Culture flat rates are named both in the Netherlands and in Germany as a solution to the problem of copyright piracy.

The idea is to have everybody pay a set amount of money each month so that they can download all they want and redistribute that money among copyright holders to compensate them for their work.

This stems from the notion that copyright holders deserve some payment for their work and that the current repression being employed to uphold the dysfunctional copyright system, is unacceptable.

It is a horribly bad idea on a great many levels.

1. It cedes to the copyright industry that piracy is an actual problem. It is not. Current piracy does not in any way threaten the creation of new works and in many ways is expediting the switch to new ways of producing culture and new business models.

2. A (semi-)government run systems such as this one removes all entrepreneurship from the production of cultural products and in doing so also removes all innovation. The mediocre will be best served by such a system and those who want to go the extra mile or go into wholly new areas will be hurt.

3. A tariff system by its design works in favor of the old and not the new. New entrants will not have made their arrangements to participate and may never do so because of other inhibiting conditions. People creating wholly new cultural works (DJs, mashups, all manner of interactive experiences and games) may find themselves falling outside of the categorizations on offer. This while the old sit back and reap the rewards for efforts form the past.

4. What should be the most important consideration but is usually left as a detail to deal with later: organizing such a system is practically intractable. Who will compensate the Americans, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Brazilian underground movie industry, the bloggers for their writing and the musicians on Soundcloud for their music?

The current organizations tasked with redistributing these tariffs on music played on the radio or in cafes (BUMA/STEMRA in the Netherlands, SEBAM in Belgium) have proved themselves to be mostly corrupt, opaque, poorly organized and exclusionary. It is an illusion to think that a newly established organization will fair any better.

Update: After thinking it over a bit more and reading more misguided German business model ideas for creative production, I think the next three requirements could be used to make a culture flat rate work:

1. Blanket. A culture flat rate would need to be truly blanket to solve a lot of problems. If it is not, the difference with Spotify or Netflix streaming is zero and it would seem odd to codify into law what is in fact just another business. On the other hand, if the goal is to solve the copyright problem for everybody, a flat rate scheme should ensure that I cannot be sued anymore for any copyright infringement. That was after all the problem to be solved. With current international intellectual property and trade treaties this seems unlikely to happen.
2. Voluntary. A flat rate should be voluntary. I should not be forced to pay into a scheme I don’t want to or which is of no use to me (like the GEZ). Styled this way, the flat rate would be a kind of legislative insurance for users to prevent getting sued for nonsense and the funds collected could be used to support a couple of starving artists. Though there seem to be altogether too many of those in Germany. This approach would also demonstrate actual market fit of the scheme.
3. Cheap. A hard requirement on any scheme would be that a flat rate needs to be cheap, cheaper even maybe than the current tv license. That is the only way to ensure incentives for creators to create new products and new business models. If the flat rate is set too high, it risks becoming a cash cow for a sick industry and further stagnate developments in an already conservative country.

Will any of those happen? Reading the proposed business models on an upcoming event, I’m rather pessimistic.

Writing these notes on a Sunday afternoon wit a mug of steaming coffee within reach as they are meant to be written.

This Monday I finally made it out to the Finanzamt with a fully filled in form for Steuerliche Erfassung (or something). After that I went to the Agora Collective to get my stuff. It is a great place, but I don’t want to be fixed in a coworking space. There are a myriad reasons why that is not a great fit, but being able to shape and own your own workplace is built-in in most offices and is purposefully left out of coworking.

Then I moved into the contur & konsorten office on Adalbertstraße with my stuff. A Burogemeinschaft with 10 people where everybody has their own independent desk, with its own walls and bookshelves, a place to put my professional library and hang my posters. In short: a place to call my own. In a total coincidence I am now a staircase neighbour of my friends at the Maker’s Loft which could lead to more serendipity in the future.

