He asked me to go to this cheap restaurant because he could not afford a more expensive dinner. Lawyers, he said. When we sat down, he gave me a business card that used to be shiny six months ago. It simply says “MyVirtualTaylor, Isrich CEO”.

Hello Karl, thanks for the meeting. MyVirtualTaylor is an e-clothing company. But what is e-clothing exactly ?

Simply put, it’s 3D printing for clothes. We have developed a clothing printer that we sell and which is the size of a washing machine. Not being bigger than a washing machine was one of our top requirements before the launch.

The clothing printer has a tank of polymer, that you need to refill regularly, and seven dye tanks. We discovered that having seven primary colors was a good deal to reproduce most of the colors.

Through wifi, you send a .clo file to the printer then wait between ten minutes and one hour, depending on the size and the complexity of the model. Everything is automatic, you can even print a bunch of .clo in a row.

How do you get a .clo file?

We have an online editor on our website that allows you to design your own clothes. We have also some standard templates: shirts, ties, stuff like that.

In fact, when we launched, we didn’t really think about that. We thought that there will be a new market for clothes creators. That’s why we wanted the .clo format to be open and documented. We sell the hardware but we didn’t want to enter the clothing market.

Can you really print anything? What are the limitations?

Currently, there are some constraints with the size. We have prototypes that can print as big as a king size bed sheet. But, of course, you can only print clothes made of polymer. No silk nor fabric.

Isn’t that a big limitation? After all, most of our clothes are made of fabric.

It should be noted that a lot of progress have been made with polymers. We can weave the polymer in a lot of different ways in order to have the properties we want.

But, most importantly, clothing material has always been about finding a compromise between style, comfort and durability. Durability being the critical point for quality clothes. The clothes have to go through hundred of washing cycles. Our solution was to remove durability from the equation.

Do you mean that printed clothes are not durable?

Not, they aren’t. But it is not the goal. Instead of cleaning them, you put them in the clothing printer and the polymer is cleaned, melted and ready to print new clothes.

Unfortunately, we still cannot extract the colors. The polymer is thus not perfect. We store the recycled polymer in a separate tank. When you print, you can allow the use of recycled polymer or not. It is good enough for every day but if you want a perfect white shirt for a wedding, you probably want the unused polymer.

The part of the polymer which is worn out goes with the waste to the sewers.

It sounds like an ecological disaster.

That’s exactly the rumor spread by our opponents.

But, while it is not perfect, you have to compare it with the traditional clothing industry. Clothes are usually made in huge factories in China, using harmful chemicals. Then, you have to take into account the transport, the storage, the shop. Not mentioning the gas needed to go to the shopping mall. To that, add the water and the soap used to wash the clothes. By contrast, we basically use electricity and release very little polymer. With time, we hope to be able to recycle more and more.

Did you talk about opponents?

You know, I’m an engineer. I never really cared about anything but the technological aspects. When the first clothing printers were sold, people immediately started to exchange .clo files. They took their own clothes and make .clo files to be able to reproduce them.

One day, I received a letter from lawyers of the FCIAA, the Fashion & Clothing Industry Association of America. I’ve never heard of them before but, basically, they wanted me to stop my company because I was threatening their business.

I thought it was a joke. Really. At first I was like: ”Funny. It’s like the candle industry suing Edison for inventing the lightbulb”. But it’s not funny any more.

I can talk about this for hours. They are bad. Really bad. They are trying to destroy my life.

Can’t you let the lawyers handle that?

For the lawsuit, of course. But there’s a lot more. I’ve been contacted by politicians. They say that I’m destroying the economy. If my product works, there will be no shops for clothes hence no jobs. They asked me: “Do you know how many Americans are working in clothing shops?”. I was accused of being anti-patriotic. From nowhere, some news laws appeared saying that clothes should have a certification in order to save children from accidental suffocation.

From that point, it became immoral to print clothes. Last year, nobody ever thought about printing clothes and, now, it is worse than eating babies alive. There’s even webshops where you can order “Not Printed” labelled t-shirts. I’ve been attacked personally, investors have turned me back and, at the same time, I still need to pay expensive legal fees.

Isn’t that true that it’s a threat for the economy?

It is a tool for making life easier. Any invention which free people from unnecessary labor seems to be a threat to the economy. But if our economy is threatened by inventions that make life better for everyone, it’s the economy we need to change, not the inventions.

What will you do next?

I feel bitter. I’m an engineer with a new useful idea and everyone turns against me: big corporations, lawyers, politicians. Even random people in the street think that “It’s the guy destroying jobs and suffocating babies”. I’ve never signed up for that. I’ve never been into politics or anything like that. Now, I’m thinking about settling somewhere in Europe but I’m afraid that the hand of the FCIAA will follow me there. 

Thanks Karl, I wish you the best.

