It’s not often that I disagree with Tim Lee, so let me relish this.  I think Netflix is being smart!  Or at least not-that-unwise. Tim casts his argument in terms of movie availability, and from that perspective he’s probably right: the DVD-only Qwikster (or however you spell it) might have a bit less leverage in amassing movie libraries than the currently-unified Netflix (then again, it might not; as far as I know Netflix has only committed to splitting its brand and customer base; the two entities might still sit together at the bargaining table).

But I think this fails to recognize the ambition of Netflix’s plans. They’re not competing with Blockbuster, or Redbox, or jeez, who is even in the movie rental business anymore?  They’re now competing with DirecTV and Comcast, first by agreeing to sell consumers video content by the ounce instead of the unwieldy, one-size-fits-all sacks of the stuff that the cable companies insist upon.  Second, I imagine they’ll begin riding the inevitable logic of a la carte pricing to its conclusion, making more deals with both marquee and low-cost cable channels, allowing customers to add that pre-time-shifted content to their lineups for a couple of bucks a month.  Netflix is also pursuing original programming, establishing itself not only as a cheaper, higher-tech and more convenient disintermediating marketplace for television, but as an exclusive provider of certain high-esteem shows (imagine if they do manage to land an exclusive on one Mad Men-style success…).

To Netflix customers who mostly think of the service as a way to get movies, I can understand why today’s move seems dumb.  But as someone who mostly thinks of the service as a way to watch television shows, it makes perfect sense.  And of course I’m delighted to see a business/tech innovation achieve what the cable/satellite market and federal regulation could not: a la carte programming and the consignment of cable network operators to a bulk-bandwidth-vending fate (I’ve been saying for a while that the natural monopoly implied by the physical realities of cable systems means that they ought to wind up as utilities, every bit as boring and regulated as the water company; I think the net neutrality fight is best understood as the death throes of an industry that, understandably, doesn’t want to be in a commodity business).

I think that this shift means that your Netflix bill will inevitably get more complicated as new option plans are made available.  That by itself is a pretty good reason for isolating the DVD-by-mail side of things; those customers want different things, and the situation was already getting confusing.  And I think the move really will free the company to concentrate more on the streaming product (I expect that they’ll soon be pushing for more uniformity in the interfaces to the service that various integrated media solutions provide, for instance). The poisonous rage of the network operators that carry those streaming products’ bits remains a real threat, but if Comcast & co. can be successfully coaxed into a gentle senescence, I think the future of a net-only Netflix is bright.

INCIDENTALLY: I think all of this can be understood as a huge indictment of Apple.  Not that iTunes hasn’t been a big success, but they’re retreating from the rental/streaming market.  They never quite managed to move past thinking of the service as a content-supplier/”we have legal content!” validator for Apple hardware products, nor to meaningfully relax their quality standards (well, except for the iTunes software, of course) in order to compete for the market segment Netflix pursued. It’s ludicrous that new receivers don’t come with big “iTunes-ready!” stickers on it; that stereo equipment manufacturers have to play catch-up, begging Apple to let them provide iPod support. It’s flat-out insane that Airplay is a closed standard, its proprietary nature used to help prop up a consumer router business.  A fucking consumer router business!  If ever there was a market you wouldn’t want to be in… At any rate, it’s a reminder that even Apple misses occasional opportunities.  And note that I say all this as a mostly-satisfied Apple TV owner.  They settled for a lucrative niche when entertainment industry world domination was within their grasp.

This post is making the rounds. I’m not sure how good it is — it’s less of an argument than a heartfelt and anguished cry from someone horrified by the commodification of something they love.  I’m sympathetic.  And the author is right, certainly, that many firms will half-heartedly pursue gamification projects, produce lackluster results, and fail, giving the trend a bad name.

But I’m not sure that “gamification is bullshit”, as Bogost maintains.  After spending an hour with someone who works for Zynga, I’m convinced it’s not that at all.  Here’s what it is: price discrimination plus a radical version of behaviorial economics.  It’s the further weaponization of marketing’s insights into consumer behavior. It isn’t just something dreamed up by morons from the marketing department–it’s actually much more frightening than that.

I mostly really like The Awl these days — contra Quinn, I think the site started strong, had a rough patch, and now is back to publishing a lot of great stuff. But this is not a very good article. It’s credulous about things that call for skepticism, and skeptical about things that are perfectly reasonable.