The office is smack on Kotti, the most important urban maelstrom in Berlin. It is a place where many large streams of traffic and people meet with the U-bahn transport hub (connecting U1 and U8) and the roundabout connecting the main thoroughfare of Skalitzer Straße with the Kottbusser Damm. Betahaus, co-up, the Maker’s Loft and many other creative places are within throwing distance and the area sports equal amounts of hipster cafés and Turkish eateries with the addicts holding their own on the main square. They can be a hassle, but their presence is inseparable from the conditions that made that part of Kreuzberg exactly what it is: a free-haven for people looking for cheap housing be they immigrants or artists —or both.

Tuesday was spent at the new office in presentation prep with the evening closed off by meeting with the local Open Knowledge Foundation chapter. It was a fruitful discussion exchanging various ideas on how to boost the openness movement in Berlin.

On Wednesday, I took a leisurely train ride to Amsterdam which seems to feel shorter and shorter the more I get in the rhythm. That day the long awaited Code 4 video launched. I’m immensely proud of the work we did and I don’t think there’s anybody who has pulled off a game like that anywhere in the world, so it might be well worth a look:

A more detailed write-up on that project is forthcoming.

Thursday I continued working on my presentation at the Open Coop. I also ripped the video of minister of economic affairs Maxime Verhagen endorsing open data from the NOS site, because their site sucks.

Friday was the big day of Social Cities of Tomorrow where I got the honor to be the first to present our case of ‘Apps for Amsterdam’ to the assembled audience. It was a wonderful event put together by our esteemed friends and colleagues of the Mobile City: Michiel de Lange and Martijn de Waal who have been leaders in this field for the better part of the past ten years. The keynotes by Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko and Dan Hill were superb and they remain a source of inspiration for our creative work.

I feel like I have to remark on two things that I thought of during the conference:

The entire day was infused with a critical stance against open data and transparency within government. Usman Haque served the opening volley with a criticism of indiscriminate data transparency and an approach to further civic engagement by giving people the tools to collect data themselves. After that Dan Hill also added some criticism against traditional methods of social change.

I agree with their points and criticisms and I would have liked to address them but that was impossible in the time given to me to present our case. I would like to say that if anybody in the Netherlands has been deeply involved on all levels in the government transparency movement and is acutely aware of the problems, issues and realities of data transparency, it is probably us. Besides that we have employed most of the techniques Dan Hill presented during the last couple of years: shaping decision making processes, deploying long lasting interventions and using the sleights of hand required to realign large organizations and work with far too many people.

We have been and will be hard liners for the cause of government transparency out of necessity and conviction. I will always defend that data that has already been collected by government and carries no issues of privacy or national security with it, belongs to the public and should be accessible by the public.

The other issue is that the conference should was probably most valuable to the people in the Netherlands who are not as current on design and technology as I have come to take for granted. The lack of reflection was painfully clear in some of the questions asked by the audience. This is a common issue, but I have seen it often in the past during Mobile Mondays or the lecture Manuel DeLanda gave in Amsterdam.

Dan Hill talked about going from the matter to the meta level and back again and all three keynoters showed that they are very capable of doing that. In the Netherlands I have found that many practitioners struggle a lot with the matter and they don’t have the time or the interest to ascend to the meta level, even though that would feed back positively into their material undertakings.

I have been looking for collaborators in the Netherlands who look beyond their narrow field and manage to recombine multiple theoretical and practical strands back into their work but there are very few. I hosted the UX Book Club Amsterdam a while, but found that most attendees there took their field of design too narrowly and the field of UX too seriously. Similarly the Berlage Institute is doing a postdoctoral course ‘to explore the forces that shape the built environment in the contemporary world’ which is limited to architects. I don’t know anybody who believes that the problems that will plague our cities in the next fifty years will be solved drawing from the monoculture of architecture school.

It is as if most people in the Netherlands are trapped within the operational closure of their own practice.

I don’t know where I would fall, but I struggle every day with striking a balance between theory and practice and I think if you do not feel that struggle you should take a long hard look at what it is you are doing.

After Social Cities of Tomorrow we had a party at our offices in the Open Coop because they officially incorporated as a cooperation and are set to do great things. The party was rather tremendous and good parties are key to getting things done in Amsterdam.