Although, as a journalist, I know I should remain objective, I can’t help but feeling empathy for the guy. As I’m packing up, I notice his clothes for the first time. “So are those printed?” “Of course” “Very nice. It’s impressive.” He sighs then try to smile at me: “Thanks. If you are interested, you will find the .clo on the Pirate Bay.”. His smile feels sad, despaired. We shake hands and he slowly walk away while I stay there, helpless.

This post is part of the Letters from the Future collection and is dedicated to Brokep for announcing his political involvement during the writing of this text. Picture by Anna Banana.

Anybody having been connected long enough on the internet knows that it never happens. Everybody stays on his own position. But why?

The reason is simple: changing opinion has a cost. A cost that we usually ignore. A good exercice is to try to evaluate this cost before any debate. For yourself and for the counterpart.

Let’s take a music fan that was convinced that piracy hurts artists. Convincing him that it’s not the case and that piracy is not immoral means to him that, firstly, he was dumb enough to be brainwashed by major companies and that, secondly, the money spent on CD is a complete waste.

Each time you will tell him “Piracy is not hurting artists and not immoral”, he will ear “You are stupid and you wasted money for years”.

This is quite a high cost but not impossible to overcome. It means that arguments should not only convince him, but also overcome that cost.

Worst: intuitively, we take the symmetry of costs for granted.

Let’s take the good old god debate.

For the atheist, the cost of being convinced is usually admitting being wrong. This is a non-negligible cost but sometimes possible. Most non-hardcore atheists are thus quite ready to be convinced. They enter any religious debate expecting the same mindset from the opponents.

But the opposite is not true. For a religious person, believing in god is
often a very important part of her life. In most case, this is something inherited from her parents. Some life choices have been made because of her belief. The person is often engaged in activities and societies related to her belief. It could be as far as being the core foundation of her social circles.

When you say “God doesn’t exist”, the religious will hear “You are stupid, your parents were liars, you wrecked your life and you have no reason to see your friends anymore”.

It looks like a joke, right? It isn’t. But, subconsciously, it is exactly what people feel and understand. No wonder that religious debates are so emotional.

Why do you think that some religious communities are fighting any individual atheist? Why do you think that any religion always try to get money or personal involvement from you? Because they want to increase the cost of not believing in them. Scammers understand that very well: they will ask you more and more money to increase the cost of you realizing it’s a scam.
Before any argument, any debate, ask everyone to answer sincerely to the question “what will happen if I’m convinced? What will I do? What will change in my life?”.

More often than not, changing opinion is simply not an option. Which settle any debate before the start.

And you? Which of your opinions are too costly to be changed? And what can you do to improve the situation?

Picture by r.nial.bradshaw

If I forget about gifts, which are a rare exception happening only within my close social circle, every transaction is either a purchase or a charity donation. Nothing else.

The implications are huge. It means that something has one and only one fixed price, fixed by the market and identical for everybody. That price is perceived as the real value. People will pay an expensive ticket for a violin concerto but will not pay attention if the same artist plays in the metro. It is free, thus worthless. In our society, price and value are synonym.

In that world, when you plan to earn money, you only have two solutions: pledge for charity or give something that customers cannot get for free. On the internet, where nearly everything can be found freely, this translated into two business models: a paywall (your readers being your customers) or advertising (your readers being the product you sell to your customers). The paywall proved to be ineffective (because people can get what they want for free anyway) and the advertisements proved to be very lucrative for the intermediaries (like Google) but not for the content providers. It also has the result of making the content providers caring more about advertiser’s interests (their customers) and to think about their followers (their product) only in terms of volume.

When I joined Flattr, in 2010, I thought it was only a way for people to give me charity. My bet was to invest 24€ in a year in order to earn more. I told myself that I would quit Flattr if made less than the, at the time mandatory, 2€/month.

I’ve earned more but, most importantly, learned much much more.

I discovered that transactions are not only of the “buying because you have no choice” or “charity” kind. It could be something hybrid, something I call the “free price”.

I thought that what I wrote on my blog had no value. My writing would be valued only if published in a book. But I discovered that it nevertheless had value for some. A different one for each reader. Not fixed by the invisible hand of the market but by their personal history. Flattr allowed people to pay for each of my blog post according to the value they saw in it. It is not charity, it is not giving. It is “paying freely”.

In a sense, it is a lot more fair. A poor reader will be able to give me 0.10€ while a richer reader can give me 1, 10 or even 50€. The content producer dilemma was “publish something for free and make it worthless in order to reach a wide audience” or “keep it confidential to earn money and monetize the content”. Now, with the “free price”, you can have both. Making stuff for free while keeping an high value.

As Amanda Palmer said, this is not new. It always existed for street artists, for waiter’s tips. But I was confusing it with charity and may not be alone in that case. It is clearly not charity. You pay for something, for a product. It is a free price.

This has the groundbreaking effect of putting into question the traditional equation price = value. Because there’s not one fixed price but as many prices as customers.