A lot of people seem to believe that it doesn’t cost anything to make documents available online, but that is absolutely not so. Yes, you can digitize an academic journal and put it online, but if you mean to offer reliable, permanent availability, it costs a huge amount of money just to keep up with the entropy. Plus you have to index the material to make it searchable, not a small job. Everything has to be backed up. When a hard drive fries, when servers or database software become obsolete or break down, when new anti-virus software is required, all this stuff requires a stable and permanent infrastructure and that does not come cheap. Finally, the more traffic you have, the more it costs to maintain fast, uninterrupted server access; you can see this whenever some little blog is mentioned in a newspaper and its server crashes five seconds later. In the case of JSTOR you are looking at many millions of hits every month, and they can’t afford any mistakes.

Actually, all this stuff really is pretty cheap. And then there’s the other nice thing about the internet: digital content of genuine utility can be more-or-less counted on to self-perpetuate.  Release a valuable DRM-free file onto the network and its preservation somewhere is more or less funded automatically by the people who exchange it. Besides, costs continue to fall while the size of scanned documents remains constant.

It’s true to some extent that dealing with large-scale distribution and managing bitrot in any particular centralized location does involve costs.  So it’s not that JSTOR doesn’t need money.  It’s more that we don’t need JSTOR.

There are nearly 19,000 documents in this 33GB download [of out-of-copyright JSTOR documents uploaded in protest by Greg Maxwell], and anyone can take them off The Pirate Bay—and then what? It will tax an ordinary home computer quite a lot to search just this one file, the archives of a single journal of the 1,400-plus currently distributed by JSTOR; that’s the tiniest drop in the bucket. The practical futility of Maxwell’s gesture only demonstrates that JSTOR is providing an invaluable service to the public, even with respect to documents in the public domain—one that could be improved upon, maybe, but completely impossible for individuals to duplicate using existing technologies.

This is just flat-out wrong. Someone who knows what they’re doing will need to OCR those PDFs and dump the results into Solr or something like it, but the actual language-to-be-searched will be a fraction of that 33GB total.  This was a big but tractable problem for a home computer a decade ago.  Today it’s basically trivial; my rough guess is that the task is on par with searching through a decade’s worth of email.  Besides which, people who actually need this data — researchers, for instance — can deal with not-that-much-more-inaccessible tools to get at it.

I’m sure JSTOR’s system is impressive.  But you know what?  There are a lot of people on the internet who can build impressive systems, and many of them are willing to do so and make the results available for free if it’s for a halfway decent cause.

It seems far more likely that if he meant to distribute any JSTOR articles on a file-sharing site, he would have stripped out any copyrighted material first (1.7 million of the 4.8 million articles he downloaded, according to the indictment.) That would be child’s play for someone like Swartz to do, and it would certainly have decreased his chances of landing in the soup.

Spoken like someone who’s never had to figure out if a document is in copyright (much less do so programmatically). Unless JSTOR had already done the work of figuring this out, it would’ve actually been a very difficult task.  That 1.7 million number is likely representative of documents that can be positively said to be in copyright.  It is much harder to positively say that something is out of copyright.

Still, the government’s indictment alleges that he intended to distribute the stuff to the public “through one or more file-sharing sites,” without offering any details as to why they think he was going to do that. If they hope to prove this allegation based solely on the 2008 Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, it would seem that they have got an uphill climb.

For one thing, Swartz has been working for years on analyzing huge data sets at Harvard and elsewhere. He has a longstanding professional interest in the study of large data sets. Sure, it’s a little bit fishy that he didn’t use the network at his home institution in order to access JSTOR. If the allegations in the indictment are true, it would also appear that Swartz took steps to cover his tracks in order to escape detection. I could think of a zillion possible reasons for this with one lobe tied behind my back: Did Swartz want to keep the nature of his work secret from a colleague for some professional reason? Had the Harvard IT department refused to permit him to take that much data down?

I don’t really know what to say about this other than it seems like a stretch to me.  Occam, etc.

From that point on, the article is actually pretty good, discussing the strangeness of the government’s decision to indict, the specific charges being brought, and ending with a very nice wrapup that appropriately and respectfully invokes Lessig and Malamud.  Still, while you all know I’m usually as cranky as anyone about internet utopianism, it really is the case that digital technology is both incredibly powerful and incredibly cheap.  JSTOR and the journals are more rentiers than humble archivists struggling to cover costs.

Spencer is right: this Wired piece about DARPA’s Nexus 7 initiative is very good. Nexus 7 is an ambitious data processing effort meant to synthesize both traditional signals (e.g. vehicle tracking data) and unorthodox signals (market fruit prices seem to be their favorite example) into useful intelligence through sophisticated analytic techniques taken from the social sciences.

