In fact the question is: Is online piracy and ubiquitous free content killing our culture? I believe we must always be open to divergent and different perspectives of the world. We must be prepared to see the world from anothers’ perspective. I do think this is at times a good question to ask.

Morozov writes: Levine’s call to arms – “it’s time to ask, seriously, whether the culture business as we know it can survive the digital age”

But then one has to ask the question for example is Fox News culture? meaningful culture, worthwhile culture. Rupert Mordoch famously said he would make Sky News in the UK more like Fox if he had his way. Just have a read about the delightful Roger Ailes that runs Fox. The mainstream media that presents information as truth that plays a key and important role in shaping the debate about our world, has been found wanting. Is this system worth preserving?

But I persisted with the review – some good points raised. However,

In a chapter subtitled “How the internet could kill Mad Men”, Levine frets about the future of cable television, seemingly unaware of the fact that, back in the 1960s, American broadcast networks did their best to wipe out the nascent cable industry, which survived only thanks to a ruling by the US supreme court. Had the judges followed Levine’s conservative logic, a more fitting subtitle would be “How the networks aborted the parents of Mad Men”.

And how many times have incumbents fought bitterly and viciously to stop others. The telegraph versus the telephone for example. Morozov goes on…

Are new technologies really that much of a threat to the culture industry? Google TV – one of the projects Levine lists among the greatest threats to cable television – seems dead on arrival; at the moment, product returns outnumber sales. According to a recent survey by BookStats, in 2011 the publishing industry earned nearly 6% more revenue than in 2008, while selling 4% more books – in part, thanks to ebooks. The global march of streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify has made piracy less appealing.

None of this excites Levine, who complains that the internet has not encouraged innovation. “Like TV, the internet is only as good as what’s on,” he writes. Statements like this underscore the danger of setting internet policy based on the interests of the content industry alone. For those in this group, the internet is merely TV on steroids – its impact on the Arab spring, economic and human development and the future of learning be damned.

I arrived at the conclusion that Levine is representative of a certain form of market fundamentalism – and this fundamentalism is dangerous. Born out of not understanding, not wanting to understand. An arrogance about what is “culture” and who has the right to create it. He sees markets not as cultural but purely economic, he sees people only as consumers. Culture in his view, and people that he represents, see “culture” as a means to extract money from people. Simple. As the economist John Kay wrote,

“Capitalists are capitalism’s worst enemy, and particularly the market fundamentalist tendency which has been in the ascendant for the last 20 years”

For me, and Morozov saves it for last, is that in “Levines opinion James Murdoch was a saviour of Journalism.” The same James Murdoch who may have perjured himself, who along with his father owned a newspaper that in its quest for monetary gain, hacked into the voice mails of dead children, to get “the edge” on their rivals in the tabloid newspaper wars. If that is what Levine thinks is culture, then God help us all.

But the real frenzy isn’t the exposure of the scandal – it’s the scale of corruption, collusion and cover-up between News International, politicians and police that the scandal has revealed. As the cast of hacking victims, blaggers and blackmailers has lengthened, and the details of the incestuous payments and job-swapping between News International, government and Scotland Yard become more complex, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture that is now emerging.

If it were not for the uncovering of this cesspit, the Cameron government would be preparing to nod through the outright takeover of BSkyB by News International, taking its dominance of Britain’s media and political world into Silvio Berlusconi territory. But what has been exposed now goes well beyond the hacking of murder victims and dead soldiers’ families – or even the media itself. The scandal has lifted the lid on how power is really exercised in 21st-century Britain – in which the unreformed City and its bankers play a central part.

What concerns Milne is the moral lassitude that seems to pervade all parts of the systems that are supposed to be edifices of British Life. Read: Barclays Bank The Real Indoor Pirates, or The Problem with Murdoch’s Media.

Is it time to truly Reboot Britain, which is different to playing lip service to it? A far too many people and organisations have done and are doing.  A people will only be free when they can control their own communications. And that fact has been drawn into sharp focus.

