Digital Vertigo

I just finished reading Digital Vertigo, the latest book by Andrew Keen. If I recall, it has been nearly five years since his last book, The Cult of the Amateur.

His target in his first book was Web 2.0 which was the user generated content of blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube, and the like. For this new book, he targets the Web 3.0 universe of social media. He lists more social media sites and apps and things than I have ever heard of.

MySpace, Facebook, Google+, SocialEyes, Twitter, Klout, Kred, LiveJournal, Blippy, BeKnown, BeWithMe, Flavor.Me, Nextdoor.com, and a whole host of other widely and lesser known social media things that offer a social solution for everything.

Keen focuses the narrative around the 19th century philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, who he happened to “meet” in London’s University College over 170 years after Bentham’s death. How? Bentham bequeathed his body to the college and that it always be on display in a wooden and glass case he called an “Auto-Icon” which he translated as “A man that is his own image.”

While ruminating on this dead man, Keen began thinking that everyone is now their own Auto-Icon as they keep up their public image on Facebook, Twitter, and every other Web 3.0 site and app and whatever else there is.

The Internet has become, what Bentham called, an Inspection House, a panopticon. Essentially a prison constructed in such a way that an observer is able to see all of the inmates, yet none of the inmates know they are being watched.

Keen applied this idea of being always watched, but not knowing it to Web 3.0, except, that’s not the case at all. Everyone on Facebook, etc know that they’re being watched, that the all important Like button is the thing they crave attention from. The funnier, goofier, most Kony2012-like thing they can come up with will generate more likes, more shares, and a higher Klout score, as well as more people who want to read what you say.

In this way, Facebook, Twitter, and company have become everyone’s personal echo chamber, one person says something or posts a picture, and then it gets shot halfway around the world in several seconds as people keep liking and sharing and commenting on it.

Many of these websites are supported with advertising dollars. Facebook displays ads, other sites do too. One thing I have always wondered about this is there’s a finite number of dollars in the world. Every time someone creates a new site or thing that needs advertising to support it, that’s less money used to advertise on something else. Eventually there’s going to be a stopping point where there is no one left who can spare the money to advertise on every new venture.

Actually, that might be happening now. GM recently announced that it will be stopping its online advertising in Facebook, as they have found it does not motivate people to go buy a new Chevrolet or Cadillac.

One thing I am interested in seeing is what will happen when people from today’s connected age start running for public office, or even the presidency? Their every Tweet, forum post, Facebook update, possibly even every meal they ate will be available for public scrutiny online on some corner of the Internet.

If you really want to protect your privacy online, then the best thing to do is to not post anything online at all.

The Internet does not forgive and it does not forget.

In all, I really enjoyed this book and had been looking forward to it for quite a while. We all live in public now. All of us. Several times each year, the news reminds us of that fact as members of the nameless, faceless masses make a post or a video or do something online that for better or worse gains them a little bit of notoriety. The world is watching.

http://us.macmillan.com/digitalvertigo/AndrewKeen

You can’t save them all, but that doesn’t mean you don’t try

You get attached to students. It happens.

You want to see them succeed and not go (back) to jail.

I subbed at Tiger today. It was great. I saw a few students I knew, and a lot of students I didn’t know. Another few months and “my” students will all be gone.

The topic of discussion among the teachers and other faculty was the news that a former student who got out a month ago was arrested earlier this week for possessing a firearm… among other things. I want to read a news report or SOMETHING as some of the information I was given about it are flipping crazy. At least he isn’t dead, but if I recall, the sentence for using a gun on someone is life in prison, but the person he was shooting used one on him first (and hit him), but who knows.

I had high hopes I’d never hear of him getting arrested or see him on the news in a negative light. I told him last year that I had bought an automotive class book for him to do work out of since he wouldn’t do the normal English work. He thought it was a good idea and was receptive to it (he had previously told me he was interested in working in the automotive repair industry). Then, as an aside, he asked, “How much did you spend on it?” I didn’t lie to him, I said, “It was $14.” I’ll never forget the look on his face as he said, “You spent $14 for me?” He couldn’t believe that someone would do that for him.

I loved it when he actually worked on the stuff I assigned out of that book. He never got a problem wrong, even came to me for assistance a few times showing me the question in the book, then showing me where he found the answer in the book wanting to help me reconcile his idea of what the right answer should be among the two he was thinking of. It was great.

Even when I left that assignment, the new teacher assured me she would continue using that book for that student, and she did. I talk to her sometimes about my students. But now, there’s only a few left. Oh, there’s a full class of 24 students, there’s always 24, but of those, only a few are ones that know of my time there.