And it’s a pretty good reminder of why I’m wary of the Big Data movement.  These were my two favorite bits:

On the surface, there wasn’t much to it: just a graph of violence in the Jalalabad region, and a plot of those fruit prices. When the level of violence was stable — reliably low, or reliably high — so were those prices. Fruit sellers knew what to expect. But when there were sudden swings in the number of attacks, the prices shot up.

Therefore, the Nexus 7 team said, you could use the fruit as an indirect indicator of instability.

The reaction was less than rapturous.

“Right from the start, I’m like: Oh. My. God,” one of the people who attended a Nexus 7 presentation tells Danger Room. “A high school kid could do that.”

Afterward, Dugan presented the pilot as a triumph — a “big breakthrough” that impressed a bevy of four-star generals.

Privately, she was underwhelmed. Dugan was looking for projects that could save troops’ lives, and maybe even bend the direction of the war. By that standard, fruit-price swings seemed pretty inconsequential.

But the presenters maintained an aura of confidence. Oh, this is just a test. Give us more data sources, they said, and we’ll make better connections. We’ve got the hardware: a cloud computing platform that would soak up all kinds of classified and open source intelligence data. We’ve got the software: these social science PhDs and counterinsurgency veterans, who can figure out how to apply that data to rebuild Afghanistan.

and:

“One assumed there was some secret mound of data to be exploited. But it’s just not true.”

I’ve fallen prey to this temptation: thinking that your mastery of awesome tools means you’re about to do some awesome stuff (perhaps via some cleverly counterintuitive Freakonomic insight). Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. You actually need to have a great idea before great things will happen, and it’s difficult to come up with great ideas unless you both know and care — deeply — about the topic you’re planning to examine.

It’s important to acknowledge that the story of Nexus 7 seems to be told, to some extent, from the perspective of people in the military establishment who feel insulted or threatened by the project.  But that in itself is telling: it’s never a good idea to enter a field of inquiry with the assumption that those who preceded you were well-meaning simpletons — particularly when your reasons for thinking so boil down to a difference in the complexity of your tools.

I think this same story is about to unfold in the tech industry, albeit with a more cheerful tone.  Consider this recent post from Read Write Web about the explosion in job listings mentioning the phrase “data scientist”:

“Right now, everybody with data knows that there’s value in there, that they should be doing something,” says Edd Dumbill, program chair for Strata, O’Reilly’s new conference on Data. ”Trouble is, nobody’s entirely clear on the next steps, but they do know that a data scientist can help frame questions and transform data into useful insight.”

They don’t “know” this. They’re assuming it.  And this leaves me worried, because the ability to draw meaning from mountains of information is almost always going to depend on the specific question being examined more so than the tools being used or the investigator’s level of enthusiasm for the idea of quantitative analysis.

It’s not that I don’t believe in the techniques and tools that have these folks so excited.  It’s not even that I think nothing will come of data-rich firms applying quantitative analytic techniques. These things have got me excited, too!  I’m trying to make sure we take advantage of the same kinds of tools at work.  Still, there’s no substitute for good ideas.

To me, this wave of hype doesn’t seem much different from the one that occurred at the start of the last decade.  ”Look at the power of webservers and online payment processing!” we exclaimed. “Can you imagine the benefits they’ll yield when applied to the problem of selling pet food?”

Those things are powerful. But that’s beside the point.

I am now substantially de-jetlagged!  Let’s get this published quickly, then deal with the chaos of my inbox.

Matt was nice enough to respond; if you haven’t already seen it, you should go read it. A few quick things, presented in bullet form because I think trying to write narrative transitions often gets me in trouble:

• Matt’s right that broadcast spending matters most at the top, of course.  I would suggest, though, that this affects many if not all other levels of office, as politicians feel obligated to give to one another in order to reify and ascend their parties’ hierarchies.
• When discussing broadcast media, I really meant to do so in the context of independent expenditures.  It was foolish of me to link to the Obama campaign’s spending breakdown — that gesture, intended to convey the staggering scale of communications costs, mostly just confused the issue.  The point I wanted to make was that restricting speech that affects a race but which is made by an entity other than one of the candidates’ campaigns is thorny, but perhaps not as thorny as we pretend: the mediums of expression that are most relevant to this problem aren’t, shouldn’t and never will be places were we can guarantee perfectly free speech.
• Still, I admit I probably emphasized broadcast more than it deserved simply because it was rhetorically convenient for me.  I don’t know if there are SuperPACs paying for (non-coordinated!) GOTV efforts — I suspect that campaigns wouldn’t like that idea, but who knows. But I’m sure that plenty of them are paying for direct mail, which is immune to the critiques I leveled at broadcast media. And I’ve read some decently compelling evidence that campaign professionals consider broadcast media and direct mail to be substitutable.
• As for spending by campaigns themselves: I suppose I’d personally be open to the idea of providing a floor of support for candidates, but I wonder how much of a difference it’d make.  It would be silly to extend the analogy very far, but in some other culturally important areas, revenue sharing sure seems less helpful at generating healthy competition than salary caps have been.  Besides which, it seems like more robust electoral competition is something you’d pursue to make elected officials more representative of the electorate’s views.  To the extent that this is a problem at all, my impression is that institutional structure is the bigger culprit.
• I’ve heard various political science professors endorse variations of “the more politics the better!” but this has always struck me as pretty silly — either a manifestation of a fairly pathetic urge to be counted the most cynical, counterintuitive and therefore sophisticated guy in the room; or an overextension of the term “politics” to encompass every aspect of every democratic system for reconciling conflicting claims, to the extent that the term loses much of its meaning.