And now it is Sunday while I am typing these notes and because of a lack of gourmet coffee, it is off to the Hubbub studio in Utrecht to be the murder board for Kars’s LIFT presentation.

Last week was cut a bit short by a commute to Amsterdam at the end (touching on that in a bit).

Monday I settled in at the Agora Collective for the week to work from there. I mentioned before that I really needed a fixed studio space to work from. I wasn’t really aiming for a coworking space, but Agora is a great place to be at.

I spent more of the week in XCode and playing around various iPhone development ins and outs.

Wednesday I viewed an office at Kottbusser Tor and then made my way to the HIIG for a discussion on how the internet changes democracy (about which I wrote ‘A deeper simulation fever’).

Thursday I had to go to the Netherlands early to attend the closing event for ‘Nederland van Boven’ a VPRO series featuring aerial videography and data visualizations. The production team spent a lot of time getting at data to be able to show it on television. I was invited to debate for the cause of open data alongside Alexander Klöpping against the sceptic positions of Marleen Stikker and Arco Groothedde.

On my visit I briefly dropped by the Open Coop and on Friday morning I skated a bit across the canals of Amsterdam before jumping into the train back to Berlin again.

Last Wednesday I was at a gathering by the Institue for Internet and Society here in Berlin in collaboration with Deutschlandfunk called “Berliner Gespräche” about how the internet influences society.

What struck me mainly was that both a professor from the panel and a commenter from the audience held the position that the internet is in fact nothing new. That it is just another medium/channel for people to communicate through. Citing Clay Shirky, I would say that more and faster information flows are in fact different. More fundamentally the internet is the manifestation of a vast new kind of object that interacts with other objects (such as us) in a myriad ways. That alone makes it something new and very significant.

I was asked by somebody from Deutschlandfunk to comment on the proceedings of the evening and I gave them my superficial outsider’s view about privacy and journalism and how the status quo of both is vastly different in the Netherlands.

On the way home what stuck with me most is that every online entity comprises within itself a subjective view of how reality works and how it wishes to interact with that reality. Facebook has notions about the desirability of privacy that permeate through all of its interactions with its users. This is the same for any websites. They are simulations that run on a subjectively chosen subset of reality just like games do.

The tool that we often employ when talking about games is Ian Bogost’s concept of ‘simulation fever’ that says that subjective simulations cause people to either accept or reject the simulation based on their position. The critical alternation (or altercation if you will) between acceptance and rejection puts the user in a moral frenzy termed simulation fever.

The subjective values that websites impose most clearly on users right now are their views when it comes to privacy but there are a slew of other values that are inherent in any web application which users may or may not accept when using them. If you must generalize —as a populace— the Dutch mostly accept those subjective realities while the Germans mostly reject.

The Dutch use sites as means of communication and self-expression while grosso modo ignoring the consequences of corporate ownership. While Germans forced by social pressures to use sites such as Facebook, try to mitigate their complicitness by employing sabotage and other defensives strategies.

There is in both countries a minority of people who are aware of the issues and use these services critically. For any meaningful discussion about the internet, they the most likely people to turn to.

Last week was my first week in Berlin in earnest and I was more than a bit eager to get back on the horse. On Monday I visited four coworking spaces, on Tuesday I met Marguerite Joly from the Hybrid Plattform and on Wednesday I visited a bunch more. Like I write over at Hubbub, I am looking for a studio space and much much more here in Berlin.

On Thursday I booked a spot at the beta breakfast at Betahaus through Gidsy where I met old friends and some interesting new people.

On Friday I had lunch with Rainer Kohlberger and then worked at betahaus for the rest of the day. I ended the week with drinks with the Gidsy and Third Wave crews.

Going over the list of services that the municipality of Amsterdam offers this week, I couldn’t help but notice this:

the option to change your date of birth (without a foreign certificate)

This is a very interesting option. I am not aware of the reasons one could assert to change their date of birth, but the fact that the option is listed, says something. In any case, it shouldn’t be too difficult to come up with a reason that fulfills official requirements.

Why would you want to do this?

