David Byrne's Journal

06.18.13: Surveillance State

2013-06-18T15:54:18-04:00

Friedman and Keller of the Times have both come out supporting the NSA collection of information. Remember, these same guys heavily supported the invasion of Iraq. Their paper reflected that point of view. Suspiciously, the Times was not one of the ones to run the leaks that Snowden provided. Maybe they weren’t offered the material, or maybe they were but refused to protect the source…or maybe they turned it down, worried about potential repercussions from the NSA and other agencies.

I don’t see Americans getting too upset about this government hoovering of their private information—not yet. Part of that laissez faire attitude might stem from the fact that those who use social media are already used to giving up much of their privacy. They tend to feel it’s a fair tradeoff for the convenience and connections that are provided in return. But hey, just because you have nothing to hide doesn’t mean someone can’t use you and your information. They do—all the time—and big corporations make lots of money from the information they collect. They don’t share that income with you and me—the providers of the information. It’s “free.”

It might take an abuse somewhere down the line to awaken the general public to the reason this kind of activity is not compatible with a democracy. Inevitably, anyone or any agency possessing that much information about its citizens will be tempted by the power that that information provides. Power corrupts, inevitably and surely, and secret power corrupts faster than any other kind. We have no legal assurances that this abuse won’t happen—just vague promises. So, in my opinion, it is just a matter of time before some agency, politician or rogue ideologue finds some nefarious use for all that data. The NRA is a breeding ground for things that will be scary, disruptive and possibly deadly to our society. Gee, that sounds like terrorism.

06.17.13: Manchester, Tenn.

2013-06-17T15:29:00-04:00

We played at Bonnaroo festival on Sunday. We arrived in the neighboring town in the morning having driven overnight from Asheville, NC and awoke to find ourselves surrounded by big box stores—all of them, all around us, in one place: Home Depot, Wall Mart, Target, Staples… on and on. There are no independent stores anywhere to be seen.

On arriving at the festival site, I pull my folding bike from the bay and set off to get the lay of the land; which stage is where, that sort of thing. I have done this in the past, and it’s a really speedy way to get from area to area, via the behind the scenes paths that staff and artists use, and one can then see many acts in a day. It’s fun and super efficient. But this time a security guy (their shirts say SAFETY) stops me and says there’s no bike riding anywhere in Bonnaroo. Woah. OK. I don’t challenge him, but WTF. I guess I’ll be walking today.

I manage to catch a few acts before we have to get ready for our 7:30 show….we’re the last act on the Which stage for this festival. Tom Petty, who goes on after us at the larger What stage, has no one playing against him. Same went for Paul McCartney and whoever was headlining last night.

I caught quite a bit of Macklemore’s set. Some of our horn guys sat in on his Thrift Shop song. For the bulk of his set, it was mostly him, a DJ/laptop guy, and a trumpet player. He was good! A real showman and improviser (or so it seemed). He doesn’t have many songs so far, so he padded out the set with entertaining patter and clever spoken bits that were funny and sometimes quite serious—there was a long spoken word/unaccompanied poetry thing that was impressive—a bold move.

Made it over to the comedy tent where I caught David Cross’ set—really good, though he did go to some iffy places: jokes riffing on Sandy Hook? Really? Well, to be fair the jokes were about the NRA’s response to Sandy Hook. Brave move here in Tennessee.

Kendrick Lamar was pretty much what you would expect. If you know his material—as the huge and vocal audience did—you were in it 100%. I was impressed by the emptiness of his stage setup. It’s a common hip hop thing—the vast empty stage—no amps, instruments, cables, singers, musicians. Visually it’s closer to a stand up comedy look, or a serious dance performance than it is to a stage associated with the rest of the musical traditions represented here. I’ve tried to come close to this, and in recent years I’ve managed to eliminate a lot of cables and mic stands. About a decade ago I switched to in ear monitors, so I don’t need any of the monitor speakers that line the front of the stage here and block part of the audience’s view of the artists. Monitor speakers—especially when they’re loud—also make it difficult for sound mixers to get a super clear mix as well.

Swans were a revelation. I didn’t see them back in the day, maybe I wrote them off as Glenn Branca or Rhys Chatham clones, but they were great. While there are elements of the guitar drone orchestra that they share with those guys, Gira has taken the thing into a more expansive place. There are songs, or bits of songs, and the look is of a bunch of characters out of a dark Flannery O Connor story—men in black come to tell you that the end is coming soon, and here’s what it sounds like. I stayed for 40 mins. and was right up close in front, but then I had to leave, fearing that my ears might close down (our ears “close down” when assaulted by loud or sustained loud noise—they re-open after awhile, usually) and we still had a show to do.

Anyway—amazing set.