It makes me sad, but what can you do? Promise yourself you’ll work that much harder on the next one? And the one after?

I’m not sure.

This post is cross posted to http://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/2012/04/you-cant-save-them-all-but-that-doesnt.html?spref=fb

Copyright of the Future…

In the future, maybe even less than fifty years from now, copyright will no longer exist. That’s not to say everyone will be allowed to copy things willy-nilly, they won’t. No one will be allowed to copy anything. Period.

With the Earth’s population approaching 10 billion people in the year 2060, drastic measures will be undertaken to curb this rampant population growth.

The death penalty factors in a big way.

If anyone is caught copying someone else’s work, either on purpose or on accident, they will be executed. It doesn’t matter how old the person is or the reason for the infraction.

This will seriously hamper any creative people from wanting to create a new book, film, painting, song, or anything else. That means no more parodies, pastiches, or satire either. No new anything will be created.

The only thing that is allowed to be made is covers of old songs, provided they do not veer away from the original song and pay any royalties to the original writers of the song. But, even then, you’re not safe. If it’s revealed that a series of notes from one song are deemed to be too close to those of another song, then the execution hammer is wielded against those who sought to hide the infraction.

The world will become a creative wasteland.

This work is published under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

This work takes part in the Future of Copyright Contest http://indiegogo.com/Future-of-Copyright

Immortality Doesn’t Mean Never Dying: The Jeff Weise Story

First a bit of background. I wrote this for my Insanity & Crime class at the University of North Florida. The date on the paper is April 1. I was to write a paper on someone who committed a crime. I was originally going to do mine on Charles Manson (no, hadn’t discovered the Unabomber at this time). The day after I was to start writing, Jeff Weise did his thing, and I asked my professor if I could do my paper on him instead. She agreed.

I would like to revisit this paper and expand on it, maybe turn it into a larger work. Looking back on it today, it looks amateurish, I know I could easily do a tighter, larger, and more in-depth essay on him and school shooters in general. Of course, over the past seven years more information has undoubtedly come to the fore. I had been interested in school shooters for years and was always saddened that none had ever been taken into custody alive. Today one in Ohio was apprehended alive, so maybe this will help shed light on these kinds of things. Here I present the paper as it appeared in 2005 (with a few small pieces of editing to make it read better, I would love to do a complete rewrite of this thing), oh, and if you read this and are aware that certain things do not jive with what really happened (example: I say he was shot in the leg when most reports now say he was shot in the arm), this was because the data I had at the time said whatever it was that I say that is now known as being wrong.

Okay, onward:

Bradley Hall
CCJ 4606
Insanity & Crime
4-1-05

Immortality Doesn’t Mean Never Dying: The Jeff Weise Story

Well now I’m back in the middle of the day that starts it all.
Well I can’t begin to let you know just what I’m feeling.
And now these red ones make me fly,
And the blue ones help me fall.
And I think I’ll blow my brain against the ceiling.
~ Headfirst for Halos, My Chemical Romance

INTRODUCTION

March 21st 2005 was a day like any other. For many people, it was. It was a beautiful Spring day. Flowers were in bloom, Spring Break was a looming thought, and the end of the current semester was on everyone’s mind. But, while most people were having the time of their lives, a group of ten people were having the last moments of theirs as they were gunned down by Jeff Weise in Red Lake, Minnesota.

Weise is the latest person to be a “school shooter,” as in, he went to school one day armed with guns and the intent to kill as many innocents as possible before turning the gun on himself.

BACKGROUND

Weise’s background is very interesting. According to the Wikipedia entry, his father committed suicide in 1997 after a feud with police. Oddly enough, Jeff’s grandfather, Daryl Lussier, was a police officer himself. A couple years later, Jeff’s mother was injured in a car accident that left her brain damaged. It was this final event that made him live with his grandfather (1). It must have felt weird living with a person who not only was a blood relative, but also was a member of the same group that pushed his father to suicide.

What makes Weise so interesting, is that never before have the writings of a killer been placed where anyone could see them. Jeff Weise posted online on several websites, including Nazist sites, Zombie forums, Newgrounds, and LiveJournal. The last two are visited by almost everyone who has an Internet account.

On www.newgrounds.com, he posted under the screen name of “Regret.” Newgrounds is a site devoted to Flash animation. Weise created two short films in the Flash format and posted them to this site. In one, called “Target Practice,” a lone figure walks up, takes a drag of a cigarette-like thing, pulls an AK-47 from a bag and proceeds to shoot everyone in sight, blows up a cop car, then shoots himself in the head (1).