Maybe this is horribly consequentialist, but for me it really comes down to this: for several reasons it strikes me as deeply unwise to put our working legislators on a constant fundraising treadmill (particularly given our legislative institutions’ other tendencies toward self-lobotimization). Yet that’s where we’ve found ourselves.  Efforts to untangle this problem quickly run afoul of speech rights.  But the speech rights in question almost invariably belong to people who wield incredible financial, social and political power.  What’s more, the rights in question tend to be concerned with the amplification of those individuals’ speech in forums that are not and will never be available to most people, rather than rights associated with getting one’s message across some threshold of discoverability.

My principled friends will be aghast, but the idea of trampling on that particular subset of super-speech rights bothers me basically not at all.  Sure, I would prefer a solution to this dilemma that arrives in a neatly-packaged, internally consistent collection of philosophical and legal thought.  But if I can’t have that, I will be content with something that wades through the pragmatically-minded muck along with much of the rest of our system.

(For the record, I would be happy to support a compromise that allows unlimited political contributions in support of speech that takes the form of blimps)

There’s no way to write this post without seeming like I’m just being a shill for my employer. And yet, as I write it, I need to be careful to point out that I am not speaking on behalf of my employer, and could easily get myself in trouble for posting it. Really, this is all downside for me.

But in the last week a couple of friends have written posts that begin, more or less, with “Given that campaign finance legislation is fundamentally incompatible with the first amendment…” And look, yes, I know that this is, if not the legal status quo, then at least what awaits us at the bottom of the legal slip and slide that our juridical institutions are gleefully hurtling down. But let me be the lame parent worrying about what all this water will do to the lawn: I still don’t buy that money is speech.

It’s probably necessary to look at this from a couple of angles. First, there’s the case in which money is given to someone else in order to support that candidate or cause’s speech. Our campaign finance laws remain relatively strong in this area, and understandably so: if it’s not my speech, my speech rights aren’t (as) relevant. Handing you a pen is not speech; neither is handing you a dollar to buy a pen.

The situation is admittedly more difficult in cases where we’re talking about restricting individuals’ ability to spend on their own expressions when those expressions benefit particular candidates or political outcomes. In a theoretical sense, I get it. It’s an intractable problem. That pen might amount to a precondition to self-expression for you, making it, from a practical perspective, indistinguishable from the act of expression itself. If we can’t summon the political will to guarantee everyone access to pens, we can sure as hell not start drafting pen-control laws and asking Staples cashiers to enforce them (in the case of the FEC, this is a generous metaphorical comparison).

I love philosophical abstractions as much as the next guy, but let’s get real: most types of communication are cheap. This is about broadcast media. The money-in-politics discussion is about domination of a small number of more-or-less zero-sum distribution channels, most of which are subject to physical constraints that necessitate a high level of regulation. Your freedom to speak within these channels is already severely limited in both a legal and practical sense.

I think we ought to distinguish between advertising and speech. I think everyone’s got a right to express what they believe and to see if it can convince others. I don’t think the right to force your message in front of others’ eyeballs is nearly so sacrosanct. It used to be pretty difficult to disentangle these two things, but every hour we spend marching deeper into the digital age makes the distinction clearer.

Or so it seems to me, anyway. I’m not claiming that our existing set of campaign finance laws is coherent; I’m not claiming that engineering a legally defensible alternative would be easy (though I have some ideas, many of them admittedly involving a jackboot on the throat of television ad sales executives). But I do think that the conversation about money’s role in politics needs to be tied more closely to a conversation about broadcast media’s role in politics. Personally, I think the latter is both a huge waste of resources and a wellspring of perverse incentives for politicians and the electorate. And I don’t think it deserves to hide within the aegis of rights that we quite correctly treat with reverence.