Wikipedia writes

In this episode Curtis tracks the effects of Ayn Rand‘s ideas on American financial markets, particularly via the influence on Alan Greenspan. Ayn Rand was born in Russia and moved to America in 1928 and worked for Cecil B. DeMille, where she got some of the plot for what became The Fountainhead from this period. Later she moved to New York, and set up a reading group called The Collective where they considered her work. On advice from a friend, Greenspan (then a logical positivist) joined The Collective.

When published, although critically savaged, Rand’s Objectivist ideas were popular and came to heavily infiltrate California, particularly Silicon Valley. The computer utopian belief (Californian Ideology) that computer networks could measure, control and self-stabilise societies, without hierarchical political control, and that people could become ‘Randian heroes’, only working for their own happiness, became more widespread.

The programme concludes that, indeed the ideology has not led to people being Randian heroes but in fact trapped them into a rigid system of control from which they are unable to escape.

Existing models of crowd behaviour  treat moving masses of humanity as though they were fluids. This works, up to a point. But it often fails to predict the changes that happen as a crowd’s density increases and its movement becomes chaotic.

Apparently marching soldiers will automatically break step on a suspension bridge – and over the last 5 years or so I have been fascinated by all sorts of participatory cultures – here is a selection of posts that explores such a fascinating and increasingly important area of investigation

Which business, which industry, which NGO or political organization, democratic or otherwise has not been touched by the impact of our most recent communications revolution? In a breath it seems, businesses defined by their socialness, community, and peer to peer interactivity have erupted in complete violation of the orthodoxy of traditional business, and how that business is made: controlled access to stuff, to information. This is the Gestalt Switch –  today people are using communication technologies to get what they want and need from each other rather than through existing organisations and institutions. Why? Because those institutions have been recognised as being unable to deliver on their promise to society. Because they abuse their position of power, because they lose sight of why they were there in the first place.

So why is access to financial capital any different? In No Straight Lines: making sense of a non-linear world, I make the case and argument that as our world has become increasingly unfair, to the point whereby that unfairness is highly corrosive, people will take action, political action, dramatic action, action with consequences. It is no accident that today, communications tools are being wielded as powerful agents of political change. As much as everything ‘digital’ has affected our world, the point is we are in a social revolution not a technological one. And, as much as we have seen profound change in certain areas of society, the owners of monetary power (banks, venture capital, financing) have seemingly been unaffected by the disruptive energy of a non-linear world until now, other than by their own doing. But what the banking crisis demonstrated is how dysfunctional finance and money markets have become, not only in venture funding and lending but in pensions, the managers of which know they will never be able to properly pay back to society.

So at either end of people’ lives; the creation of jobs and then a happy retirement, the system which should support that has failed. Its not failing, its failed. So where do the new entrepreneurial companies that create the new jobs come from? How will we finance our retirement? We need novel ways to make this all happen.

In the same way that Martin Luther used Gutenberg’s printing press to reform the church, organisations such as GrowVC, or Profounder or Kiva or Zopa, or Kickstarter, to name but a few, are also part of this challenge to financial hierarchies and their positions of power that now serve themselves rather than society at large. And this process is starting to accelerate, (see the Startup Exemption Petition)

Disruption does not ask permission

So disruption does not ask permission, and it never comes from the centre, the future of investing and the kickstarting of innovation requires radical new ways of funding and this will have a significant impact on society. This innovation will flatten  powerhouses of financial capital and if the idea proves as exciting as the ideas explored and brought to life in the writings and pamphlets that led to the French Revolution, then that idea will spread. As Tony Judt wrote in, Ill Fares the Land, (review)

By the time the revolution broke out, this new language of politics was in place, and in so doing discredited everything that had gone before it.

And once you have stormed the Bastille, you don’t go back to your day job. Who is an entrepreneur? Who is an investor? Who has the right to be either? Such perspectives are as skewed as the myopia of those that whinge about professionals and amateurs, and how the internet has destroyed culture. The question to that is who owns culture and who makes it? What we are seeing is a decoupling from the belief systems that have defined our world for generations.