While I’m very excited about this, I also realise that this is the main weakness of Flattr: it is too disruptive.

Flattr will only work for people already convinced that this third transaction model is possible. It will only work for the people that are already seeing value in stuff that have no price. People that are ready to go through the hassle of creating an account, sending money, etc.

But what if we could transform Flattr into an educational tool? Teaching people the joy of paying for stuff without a fixed price? After all, it’s exactly the effect it had on me.

What about a Flattr paywall as a Trojan horse? A Flattr paywall is something I already explored in my story “The Publisher’s Dilemma”. To access a list of content, a Flattr account would be required and any content you access would be automatically Flattered. Psychologically, content producers will then learn to make content for a “free price” without being required to publish completely for free (which is, thanks to the industry lobbying, something artists are afraid of).

On the other hand, many consumers who never bothered to pay for something may think “Hey, I can access many content on many websites for only 2€/month. Let’s create an account.” Once their account is credited, they may Flattr other content. After all it doesn’t cost them more money. And, like I did myself, find themselves increasing their monthly Flattr.

Flattr is an awesome tool for people who believe in a “free price”. But it could go one step further and become an advocacy tool for the “free price”. Something which is shaking one of the deepest foundation of our society, the infamous price tyranny.

Picture by FrostWire.

Nevertheless, on the individual scale, this evolution is understandably not accepted by the people who were used to sell content by purposedly confusing a given content and its physical medium. After a failed attempt to artificially make content impossible to copy, some tried to monetize their content through advertisements. The fundamental flaw in that model being that it would keep the money in the real big-blue-ceiling world. A world which, unlike the virtual world, is physically limited. The growing virtual world would become nothing but a huge billboard for the real world. Not realistic…

When you cannot block people to access stuff for free but want to make them pay anyway, you have only one solution left: morality.

Current calls to morality are incredibly negative: “Not paying is bad”, “If you don’t pay, content creators will die”, “If you don’t pay, you will get sued”, “Not paying is stealing”, …

It leads to a business model based on fear and guilt. A world where everyone has to pay the same price before consuming the content. Not to mention the inherent contradiction of wanting to see the content spreading while, at the same time, blocking some from accessing it.

But what if the call to morality was actually positive? “You don’t have to pay but it will be appreciated”. “If you pay, I will be able to create more content”. “If you can’t afford to pay for it, at least share it with your friends, spread it!”.

In that new virtual world, only those who liked the content would pay. And they would pay the amount they want. Does it seems unrealistic because most people would choose to not pay? But it already exists. A lot of waiter and waitress in the world actually earn a living from tips. Or street artists like Amanda Palmer in her early days. Those tips are optional and paid afterwards. The amount being proportional to the quality of the service or the pleasure we had. Why is it working? Because we are used to that system. Because we are positively compelled to give a tip. Because we can give what we find reasonable for our budget.

In order for this system to work in the virtual world, it should be incredibly easy to give a tip without even thinking about it. Yet, such a system already exists. It is called Flattr and I already gave you a presentation. The strength of Flattr is that you pay in advance a monthly tip. There’s no way to get over your budget as it is monthly fixed.

But this would be even more awesome it the tip could be automatized. We spend a lot of time liking picture on Instagram, video on Vimeo, favouriting tweets and listenning to song on Grooveshark. Guess what? Flattr dit it! Starting yesterday, those like/favourite/recommend actions will automatically give a Flattr to the authors (if you enable it, of course).

And this service is open to any content provider. Each time you would like something on your favourite platform, you would send a tip. 90% of that tip goes directly to the author, 5% goes to Flattr and 5% goes to Medium.

For sure, those tips might appear negligible in the first time. But, as a content creator, isn’t it compelling to earn money because people wanted to give you money? Not because they were deceived into buying the entrance ticket but because they actually enjoyed your content? Wouldn’t it send a positive signal to new generation of content creators?

Feel free to consume the content. Feel free to share it. Feel free to tip it.

Just feel free…

Disclaimer: I earn between 4€ and 110€ per month with Flattr. I’m not affiliated with Flattr in any way but I’m really excited by the philosophical implications of Flattr. That’s why I’m writing so much about it. I would of course welcome any similar service, especially if it could be decentralized. This post was first written on Medium. Picture by Parisa.

But Bitcoin has some major issues, something which was covered by Rick Falkvinge on his blog.

The first problem that hits any Bitcoin user is usability. Using Bitcoin is complicated and cumbersome. You can’t send a simple payment with a comment to someone without asking him first to create a dedicated Bitcoin address. You have to care about making a secure backup of your wallet. This makes things nearly impossible to use for a huge percentage of the population.

The second problem is trust: how do you know that the Bitcoin address is valid and was not replaced through a man-in-the-middle attack? How do you know that you will well receive the goods or the service? Sure, many escrow services appeared but they make a Bitcoin transaction even more cumbersome.