I am reasonably sure that most statistical inference methods on databases are pinned fairly rigidly on the fact that somebody’s date of birth never changes. The various parts of your name can be mismatched, but if you do not have an id for somebody (like a social security number), the date of birth is your best bet to reduce the number of possible matches.

If you manage to change your date of birth if only by a day and re-register with that everywhere, you will have shed your privacy tail and can start anew. That by itself, struck me as a hopeful thought. Now just to have somebody try it out.

Post scriptum: I talked about this with Rejo and he suggested I FOIA the number of times this occurs and the reasons why it happens. I put that on my list, for some time in the future.

In 2011:

I taught a minor in data visualization at the Willem de Kooning Academy.
I built bespoke cartography for the PvdA and for the AUB.
I presented at /dev/hague, ODEC, CHI sparks, Ignite Amsterdam.
I presented on cities and games for Virtueel Platform.
I gave several radio interviews.
I ran workshops at the ROOSdagen, the RIVM and the NOS.
I taught at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam.
I published a book review in Vrij Nederland.
I wrote a handful of game reviews in nrc.next.
I visited dConstruct, FOSDEM, the Infographics congress and Playful.
I got an iPhone 4.
I made journalistic visualizations for de Groene Amsterdammer and Sargasso.
I moved house twice, once across the city and the next time across Europe.
I launched a web store with the freshest graphics in the Netherlands.
I judged one app competition and chaired the proceedings of another.
I learned iOS programming.
I participated in a pilot for a interactive design television show.
I went to the Alps for the first time.
I joined the Next Speaker.
I raised funds for Bits of Freedom.
I created a glanceable display for transit in Amsterdam.
I wrote code for a theater play.
I moved studio from Volkskrantgebouw to the Open Coop and got the keys to another.
I taped a video report on the Utrecht game scene.
I was cured from my infatuation with Android.
I participated in a workshop with Manuel DeLanda.
I went to Berlin five times, the last time for good.

We launched the new Hack de Overheid site.
We created a large scale serious game for organizational change called Code 4.
We conceived and ran: Apps for Amsterdam, Apps for Noord-Holland and Apps voor Nederland
We created a bespoke platform for cartographic visualization called Statlas.
We organized five hackathons, among which Hack de Overheid, Nederland van Boven, a hackathon on a historic fortress island, an Open Data Bazaar and Code Camping Amsterdam where hundreds of people came to program dozens of civic applications.
We went to Cognitive Cities and rocked Berlin.
We merged Hack de Ovenheid and het Nieuwe Stemmen into a new entity called the Open State Foundation.

In the beginning of the week I spotted an interesting dataset on Sargasso, requested to play with it and got the following visual published the next day (our write-up).

Then it was off to Berlin to finalize things with the appartment and prepare the move.

My review of “Where is my Heart?” was also published in the nrc.next that week (tweet):

Finally my proposal to present on the Apps for Amsterdam project on the Social Cities of Tomorrow conference was aspected and I will be attending and presenting at that conference in Amsterdam. Data commons are a topic that is very near to our practice and I look forward to exchanging ideas with those attending.

Some remaindered weeknotes that have been the casualty of an international move.

This week marked a strategic planning session for the coming year out of which a lot of opportunity flowed. I also finished ‘Where is my Heart?’ for an upcoming nrc.next review. It is a spectacular piece of work and a total mind altering experience. A well deserved five stars.

Next we did some project planning for a fun little thing (saba) we’re going to build in 2012Q1. And then we played Quarriors which I won against all odds.

The rest of the week was spent actually writing the review. A lot of time goes into writing a good review. Too much for the regular press to do much of it as I’ve written here about Cultural Criticism. I was very pleased with Niels’s criticism and how the thing turned out (though it would of course have been better with another week spent on it).

Thursday I went to the Dialogues House to see Yochai Benkler present on his work and books. The clarity with which he presented complex concepts of value and organization was expected but still good to witness. The Dialogues House though situated a bit unluckily is really a vibrant and creative place.

Then on Friday it was tying off some odds and ends (I added a view back and forward for Fast Moving Targets year end project) and preparing for the Open Coop party.

