live out of their creative ideas, business models and activities linked to their creations. Trying to hold an obsolete industry with legislative changes is neither fair nor realistic. If their business model was based on controlling copies of any creation and this is not possible any more on the Internet, they should look for a new business model.

6 .- We believe that cultural industries need modern, effective, credible and affordable alternatives to survive. They also need to adapt to new social practices.

7 .- The Internet should be free and not have any interference from groups that seek to perpetuate obsolete business models and stop the free flow of human knowledge.

8 .- We ask the Government to guarantee net neutrality in Spain, as it will act as a framework in which a sustainable economy may develop.

9 .- We propose a real reform of intellectual property rights in order to ensure a society of knowledge, promote the public domain and limit abuses from copyright organizations.

10 .- In a democracy, laws and their amendments should only be adopted after a timely public debate and consultation with all involved parties. Legislative changes affecting fundamental rights can only be made in a Constitutional law.

translation taken from Cory Doctorow’s http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/02/spanish-activists-is.html

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