The third problem is the power of the exchanges. The whole Bitcoin economy runs with only a handful of Bitcoin exchange services, MtGox being the bigger. This de-facto centralisation is a big weakness for Bitcoin. MtGox has the power to control the price. If MtGox has any problem, the whole value plummets.

Last but not least, people have to trust bitcoins. Except when Internet Archives offers its employees to receive a Bitcoin salary, most services accepting bitcoins are in fact converting them immediately to dollars/euros. It means that Bitcoin is seen as a transport, not a currency.

I even drafted a proposed solution as a Bitcoin-banking decentralized protocol. Recently a quite old project called Ripple surfaced and brought the idea to a whole new level: what if every one of us was a bank and we decide who we trust and at what level.

Remember when you go on a trip with a bunch of friends. Everybody pays for some stuff and, at the end, you try to equilibrate the balance. It was a nightmare until you discovered Tricount. Well, Ripple is basically a decentralised Tricount at the scale of the internet. We are 7 billions friends on the same trip. We pay for each other, we owe some people money and that’s it.

The beauty of it is that it solves all Bitcoin’s hurdles as long as there are enough people in the network. It is easy, decentralized. It will also make money exchanges completely obsoletes. It has the potential to create a true P2P economy.

Now, it is only a proof of concept. Firstly, if the client is opensource, the server is not (yet). And that’s a problem because there’s no competition to ripple.com at the moment. It means it is hugely centralised.

Also, you still have to exchange weird addresses like rKXFsg5EuG4BzLxdTBFXJq2a6iNfyx1hRX (this is my actual Ripple address). In order to become popular, Ripple should allow you to directly connect with your Facebook/G+/Twitter friends so you can trust them or send them money. After creating the Ripple wallet, the process is still very mysterious.

Ripple also raises a few questions. Is its own internal money (XRP) making Bitcoin obsolete? Or is Bitcoin going to stay? And what about the Dollar or the Euro? At least, an interesting experiment to follow.

Picture by Lee Haywood

Given how the human brain works, this is unfortunately not true.

Firstly, we don’t deal with individual items as we are with groups. Meet 3 persons? Those are Alice, Bob and Charles. Meet 15 persons? Those are a group. Or a lot of people. Same applies for your inbox: if there are hundreds of emails in your inbox, your brain doesn’t care about the read/unread status. It just consider it as “a lot of emails”.

The natural consequence is that you will have the tendency to not react to a new email. You have no reward for dealing with an email: 100 or 101 doesn’t change anything. Worst: dealing with an email looks useless and pointless. It will not change anything. While, if your inbox is empty, you will have a natural tendency to act as quickly as possible. Seeing your inbox empty is a relief, a reward in itself.

The second point is that the more time you are given to do a task, the harder the task will look. If I tell you that you have one hour to write an essay about a subject, you will rush and do it. If I give you six months, you will first procrastinate then do some research then realize that you have only one month left to do what is supposed to be a six months work. This will make you feel that the task is really hard. An email sitting in your inbox is doing exactly that: reminding you that you have a task that started the day you received an email. The longer the email stays in your inbox, the harder the task will unconsciously look, the more you will tend to procrastinate.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to be very efficient without an inbox 0. It is just a lot harder and requires more energy.

Now, maybe it’s time to ask the opposite question: why are you not at inbox 0? Why is that given email still in your inbox?

1. Because you need to reply to that email

In that case, don’t hesitate to go for the quick reply. A fast and quick reply is often better than a deep reply, one month later. If your reply really needs an in-depth investigation, it’s not a simple reply any more, it’s a task in itself and should be in your todo-list. Once replied, archive the mail immediately.

Try to answer as soon as you are reading the mail. But this does not mean you have to check your email every five minutes. Disable notifications and choose when to read your emails.

2. Because you need to do something about this email

Then take your todo-list and write that something. A todo should always start with a verb. It’s an action. The problem with an email is that, very often, you don’t know exactly what to do. You know you have something to do but you procrastinate because the next action is not clear.

Sit down, write the action you have to take regarding this email then archive the email.

A good todo-list will not bother you with every possible task every day but only give you what you can achieve, avoiding the constant exposition leading to procrastination.

3. Because the information in the email might be useful

If it is an information you need for another task, copy that information in your todo list, your agenda or where it belongs. Then archive the email.

If you don’t need the information immediately, archive the email. Your archive is not a trash, you can find the information you need at any time there.

4. Because you are not sure about what to do

Sometimes, you have to take decision. Such emails are often related to an invitation: I should reply but I still don’t know if I’m going. Action is simple: take your decision, put the event in your calendar.

If you are really unsure, put it in your calendar anyway and tell the sender that you have the event in your agenda but are not 100% sure to attend. Then archive the mail.

If the decision is really hard, just make it a task in your todo list: “make a decision about X”. Don’t let a related email clutter your inbox.

