marcellmars · August 29, 2015 14:19
diff --git a/StreamifyFTW b/StreamifyFTW
 # Streamify FTW

 When Andrea and I started to talk about this talk the first proposal was to talk about music industry and in particular streaming services like Spotify, Tidal, Pandora, Groveshark but also Soundcloud, Mixcloud or more from the past like Last.FM. I said Nooo. Talking about music industry and what they do reminds me about so much whining, blaming, complaining and in general frustration. And that all happens at the time when music was never this accessible and as much easy to create, distribute and enjoy. I don't want to say that the current time where we live in is the time we shouldn't complain about, shouldn't be frustrated or even raged about. Or that the way how technology is in use by corporations to make profit is a good thing. Or that asymmetries of power are something we should be quiet about.  No. Of course not. Exactly the opposite.

 Still I couldn't get rid of the music references. These are the first two which came to my mind and draft I sent to Andrea right after our first conversation:

 In 2003, at World-Information in Geneva, Ignacio Escolar was praising people to pirate his songs[^wi]. He was a successful musician, so called 1% of the most successful ones, still, in three years of his full time commitment to music he made not more than 3000 EUR (or 85 EUR per month) from selling CDs . In April 2015 Portishead[^nme], reported that they made 2500 EUR from 34 million streams on Spotify and Youtube.

 It seems that 12 years of technological development didn't streamify author's revenues as much as the data. What internet did, as in so many other instances, is that it accelerated the underlying mechanisms and rules of operation and then showed clearly what's the world we live in.

 This is the world in which research&development efforts are outsourced to the enthusiastic gamblers, so called risk takers or entrepreneurs, running their start-ups into popularity contest, so called internet effect. Start-up runs for the head (in power law graph) so long tail can be monetized after acquisition. 

 Winner takes all but the house always wins too.

 So, let's try to get further from this draft.

 The system only allows few winners. Only few musicians will become successful. Distribution tends to concentrate around one or few channels, streaming services or whatever will be the vocabulary describing the phenomena of monopoly of certain time. Distribution is the key. Who controls the distribution controls the both ends. In and out of production and consumption. Amazon is a great example of how technological innovation is in use to support corporate mission to win over all other competitors.

 As we know Amazon.com started with catalog of old good solid printed books, first kept in a garage, then in a warehouse, ordered online and then sent with couriers or mail (not email mail). Now Kindle book is by no means solid, book's metadata and content is in the database stored on the hard disks of Amazon's data centres, it's still ordered online but now sent through air into the e-ink little bubbles - e-ink little capsules - onto the screen of e-reader. All that is solid Amazon melts into air. During that transition for their regular daily operations, Amazon hired a neo-nazi security company Hensel European Security Services, whose initials are hommage to Rudolf Hess, to monitor and control the warehouse workers. Workers worked in terrible conditions, for less than a minimum wage in many warehouses around the world and as we know a lot of people complained and publicly embarrassed Amazon for such a horrendous practice. Rightfully so. They fired the HESS company after the peak of PR disaster which was happening mostly through 2013... But just before the shit hit the fan Amazon bought Kiva Systems company in 2012. for $775M. I'll show you a video it's almost 5 minutes long but I would kindly ask you to pay attention, watch the video and learn about the process: http://www.kivasystems.com/resources/demo

 All new Amazon's warehouses these days are built with Kiva Systems. The old ones are not upgraded because of internal policy in Amazon where that proved to be too expensive.

 Ok, so why did I start with this story? First, to show that the phenomena of "everything solid melting into air" does not start with computers, or equally wrong that it starts with internet. Here is an excerpt from text published in 1848:  "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." It is a text which talks a lot about ownership and rapid changes of means of production. A Communist Manifesto.

 Amazon.com example is convincing enough to remind us about the materiality of these conditions and phenomena. It is a good sneak in into overall production-distribution system and one more reminder why the price of a final product is less a price of a initial idea or labor but more transaction cost of distribution and something I didn't show but you can easily imagine which is marketing or hype and desire production in the world of scarce attention time.  