Looking back in retrospect, it could be thought “he was trying to tell us something,” but, if everyone who writes has murderous tendencies lurking inside them I wonder what Koushun Takami (author of Battle Royale, see endnotes) and Stephen King have been trying to tell us in their stories.

In his posts, he says that once he decides something, he sticks it through to the end, and he’s a budding writer. He posted a three-part story called “Rise of the Dead” on a zombie fan website that features what is first thought to be a school shooting from the perspective of a potential victim, but turns out to be a zombie on the loose in the school. At which time, the military steps in and cleans up. Aside from a few grammatical problems, it was a very good read.

On the various forums, he used a variety of aliases, including blades11, Todesengel, NativeNazi, Regret and others.

BEHAVIOUR: BEFORE AND DURING THE CRIME

BEFORE

Aside from the circumstances surrounding the death of his father and debilitating injury of his mother, Weise was largely ridiculed and made fun of by other kids (4). He was also on antidepressants. His dosage had been increased to 60MG of Prozac the week before the shootings (4). Most antidepressants have warning labels signifying that people should monitor those who actively use them since suicidal thoughts can manifest.

In Internet posts, Weise stated that before her accident, his mother would beat and berate him saying things such as “You were a mistake.” (4). He was a loner who often got into fights at school (1). Various students said that he always carried a notebook that he’d draw “evil” pictures in (1). In his LiveJournal, he describes himself as “your ordinary Native American stoner (1).”

DURING

On that morning, he killed his grandfather, Daryl Lussier, and his girlfriend. Then, sometime after noon he donned his fallen grandfather’s bulletproof vest and his guns (some accounts say he took one pistol and one shotgun, though this is in conflict at this time), stole [his grandfather's] patrol vehicle, and rammed right into the front door [of his school]. He leapt out and killed security guard Derrick Brun (2).

The next part is interesting, he killed a few random students with the shotgun until he came face to face with teacher Neva Rogers. He lifted the shotgun and pulled the trigger, but it wouldn’t fire. After throwing it down, he shot her with the pistol (2). Leaving the classroom, he encountered a tribal police officer that shot Weise once in the hip and another time in the leg (3). Weise limped back to Rogers’ room where he lifted the formerly discarded shotgun and fired one last shot into his own head.

I do not know whether Weise would be categorized as an “organized” or “disorganized” killer. He showed symptoms of both kinds. He obviously planned his crime and brought his own weapons, which fit with the organized personality, but, he left the bodies where they fell and didn’t seem to care about leaving evidence such as his dead body behind. Also, I’m sure he doesn’t care to follow the investigation either. So, my guess is he fits half of each.

CONCLUSION

From what I’ve read, Weise was an emotionally disturbed young man. Surely he displayed quite a few “warning signs” that something was amiss inside his head. Many of these can still be seen today in his LJ posts, Flash animations, etc. People across the country are accessing these sites, reading what he had to say in his short life, and making notes. While researching some of the things he liked, I couldn’t help but think that if I were to have run across him online one day, that we could have been friends.

Yet no one tried to help him. Not his therapist, not his grandfather, no one. He was alone inside his torment. In this state, he found Adolf Hitler and his dream. Young Weise loved what Hitler stood, fought, and died for. Though I’m sure Hitler would have eventually ordered the slaughter of countless Native Americans in his conquest to rule the world. In this matter, Weise was oblivious.

Every time an event like this happens, people put on a show of pity and remorse for what happened, saying that the person who precipitated the attack “slipped through the cracks” somehow. And every time, it receives less and less attention. It’s almost like the country as a whole has become desensitized to this problem. Several years ago, the Columbine Massacre filled our TV screens, newspapers, and elected officials mouths for weeks, if not months. Now, with Red Lake, all we got was four or five days’ worth of newspaper articles and maybe three minutes on TV.

Is that what this country has come to? If the people in Weise’s life took a little more interest in what he was doing, he may have turned out all right. Surely his grandfather, the guy who BOUGHT Jeff’s prescriptions knew what they were for, so why didn’t he try just a little bit to see what his problem was? The world may never know.

ENDNOTE

Battle Royale: Battle Royale is a book written by Japanese writer Koushun Takami. The story centers on an alternate universe in the Republic of Greater East Asia. Every few months, a random ninth grade class is chosen to compete in the “Battle Royale.” In the Battle Royale, the students are taken to a remote island and each is given a bag containing a compass, food, water, a map, and a random weapon. The weapons range from a fork to a semi-automatic machinegun. The students are given three days to kill each other until only one remains and is announced as the winner. If after three days more than one student is still alive, they all die.