Cute trick, but this is no good. Sure, I overuse the em dash — anyone who’s read anything I’ve written will quickly learn that truth about me. But I think the linked column betrays an impoverished conception of writing. Call it Editor’s Disease: the written word as its own artifact (or, worse, as precursor to embodiment in A Font About Which Editor Has Strong Opinions). If your thoughts stray to subjects like kerning before your composition is complete, I think you’re doing something wrong. If your goal in writing is to create clean, efficient prose, well, great, but personally I value those qualities in the consumer electronics I purchase, not the things I read.

I like to think of text as a convenient embodiment of speech, and the speech I most like to record aspires to being a witty, conversational and perhaps slightly tipsy soliloquy. Real human speech is not only full of asides, but is most effective when it’s delivered with a sense of timing. Em dashes are great for satisfying both of those requirements, largely because of the flexibility acknowledge by the article.

If you’re in the market for project management software — and it seems like a large portion of people working on the internet perpetually are — let me encourage you to check out my cousin Sophia’s startup, Webplanner. I am admittedly not the world’s biggest Silverlight fan, but the software seems to do a nice job of actually having something to do with projects and how they are executed (as opposed to, say, Pivotal, which has always struck me as a more awful videogame than bug tracker), while not being quite as stripped-down-to-the-point-of-frustration as Basecamp. Worth a look.

I was glad to see Tim writing about Stephen Colbert’s decision to start a PAC. At work we’ve been excited to have such a high-profile figure talking about the campaign finance system — excited enough to dress people in bear costumes, in fact.

But I don’t think Tim gives Colbert enough credit. Yes, there are tensions within Colbert’s efforts that are related to speech rights. But it’s a mistake to expect Colbert to be perfectly logically consistent. I think his aim is to point out absurdities within our system — absurdities that are to some extent the product of the contradictions Tim mentions. This undertaking can be done — and can be useful — without offering a solution.

Tim’s critique also ignores the issue of disclosure, which is central to Colbert’s focus on Citizens United, and which is the motivation behind his pursuit of a media exemption. I’m sympathetic to arguments about the importance of preserving avenues for anonymous political speech. But a good case can also be made that it is reasonable to expect those who avail themselves of privileged mediums of expression to stand by the statements they make in them. In practice if not in law I would face different obligations for a statement I whispered to a friend versus one I slapped on a billboard. I think that’s reasonable.

Finally, Tim’s post sidesteps the thorniest questions associated with distinguishing corporate speech from speech made by humans. He rightly observes that “this isn’t how free speech jurisprudence works”, but I find that argument more depressing than compelling. The personhood question is so dreary and vast that I’m hesitant to bring it up here. But when it comes to political speech, the same culpability two-step is very much in play: like Dr. Jekyll trying to cordone his negative impulses in a separate entity, the division between an active, proudly amoral leadership and the slumbering ownership whose authority they exert often leads to bad outcomes. I think it’s telling that defenders of corporate money in our system can’t brook the idea of requiring that the owners of that money be forced to approve its use for political ends. It puts the lie to their protestations that corporate giving is simply a vehicle for expressing individuals’ speech rights collectively.

Clearly, political and legal momentum are not on the side of people who feel the way I do. But our system has long acknowledged these tensions in its prohibition on direct giving from corporations to politicians. That PACs can and do launder this kind of money doesn’t validate the practice.

Tim’s point is that some of our society’s legal traditions and most cherished principles demand that we not restrict corporate speech. Colbert’s point is that those principles are forcing us to further empower inhuman actors whose influence on our political system may imperil our society, and perhaps even our planet. I don’t think either side is wrong.

Regarding the new caps on debit card interchange fees:

TechNet said the loss of revenue to banks and card networks could lead them to cut costs in the technology systems that protect personal financial information from fraud and identity theft.

You have to sort of admire the brazenness of this threat. I mean really: that’s astounding.

I guess I’ve seen enough frightening ads on Metro to be convinced that this really is just a transfer from banks to merchants. But hey, that seems okay! Particularly given banks’ ongoing profitability relative to everyone else, their continued lack of punishment, and the concentration in the payment processing market.

Besides, won’t merchants just turn right around and send that money into the supposedly-loss-leading (but I suspect just loss-???ing) “online coupon site” bubble, which will then distribute it to consumers during whatever time is left between now and the conclusion of that sector’s frantic race to the bottom? I’d say it’s a toss-up between this and Secret Millionaire for the title of “Most Serious-Minded New Attempt to Address Inequality of the Last Decade”*.

* They say you can damn with faint praise; I aspire to composing praise so faint that it amounts to dragging the target into the town square and cutting its head off