 Amazon.com is a good example of how alienation of the worker from the product of his labor is almost the same alienation of the author from his own work. Also, how that alienation could disappear not only towards emancipation but also in the direction of a Kiva System robots. I'm not trying to say that we will soon see an autonomous robot composer, even there is a more and more all kind of auto-tune robots in recent productions, but more that in overall cost of delivery of the product most of the human labor will be soon replaced by robots. Which is not a good news for society where winners take all, nor for workers or for the authors.

 Going back to whining, blaming, complaining issue: yes, we need a well articulated political struggle and my proposal is the good old worker's struggle. Exclusive authors rights or even worse support for restrictive intellectual property regime are, in my opinion, very toxic ground to build on top. That said, I would rather leave that topic, about which I'm strongly opinionated for the Q&A later.

 Now I would rather try to introduce three trajectories shaping the process of streamification of digital data. (Just a small digression it is quite funny how derivatives of the word stream: streamify, streamified or streamification comes mostly from coders, programmers, software engineers...) These three trajectories are: 

 - change of dominant user interface metaphors
 - a term which is now well known even in non-software development circles: a application programming interfaces
 - venture capital investments into experimental solutions (mostly) without any business model (or a clue how to actually make money on the market). 

 All of these are about the access and control of the access to resources and infrastructures.
 That of course doesn't happen without a complicity from all of us. It usually happens through the desire to do things on computers in a most convenient way possible. Here I don't advocate for any comeback of punched cards and my attempt here is to explain the change of dominant user interface metaphors.

 The accurate explanation of how computers work is too laborious, painful, repetitious, meticulous for anyone involved in any work related to computers. That's why we talk and develop hardware and software aligning with the narratives and metaphors. Some of the metaphors are shared in between software developers and users, some metaphors are different. Some were able to make computers popular some were not. Of all possible successful narratives we could have ended up with we ended up with a metaphor of business office. That one brought us a office vocabulary so we create, edit, move, manage and drag'n'drop documents or files into folders, folders into folders and place all of them on a desktop. Then we use Finder to find them, Explorer to explore, Browser to browse, Navigator to navigate. It's not only that the business office metaphor transformed everyone being  counter-cultural, sub-cultural, whatever-cultural into main stream office worker, metaphorically at least. Computer industry promised us that we only have to learn how to navigate the business office - metaphor - they equipped us with books for dummies and promised that if we are not idiots their idiot-proof interface should do the magic for us. Sounds very 90s, no?

 Then internet came. And the office - metaphor - became a waaaay to small and claustrophobic for such a flood of documents, files, images, videos, music and games. So we moved to the tiny search bar on a web page where we learned how search. Keywords, keywords in quotes, waiting for auto-completion, learning simple syntax rules so we can convert from euros to dollars and back. Then the screen got touchable and very small but mobile so we move while swiping, flicking, tapping, nudging, pinching, spreading and sliding the touch screen. While moving to internet then to moving ourselves while internet we somehow lost the file, the document, folder and desktop. So the dummy from the 90s finally who learned what file is where and how you copy, paste or move the file now got upgraded into advanced user who would try to find the app which will let him store the file for offline use. But that proved to be very hard almost impossible in the brand new metaphor of App stores which let you stream other stores of things once solid and now melted into the air.

 Application programming interface trajectory is a little bit more tricky. But let's start with something simple. Back in the days of early internet every browser had in one click drop-down menu the action "View source". And one could see the source: HTML (hypertext markup language). Knowing that this is the file, a part of being dummy at that time, one could easily figure out how to save the file locally, edit it and open it in a browser. Boom! A new web page. A new web developer. This is by far the single most important mouse-click in the history of computers which transformed so many users into developers/publishers.

 Soon after that RSS was invented. The access to RSS was even easier one direct mouse-click on an icon at the web browser's toolbar would add the stream of news or any other structured data into aggregation of personalized composition of interesting news. Waay before facebook came up with a wall. That easy way to aggregate and subscribe via RSS allowed podcasts to happen. So a single person, a user, could become a media producer distributing on internet its media work without any hassle. That's why Time made YOU the person of the year in 2006. Twitter was founded in March of the same year. The "fail whale" was very often on the front page but it had the support for RSS and everybody loved Twitter. Google Reader was launched only couple of months earlier. These were the cockpits of a new content producer/developer. Then slowly in the coming years an acronym API (Application programming interface) was more and more in use. It made platforms like Twitter or Facebook able to control and rule the API developers. Browsers lost an icon from the address bar and we were all back to the world of promises where developers will innovate and improve our world. That fine-grained control of access to resources enabled the companies to decide who, when and what will be able to get. Facebook never let anyone get the address book. After Facebook did that Google changed its mind about their address book. The struggle for monopoly position could start. It only needed one more trajectory.