When it was released in Japan in 1999 (and in 2001 when it was released here), many anti-violence groups immediately protested against it. Their main claim was that the violence depicted in the book could plant ideas into the impressionable minds of young people around the world. Needless to say, I bought the book (and imported the movies based on it) and enjoyed every minute spent reading it.

Bibliography

1.Www.wikipedia.com entry on Jeff Weise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Weise

2.USA Today article, “Tribal leader says son didn’t help shooter” by Richard Willing. March 30, 2005

3. USA Today article, “School gunman was shot twice” by Kevin Johnson. March 30, 2005

4. Minnesota Star Tribune article, “Did meds play a role?” by Chuck Haga. March 25, 2005

Additional Source

A. Takami, Koushun. Battle Royale. Translated by Yuji Oniki. Published by Viz, LLC

Reamde

I loved Neal Stephenson’s book Snow Crash, but I hated Cryptonomicon. So, to me, Stephenson was 1-1 when I started Reamde.

I should now say that Stephenson now stands at 2-1. I loved this book.

William Gibson started a trend with his book Pattern Recognition in which a book can be technically savvy, almost cyberpunk, yet still inhabit a world not far removed from the one we live in.

Reamde gives up Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong for the real thing as a group of Russian mobsters fall to the mercy of an unknown Chinese hacker who propagated a virus, dubbed reamde, a misspelling of “readme” a common file name that is often included in every computer program in some way, shape, or form, that serves to explain the features of the program.

Once you try to read this one, you’re screwed. Your computer encrypts itself and you’re instructed to use a non-infected computer to go to a massively multi-player online game and drop a certain amount of in-game currency to a person and get the code to fix your computer.

It just so happens that one player happens to be a bit of a crook and sells information to the Russian mob and manages to lose all the information as he has fallen victim to the virus and can’t get to the data.

This book is a world spanning tour de force. It clocks in at over a thousand pages, though to read it you wouldn’t know. It rocks plain and simple.

Anatomy of a Book Release

On Tuesday, January 24th, 2012, the United States Pirate Party released their first book, No Safe Harbor. As I was the editor of the book, this is not a review, I cannot objectively critique this book, nor do I wish to try.

We released the book as an ebook in several formats, including .mobi, .epub, .PDF, and others. There was also a printed book available for those who wanted them. The book costs $9.99.

The original price of the book was set at $13.99, the price gave the USPP $2 per book. Clearly we didn’t want to overprice the book, but we did still want some kind of residual from it.

The change came about a few days before release when Createspace, the company doing the Print-on-Demand services for the book, altered their royalty and pay structure. Amazingly it was in our favor. I decided to lower the price to $9.99. At this price, no one could say we were price gouging, and it still gave us the $2 royalty rate we wanted.

Whether anyone but I wanted that, is beyond me. While Andrew Norton and a few others worked on the book, I was the “main” editor. I contacted the authors, set terms, wrote contracts, and figured out what order to put the essays in.

While it was tedious at times, I’d still do it again, and plan to, actually.

The book, both ebook and printed book, were released under a Creative Commons license, BY-NC-SA.

Sometime on Jan 24th, the website went down. Andrew, myself, another guy named Andrew, Chris, and some others rallied to fix what was wrong. We created a page on Blogger and redirected our link, www.nosafeharbor.com, to it.

While we waited for traffic to pick back up, we scoured the Net and saw what happened. The site was Slashdotted. A deluge occurred.

The files for the book were hosted on the PPI site, no problem there. All we needed was a page for people to get to, hence, the Blogger page.

While watching the site stats, we saw it take off. First a hundred, then two, then, not even two hours after the site was back up, we had over 2000 hits to the page.

At the end of the day, it would go up to 13,000 hits.

At the same time, we had a Torrent set up. I have personally seeded nearly 3GB of a 50MB file (of course if someone is using uTorrent or a cooler system, they could download only the files they wanted and not worry about the 40MB RTF file.

We haven’t sold many copies of the physical book, we didn’t expect to. It was actually my idea to have a physical book, as I am struck by what Whitman called, “The mania of owning things.”

Somehow people seem to care more if your book/film/album is in a physical format, that it doesn’t “matter” if it’s not in something made of matter.

Within the day of the book’s release, I found somewhere I now forget where, someone translating the book into Spanish. I did however remember the link to the people translating it into Russian.

http://notabenoid.com/book/25510

I couldn’t believe it, Russians want to translate this book into Russian!? More power to them.

I love this, I really do. I keep Googling and seeing what I come up with.

Pictures

Hi guys.