IT is not magic pixie dust

“Well, this theory that I have — that is to say, which is mine — …is mine.”

Books, Comics, IT is not magic pixie dust, Life under Capitalism
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I absolutely, totally, fail to see the point of the e-reader, except as a way of making yet more money from the consumer by introducing more hardware and more formats (not to mention more intrusive control by the publisher over what is ostensibly the consumer’s property).

Seems to me, sitting here looking at my little netbook, that if I could unclip the LCD screen a la Snap on Tools, and if it were fitted with scroll buttons and a wifi transmitter, well, then I’d have a perfectly good built in e-reader.

After all an e-reader is a tablet pc in all but name, isn’t it? So why has no major manufacturer done it yet? Oh duh, I answered my own question already. Money.

Still, I think it’s a good idea and if indeed no-one’s yet come up with the same idea , it’s MINE.

Your Happening World (15)

Bloody Lawyers, Capitalism, Forward March of Decentism, IT is not magic pixie dust, Life under Capitalism, Linky Linky
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Easter weekend happenings:

  • The Dutch government has released (almost) its entire internet presence under a Creative Commons Zero licence, putting it in the public domain. As Dutch internet law expert Arnoud Engelfriet explains (in Dutch, natch), they didn’t need to do this as by law any government work is in the public domain, but this makes it explicit.
  • A few days ago Nick Cohen was busy upbraidign an obscure student for publishing a thesis critical of the work of Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. This after he helped smear Amnesty International not a mere two months ago. Now he’s after Joanna Lumley for erm helping the Ghurka veterans getting their pensions. There’s no pleasing the guy.
  • Christian wannabe-terrorists are weird.
  • Jamie points out that being shocked at Catholic Church officials comparing the uproar about pedo priests to anti-semitism is just what they want. The discussion now revolves around what the Church says instead of what it does…
  • Lenny on the role the courts play in the class war.

The secret copyright negotiatons – revealed!

IT is not magic pixie dust, Life under Capitalism
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One of the great but largely ignored battlefields of 21st century politics is intellectual property. The relentless march of technology ™ means copying data today, in whatever form it takes, is as hard as it’s ever going to be, to put it in Cory Doctorow’s words. Cheap harddrive storage, fast internet and easy to use filesharing technology has made it much easier to find, get and store any kind of media you’d like, from this weeks comics to bootleg recordings of 1970 pop festivals to the latest Hollywood blockbuster to whatever weird hybrid some kids have thought up in their bedroom yesterday. Any company or person whose business depends on controlling the right to copy is therefore fucked. The monopoly on copyright has been irrevocably broken, at least technically.

How do you deal with that, as an industry built on the assumption that copying is hard and is therefore worthwhile to control? Letting go of this control is hard, when you’ve spent your entire life fighting to get it and keep it. It’s no wonder then that Hollywood, the music industry and the various other industries built on this assumption have instead chosen to make copying harder legally, the more it became easier to do technically. Before we had tape cassettes it was so difficult to copy your favourite record it was pointless even trying, so no legislation was needed to stop home copying. Once Philips made copying music as easy as putting on an album on your home entertainment system and then press “record”, suddenly we get increasingly Draconian legislation making it illegal. This process has obviously only accelerated in the internet age, which brings us to our current situation.

Technology not only makes copying easier, but also surveillance — if it’s easier to download, it is also easier to see what we’re downloading… What the big content monopolists now want to do is to use technology to retake control, by getting governments around the world to spy on us to make sure we’re not getting things we haven’t paid for and then punishing us if we have. The way they do that is through ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Intended to stop both commercial and home copying, it’s being negotiated in secret by the content industries with our governments, but without any legislative oversight or input from us. It’s purely intended to serve the interests of Hollywood and co, by making it very very easy to get copyright “infringers” taken down, but hard to appeal and in which no balance has been struck between the legitamite desire of content producers to make money of their work and the public interest in having information freely/easily available. As you know Bob, originally copyright was set up as a state given monopoly to encourage authors and publishers to, well, publish, while recognising that this monopoly should be finite in order to enable dissemination of information. This last consideration has almost entirely disappear from modern copyright, thanks to monopolist lobbying and ACTA is the ultimate expression of it.

Because the negotiations about it have been held in secret, it has been difficult to know what ACTA will entail. There have been rumours and a few leaks, but nothing concrete, until recently. The entire text of the current draft proposal has been leaked and even better, has been wikified.. With this leak it finally became clear just how dangerous ACTA is for us, as Margot Kaminski explains: for example, if ACTA is passed in its current form, it will making copying.downloading not just a civil, but a criminal offence….

Unionising call centre workers

IT is not magic pixie dust
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Lenny talks about call centres and the struggle to unionise them:

I spent about six years working in call centres, and I just say a bit about what it is like, for those of you who have avoided it. All of the call centres I worked in employed people on a casual, part-time and temporary basis. All of them had their share of bullying, vindictive and harrassing supervisors. Supervisors were empowered to sack one at a moment’s notice, and didn’t require a particularly good excuse. Actually, they could just stop booking you for shifts if they didn’t like you for some reason. Pay was always low, about as close to minimum wage as they could get away with. Lunch or dinner breaks were usually unpaid. Toilet breaks are timed, and more than five minutes away from one’s computer might be penalised. And it’s miserable. Most call centres are situated in relatively inexpensive office space out in the sticks – bleak looking industrial wastelands with few amenities nearby.

[…]

It isn’t easy to unionise call centres. To get recognition, you need a vote of all employees. But there’s a high turnover of staff, and a large number of people who remain formally on the books long after they have ceased to work shifts. On top of that, staff are disproportionately young, and are perhaps not as assertive as they need to be. And most people have other things they’re moving on to – they don’t see it as a permanent job, and thus may be reluctant to get involved in lengthy battles with management, especially if it’s so easy to fire them.

It struck me recently that, unlike what we were promised with the micro computer (remember them?) and internet revolutions, the IT business has managed to replicate almost exactly the old industrial divide of proletariat and labour aristocracy. You have an elite of programmers and consultants and other IT specialists who, the occasional outsourcing worry notwithstanding, have pretty good jobs, who are encouraged to believe this is all due to their own innate talents and who have little need for unions because those innate talents are supposed to be good enough to keep them employed. This IT aristocracy is fairly well paid and compensated in other ways, have a lot of freedom in their work and often treated as if they are the entire IT workforce, gratuitously sucked up to by politicians and “business leaders” as the “creative classes”.

At the other end of the scale you have the people Lenny describes above, whose work is just as demanding but who have much less freedom, are paid less and have to do all the scutwork: sys admins, helldeskers, call centre employees and so on. They work as temps, as casual labour, have little job security or recognition.

Of course, over time many of the workers in the aristocracy will find themselves to be actually in the other category as their jobs get otusourced or deskilled. For both groups, unionisation is the only real way to fight against this tendency, but both are notoriously hard to convince of it, if only because they’ve been indoctrinated with the idea that unions are for losers.