Our show goes well. It’s shorter than our normal set—fewer ballads as the festival crowd has been out in the sun most of the day. I sense that the reception to our show carries less baggage than our theater shows. In other words, there isn’t a contingent of folks who mainly want to hear my old material. I enjoy doing some of those songs, but what was nice is that this mainly young festival audience is hearing much of our material, mine and Annie’s, maybe for the first time, so their reactions are visceral—based on how they liked the songs and performances right there and then. Sometimes an Annie song that maybe got an OK reception in our typical theatrical settings got a big response here. That was nice—there was a more level playing field.

06.15.13: Asheville, North Carolina

2013-06-15T13:43:00-04:00

Despite the hills in this town, I go for some bike rides. Down by French Broad River (yup, that’s the name), it’s especially scenic.

One day there is a Celtic heritage festival in a riverside park. I can hear songs about drinking sung by men in kilts.

I stop at a farmers market—there are black honey and pork butts.

Some of us go for a tour of the Moog factory. I remembered using a minimoog on some Talking Heads songs, and Bernie Worrell was a forerunner using the fat bass sounds on these Moog oscillators to do some of the bass parts on P-Funk tunes. Unfortunately, those early synths were tough to use on stage, as their pitch “drifted” a bit over time, but great sounds.

Now many of those problems have been solved, and on some of the gear you can save your settings…which is a huge help as well.

Here are a bunch of bass synths getting burnt in—they leave them on for a while to see if any parts burn out.

Previously, Annie had acquired a guitar they made that uses acoustic synthesis. What does that mean? It means their device activates the strings of the guitar rather than synthesizing sounds. It makes the guitar a whole new instrument—you can’t play it like a regular guitar, well, you could, but it would be weird. Imagine something like a set of E-bows, one for each string that can keep them sounding once activated or touched. It has way more options—filters, arpeggiators, mutes, etc—than an E-bow, but that analogy might allow you to picture it.

Anyway, it’s nice to see them developing that and some of the other gadgets that have no obvious market. I doubt there are players out there asking for something like this, but some might figure out a way to make a new kind of music on it. You have to figure out how to use them or play them from scratch (sort of). A guitar virtuoso wouldn’t be able to jump onto this thing for example—it requires a re-think.

Some of us jammed briefly on some of their gear that they had set up in a back room.

Moog jam from Todo Mundo on Vimeo.

I saw other synths in a used gear store—some made by former Moog factory employees—that were equally bizarre. One had no keyboard, or way to input a keyboard, and it had alien glyphs to assign patches. Another had many buttons that were completely unlabeled. What’s going on down here?

Southern Foam

Some of us went to a very tasty restaurant called The Admiral in a cinder block building in West Asheville.

There has been an explosion of foodie places around here. Some are impossible to get into. We had to book ahead for this one, and we just got in for the last orders before the place turns into an innovative and fairly small dance club! (They remove all the tables)

There was local cuisine with foams—all very tasty, but not sure I approve of the Southern Foam concept…this (below) is probably the reason a lot of restaurants discourage food photography…sorry guys. It WAS really tasty.

Carter (Trumpet and Flugelhorn) was at the same music store, and after leaving he witnessed a local cyclist get into an altercation with a driver. One of them (the driver or the cyclist) had cut off the other. The angry cyclist pulled around to the driver’s window to exchange words, only to throw his hands up and quickly back away when confronted by a gun.

It sounded like this cyclist has a little bit of a short fuse, which might need to be addressed, but it also shows the ease with which a gun comes into play in many parts of this country. Easy to see how a random stupid confrontation or bit of road rage could quickly escalate into someone’s death. Scary.

The audience here in Asheville was incredible! They were on their feet from the beginning of the show. Wild Wild Life is going over well—OK, it is pretty familiar, but Kelly’s arrangement and Annie B Parson’s choreography really helps as well….not to mention the willingness of the band to go somewhere completely new on that song.

Another image from near the river.

06.14.13: Baltimore

2013-06-14T14:00:00-04:00

My tour with St. Vincent is back up and running. All the same band, which is incredibly lucky—to teach new people all the music and choreography we have learned would have taken at least a week. We have learned a new song—new for us—a Talking Heads song, Wild Wild Life, with new choreography for that one too.

Rachael D. (French Horn) and I went for a ride up to Druid Hill Park. We passed through the Mt. Royal area adjacent to MICA, where I went to art school for a year. Baltimore has been through some tough times. They complain that The Wire showed the city at its worst and that the show was based on David Simon’s earlier days as a reporter but that it has come back a bit since then.

The Mt. Royal neighborhood is filled with gorgeous town houses, many of which were subdivided into small apartments for student housing when I was here. I remember the roach infestation in them was biblical. Now these incredible places overlooking the greenway and the park are up for sale. Some are pretty fixed up, some in disrepair and some boarded up. I wonder to myself if the middle class—both black and white—could find a way to make a life in downtown Baltimore—in these once grand neighborhoods. There are actually parts of Baltimore that never took the kind of hits these places did….but much of the center city is struggling.

