Singularity or Dark Age?
Posted by Jeriaska on December 26th, 2007
Historical progress isn’t inevitable – the pendulum of history doesn’t have a regular period. Sometimes you get a 500-year Dark Age. Science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist Cory Doctorow argued at the 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford that whether a Singularity or Dark Age comes next is not preordained, but depends on our conscious effort.
The following transcript of Cory Doctorow’s Singularity Summit at Stanford presentation entitled “Singularity or Dark Age? How the copyright wars threaten technological progress” has not been approved by the author. Video and audio are available on the Singularity Institute website.
Singularity or Dark Age?
How did three million pictures of cats get on the internet? How did we end up with so much investment poured into technology, into tools, into things that help us extend our capability and understand the world better that we can chart it on something like the law of accelerating returns? What is it that causes human beings to devote so much energy to using our tools to make more tools, to make more tools. After all, tools aren’t the only things that accelerate themselves. Disease accelerates itself. Ebola kills someone, that person falls dead, that person forms a puddle, that puddle is septic, it makes more disease, more people get Ebola, and so on. And yet, we don’t have a law of accelerating Ebola. What is it that causes human beings to make more tools? Well, I would say that the thing that makes us so fascinated with our tools, the thing that incentivizes us to upload so many pictures of our dogs is that technology gives us agency. It gives us the ability to look at, understand, and therefore control the world, to control the narrative of the world in which we live.
If you want to see an example of a narrative before human beings had agency, look at the old Greek plays. At the end of a Greek play, the playwright would run out of ideas and he would say a god appears in a box, a deus ex machina, and solves everyone’s problems. Now, why was that a satisfying ending for a play to an ancient Greek? There are a lot of different theories, but mine is that if you don’t know how the world works, if you can’t measure the world or understand the world, if the world is a non-causal place, if the world is a place where you have no agency and are merely buffeted by the fates and driven by them, then a god in a box solving your problems is as satisfying as any other ending that you might want to have for drama.
Today, we are artifacts of agency and our narratives have agency. If I were to tell you a story in which at the end the character merely wakes up, or something comes up at the very end that has not been foreshadowed in that which came before and solves all the problems, or in which the lead character does nothing and is merely buffeted by the fates, you would be bored and walk out. This is a characteristic of amateur fiction, something we see over and over again in that which does not get published.
Now, the way that agency and technology has evolved was characterized by a bunch of different theories and philosophies about how to allow us to better control our world. For 500 years the dominant mechanism for doing science was to do it in secret and not share what you had learned. We call that alchemy, and we call the 500 year period the Dark Ages. Every alchemist discovered for himself that drinking mercury was a bad idea and not much technological progress occurred. One day, an alchemist got the bright idea of publishing his outcomes and sharing his knowledge. That begat the practice that we called the Enlightenment and the technological progress that has flowed from it. We are today creatures of that decision to publish instead of hording knowledge.
The copyright wars are being fought today on many fronts, but none is more pernicious to my mind than what is called digital rights management technology. These are copy restriction and use restriction technologies whose objective it is to see to it that the devices you own obey someone other than you, to see to it that when you load a DVD into your drive or attempt to play your iTune on a sixth CPU, or try to take a ringtone off of one phone and load it onto another, or try to service a car engine without permission from the manufacturer, or try to refill a toner cartridge, or try to gain control of your environment to exercise your agency that that agency is stymied, frustrated and taken away from you. Agency is the difference between Frankenstein and iRobot. It’s the difference between a world where technology serves us and makes us into happier and better people, and one in which technology controls us and makes us into less happy and less contributory people.
Publishing is security. Publishing is the mechanism by which we make security better. As Bruce Schneier says, “There is no security system so fiendishly clever that the person who invented it can’t think of a way of breaking it.” In other words, if you don’t tell someone how your security system works, you’ll never know whether or not you’ve solved all the problems that exist in it. But digital rights management is a security system that requires that its details not be made public, because the attacker in the digital rights management universe is the owner of the device. If the owner of the device understands how the device works, then the owner of the device can change how the device works and circumvent the restrictions built into it. It is in fact unlawful to tell people how digital rights management systems work, thanks to a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that comes to us from a WIPO Treaty, a treaty from the United Nations, that requires all of its member states to sign on and enact these laws. So in Europe we have the EUCD, in Canada there is the proposal for Bill C-60, Australia is implementing its own version, and so on.
