On episode 65 of “Amplified” Dan Benjamin and Jim Dalrymple had an interesting conversation about the relationship we have with the content we consume and the platforms we consume it on. As we move into consuming our media digitally, our content is simultaneously becoming locked into platforms. [1] Media content, no matter how we choose to access it, has become a feature of a software and hardware ecosystem rather than a thing of its own. When you commit to Apple, for example, you’re typically committing to buying your media from iTunes, at least if you want to have it on all your Apple devices with the least amount of pain. It’s the same if you buy an Amazon Kindle, or a device built around Google Play. The media library is a feature of the product.
This also functions as a form of lock-in, though it’s not a particularly secure lock in many cases. If you’re buying music, whether from iTunes, Amazon, or any other legitimate music download service, DRM is a thing of the past. Your iTunes and Amazon files will play on almost anything you throw them at. Video content is still locked down with DRM, but I imagine it’s only a matter of time before TV and movie studios wise up in the way the recording industry has and take the locks off. DRM is also a problem in eBooks that I hope will be temporary as well. Amazon has a more subtle lock-in strategy with their use of the MOBI format, and eschewing the ePub standard. Even if the publishing industry were to give up DRM, I can’t see Amazon embracing the ePub format on Kindles. They have too much to lose.
These are issues you simply do not have to worry about for physical media. A CD will play in every CD player, a DVD in every DVD player, and so on. You might have a hard time copying it or converting it to digital file, but you can take the physical copy and play it anywhere, regardless of the brand of hardware you’re using it on. If a Sony DVD player could only play back discs made by Sony, the format would never have caught on. This only matters, however, if you’re buying content for keeps. The big growth in the content space is now in streaming subscription services.
There’s dozens of music and video streaming services, some linked to specific platforms and some available on multiple. Netflix, for example, is available on pretty much every piece of hardware you can buy and hook up to a display. A Netflix subscription is an easy way to guarantee that you can get your content anywhere there’s an Internet connection, but Netflix doesn’t have everything. That’s where the problems start. Now that a content library has become a feature of an ecosystem, the specific content varies depending on who we’re asking to provide it. The content of different studios, networks, and production companies is accessible only through certain partnership deals, exclusive contracts, and revenue sharing agreements that make it so that you either need to buy into more than one subscription service, or illegally download anything you’re missing.
I’ve long eyed subscription streaming, at least for music, warily. With something as typically ephemeral as TV and movies, a subscription streaming service makes sense in the same way a cable TV subscription made sense in the 90s. But, for music? Why pay for something you can’t keep? Of course, I also look at music streaming with the eye of a music fan and as a collector (albeit a collector who operates increasingly in a digital world). When I get something I plan to use more than once, I expect to do it on my terms, which is why I buy music, often from iTunes. My view, it seems, is becoming the minority.
If we’re accessing music, movies, TV shows, and even books through locked-in ecosystems, how does this change the relation we have with that media? The big worry I have is that none of these services have everything. There’s a TV commercial from around 1999–2000 that predicted the ability to watch any movie at any time. This was in the days before YouTube, or even widespread access to broadband. What’s hampered the utopian vision is the tying of content to specific services and platforms. How it will shake out, I can’t say, but as long as people have to either lock themselves into an ecosystem, or find the particular subscription streaming service that has the particular content they want, frustration will win out more often than not.
What worries me isn’t lock-in via DRM. That will end in time. What worries me is that creative work that demands to be viewed on its own merits, and accessible by the largest audience possible, runs the risk of being locked to a specific piece of hardware, or a specific paid service, for eternity. Why? Because exclusivity is more valuable to the company that owns the work than the work is to either the creator or the audience. In the case of the creator, hopefully it’s lucrative enough to keep them making work, but for the audience… what good is access to a vast library if none of it is valuable?
For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to talk mostly about legally-acquired content. Illegal downloads are certainly a topic of discussion, but they are—by nature—more open, but not quite ubiquitous. ↩
This week, Andrew gives his thoughts on Yeezus, a long talk about Chiptune, video game music, other electronic music, and film soundtracks. Also, the passing of Pere Ubu bassist Tim Wright (who is, in fact, not Pink Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright), the Living Computer Museum, Daft Punk not appearing on The Colbert Report, that 80s music production sound, Nine Inch Nails festival show, and more.
My podcast continues to live another day. Please listen to it. Nothing feels worse than talking about music with your friends in a void. Except, perhaps, actual physical pain.
Schüll spent more than a decade going to Las Vegas and talking with gamblers and casino operators about slot machines, which have exploded in profitability during the digital era as game designers have optimized them to keep people playing.
What she discovered is that most people playing the machines aren’t there to make money. They know they’re not going to hit the jackpot and go home. As Roman Mars put it in a recent episode of his awesome podcast, 99% Invisible, on Schüll’s research: “It’s not about winning; it’s about getting into the zone.”