 Venture capital investment scheme. Let me quote Joi Ito, famous internet entrepreneur and investor,  now director of MIT Media Lab: "During the bubble, people often invested on the "greater fools theory" which was the theory that there was always someone more stupid than you and that as long as the hype continued, you could sell your shares for more money to the next more stupid guy. This is VERY dangerous way to invest and luckily doesn't make sense anymore." It doesn't make sense anymore because after the dot.com crash the industry waited for the ones who actually have a clue how to make money on internet. And the big winners are: Google, Amazon.com, Apple and Facebook. With very few to follow. A venture or Adventure capital is the high risk investment which is like a head hunter net in a casino which motivates the candidates to gamble so that winners (who always take all) could be bought by the giants (who learned how to make money on internet) because the winner gamblers almost never have any clue how to monetize what they did. That's mostly because they play a popularity contest competing with other gamblers over a network effect. Then when enough of a user base you can get a billion for applying image effects, already very well known processing technique, on a scale which matters.

 These three trajectories are making a net of fine-grained control of the access to knowledge and development. Some through forgetting the ways people knew what's and where is their data stored on their hardware, some through control over how can access and build on established infrastructures and of course the access and rules of how to get paid for labor in research and development. 



 Let's go back to whining, blaming, complaining and in general frustration.. Who and how would complain about streaming. 



 Let's see how we end up in a streaming of something which use to be solid.

 Notes:
 Massive cultural production. Fordian.
 Authorship. Cult of author.


 [^wi]:http://world-information.org/wio/readme/992007035/1078488174

 [^nme]:http://www.nme.com/news/portishead/84559
	# Streamify FTW

	When Andrea and I started to talk about this talk the first proposal was to talk about music industry and in particular streaming services like Spotify, Tidal, Pandora, Groveshark but also Soundcloud, Mixcloud or more from the past like Last.FM. I said Nooo. Talking about music industry and what they do reminds me about so much whining, blaming, complaining and in general frustration. And that all happens at the time when music was never this accessible and as much easy to create, distribute and enjoy. I don't want to say that the current time where we live in is the time we shouldn't complain about, shouldn't be frustrated or even raged about. Or that the way how technology is in use by corporations to make profit is a good thing. Or that asymmetries of power are something we should be quiet about. No. Of course not. Exactly the opposite.

	Still I couldn't get rid of the music references. These are the first two which came to my mind and draft I sent to Andrea right after our first conversation:

	In 2003, at World-Information in Geneva, Ignacio Escolar was praising people to pirate his songs[^wi]. He was a successful musician, so called 1% of the most successful ones, still, in three years of his full time commitment to music he made not more than 3000 EUR (or 85 EUR per month) from selling CDs . In April 2015 Portishead[^nme], reported that they made 2500 EUR from 34 million streams on Spotify and Youtube.

	It seems that 12 years of technological development didn't streamify author's revenues as much as the data. What internet did, as in so many other instances, is that it accelerated the underlying mechanisms and rules of operation and then showed clearly what's the world we live in.

	This is the world in which research&development efforts are outsourced to the enthusiastic gamblers, so called risk takers or entrepreneurs, running their start-ups into popularity contest, so called internet effect. Start-up runs for the head (in power law graph) so long tail can be monetized after acquisition.

	Winner takes all but the house always wins too.

	So, let's try to get further from this draft.

	The system only allows few winners. Only few musicians will become successful. Distribution tends to concentrate around one or few channels, streaming services or whatever will be the vocabulary describing the phenomena of monopoly of certain time. Distribution is the key. Who controls the distribution controls the both ends. In and out of production and consumption. Amazon is a great example of how technological innovation is in use to support corporate mission to win over all other competitors.