All over the world we are seeing laws that prohibit agency, that require you not to understand your technology. The investment that makes technology possible is driven by user innovation and by user adoption. The reason that the internet is capable of forming a giant supercomputer that can solve huge mathematical problems like protein folding is because people have bought computers to take pictures of their dogs with and upload them to the internet. Increasing network capacity and hardware are also driven by these applications. There was a time when connecting a third-party device to the phone network was unlawful. AT&T, who had a nice racket in renting you your phones, argued that this was the only way in which to build a viable phone network. A court broke up AT&T’s regulatory monopoly over phone equipment long before they broke up AT&T altogether. The court required AT&T to allow third parties to make equipment. The outcome of that was an unparalleled era of innovation that was only matched when the internet itself came along – the internet being a network characterized by rough consensus in running code where anyone is allowed to connect anything to the network.
Compare AOL to real internet email. There was a time when AOL didn’t have a spam problem. The only people who could send email to AOL subscribers was other AOL subscribers, and every AOL subscriber had a relationship with AOL that could be terminated in the event that they abused the system. Nevertheless, AOL has adopted internet email, and until recently it never looked back. In fact, I think most of us would agree that an ISP that gave you internet access but did not let you communicate with the whole internet and only with its other subscribers would be dead in the water. That’s because the complexity introduced by a network where anyone can communicate with anyone else more than outweighs the problems introduced by such a system. In fact, those problems are endemic to complex systems. As Catherine, who is sitting over there, is wont to say, “All complex ecosystems have parasites.” You can’t solve parasites by rendering the system simple. Solving the parasites by rendering the system simple renders the system not powerful enough to even bother with.
But there is no guarantee that demand will remain, that we will go on seeing new applications being developed. There are lots of instances in which people have not been able to generate or express the demand that caused new, cheaper, better, faster systems that match that incredible curve that characterizes so many of Ray‘s slides. For example, CDs versus DVDs. These are approximately the same technology. We read them and write them with just about the same lasers these days, but they have one tremendous difference. The difference is that because CDs don’t have digital rights management technology, anyone can make a CD player and add whatever features to it they wish. By comparison, DVD’s have digital rights management technology and you can only make a better DVD player if you can satisfy the people whose industries are predicated on selling DVDs that what you are about to do won’t disrupt them.
So here’s a little Gedanken experiment for you. Imagine it’s ten years ago and you are walking down University Avenue here, you popped into the Borders, and you bought a thousand dollars worth of CDs. Ten years later that investment in CDs has paid a handsome dividend because ten years later you can take those CDs and you can rip them and turn them into mp3s and ring tones, you can match them up and share them with friends, stream them from your home server and back them up, and you can have an entire mp3 industry that has driven miniaturization of hard drives, increased capacity, and better price performance curves for storage and so on being driven by your investment in CDs. That is a handsome dividend to have been paid on your CD investment.
Now imagine that instead you spent the same thousand dollars on DVDs. As I say, these are approximately the same technology. We read them and write them with the same lasers. Knowing how to read a DVD is not a tricky thing to do. It’s solved. But if you want to add new features to a DVD, you have to get permission. How many times has permission been granted in the last ten years since DVDs were introduced? How many new features have been added to your DVD collection in the decade since you spent your thousand dollars? The answer is none. No one has built video iPods to allow you to sync your thousand DVD collection to your video iPod, because doing so would be unlawful.
Instead, we have just the first rumblings of tiny little DVD or video devices that aren’t intended to host giant video libraries, but are intended to host the occasional file that you shelled out again to buy. Whereas taking a CD and installing it on your iPod is lawful and has created the iPod industry, taking a DVD and installing it on the same iPod is criminal and sends Norwegian teenagers through the court system for five years, and has Russian programmers busted and thrown in prison here in America, and takes Princeton University professors and threatens them with lawsuits if they give presentations about statistical math at technology conferences.
We tend to think of entities that want to hold back progress in things like DVDs and other entertainment technologies, the technologies that create end-user demand, that therefore create increased capacity, that therefore give us the law of accelerating returns, we tend to think of these opponents as luddites, as people who are technophobic, as people who don’t want progress because they like things the way they are. There is some truth to that, but indeed I’ve met innumerable executives from the technology side of the recording industry and the film industry, I’ve spent the last four years in Standards Bodies and United Nations meetings with these people, and I’ve never met a more gadget-obsessed group of people. I’ve never met a more technophilic group of people. I’ve never met a group of people so like me in their willingness to spend enormous amounts of money to beta test other people’s mistakes.