5. Because you are not sure if you should keep this email or not

Archive it. As I told you, forget the trash, archive everything.

6. Because you are not sure in which folder you should put this mail

Don’t do folders. Don’t. Archive. That’s exactly the main reason to avoid folders.

7. Because your inbox is your todo-list

While this is not impossible, it requires a lot more energy. It also makes your todo list completely weird: in most case, an email is not a task. It is related to a task, which is something completely different. Worst: an email called “weekly report” could contain multiple tasks and the title say nothing about them.

Maybe it’s time to hunt for a good todo-list. But, surely, your inbox is the worst possible solution.

Conclusion

When a mail stays for more than a few days in your inbox, you have to be conscious about the fact and not accept it with any excuse like “I’m already efficient enough”. You would never leave all your letters from the past years in your front-yard mailbox. Same applies for your inbox.

Having an inbox filled is not a fatality. You can, today, claims control over your inbox simply by realising why a mail sometimes rots in your inbox and by taking some proactive measures.

You would be surprised how email can still be very efficient and easy.

Picture by John Morgan

I’m a book publisher. Maybe I should say “I was”. Or “I’m still”. I’m not even sure what my job is. Nor do I know if I still have a job. I’m currently struggling with the “Publisher’s dilemma”. Should I be happy? Am I lucky or desperate? I have no idea…

In 2016, for the first time, there was more electronic magazines sold in the USA than prints. An evolution due to the offer of very cheap and waterproof ebook readers featuring coloured screens. Not to mention the advent of e-ink/amoled combined screens on phones and tablets.

Nevertheless, ebooks were still nearly as expensive as their paperback counterparts, encouraging users to illegally download when they could. Or to buy the paper version to get that superannuated feeling of “owning a thing”.

That was until ReadR appeared. During its first year, the startup was acclaimed and Wired called it “The Spotify for ebooks”. The model was simple: you could buy a subscription per month and read as many books as you want. Their slogan: “Read and Enjoy”.

You’ve probably used ReadR and you know the advantages: your virtual bookshelf is synchronized across all your devices. You can start reading a book on your big e-reader at home, continue it on your phone while in line at the supermarket then finish on your computer’s screen at work during your lunch break. Yes, you can even download a DRM free version of each ebook you’ve read.

The experience is seamless. Best of all : you can add your own ebooks to your ReadR account and share them with your ReadR friends or the whole ReadR community. You’ve just finished a book? Here’s a list of your friend’s recommendations, a list of books from the same authors, etc. ReadR abolishes the limitations of the physical world. Read and enjoy!

The upload feature combined with the recommendation system was immediately perceived as an open gate to massive piracy. Hopefully, the writing industry decided to not follow the steps of its musical counterpart and, instead, to embrace the progress.

After lengthy negotiations, most book publishers, including my company, agreed to publish their entire catalog on ReadR. Each book would receive some money each time it was read. But, instead of a fixed sum, the model was inspired by Flattr, a Swedish micro-donation company.

ReadR now offers four subscription models: the free one, where you can read free content including the complete Project Gutenberg catalog, the mini membership, at 2€/month, the regular, at 5€/month and the premium, at 10€/month. In fact, the 10€/month is a minimal price as you can choose to give as much as you want.

Each book you’ve opened during a given month is awarded a ReadR point for that month. If you recommended a book, to a single friend or to the community, that book receive a second point for that month.

At the end of the month, your monthly subscription is divided by the number of points you’ve awarded. If, in January, you’ve read three books and recommended the last one, that’s a total of four ReadR points. With a mini membership, each point is then valued at 50 cents and the last book receives 1€ (one reading point plus one recommendation point). Ninety percent of that sum goes directly to the author. Yes, authors all secretly hope that you start a book on the last day of the month and read it during five more weeks. They even publish separate chapters for that reason.

The book industry settled on that deal with one major condition: each author could choose to have his book only available for a given membership level. It was foreseen that people, on the average, don’t read more than two books a month. Thus, being read by people paying 5€ or 10€ a month was seen as a good deal. Short stories and small novels were made available for the mini members.

Everybody was happy with the deal and it looked like the books industry mastered the transition from the paper to the virtual. I remember partying all night after the formal agreement. The future was bright and our authors were happy. We laughed at those crooks from the musical industry.

But I didn’t realized that, for the last ten years, there was a growing cast of writers already used to the pure virtuality: bloggers, journalists, hobbyists authors. Most of them never published a dead tree paper book. For that reason, we never considered them as “true authors”. It was only a bunch of talentless amateurs. They nevertheless wrote and gained an audience. They immediately started to publish on ReadR, from short articles to full fledged novels. Journalists published their investigations. Through recommendations on social networks, all of them managed to get readers without having met a single book or a magazine publisher.

They were broadcasting their writing to readers without our help!