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The show at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall went really well—we had a very appreciative audience. I suggested we add the Phil Glass tune (Open The Kingdom) that he and I wrote together years ago to the set, as both he and I hail from here. It went down pretty well! Annie and I sang it in unison and then we split into harmonies in the latter parts. This version is not quite as transcendent as the recording sung by a counter tenor, but we can certainly do grand with all the horns and brass on stage.

06.12.13: Here Lies Love

2013-06-12T13:25:00-04:00

Here Lies Love is still running! What a weird feeling to leave town when this show I have worked on for so many years is still playing almost every night.

We have to get out of the LuEsther space at The Public in August, so we are looking for appropriate or could be venues in NYC where the piece could move. Very exciting.

A cast album has been recorded, and mixing is proceeding in stages—we’ll pick it up again when I have a break from touring. There are many (7 or 8) songs that were written for the show that were not on the previous recorded version. The narrative and character are much more apparent with these new songs…and the cast do an incredible job singing them.

03.08.13: Sold Out!

2013-03-08T12:17:00-05:00

The floor (standing room) for Here Lies Love is sold out for the entire run! Most of the audience will be on the floor— there are only a small number of balcony seats for those who can’t stand throughout the show, so this news is pretty thrilling. I did hear a rumor that the show might get extended through the end of May; so more tix may become available soon.

Here’s the LuEsther space where the show will take place. (This is from about a week ago when construction was still in progress.)

The “action” takes place on the small stages and platforms one can see all around the edges. The audience stands in the middle. Balcony railings are not in yet.

03.07.13: Petraeus and Rummy—War Criminals

2013-03-07T14:35:00-05:00

It is a mystery to me why the U.S. newspapers (the Times in particular) did not run this piece that was the result of a lot of investigative journalism by the UK Guardian. This is the same newspaper that kept digging into the phone hacking by News Corp/Murdoch folks, even when Scotland Yard mysteriously got lackadaisical with their own investigation. This is what we will miss when newspaper budgets and staff get slashed.

Anyway, it seems like a major story that reveals why the Petraeus sex scandal suddenly caused his removal— he had approved torture all over the world. The piece totally proves what many already suspected—torture was not the exception, the behavior of a few bad apples, it was not only approved, but managed from the top. It also links the torture in Iraq and elsewhere and the dirty wars the U.S. funded and managed in Latin America for decades.

Here is a long video feature on the story:

James Steele: America's mystery man in Iraq - video

Why has this major story remained all but invisible?

2.12.13: Civil Disobedience 2

2013-02-12T13:39:15-05:00

**This was posted a week or so ago, and I got a lot of reactions to it—positive and sort of negative. Some of the latter were more in the area of factual errors I might have made, rather than “you’re totally wrong”, so I’m re-posting now with some of those corrections incorporated. All edits and reactions are in blue.**

How does one react to laws and practices that seem to be unfair or bordering on immoral? What is unfair and immoral depends on one’s point of view, of course. Scientists and philosophers argue whether we have a built-in evolved sense of morality that our laws are meant to reinforce and uphold- that may or may not be, but many laws and behaviors while legal may, in retrospect, be considered immoral.

As I think about how laws and behaviors get changed I suspect we should be following, amongst others, the example of Gandhi or the Civil Rights activists in the Southern U.S. who sat at lunch counters where they weren’t allowed and refused to ride in the back of busses—or automatically give up their seats for white people. Rosa Parks is a good example.

Source

And these folks were sometimes willingly and peacefully hauled off to jail as a result—all very peaceful and civil though they were often also harassed by locals. Here is a policeman harassing folks who want to sit at a lunch counter in Oklahoma.

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Draft resisters who opposed the Vietnam War similarly voluntarily went to prison. All of these people opposed laws that were accepted, on the books, but that they decided were unjust. Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Dept. employee who eventually decided to distribute what became known as the Pentagon Papers described the moment when he decided that he had to take action in response to what he felt was an unjust war:

“And he [Randy Kehler, a draft resister] said this very calmly. I hadn't known that he was about to be sentenced for draft resistance. It hit me as a total surprise and shock, because I heard his words in the midst of actually feeling proud of my country listening to him. And then I heard he was going to prison. It wasn't what he said exactly that changed my worldview. It was the example he was setting with his life. How his words in general showed that he was a stellar American, and that he was going to jail as a very deliberate choice—because he thought it was the right thing to do. There was no question in my mind that my government was involved in an unjust war that was going to continue and get larger.” Source

Ellsberg decided to release The Pentagon Papers. These were documents that made clear the hubris and hypocritical decisions made by politicians and generals that were affecting soldiers on the ground in Vietnam. Though many of us suspected that what was contained in these documents was already common knowledge, to make it public and verifiable was a big step. I would argue that his actions—and the subsequent publishing of the papers in the NY Times and Washington Post—hastened the end of the Vietnam War (as the Wikileaks data leaks have, in my opinion, hastened the ending of the U.S.-backed invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan). I cheered both of these revelations, partly because I too felt that both wars are unjust and immoral.