	As we know Amazon.com started with catalog of old good solid printed books, first kept in a garage, then in a warehouse, ordered online and then sent with couriers or mail (not email mail). Now Kindle book is by no means solid, book's metadata and content is in the database stored on the hard disks of Amazon's data centres, it's still ordered online but now sent through air into the e-ink little bubbles - e-ink little capsules - onto the screen of e-reader. All that is solid Amazon melts into air. During that transition for their regular daily operations, Amazon hired a neo-nazi security company Hensel European Security Services, whose initials are hommage to Rudolf Hess, to monitor and control the warehouse workers. Workers worked in terrible conditions, for less than a minimum wage in many warehouses around the world and as we know a lot of people complained and publicly embarrassed Amazon for such a horrendous practice. Rightfully so. They fired the HESS company after the peak of PR disaster which was happening mostly through 2013... But just before the shit hit the fan Amazon bought Kiva Systems company in 2012. for $775M. I'll show you a video it's almost 5 minutes long but I would kindly ask you to pay attention, watch the video and learn about the process: http://www.kivasystems.com/resources/demo

	All new Amazon's warehouses these days are built with Kiva Systems. The old ones are not upgraded because of internal policy in Amazon where that proved to be too expensive.

	Ok, so why did I start with this story? First, to show that the phenomena of "everything solid melting into air" does not start with computers, or equally wrong that it starts with internet. Here is an excerpt from text published in 1848: "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." It is a text which talks a lot about ownership and rapid changes of means of production. A Communist Manifesto.

	Amazon.com example is convincing enough to remind us about the materiality of these conditions and phenomena. It is a good sneak in into overall production-distribution system and one more reminder why the price of a final product is less a price of a initial idea or labor but more transaction cost of distribution and something I didn't show but you can easily imagine which is marketing or hype and desire production in the world of scarce attention time.

	Amazon.com is a good example of how alienation of the worker from the product of his labor is almost the same alienation of the author from his own work. Also, how that alienation could disappear not only towards emancipation but also in the direction of a Kiva System robots. I'm not trying to say that we will soon see an autonomous robot composer, even there is a more and more all kind of auto-tune robots in recent productions, but more that in overall cost of delivery of the product most of the human labor will be soon replaced by robots. Which is not a good news for society where winners take all, nor for workers or for the authors.

	Going back to whining, blaming, complaining issue: yes, we need a well articulated political struggle and my proposal is the good old worker's struggle. Exclusive authors rights or even worse support for restrictive intellectual property regime are, in my opinion, very toxic ground to build on top. That said, I would rather leave that topic, about which I'm strongly opinionated for the Q&A later.

	Now I would rather try to introduce three trajectories shaping the process of streamification of digital data. (Just a small digression it is quite funny how derivatives of the word stream: streamify, streamified or streamification comes mostly from coders, programmers, software engineers...) These three trajectories are:

	- change of dominant user interface metaphors
	- a term which is now well known even in non-software development circles: a application programming interfaces
	- venture capital investments into experimental solutions (mostly) without any business model (or a clue how to actually make money on the market).

	All of these are about the access and control of the access to resources and infrastructures.
	That of course doesn't happen without a complicity from all of us. It usually happens through the desire to do things on computers in a most convenient way possible. Here I don't advocate for any comeback of punched cards and my attempt here is to explain the change of dominant user interface metaphors.

	The accurate explanation of how computers work is too laborious, painful, repetitious, meticulous for anyone involved in any work related to computers. That's why we talk and develop hardware and software aligning with the narratives and metaphors. Some of the metaphors are shared in between software developers and users, some metaphors are different. Some were able to make computers popular some were not. Of all possible successful narratives we could have ended up with we ended up with a metaphor of business office. That one brought us a office vocabulary so we create, edit, move, manage and drag'n'drop documents or files into folders, folders into folders and place all of them on a desktop. Then we use Finder to find them, Explorer to explore, Browser to browse, Navigator to navigate. It's not only that the business office metaphor transformed everyone being counter-cultural, sub-cultural, whatever-cultural into main stream office worker, metaphorically at least. Computer industry promised us that we only have to learn how to navigate the business office - metaphor - they equipped us with books for dummies and promised that if we are not idiots their idiot-proof interface should do the magic for us. Sounds very 90s, no?