In this process of the democratisation of venture funding, and the creation of a new innovation eco-system (to accelerate deal flow, that creates more companies and that creates more jobs), it has been reported back to me that some American’s believe this could be the re-invention of the American Dream. And Ross Dawson suggests, that a significant shift in capitalism could be coming. As head of vision at Grow Venture Community (GrowVC), I have watched these developments with great interest. I think, in the same way that micro loans work in many countries, rather than pointing to such financing models as ‘only for the really poor’, there is a more fundamental dynamic at work here, that participatory human systems when connected by the connective tissue of communications media can do some extraordinary things. It also I think breaks down the false barriers between who can and who cannot engage in wealth and value creation. This false distinction has corrupted many in their greed, consequently hurting society per se. As John Kay wrote, “Capitalists, are capitalism’s worst enemy – and particularly the market fundamentalist tendency which has been in the ascendant for the last 20 years”. And yet many in the finance and banking world cannot accept even though they were bailed out by states around the world paying millions in bonus’s is fair. In the same way Ann-Marie suggested the starving in the streets of Paris ‘eat cake’, the financial institutions has become detached from understanding their role in the wider society (read here for a selection of posts that explores these issues). So change is gonna come,

Ross believes,

While we supposedly live in a capitalist society, the potential is for new and more open structures to create far better use of capital than we have today. A more fluid form capitalism could transform business and how individuals create value.

The Wall Street Journal,

Federal securities regulators are weighing demands to make it easier for fast-growing companies to use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to raise money by tapping thousands of investors for very small amounts of shares. The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at adapting its rules to encourage Internet-age techniques for small companies raising capital. The issue is part of a wider review by the agency into whether to ease decades-old constraints on share issues by closely held companies.

The use of “crowd-funding” techniques has spread in recent years from artists looking to fund creative works to entrepreneurs trying to expand their firms. In a typical example, a company looking to raise $100,000 would use an Internet site to invite investors to buy as much as $100 of shares each.

If all goes well, small companies can raise cash relatively cheaply, while investors get a stake in an innovative business with limited downside risk. The SEC is now considering calls to relax its rules to make it easier for companies to use crowd-funding without having to undergo the full panoply of disclosure and other legal requirements required by the securities laws for share issues.

In Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift he writes, the hegemony of the market can undermine the possibility of gift-exchange, the esemplastic powers can be destroyed by an overvaluation of analytic cognition. Ushahidi is a gift to the world and asks nothing in return.

Juliana Rotich about Ushahidi’s Crisis Mapping in 280 seconds from 99FACES on Vimeo.

This was never a tech revolution in the same way Gutenberg’s printing press was a tech rev – it was like in Tunisia, Egypt, Libiya, and throughout the western world; a revolt against power, corporate power, political power who has it and who wields it – its interesting to note that Umar Haque although working for Havas struggles with the ethics of living in a world which is unfair. He is I believe representative of many. But the powerful are now beginning the pinch of the powerless, where people sick and tired of the same shit, are learning to get what they need from each other – institutionally American Government has failed, business are failing and we need a new literacy in which people know how to create new and better things. The fact was nobody was really prepared to listen not until it was too late.

Communities Dominate Brands is six years old and yet people still tell me from RIM, to Disney, to startups that it is still mandatory reading. I don’t do it very often but hurrah for us.

You can buy it HERE

True democracies need open public spaces, that are shared, where people can meet as equals, writes John Keane in The Life and Death of Democracy. It is no surprise then that we see the square recently as the symbol of a free society Tahrir Square for example. Seumas Milne, writes

The strong likelihood that neither the Egyptian army nor anyone else is going to be able to halt this process where it is, nor prevent a far deeper democratic transformation and settling of accounts with the old regime. This is not some phoney western-backed “colour revolution”, after all, swapping one elite for another with a stage army made for TV. The evidence of the scale of popular self-organisation and collective commitment reflects a profound social process that is unlikely to be derailed before it has delivered much more radical change. That will have a global as well as a domestic impact, and not only because of the impetus it has given to opposition forces across the region. The greater the democratic cleansing of an economically parasitic regime dependent on foreign support, the more a country that has been the pivot of western power in the Middle East is likely to take an independent course.

Through the open squares, that were once upon a time, only symbols of people-power today are the medium by which the powerful begin to feel the pinch of the powerless. Yes, digital technologies played a role, speak-to-tweet, twitter, mobile communications, Facebook as tools for organisation. But its the people in the streets that are visceral, that force into consciousness the fact the people want back their public squares. In No Straight Lines; making sense of our non-linear world I argue, we are renegotiating the power relationships of how we want to live, work, govern, and that communication tools that are low cost and widespread can be used as tools for political change. In the age of networked communications, we are witness to something of a ‘Gestalt switch’ which makes us think differently about how we perceive power and who wields it’. This is a universal ideal not one linked to any particular region.