Ellsberg was, like his inspiration Kehler, willing to face the consequences and publicly surrendered to the Boston DA’s office, facing charges that carried a maximum sentence of 115 years. In admitting to giving the documents to the press, Ellsberg said:

“I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.” Source

Civil Disobedience in the Internet Age

Is there a contemporary equivalent to these actions? If we, as citizens, feel an injustice, an immoral act is being committed in our name, in our nations name, are these models effective ways to draw attention to it? To eventually effect change?

Passive resistance is sometimes dangerous—a young woman who sat down in front of some Israeli bulldozers as a protest against illegal settlements was killed. That’s worse than the threat of going to prison. My mom was threatened when she protested the invasion of Iraq.

One key aspect in the success of non-violent protest is the fact that it relies on media being present. Otherwise, it doesn’t draw attention to the issue, and similarly, the action has to be done publicly. Transparency is key. Me privately deciding not to pay taxes that go to the invasion of Iraq, to take a hypothetical example, doesn’t serve as a very effective protest unless I crank up a publicity machine, let everyone know I’m doing this as a protest, and then willingly face the consequences.

I’ve been following the canonization of young Aaron Swartz—the coder, hacker, and digital rights activist—after his recent tragic suicide. For those who haven’t been following this, it seems he surreptitiously set up his personal computer to download many, many academic papers from the academic database, JSTOR, through MIT’s open network. Why did he do this? Do we know? Was it a crime?

It took a little poking in the Internet, but it seems this theft of data was Swartz’s own form of civil disobedience. Here is what he wrote:

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.” Source

Later in his manifesto he suggests a mass movement devoted to “liberating” this data that is “locked up”:

“Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.” Source

So, we can assume he covertly downloaded the data to draw attention to a perceived injustice—that he felt that the academic papers in the JSTOR archive were unfairly behind a paywall and should be available to all. Following the imperative of his manifesto one might assume he was going to give them all away—to make them free, as he thought they should be. But he didn’t. (He certainly wasn’t going to sell them himself.)

He hid his face from library cameras, so he didn’t want to get caught in the act—though maybe he thought it was going to be OK and he wouldn’t actually get caught. Sort of an unreasonable assumption given that someone makes money on this stuff (but given his skills as a coder maybe it was not an unreasonable assumption). We also might assume that he was then going to proudly and publicly announce that he had “liberated” these documents to draw attention to his position. Transparency, as mentioned above, is key to the effectiveness of this kind of protest. This publicised “liberation” would also be a sort of “come and get me” action. Like the Civil Rights activists, he would, one might assume, be willing to face the consequences in order to draw attention to this perceived injustice. I don’t think he did that either. He was a disturbed young man, and seems to have hesitated in carrying out the typical civil disobedience MO.

What bothered him so much about this archive of data behind a paywall?

What’s the deal with these academic archives? How do they typically work?

Like music and movies that are legally controlled by copyright holders—typically movie studios or record companies—many academic databases contain papers and other material that are proprietary. Institutions or individuals therefore have to subscribe to access them or pay a fee to get to download these papers. LexisNexis is one such academic site in which the material is protected by a pay wall; Swartz downloaded his documents from a similar database called JSTOR. Needless to say, he didn’t pay for them.

Where does the money that subscribers pay to these services go? Do the poor academics who did the research and wrote the papers get some part of those fees? It has been pointed out to me [by Cory Doctorow] that this never happens—they never get paid for their contributions to these journals. Academics get paid a salary by their institutions, and are obliged, but not paid, to publish papers like the ones stored in JSTOR. Part of the deal is also that they hand over their copyrights as well—worse than the record business!

They don’t get paid for publishing these papers, but they have to publish in the journals to eventually get tenure and keep up their academic standing. They usually publish their work first in various academic print journals, and it is often these journals that by default post their papers on JSTOR or similar sites. The academic is, one might say, coerced into placing their work behind the paywall. Record companies who own the copyright on many of my recordings place those recordings in places where I might not wish them to be—it’s an ongoing battle… and another story. JSTOR and others funnel their income to the print journals who own the rights to the papers. One hopes the journals would pass some of that income on to the writers. This reminds me of my own pathetic income from Spotify and other services that record companies (who own the copyright on some recordings) place my recordings on—the income I get is so small that it’s essentially nothing. The record companies get the lions share.

I can empathize both with academics who might either want to monetize their research or those who might want to make it freely available to all—and the choice, ideally, should be the authors’. One would assume that this is one of the issues young Swartz was trying to draw attention to.