Who is a book author? Who is a journalist? Who is a blogger? Who is a teenager writing on the internet? Why would you even ask such a question? Read and enjoy!

Read and enjoy!

That’s when I really understood ReadR’s motto.

The whole concept of “book” is moving as we witness some experiments mixing movies, writing, still pictures, sounds. The soon to be published printed book I have next to my keyboard looks like an ancient manuscript. I feel obsolete myself, like an old yellowed page.

Two years after the launch of ReadR, the whole writing industry is entering into panic mode. Some best-sellers of the last decade didn’t managed to sell well on ReadR. There are many alternatives and everybody reads what he wants to read, thanks to recommendations of friends and acquaintances. We have to build a new marketing infrastructure from scratch in order to get people to read what we want them to read.

We envisioned the ReadR membership levels as a kind of guaranteed revenue. People would not read our books without paying. But what happened is that, instead of pirating, they decided to read something else.

This raised the question: publish for free on ReadR, to get recommendations and get as many readers as possible (including those with a highest membership) or only allow readers from the regular or premium membership?

The answer is simple: the free version is always better. The more visibility, the more chances you have to get premium readers. But if every author publish for free, why would anyone buy a membership? This is called the “Publisher’s dilemma” and is currently giving me a serious headache.

Maybe we should have followed the musical industry’s route: buying politicians, lobbying, suing and making as much money as possible for a few decades, even at the cost of perverting the morality. Or, like newspapers, begging at Google.

But there should be a way. There must be a way. I remember hearing a conversation today, in the street. The woman was saying “It’s funny…” to her girlfriend. Something like “It’s funny, I have a premium membership on ReadR and I only read books from the free catalog. But I don’t care. In fact, I’m happy to give a few bucks to the authors that share their writings.” Yes, it was something like that.

I have to think more about it. There must be a way. Read and enjoy! Read and enjoy!

Ce texte en français

This post is part of the Letters from the Future collection. Picture by Kevin Raybon.

When I told you why I was a pirate, I received a lot of reactions telling me that I was only trying to give a justification to something inherently bad. When I wrote an open letter to artists and suggested a new way of being paid, I also had those kind of reactions and I was told that I had to respect the artist’s choice. If the artist doesn’t want to be found on The Pirate Bay, it was inherently bad to download his content there.

Inherently bad? But to what extend?

Let say that I legally bought a CD from an artist which is against the evil pirates of the internet. You know what I mean.

Is it bad to rip the CD to my hard disk and make MP3 files? Probably not.

I regularly backup my data on an external USB disk. The MP3 are then also on that disk. Is it bad? I would say no.

Being tired of the music, I sell the CD in a second hand store. Or I give it for free to a friend. Is that bad? Some would say that I have to delete the MP3s from my computer. Being honest, I do it. I delete the files.

One week later, my hard drive crashes. Hopefully, I have a week old backup and I restore from there. At this point, the MP3s are restored too. But, being busy recovering important files, I completely forgot those MP3s.

Am I a pirate because I have illegal MP3s on my computer? Even if I forgot about it? Is that morally bad? If yes, then piracy is the mere possession of a given information on a computer. In that case, listening to a streaming website should be OK, isn’t it? I can also make all my friends become pirates just by sending them the files. As long as they don’t delete the email and empty the trash, they are pirates! So, I would guess that only having the file is not inherently bad.

What if I didn’t originally bought the CD but received it for free from a friend who was tired of it? And who had a backup too?

When I listen to music, it’s usually random. There’s then a good chance that I will listen to those MP3. Do I become a pirate when I listen to the music, even if I forgot that I sold the CD weeks ago? If yes, then I’m also a pirate when my neighbour listen to loud music.

Or do I become a pirate when I realise that I don’t have the CD and willingly choose to not delete the music? Then, being a pirate is only a thought, it’s something completely intangible in your head.

I don’t know what you think but, to me, living in a society where you can be punished for a thought is probably the worst nightmare I can dream of.

How do you rate a “Thought Police” on your morality scale?

Picture by Scott Ogilvie

In fall 2014, BlackMa.il made the buzz. The startup is nonetheless very discreet. A simple CrowIT logo on a letterbox, a hallway, a lift and I am in the lair. Here, zero multicolored balls lying on the ground, zero ostensious accessories: a handful of grey desks and a dozen employees starring at their screens without paying attention to my visit.

With a tainted irony, the principal’s office displays “John Doe.” It is true that the creator of this London-based company prefers to remain anonymous. Respecting this was a requirement to grant me an interview.

The man is tall and has a bald head. Jovial, he rises from his chair to greet me. He looks humble and immediately puts me at ease while I pull out my dictaphone. I feel like I’m meeting a friendly grandfather running a small grocery store.

Hello Mr Doe. Thank you for this meeting. I think you do not give many interviews.

To tell the truth, it is the first time a journalist is allowed to enter this office. But I guess that’s the price of success…

Success, let’s talk about it. Blackma.il is only six months old and already showing an income of tens of millions of dollars. All of that without any VC funding. How do you explain this?