Further reading

• The Life and Death of Democracy in the networked society
• Democracy lock down – but where is that exactly?
• Wikileaks and the battle for middle earth begins
• When the shit hits the fan its time to innovate
• Musings on the common spirit of distrust
• A people will only be free when their control their own communications Mr Murdoch

Did the Church see Gutenberg coming? I asked this question recently at an event on innovation and disruption. Those of you that are fans of Blackadder, let me use the comedic twinning of Rowan Atkinson as Bishop Blackadder and his side-kick Tony Robinson as Baldrick.

So Baldrick comes running into Bishop Blackadders bedroom as he is preparing for his day

Blackadder: ahhhh there you are Baldrick, I wondered when you might turn up

Baldrick: sorry sir, I was out last night in the Tavern

Blackadder: the Tavern Baldrick, have you taken leave of your senses

Baldrick: well no sir, but I ended up over-hearing a conversation between two men, a Johannes Gutenberg and some other geezer, that, that, that, that,

(Baldrick pauses)

Blackadder: c’mon man out with it

Baldrick: that could change the whole power base of the church sir – Gutenberg has taken a wine press and he’s going to print bibles on it sir

Blackadder just stares at Baldrick, and slaps him around the head, knocking him over and then kicks him

Blackadder: POPPYCOCK Bladrick (turning to face the window looking out onto the town of Mainz and its surrounding countryside) As Bishop Baldrick, I rule everything I see, and even that which I don’t. How on earth do you think that some fool up in a garret in Mainz with a convertible wine press is going to reform the church, and remove our strangle hold over the whole of Europe, hmmmmm?

This particular question has a certain relevancy if not urgency today, as it was through Gutenberg’s invention we as a society moved from the Dark Ages into the Reformation. The Church controlled all, its omnipotence felt by every single European man woman and child. Yet within a brief decade of the printing of the 42-Line bible and the facsimile re-creation of Gutenberg’s printing press, between 8 – 20 million books had been printed, whereas before, none had existed outside of a monastery. Martin Luther unleashed of the power of the printing press to decouple the Church from its divine power base, whilst simultaneously challenging political stability.

The lesson is – when new communication tools are not only invented but ubiquitously adopted, they can become a tool wielded for profound societal and political change, if society wills it.

So lets ask another question; which business, which industry, which NGO or political organization, democratic or otherwise has not been touched by the impact of our most recent communications revolution? In a breath it seems, businesses defined by their socialness, community, and peer to peer interactivity have erupted in complete violation of the orthodoxy of traditional business, and how that business is made: controlled access to stuff, to information. This is the Gestalt Switch – once we were atomized but connected up to each other by big media but not across each other, today that power has eroded, people are using communication technology to get what they want and need from each other rather than through existing organisations and institutions.

In 2005, Facebook, and YouTube were born – we were aware of the emergence of digital communications but that was seen from afar, there but not here. Today Facebook has a congregation of 500 million people connecting and getting stuff done though its platform, Youtube uploads 20 hours of audio visual content every minute of every day of every year, Flickr holds the largest repository of still images anywhere in the world – but why all this sharing? Because, as USC Professor Henry Jenkins states, an expert on participatory cultures, we were ready for it. Linux is a co-created operating system, (which companies like IBM use) generating huge sums of money for those that build businesses around its services even though the operating code is free and the people that write the code do so for free. From a traditional standpoint it is illogical, yet it works.

At the same time we are using the words social media and social networking, which drip off our lips like an adman would say 60 second TV spot 15 years ago, it seems people are all atwitter about twitter and the CBI produces a report about how employees using “social media” during their working hours are losing the UK millions. The truth is the connection of participatory cultures, socialness and a communications revolution in the true context of our age has been misunderstood by many.