Some interesting thoughts by Alexis Madrigal on why we’re so compelled to flip through Facebook photos, scroll on Tumblr, or dive down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. I’ve caught myself doing this at least… oh, twice or more a day. It’s a quirk of our brain chemistry working against us, the mirror image of the “flow state” that keeps us working when we’re challenged to the edge of our abilities. While the machines of Las Vegas, as described in the excerpt above, are clearly designed with addiction in mind, I’m not sure if the addictive elements of various social platforms and the like are quite as deliberate. It’s a happy accident—happy for their stats and advertisers, at least—that we’re compelled to scroll on and on. Not that there’s incentive for them to change it.
That said, reading Alexis’s article proves an interesting companion to the recent Gamasutra article on “chasing the whale”—the big buyers that keep free-to-play games afloat. Where Gamasutra discusses the ethics, Alexis discusses the psychology that keeps people clicking, buying, and stuck in the “machine zone” of repetitive tasks with no constructive benefit. Both are worth your time. Awareness is, perhaps, the only way to get out of the zone, and back to reality.
So, it’s come out that the security apparatus of the American government knows even more about us than it’s let on, to the utter lack of shock and surprise of everyone who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention. This lack of surprise is also, however, not surprising—as is the lack of sustained outrage from those outside the technology sphere. The technological sophistication that defines the NSA’s digital spying system is mind-blowing and the scope is incredible. Unless you’re an expert in technology and security, it’s hard to grasp the full extent of what’s going on. Most people are not experts in technology and security.
PRISM, X-Keyscore, and whatever else is up the sleeves of the NSA and similar organizations, are endemic of a real divide between the understanding of technology between the people who have the power to create and implement such programs, and the people being spied upon. They’re based on the implicit understanding that the average Internet user has no real understanding about how the Internet works, where their data goes, and who can access it. To be fair, the NSA isn’t the only one benefitting from this. Google tacitly acknowledges that it’s keeping an eye on what you use it for to better serve you advertisements, but they’re not going out of their way to call attention to it. Doing so would undermine their bottom line.
What Google does for their profits, however, is fundamentally less terrible than what the apparatuses of the United States government—and very likely other governments—are doing. The worst we can say about Google is they want to make money to pay their employees and make more stuff. The NSA is collecting data with a far more sinister purpose in mind. They’ll find a way to put what they’re collecting to use to accomplish something that, to the eyes of a technologically unsophisticated populace with an equally technologically unsophisticated government, allows them to get a bigger share of tax revenues, and justify their continued existence.
Actually, the NSA and Google aren’t so far removed, after all. The difference is that Google serves some utility to most of us, while the NSA does not. The NSA serves the political interests of those who want to look tough on terrorism, crime, and the moral panic of the day. Whichever of these the NSA can use their data to justify going against, that’s all it will take for the tide to swing in their direction. Google’s PR problems are harder to solve.
This is why it’s important that we find a way to educate people about not only the extent and power of the NSA’s online domestic spying program, but also about how this affects them and the technology they use on a daily basis. We need to know the tradeoffs. I’m reminded of a worry my father had about the E-Z Pass system used to automatically pay tolls on turnpikes and bridges. The logic worked like this: if they know when you go through each toll plaza, they know how fast you were going, and can send you a speeding ticket. This hasn’t happened, probably because it’s not quite that simple. My father was aware of the potential even in the early 2000s. (He’s since started using an E-Z Pass.)
People like my father are the exception rather than the rule, when it comes to thinking about technology’s effects on our lives. We see all the positive outcomes, because that’s all we hear from the commercials and mainstream news. Technology journalism sometimes covers potential downsides, but it’s just as likely to be retreads of corporate talking points that make an ostensibly objective product review read like advertising copy. Being “informed” and “knowledgeable” about technology is more about knowing how to read spec sheets and feature comparison checklists, rather than knowing how devices work and what we can do with them.
Knowledge is power. Right now, the people with the most knowledge of how these tools and services we use can be exploited are the ones exploiting them. They have the power to see who we are, what we’re doing, and send armed men to your door because of it. Though some have sniffed out potential BS around this story, the idea that a series of innocuous Google searches might set off alarms in the bowels of some computer system makes sense. Our credit and debit cards use a similar system to prevent fraud. Buy two tanks of gas and a pair of sneakers with your card and see what happens.
The only people with the knowledge of what constitutes a red flag, or how many red flags it takes to get a visit from armed men in black SUVs are the folks running the system. It’s to their benefit that we don’t know. We need to take that power out of their hands, and the only way to do it is by learning and understanding as much as we can about the tools and the technologies we use on a daily basis—and how they can be used against us. From there, we can decide how, when, and why to use them, and prevent future abuses.
It was a confluence of magnificent proportions that led six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on my door Wednesday morning. Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling. Because somewhere out there, someone was watching.
While I have a longer piece I’m writing about the problems of digital spying, this essay should give all of us pause. Looking up things on the Internet is not a crime, even bomb making. There will be some people out there who feel that law enforcement were just doing their job, and better to investigate and search an innocent family’s house than miss the terrorist in our midst. I say, why should I have to worry about armed men in black SUVs pulling up to my house when I’m researching kitchen appliances?