	Then internet came. And the office - metaphor - became a waaaay to small and claustrophobic for such a flood of documents, files, images, videos, music and games. So we moved to the tiny search bar on a web page where we learned how search. Keywords, keywords in quotes, waiting for auto-completion, learning simple syntax rules so we can convert from euros to dollars and back. Then the screen got touchable and very small but mobile so we move while swiping, flicking, tapping, nudging, pinching, spreading and sliding the touch screen. While moving to internet then to moving ourselves while internet we somehow lost the file, the document, folder and desktop. So the dummy from the 90s finally who learned what file is where and how you copy, paste or move the file now got upgraded into advanced user who would try to find the app which will let him store the file for offline use. But that proved to be very hard almost impossible in the brand new metaphor of App stores which let you stream other stores of things once solid and now melted into the air.

	Application programming interface trajectory is a little bit more tricky. But let's start with something simple. Back in the days of early internet every browser had in one click drop-down menu the action "View source". And one could see the source: HTML (hypertext markup language). Knowing that this is the file, a part of being dummy at that time, one could easily figure out how to save the file locally, edit it and open it in a browser. Boom! A new web page. A new web developer. This is by far the single most important mouse-click in the history of computers which transformed so many users into developers/publishers.

	Soon after that RSS was invented. The access to RSS was even easier one direct mouse-click on an icon at the web browser's toolbar would add the stream of news or any other structured data into aggregation of personalized composition of interesting news. Waay before facebook came up with a wall. That easy way to aggregate and subscribe via RSS allowed podcasts to happen. So a single person, a user, could become a media producer distributing on internet its media work without any hassle. That's why Time made YOU the person of the year in 2006. Twitter was founded in March of the same year. The "fail whale" was very often on the front page but it had the support for RSS and everybody loved Twitter. Google Reader was launched only couple of months earlier. These were the cockpits of a new content producer/developer. Then slowly in the coming years an acronym API (Application programming interface) was more and more in use. It made platforms like Twitter or Facebook able to control and rule the API developers. Browsers lost an icon from the address bar and we were all back to the world of promises where developers will innovate and improve our world. That fine-grained control of access to resources enabled the companies to decide who, when and what will be able to get. Facebook never let anyone get the address book. After Facebook did that Google changed its mind about their address book. The struggle for monopoly position could start. It only needed one more trajectory.

	Venture capital investment scheme. Let me quote Joi Ito, famous internet entrepreneur and investor, now director of MIT Media Lab: "During the bubble, people often invested on the "greater fools theory" which was the theory that there was always someone more stupid than you and that as long as the hype continued, you could sell your shares for more money to the next more stupid guy. This is VERY dangerous way to invest and luckily doesn't make sense anymore." It doesn't make sense anymore because after the dot.com crash the industry waited for the ones who actually have a clue how to make money on internet. And the big winners are: Google, Amazon.com, Apple and Facebook. With very few to follow. A venture or Adventure capital is the high risk investment which is like a head hunter net in a casino which motivates the candidates to gamble so that winners (who always take all) could be bought by the giants (who learned how to make money on internet) because the winner gamblers almost never have any clue how to monetize what they did. That's mostly because they play a popularity contest competing with other gamblers over a network effect. Then when enough of a user base you can get a billion for applying image effects, already very well known processing technique, on a scale which matters.

	These three trajectories are making a net of fine-grained control of the access to knowledge and development. Some through forgetting the ways people knew what's and where is their data stored on their hardware, some through control over how can access and build on established infrastructures and of course the access and rules of how to get paid for labor in research and development.



	Let's go back to whining, blaming, complaining and in general frustration.. Who and how would complain about streaming.



	Let's see how we end up in a streaming of something which use to be solid.

	Notes:
	Massive cultural production. Fordian.
	Authorship. Cult of author.


	[^wi]:http://world-information.org/wio/readme/992007035/1078488174

	[^nme]:http://www.nme.com/news/portishead/84559