Unlike the majority of so-called social web companies, I have not tried to make a trendy service or to attract millions of users. I just asked myself the question: what would people be willing to pay?

The answer became clear at a time when everyone sees his intimacy unveiled on Google or Facebook. Before, we were paying to spread information. Nowadays, this information is public by default. The corollary is obvious: people will then pay to keep some information confidential.

And how does BlackMa.il practically work?

Rather than go fishing ourselves, we prefer to leave it to our users and to share half of our profits with them. Our users find hidden information and we offer them 50% of our profit.

But who is paying?

Those who wish to keep an information secret. An example: I witness that you cheat on your husband. I took a picture with my phone during one of your tryst. I send this photo on BlackMa.il with the sum I’m requesting, say € 1,000, and the email address of your husband.

From this point, you have one month to answer. After a month without response from you, Blackma.il will send the original photo to your husband. We call it the  ”recipient” in our jargon. If you pay € 1000, the case is closed and the photo is not sent. You can also buy some hesitation time at 10% of the requested price per month. In our case, every € 100 buys you a month. After a year, we consider the matter as concluded. It means you only pay for 2 more months to spread the payment.

50% of the money goes directly to our informant and you will never know his identity. We even care to remove all hidden information from pictures and videos.

Is it legal?

It heavily depends on the country and is different for each particular case. For this reason, the company that manages BlackMa.il is offshored. This office only hosts CrowIT, the consulting firm that provides computer expertise to BlackMa.il.

I know it might be surprising but we didn’t have the slightest threat of litigation so far.

How do you explain this? People should probably be upset to have to pay you!

Firstly, people prefer to avoid scandal. BlackMa.il is a middle man. If you refuse to pay, BlackMa.il is only sending an automatic mail written by another user. It is very difficult to attack, it would be like attacking GMail when someone sends an insult email. Everything was put in place with the help of several legal experts and the offshoring means it is really complicated to legally fight us.

Secondly, we offer guarantees. We explain that we are not responsible for anything but that we do have commitments: we do not accept that the same person have to pay more than once for the same information. Once you have paid € 1,000 for your extramarital affair, you can refute any new request by giving us the transaction number of the first application.

While € 100 is the minimum payment, we encourage informants to make reasonable requests that are more likely to receive a positive response.

We try to be a partner, an intermediary who does not take sides.

What prevents the informant to bypass Blackma.il to request more money a second time?

If you could bypass us, why use Blackma.il firstly? The answer is that Blackma.il offers a zero risk of being identified and facilitates payment. In addition, we have acquired a solid reputation. We guarantee the deletion of any information related to the informant at the end of each case. This way, it becomes impossible to trace the identity of an informant, even for us.

A month ago, a cheaper competitor appeared in Russia. It turned out that after the end of each case, the informants were threatened to have their identity revealed if they did not pay an unexpected amount of money.

I know that Blackma.il is often put in a bad light but we are ethical. This is what differentiates us.

How do you justify the morality of such a business?

Our lives are becoming more transparent. We hide certain aspects of our personality only because of stupid moral conventions. Why couldn’t a woman like you have many lovers? Contraception has obsoleted the need for monogamy.

Somehow, BlackMa.il tries to encourage people to publicly stand. We have many  cases in which the informant claimed to publicize the homosexuality of the subject. More than half stay unheeded. The financial threat pushes these people to make their coming out, to accept themselves. I think this is a very good thing.

In some countries, adultery and homosexuality is still a crime. Don’t you take exceptional measures?

Forcing people to hide their homosexuality is homophobia. This is what must be denounced. By deferring the guilt on the messenger, we justify homophobia and rejection. Everyone should be free to say that someone is gay just like you could say he has blonde hair.

I guess that homosexuality doesn’t cover all of your cases.

Over 80% of our business is sex related: infidelity, addiction to pornography, homosexuality, illegitimate children, going to prostitutes. Sex remains a huge taboo.

On Google Images, you can find images of dead people, images of violence, racism, weapons, nameless horrors. But naked body images are filtered by default. Death, yes. Violence, rejection, yes. Sex, no!

Indirectly, BlackMa.il forces people to accept their sexuality. Visiting a pornographic website does not make you a monster but that is the image we have. Even when we realize that 75% of adults consume pornography.

What about non-sexual cases?

If sex is our main supplier, the second recurring theme is money. Particularly within enterprises. An employee who is witnessing his boss diverting part of the budget. Or a person who realises that someone was scammed by somebody else and asks for a share in the scam.

Those cases are much less numerous but they are much more lucrative. The average amount is multiplied by a thousand.

Can you give an example?

I do not want to say too much. But if you witness someone diverting money, asking for 10% is the most profitable. The recipient is often reluctant to pay more. However, it is not uncommon to witness the diversion of millions or tens of millions.