I think most of the thinking around The Filter Bubble comes from people who are not very procedurally literate to begin with. That is to say they are not very adept at understanding the rules that govern interactive systems nor are they well equipped at reconfiguring them to suit their ends. I touch on this because the same tired argument was parroted in this Zeit interview with Miriam Meckel, a leading German communication scientist. It starts off with some very sensible sentiments but then it quickly derails on the topic of algorithms and concludes on several sidelines.

There is a clear need for caution when it comes to algorithms, as has also been expressed by algoworld expert Kevin Slavin in his TED talk ‘How algorithms shape our world’ but there is no need for the undue fear being mongered by Eli Pariser and his pack. Meckel says the following (as also remarked by Basti Hirsch):

Es gäbe keinen kritischen Diskurs mehr, und damit würde unser System auseinanderfallen. Informationen sind der Kitt, der unsere Gesellschaft zusammenhält. In meinem Buch treibe ich diese Idee auf die Spitze: Die Menschheit schafft sich durch die Perfektionierung der Algorithmen selbst ab.

Bei manchen durch Algorithmen betriebenen Werbeangeboten hingegen bekämen Sie diesen Artikel gar nicht erst zu sehen.

While deploring the extremism prevalent in German discourse on the topic of the internet. She herself now takes an extremist and poorly nuanced position herself. The Filter Bubble argument that is currently in vogue (see this treatment by Alexander) is mostly hollow and it creates understanding on the back of fear. I work for the internet and I am sick of hearing this nonsense time and time again.

The Filter Bubble contrasts a previously filtered situation of redacted mainstream media with the new filtered situation of personalized online content and plays off of people’s fears. There are two main differences in the new situation.

The first difference is that the filters personalize content spheres for each person. I don’t think this is all that problematic. Having trained machine learning algorithms myself, I have seen how coarse they turn out no matter what amount of training. Training which is somewhere between a dark art and trying to hit a subjective target somewhere. Algorithmic filters resemble fractal surfaces more than they do smooth bubbles and personalization will never provide a perfectly sealed off environment. This means that as soon as you get into the technical details the whole thing very quickly falls apart.

The second difference is that filters are being applied by algorithms instead of editors now. Both are enigmatic creatures, but judging from the cold reception algorithms get, it seems that the traditional humanities are better equipped to deal with human entities than they are with the algorithmic variety. There is nothing new under the sun. Large scale social segregation and associated detrimental effects also happened using traditional media with people logging into their own newspaper or radio station. One of the most visibly polarized societies right now is the USA where the ‘debate’ between the right and the left is raging on talk radio, 24 hour news networks and, yes, also online. If anything the filters may help by making the groups of like minded people too small and too busy to be harmful to society.

My second problem is that while complaining about the lack of technical literacy in the general populace, her discipline and her research does not come over as very technically literate. She says:

Unser Land ist tendenziell eher technikfeindlich eingestellt.

The interviewer then adds that she draws from literary and philosophical sources. Those are interesting but hardly enough to thoroughly treat a subject. Deep talk about about information technology should draw from philosophy but it should also bring a literacy of the field itself. That means knowledge of its technical workings and affordances, the design practices inherent in the creation of technical artifacts and the procedurality and interaction that is so key to them.

So yes I very much agree that we need to instill a large scale procedural, data and media literacy in people and we may well need to start with the humanities. That may be the only way to fix their relevance problems when it comes to digital things (see also Ian Bogost’s two part essay ‘Beyond the Elbow-patched Playground’ on that).

So with those skills in hand, we could discuss the filter bubble drawing from applied research. One finding I would like to see is a technical assessment of the feasibility of trapping people in filter bubbles and measurements of the amount of information isolation that can be achieved. Another would be to research real life internet users and see if in fact they shut themselves off more from other influences and how far this affects their world views. Only with a praxis firmly based in reality can we talk about this subject in a way that is not gratuitous.

Update: This review of the Filter Bubble by Olga Goriunova in Computational Culture mostly vindicates my argument and I agree that we need more writing, not less to bridge the gap of literacy that stands ahead of us.