LeeAnn Rossi writes—in the case of JSTOR, institutions pay a one-time Archive Capital Fee (which fluctuates based on size of institution and amount of access to documents granted) plus an Annual Access Fee. From the breakdown of their 2008 tax documents, it looks like they [JSTOR] made $43m and had expenditures of $35m, giving them an $8m profit (they're registered as a non-profit organization). Of those expenditures, $8.3m were under the line item "Publisher's Fees and Payments", though there is no breakdown for how the Publisher accounts to the Author on the backend. From this article—it sounds like the name of the game in the academic world is that authors and scientists don't get paid for their peer-reviewed work in journals or on databases at all. Another anti-academic publishing article ironically ends with a nod to this article, which you can't read because it's behind a paywall.

Ultimately that is all irrelevant, the point is the owners of this material have their work behind these pay walls. The authors were coerced maybe, unfairly, probably, but there it is. It’s legal. Unfair maybe, but legal. Swartz, as I understand it, was an advocate for “free”—that all of this information (and presumably much other copyrighted material) created by others should ideally be free and available to all. Information, especially scientific and academic information, should, in this view, be intrinsically shared. Information, like that contained in these papers, is what scholars use to inspire themselves and it often serves a foundation for their own research. They therefore don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they begin some avenue of research—which would cause research to proceed at a snails pace. I agree with this idea—with the added clause that whether something is free or monetized should be entirely up to the author.

Archives like JSTOR also, according to Swartz, buy up research and papers that are in the public domain, then lock them up and privatize them, as a way of profiting from works that were once available to all. While I can see that there might be some minimal admin charge for organizing and storing all this data, this seems incredibly greedy. Orphaned works should, I agree, enter the public domain—and stay that way.

LeeAnn writes again—He was mostly fighting against what he saw as corporations owning and profiting off of something that was produced and owned by individuals who not only never recieved any compensation for their work, but also never produced it with profit in mind in the first place.

There is a big difference in my opinion between using someone else’s work as inspiration and as a stepping-stone and using that work—or work that incorporates that work—as a way to make money. I am happy, for example, for people to slice and dice my recordings—recordings they have legally obtained—and play around with them to their hearts content as long as they don’t decide to make money from that new work—either directly or indirectly. I am, I think, quite open about sharing income if someone builds on my work—but the crucial concept is “share”. (I have to point out that even posting songs on YouTube these days is in fact selling something—it is often monetizing someone else’s work. YouTube makes money on the ads that are all over their site. It’s not an altruistic “sharing service”.) I have no problem, for example, if someone performs a Talking Heads song or creates a video with their cat that uses it. But the fact is that all these services like You Tube and Facebook are filled with ads now, so someone is making money somewhere. It’s ripping off not just me and the corporate owner of that recording, but the filmmaker with the cat as well.

But back to civil disobedience. Swartz stole the material, pure and simple, and he seems to feel that he and others have, in this case, the right to steal because they are beholden to a higher moral standard. I am sort of fine with this if he’s willing to accept the consequences, as Ellsberg and the Civil Rights activists were. I sort of feel the same way about Wikileaks—though much of the data they make available wasn’t “stolen” by them directly, though they do know that under many nation’s laws disseminating that data is illegal. (Significantly, the NY Times and Washington Post were not prosecuted for printing the Pentagon Papers—though Nixon tried to do so—and these same papers were not thrown in jail for printing Wikileaks excerpts. So when is dissemination a crime and when is it not? What’s the difference between Wikileaks disseminating stuff online and the NY Times disseminating that very same stuff on their own website?) And as much as I’m glad these files made the horrors of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq obvious, Assange might face jail under U.S. law—though I’m happy that more corporate and military misbehaviors are made public.

If Ellsberg and the civil rights activists were willing to go to jail, should Assange and Swartz and formerNY Times editor Bill Keller and (Oh jeez, am I writing this?) poor Bradley Manning also be publicly willing go to jail too?

I’m going to shift the subject for a minute.

I wonder where one draws the line with the claim of “higher morality” as a justification for breaking the law. Conversely, when do acts based on one’s personal moral indignation become unjustified? I empathize with many of the actions above, but there are many acts made by those who similarly claim to be impelled by a higher moral calling that I find repellant and horrible.

Lots of religious fanatics also claim to be acting based on higher moral standards—and they’re quite public about it: lunatics, building bombers, abortion clinic bombers. Lots of wars have been fought by the U.S. and others based on claims that God is on our side—as an argument it’s pretty risky. Anyone can make it. In the case of civil disobedience, a lot depends on public opinion and how the media delivers the news of the action to that public. It also depends on that transparency, which allows one to hold the moral high ground. In some cases, it is assumed that the civil disobedience is not doing a lot of harm. Unlike the morally justified abortion clinic bombings mentioned above, no one was harmed by Rosa Parks, but I’m sure the Nixon administration made a case that Ellsberg’s leaks damaged national security—as the Obama administration has done with the Wikileaks material.

In civil disobedience actions it’s critical how the acts play out in public—that the perception be that the consequences are good, not harm.