So why do these people hate the idea of ripping a DVD? They hate it not because they are opposed to technology but because they are industrial protectionists, because they’re incumbents who don’t want their industry disrupted. It’s not because they are inherently conservative, it’s because they worry that if these technologies come into the marketplace that they won’t be able to make as much money. The dirty secret is that might be true. The dirty secret is that it may be the case that in twenty years, long before the singularity arrives that the recording industry, film industry, or even publishing go through singularities of their own and emerge as something unrecognizable; that the entities that today fill office towers in Los Angeles and New York will find themselves folding up, going bankrupt, and their practitioners driving taxis and flipping pizzas for a living.
I don’t wish that on anyone, but the important thing to notice here is that by no means means the end of art. There were Vaudeville players who could not transition to radio because Vaudeville was about charisma and radio is about virtuosity. Vaudeville is about how great you perform on stage, radio is about how good you sound if you close your eyes. Anyone who argues that radio is bad for music hasn’t been paying attention, because if all we had for performance was live performance and no industry for performance, then an entire generation of artists who grew up optimized for radio would never have had the opportunity to flourish. Technology gives and technology takes away. When the Protestant Reformation bankrupted the entities who were in charge of seeing to it that multi-generational cathedrals could be erected, it didn’t mean the end of religion. It just meant the end of cathedrals.
The United States was a pirate nation for the first hundred years of its existence. There was a hundred-year period in which it made sense in the U.S. only to extend copyright and patent protection to American inventors and not to foreign inventors, the majority of whom they had just fought a long, bloody war against. That hundred-year period didn’t stymie progress, it generated unparalleled progress. There is a time when exclusive rights generate more and there is a time when exclusive rights generate less.
Copyright regulates technology. Copying, broadcasting, making derived works, performing, today all of these things are technological activities. By its nature, copyright has to regulate technology, and laws and technology are uneasy bedfellows, because technology changes fast and law changes slowly. So it’s not surprising that when a technology as disrupting as the internet emerges that it is inconsistent with copyright law, no more than it is surprising that when a rocket ship emerges it is inconsistent with stop signs. We do need rules and regulations that see to it that new art goes on being created. We need systems that see to it that new creativity flourishes. But to say that yesterday’s copyright will serve tomorrow’s technology is patently untrue.
A viable future for technology is a future where yesterday’s technology regulations aren’t given primacy over tomorrow’s technological revolutions. It’s a future where agency is possible, where we can understand, modify, and improve upon our devices, and in so doing, create the market forces that drive the law of accelerating returns. It is a world where inventors can invent and no one is guaranteed that their industry will not be disrupted by technology. It’s a world where abundance is celebrated and not mourned. If you could reproduce hot lunches at will with no incremental cost, no one would characterize that as a disaster, except perhaps the delicatessen industry. But today, where human knowledge can be reproduced at no incremental cost, our first response is to see to it how we can make that stop. Human knowledge has through history been the prime factor that drives the human condition, our ability to enjoy our lives. The unfettered access to human knowledge improves us and makes us better.
Here is an example of a genuine abomination that is enabled by technology that represents the reverse of what we should be doing. This university if it subscribes to Elsevier publications on paper, when it cancels its subscription has those scientific journals, so this repository of human knowledge has a library of human knowledge. That’s good. Today, because of technology, Elsevier has pioneered a system whereby if this university cancels its subscriptions, those periodicals can vanish from its archives. That’s bad. That’s a worse future than the past.
So, how do you solve this? What do you do about it? Well, there are a lot of different groups that are attacking this from many different angles. One thing that characterizes something that is genuinely new is that no one knows which discipline it fits in. Jamie Boyle at Duke University likes to talk about how the environmental movement wasn’t a movement because no one knew that saving the whales, stopping pollution, and eating health food were all the same issue until someone invented the word “ecology.” We don’t have a word for this movement yet, but what we do have are disparate groups, non-governmental organizations, political action committees, and so on, working at this on many different angles, all of which would be happy to have your membership and support. One of them is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I’m privileged to be a Fellow of, having worked for them for four years. Our chairman of the board is sitting over there. They are a membership organization, a 501(c)(3). There is also Public Knowledge, the Free Software Foundation, the Creative Commons, IPac, and the Free Culture Movement, which has an active chapter here on campus at Stanford. All of these are opportunities for you to get involved in greater or lesser extents and see to it that the technological future is one where we have more control over our environment instead of our environment controlling us. Thank you.