In The Enterprise of the Future a report published by IBM in 2006 – their survey of CEO’s revealed that 8/10 CEO’s saw significant change ahead and yet the gap between expected levels of change plus the ability to manage it had tripled. This is natural because as a new economy takes hold, as a consequence of the old one faltering, it unleashes a powerful set of forces that cleave the fabric of the economy along fault lines, consequently there is a catastrophic resistance to change. For example, social media from a business context is easy to dismiss, it is looked at with idling curiosity, or downright mistrust in the C-suite as it is not a core part of daily grown up business, sadly this is the same mistake which the church made in misunderstanding Gutenberg in his garret in Mainz.

The reality is people are a highly participatory social species, we are designed to work in aggregates, this is different to the logic that created firms perfected for industrial production. We are in the process of renegotiating that power relationship. What companies face today is a design problem and part of that problem is understanding that embedding socialness into the core of what makes a company work successfully is very different to thinking about social media as an addendum to what it does. It requires a new philosophy, language, media and communications literacy, tools and processes. There are companies which whether it be automotive; Local Motors, venture funding; GrowVC, scientific innovation; innocentive, YourEncore, or Topcoder which has NASA as a client, books; Amazon or book mooch, mobile marketing; Qustodian, trading; ebay, that have all embedded socialness into the DNA of the company to improve commercial success. So is it social media or social business – as answering that question might be more important than you think.

Related articles

• Trend for 2011: Collaborative story-telling on social media (reportr.net)
• Facebook Nation, Facebook World (lewrockwell.com)
• Gutenberg In The Middle East (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• The Gutenberg Bible. (jwitness.wordpress.com)

The area that Rory represents is vast, communities can be small, as he says the problems are distance and isolation. This means broadband companies are reluctant to lay the cable to deliver broadband – not cost efficient. But as we know connectivity makes commerce possible. And without connectivity, communities dwindle even further for social as well as commercial reasons.

Broadband would allow our businesses to follow our local fishing supply shop, which does £1m of sales a year out of the door but £7m online. Farmers could fill forms online; Lake District B&Bs could market themselves in Japan; and “creative” industries that depend on fast internet speeds could grow. Parkinson’s patients could talk to their neurologist by videolink without leaving home (and grandparents could talk to their grandchildren in Canada); children could take classes which they couldn’t find in the district. Village shops could collaborate online to increase their purchasing power; village halls could share bookings; medical teams could exchange emergency calls more efficiently. People might decide again to work and bring their families up in villages.

£100m has been invested in broadband in Cornwall, but Cumbria is twice as big, with geographic challenges. This where the design challenge comes in – an intractable dilemma. Commercial companies say ‘non’, based upon their criteria, which has real social and commercial consequences. So what happened next?

But our Eden communities may have the solution. In Great Asby, one volunteer discovered there was already fibre, paid for by the taxpayer, for the school. The school let him splice off the fibre to a cabinet that he calls a “parish pump”. From that he ran a wireless network, with transmitters in the church tower and one, powered by solar panels, on a dead tree to reach the outlying farms. He has persuaded 70% of the village to sign up and is making enough money (as an unpaid volunteer) to upgrade the network. Local farmers have agreed to lay the fibre, at a fraction of the commercial cost. This is not a just impressive technology, it’s astonishing community action. And it suggests a model for rural Britain. The 130 activists who drove to Great Asby are now aiming to replicate it in 100 more villages. They have established a new website – though some of them have to drive to Penrith to log on. Libby, in Kirkby Stephen, is photographing and mapping all existing telecoms cabinets. Freddy, in Morland, is exploring alternative technologies from microwave transmitters and wireless hubs, to laying fibre in sewers. Five out of six farmers around Crosby Ravensworth have offered to forego wayleave charges and help dig trenches. Kate, in Stanwix, is training people to get online. Daniel, in Alston, is piloting medical tests from homes.

This is what happens when communities are empowered, when they are driven to create something for themselves. Traditional orthodoxies don’t need to apply. And of course the economics of community run networks is different, because communities can sign up well over 70% of a village to use broadband, they are much more attractive economic propositions. But if companies don’t invest, communities will bypass them entirely and build, own and run their own networks. The market orthodoxy wants us to behave in a certain – for their benefit. The Eden community demonstrates that designing a different solution, means they can change the rules and deliver a service that probably is more sustainable.