What was the reaction when Swartz’s theft was discovered? In this case it seems MIT may have erred in calling in the Feds to handle a matter of theft within their academic community—even though their rulebook may have said that was the thing to do. The Feds seem to have overreacted too—they proceeded even after JSTOR dropped charges when Swartz returned everything and promised not to distribute or use it. (I thought his whole point was to distribute it!?) Some think it was a way to get to Swartz after they failed to prosecute him for the PACER documents he posted in 2009.

This reminds me of the way the entertainment industries often overreacted to kids and grannies who were busted for file sharing (downloading copyright material without paying for it). By overreacting, the institutions helped folks to empathize with those they were prosecuting. The grannies weren’t engaging in civil disobedience though.

However, Swartz wasn’t totally transparent and he fought back. If Swartz had admitted the theft and publicized his willingness to go to jail, as did the civil disobedience activists mentioned above, thereby bringing attention to the inordinate punishment he was about to receive and to the inequities of databases like JSTOR, then he might have better made his point—in my opinion. He was, as I have read, a disturbed young man who maybe sadly wasn’t quite psychologically ready to be a Gandhi figure—should he have realized this ahead of time? Hypothetical and impossible to answer now, as his tragic suicide has clouded the issue.

I am reminded how Jean Valjean, who stole a loaf of bread in the novel Les Mis, was unfairly punished by the authorities—which eventually highlighted the need to overthrow the royalty. He didn’t steal the bread as a form of civil disobedience, but I seem to remember it functions in the narrative in much the same way.

Swartz’s actions as a form of civil disobedience are very confusing for me. It’s not like he didn’t know he was doing anything wrong. He hid his laptop and hard drive in a little closet at MIT and hid from security cameras when he went there to retrieve his data trove. Imagine, as MIT seems to have briefly done, that it was the Chinese or North Koreans or some other entity stealing this data (and it very well could have been)—the “higher moral grounds” defense would then seem pretty ridiculous. Cory Doctorow has pointed out that China or North Korea wouldn’t need to steal this particular data, but my point here was more about the sneaky way that Swartz went about obtaining data that was supposedly gathered in a legal and upstanding way.

I don’t disagree with many of Swartz’s points. I can certainly see the point that much academic data, when freely available, can have a greater chance to spur insights and creativity from researchers and scientists around the world than if it is locked up behind paywalls. Withholding cancer research from academics who can’t afford access because a big pharmaceutical company “owns” the data doesn’t seem like a very morally defensible position—even if it is what the law might say is perfectly legal.

But who then decides what data “deserves” to be stolen and “liberated”? There are all sorts of data. Some of it is—though I hate to admit it—possibly essential to our security, and some is strictly personal and deserves to stay that way. It’s complicated, and this particular case seems messy—though Swartz’s points are mostly valid… but maybe his method was sloppy.

02.05.13: Civil Disobedience

2013-02-05T10:49:00-05:00

How does one react to laws and practices that seem to be unfair or bordering on immoral? What is unfair and immoral depends on one’s point of view, of course. As I think about this I suspect we should be following the example of Gandhi or the Civil Rights activists in the Southern U.S. who sat at lunch counters where they weren’t allowed and refused to ride in the back of busses—or automatically give up their seats for white people.

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And these folks were sometimes willingly and peacefully hauled off to jail as a result—though they were often also harassed by locals. Here is a policeman harassing folks who want to sit at a lunch counter in Oklahoma.

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“And he [Randy Kehler, a draft resister] said this very calmly. I hadn't known that he was about to be sentenced for draft resistance. It hit me as a total surprise and shock, because I heard his words in the midst of actually feeling proud of my country listening to him. And then I heard he was going to prison. It wasn't what he said exactly that changed my worldview. It was the example he was setting with his life. How his words in general showed that he was a stellar American, and that he was going to jail as a very deliberate choice—because he thought it was the right thing to do. There was no question in my mind that my government was involved in an unjust war that was going to continue and get larger.”
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Ellsberg decided to release The Pentagon Papers. These were documents that made clear the hubris and hypocritical decisions that were affecting soldiers on the ground in Vietnam. Though many of us suspected that what was contained in these documents was already common knowledge, to make it public and verifiable was a big step. I would argue that his actions—and the subsequent publishing of the papers in the NY Times and Washington Post—hastened the end of the Vietnam War (as the Wikileaks data leaks have, in my opinion, hastened the ending of the U.S.-backed invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan).

Ellsberg was, like his inspiration Kehler, willing to face the consequences and publicly surrendered to the Boston DA's office, facing charges that carried a maximum sentence of 115 years. In admitting to giving the documents to the press, Ellsberg said:

“I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision.”
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Is there a contemporary equivalent to these actions? If we, as citizens, feel an injustice, an immoral act is being committed in our name, in our nations name—is this a model of an effective way to draw attention to it? To effect change?