BlackMa.il here plays a moral role similar to WikiLeaks: it discourages dishonest actions more effectively than any lawsuit threat and preserves the anonymity of the informant.

And BlackMa.il takes 50%?

The fact that we have a strong interest ensures that we wish above all the success of the business. We educate our informants about it. That’s also why we allow the spreading of payment. One non-paid case is a loss for BlackMa.il. It is not in our interest.

I prefer to say that it is a partnership with the informant, especially when one considers that we pay for the infrastructure.

Are you ever bargaining? Handling special cases?

This is one of the great strengths of BlackMa.il: the subject can not contact us other than with a form. He may only answer that he does not pay, that he will pay (monthly or fixed) or request an assimiliation with another previously paid case. There’s no discussion. Moreover, the process is fully automated. The subject knows it and has one month to take a decision.

Do you ever experience remorse?

The vast majority of cases we handle are, in fact, already public. For example, the discussion between the unfaithful husband and his lover can be found on Google in the archives of a forum. This man who is threatened with a revelation of his attendance at a striptease show is already a fan of that show on Facebook. However, he still pays to keep that public information out of his wife’s mailbox.

We are entering in a new transparent society. We can either be hypocrites and hide our differences. Or accept ourselves as we are and accept others without judging.

What about the fundamental right to privacy?

But we respect it! We do not make anything public. The information is only sent to a few selected recipients. Privacy is, for us, as going to the toilet: everyone does it and yet we do not like to do so in public. However, if I send to your husband a picture of yourself taking a piss, he will not be offended. It would be pointless. Unless you always said  to him that you never go to the toilet. In any case, it is not BlackMa.il’s problem and nothing would have been made public.

A word in conclusion?

BlackMa.il is strongly criticized. Publicly, everyone hates it. Yet we have hundreds of thousands of users. Including some of our most ardent critics.

BlackMa.il is to global morality the same shock that WikiLeaks was on world politics. Mankind will be forced to accept differences and stop judging others. BlackMa.il will actually have a positive and peacemaker effect.

Thank you for this interview Mr Doe.

The pleasure was all mine.

While he takes me back to the elevator, an idea suddenly comes.

What would happen if I threatened to publish your real name. How much would you be willing to pay?

This case has already been processed. You need to find something else. But I’m glad to see you as a potential partner. You understand all the potential of BlackMa.il.

With a delicate arm movement, he helps me to get into the elevator. Steel doors close on his smile as he gives me a friendly waving hand. Mechanically, I smile back, like at an old friend.

Photo by Marynka Egremy

Disponible en français

The logic behind this behaviour is not trivial but the point is that Microsoft was sending mail in a non-standard format. They were guilty of breaking the mail standard and the only sane solution was, obviously, for them to fix MS Outlook.

But it didn’t happened. And people not using MS Outlook received winmail.dat files while Outlook users could exchange information without problems.

Even if it was nothing but a faulty implementation in MS Outlook, some webmails started to transparently convert winmail.dat to a normal mail format: Hotmail, Yahoo and even GMail. It’s not a standard, it’s the sender fault but the receiver is the one who ends complaining. As such, it was fixed on the receiver side. A really bad and disgusting hack.

The result is that a lot of people are now able to receive badly sent MS Outlook emails. If one of your contacts sends such an email to a bunch of friends, only a tiny minority will actually complain.

And because they are a minority, it will be considered that the fault is theirs. “Oh but you are using that strange mail provider/your own server. You are the geek, you do strange things, fix the issue on your side”.

Worst: if you run a business and offer mail services to paying customers, they will complain and get angry at you. They can’t read an email from a potential customer! They are loosing business opportunities because of you! And no, it’s not Microsoft fault : according to the sender, they are the first to complain. And even if it’s Microsoft fault, they don’t care, they just want to read their emails. Which is a perfectly understandable answer.

I call this anecdote the “Winmail.dat Syndrome“. In the Free Software community, we are eager to support standardisation. To blame people who don’t follow a written standard.

But, sometimes, we are blind to the real de facto standard. A standard that might be a piece of shit, a pure accident. A standard that was chosen by nobody. We try to educate people to the fact that their standard is not good, not a “real” one. But, in reality, nobody cares. They just want to use anything that works, even if suboptimal under the hood.

By being picky about using a true written-by-experts standard, we are sometimes only excluding ourselves from the party. We are doing exactly what we are blaming: not acting as everybody else and doing our own protocol that nobody can understand. The fact that our protocol is open and could be implemented by anyone doesn’t matter for the end users. Nobody understands it and we are the troublemakers.

Does it means that we should accept everything and forget about standardisation? Of course not! But shouldn’t we sometimes admit that we’ve lost a battle and that staying “pure” actually harm our end users instead of helping them?

I tend to think that when a project is hurting its users instead of helping them, even with good intentions, something is very wrong about that project.