It’s sometimes dangerous—a young woman who sat down in front of some Israeli bulldozers as a protest against illegal settlements was killed. That’s worse than the threat of going to prison. One aspect of this kind non-violent of protest is the fact that it relies on media being present. Otherwise, it doesn’t draw attention to the issue, and similarly, the action has to be done publicly. Me privately deciding not to pay taxes that go towards the invasion of Iraq, to take a hypothetical example, doesn’t serve as a protest unless I crank up a publicity machine, let everyone know I’m doing this as a protest, and then willingly face the consequences.

I’ve been following the canonization of young Aaron Swartz—the coder, hacker, and digital rights activist—after his recent tragic suicide. For those who haven’t been following this, it seems he illegally hacked his way into an MIT database that contained many, many academic and technical papers and downloaded them onto his hard drive, rather than paying for access. Why did he do this? Do we know?

It took a little poking in the Internet, but it seems this theft of data was Swartz’s own form of civil disobedience. Here is what he wrote:

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.”
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Later in his manifesto he suggests “liberating” this data that is “locked up”:

“Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.”
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So, we can assume he covertly stole the data to draw attention to a perceived injustice—that he felt that the academic papers in the JSTOR archive were unfairly behind a paywall and should be available to all. Following the imperative of his manifesto one might assume he was going to give them all away—to make them free, as he thought they should be. He didn’t. (He certainly wasn’t going to sell them himself.)

His theft was done surreptitiously, so it seems he didn’t want to get caught in the act, though maybe he thought it was going to be OK and he wouldn’t actually get caught. Sort of an unreasonable assumption given that someone makes money on this stuff—but given his skills as a coder and hacker, maybe not an unreasonable assumption. We also might assume that he was then going to proudly and publicly announce that he had “liberated” these documents to draw attention to his position. This public “liberation” would also be a sort of “come and get me” action. Like the Civil Rights activists, he would, one might assume, be willing to face the consequences in order to draw attention to this perceived injustice. I don’t think he did that either. He was a disturbed young man, and seems to have hesitated in carrying out the typical civil disobedience agenda.

What bothered him so much about this archive of data behind a paywall?

What’s the deal with these academic archives? How do they typically work?

Where does the money that subscribers pay to these services go? Do the poor academics who did the research and wrote the papers get some part of those fees? One would hope so, but I have my doubts that they get very much of it. Academics get paid by their institutions, and are obliged, but not paid, to publish papers like the ones stored in JSTOR. They don’t necessarily get paid for publishing these papers, but they have to do so to eventually get tenure and keep up their academic standing. They usually publish their work in various academic print journals, and it is often the journals that by default post their papers on JSTOR or similar sites. The academic is, one might say, coerced into placing their work behind the paywall. Record companies who own the copyright on many of my recordings place those recordings in places where I might not wish them to be—it’s an ongoing battle… another story. JSTOR and others funnel their income to the journals who own the rights to the papers. One hopes the journals would pass some of that income on to the writers. This reminds me of my own pathetic income from Spotify and other services that record companies place my recordings on—the income I get is so small that it’s essentially nothing.

While I can empathize both with academics who might either want to monetize their research or those who might want to make it freely available to all—the choice, ideally, should be the authors’. One would assume that this is one of the issues young Swartz was trying to draw attention to.

Archives like JSTOR also, according to Swartz, buy up research and papers that are in the public domain, lock them up and then privatize them, as a way of profiting from works that were once available to all.

But back to civil disobedience. Swartz stole the material, pure and simple, and he seems to feel that he and others have, in this case, the right to steal because they are beholden to a higher moral standard. I am sort of fine with this if he’s willing to accept the consequences, as Ellsberg and the Civil Rights activists were. I sort of feel the same way about Wikileaks—though much of the data they make available wasn’t “stolen” by them, they do know that under many nation’s laws disseminating that data is illegal. (Significantly, the NY Times and Washington Post were not prosecuted for printing the Pentagon Papers—though Nixon tried to do so—and these same papers were not thrown in jail for printing Wikileaks excerpts.) And as much as I’m glad they made the horrors of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq obvious, Assange might face jail under U.S. law—though I’m happy that more corporate and military misbehaviors are made public.

If Ellsberg and the Civil Rights activists were willing to go to jail, should Assange and Swartz and (Oh jeez, am I writing this?) poor Bradley Manning be willing go to jail too?

I’m going to shift the subject for a minute.

I wonder where one draws the line with “higher morality” used as a justification for breaking the law. When do acts based on one’s moral indignation become unjustified? I empathize with many of the actions above, but there are also acts made by those who similarly claim to be impelled by a higher moral calling that I find repellant and horrible.

Lots of religious fanatics claim to be acting based on higher moral standards—and they’re quite public about it: lunatics, building bombers, abortion clinic bombers. Lots of wars have been fought by the U.S. and others based on claims that God is on our side—as an argument it’s pretty risky. In the case of civil disobedience, a lot depends on public opinion and how the media delivers the news of the action to that public. In some cases, it is assumed that the civil disobedience is not doing a lot of harm—unlike abortion clinic bombings mentioned above. No one was harmed by Rosa Parks, certainly, but I’m sure the Nixon administration made a case that Ellsberg’s leaks damaged national security—as the Obama administration has done with the Wikileaks material.

In civil disobedience actions it’s critical how the acts play out in public—that the perception be that they have done good, not harm.

However, Swartz fought back. If Swartz had admitted the theft and publicized his willingness to go to jail, as did the civil disobedience activists above, thereby bringing attention to the inordinate punishment he was receiving and to the inequities of databases like JSTOR, then he might have better made his point—in my opinion. In my opinion this was a bad move. He was, as I have read, a disturbed young man who maybe sadly wasn’t quite psychologically ready to be a Gandhi figure—should he have realized this ahead of time?

I am reminded how Jean Valjean, who stole a loaf of bread in the novel Les Mis, was unfairly punished by the authorities—which highlighted the need to overthrow the royalty.

In much of the recent discussion, Swartz is portrayed as a martyr. The fact that, yes, he is also legally a thief, is almost never mentioned. The emphasis tends towards lauding his advocacy (see higher principals, above) and there is often mention of his known mental instability, a fact that made him particularly susceptible to the kinds of harassment the Feds seem to have engaged in.

It’s very confusing for me. It’s not like he didn’t know he was doing anything wrong. He hid his laptop and hard drive in a little closet at MIT and hid from security cameras when he went there to retrieve his data trove. Imagine, as MIT seems to have briefly done, that it was the Chinese or North Koreans or some other entity stealing this data (and it very well could have been)—the “higher moral grounds” defense would then seem pretty ridiculous.

01.22.13: Benefit, Fires, Scenery

2013-01-22T12:13:00-05:00

Benefit and Fires

Before we arrived in Australia there was a long drought, followed by brush fires that raged all over the continent. Tasmania was hit hard. Hundreds of people lost their homes, and a massive amount of forests and farmland were turned into weird surreal landscapes of black dead trees surmounting hills of ash. Here is what’s left of a home maybe 70km from Hobart:

The hills beyond are all burnt trees. I think the fires swept through so fast that the tress were not consumed, not turned to dust—but their bark and all the brush is gone. Here’s a bit of woods bordering the road where the power lines (the light green bit) have fallen and the power lines themselves dangle over the trees!

Sometimes a house reduced to cinders would be next to one that seemed relatively untouched; sometimes one side of the road was covered in ashes and the other side was green. The fires took weird destructive paths, sometimes jumping over hills and even across some bodies of water.

So, a week before we arrived in Tasmania, when we were already in Australia, I got an email from Jherek Bischoff—bass player, composer and arranger—who was touring with Amanda Palmer, but was now is supporting her husband, Neil Gaiman. He was already in touch with the festival folks and it seems there was an initiative to do a hastily organized benefit for the fire victims the day after our show. It happened that I was planning to stay on for a couple of days anyway, to check out the day hikes not too far from Hobart, so I agreed to participate. Annie joined as well, singing harmony. We were the opening act—joined by a string quartet, the drummer from Midnight Oil, and Neil. I had some string charts emailed from my office in NY and Jherek hastily composed an arrangement for “And She Was”. It wasn’t super well rehearsed, but it felt great and seemed to go over well. The bigger rock acts followed later in the evening—some big names from the Aussie rock pantheon chipped in.

Scenery

The following day I did manage to get in a couple of hikes. Down to the nearby Tasman Peninsula I drove, past the fire damage. There’s a national park there and spectacular scenery. This arch is right off the road near Eaglehawk Neck:

Further on I took a dirt road to some less visited hikes.

On this one I was the only person on the 1½ hour hike to a lookout near Waterfall Bay. I thought to myself, “No twisted ankle or injury—as no one is likely to come by here and there’s no cell service.” Here’s a chimney viewed from the cliff walk:

After fish and chips at a café in Nubeena, I headed for another hike at the very base of the peninsula—Cape Raoul. Quite a long hike this one—4 hours, and I didn’t make it to the end. I got as far as the flat area in the distance, and then realized I’d have a long uphill slog on the way back, so I didn’t proceed to the point. Spectacular.

Nearby, forking off this trail to the cape, was another 2-hour trail that leads to one of the most famous surf breaks in Australia—Ship Stern Bluff. There it is, at the point.

How surfers found it is a wonder—maybe they saw it from a boat or from these cliffs and hiked down with their boards. God forbid anything happened to them on a day with big waves, as there’s no way in or out except hiking. Look at the size of these waves! You’ve got to be kidding!

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Lots of road kill visible on the roads down here—sadly some small kangaroos and other critters. A bounty for the Tasmanian devils, who like their meat dead and have jaws strong enough to crunch through bone.