matsu

instant gratification

Well, this photograph is not only about instant gratification. It’s also about the value of good things.

This is my second pair of Red Wing 2233 boots, which I bought 14 years ago in 1996, and which are my weekend boots for general mayhem and destruction (I have a pair from 2003 which I use during the week). This is the part about the value of good things – sometimes it’s cheaper to buy more expensive but excellent things, as long as you take just a bit of time every now and then to take good care of them.

Which brings me to the title and the question of instant gratification – the boot on the right was exactly like the boot on the left before I spent ten minutes caring for it with lots and lots of shoe polish, and a good brush. Ten short minutes to go from a wreck to something absolutely stunning. This feeling of instant personal realization is priceless for our self worth, considering that we have jobs where the time scales between starting something and seeing (or not) the fruits of that labor can be measured in weeks, months, or even years.

That’s why it’s great to have a few things in life that are this quick and fulfilling.

[originally posted on my Flickr stream]

My artist’s manifesto

All artists, sooner or later, must make a manifesto, or in my case, a counter-manifesto. Chalk it up to youth! Here it is:

The Value of Things

Value is a complex thing. Either in a currency system, or in a system of barter, value is something that must be discussed, negotiated, settled. It depends essentially on the ratio between offer and demand, and offer depends on the scarcity of each of the components that make up each good or service. Demand is even more complex, depending on what is needed, but increasingly, on what is wanted.

The evolution of scarcity

In great part, the history of Humanity is the history of technology. Fire is technology. The wheel is technology. Writing, mathematics, farming, bureaucracy – they’re all technologies. And technology upsets the status quo of what scarcity is. The wheel made distance a less expensive commodity. Gutenberg made information so simple to disseminate to the point that it transformed something easy to safeguard to something easy to copy. The loom made textiles worthy of a King available to the poorest. And technology keeps its relentless pace.

The evolution of demand

Producers of goods and services, to safeguard their livelihoods in the face of dwindling scarcity, created fashion. It’s just the simple act of creating “wants” where before there were “needs”. It’s fashionable to have the latest clothing. To live in the best places. To have a finer car. You don’t need any of those things, it’s all a question of what is fashionable.

Meta Evolution

Digital is the meta invention. Digital + The Internet are the Gutenberg press squared. Cubed. What once was made easy is now completely effortless. If you can describe it or scan it, you can make it available to the world, and thanks to the search engines, if you tag it well, it will be found by those who need it (or merely want it). Even if you’re just copying what someone else created, even without their consent.

The Problem

If an artisan spends a considerable percentage of his/her time creating something physical, if you just go and grab what they created, it’s theft. In part because it’s easily enforceable (you can lock physical things up) and also because it’s our culture, of property of physical goods. If an artisan spends a considerable time creating something that can be scanned or is natively digital, and wants to sell it, the buyer can easily duplicate it. Physical goods vs. Informational goods. They’re very different (and even the design of physical goods is usually easily replicated).

Trying to stop the ocean

The intellectual property industry’s reaction was to try to lock content up with DRM (Digital Rights Management). Millions were spent trying to lock what can’t possibly be contained. What they didn’t understand is that it takes only a single copy to get freed to be replicated endlessly to everyone who wants it. Basically it was a big and shortsighted waste of money.

An opportunity

Instead of fighting what can’t possibly be fought, some intelligent people created the Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) – basically, the expanse between “All Rights Reserved” (full copyright) and “No Rights Reserved” (placing something in the public domain). Instead of only having only the extreme options, they created several types of machine/people/lawyer readable legal licenses under which you can license what you create. Want your work to be available for free, but only for non-commercial uses? But not used in derivative works? But you insist on having it attributed to your name? No problem, Creative Commons licenses have it covered.

For free? Why?

Because the money to be earned is not on things that can be copied. That’s a lost battle. If you’re a musician, you can make more money on concerts and events. If you’re a photographer, more money can be made by shooting specific assignments for customers, or on photography workshops. If you’re a writer, you can make more money by participating as a speaker at conferences. The era of making something and making your livelihood from just selling copies of it is nearing its end. And getting your creations known to the widest possible audience is the key for getting work that can’t be replicated.

Summing up

This is the reason why I don’t create single copies of my photographs or limited editions. I want people to enjoy my photography not because it’s scarce, but because they like it. I do sell signed and numbered copies (limitless editions only), but only for the people who voluntarily want to financially support my art. Don’t buy it as an investment – buy it because you enjoy it and want to see more of it! Everyone else is welcome to just download and use (non-commercially) my photographs any way they like it – on your computer desktop, on your blog, by printing and hanging it on your walls!

You can visit my portfolio at pedromourapinheiro.com

Codebits 2009

For those of you who don’t know what Codebits is, it’s a three day international event of programming and hacking held every year by Sapo, with talks, workshops, quiz competitions, a 24 hour team coding contest, and a live music show (this year by pornophonique). It’s free, and it hosts, feeds, and powers (two full time generators for all those multi-core laptops) around 600 participants for three days of fun, work, meeting people, and lots, lots, lots of pizza.

Although I’m not a real programmer, I submitted a LEGO Mindstorms NXT project, and we ended up being the biggest team, with nine members!! Here’s the video:

And besides the project, I had two very unique experiences: first, meeting Mitch Altman and buying a TV-B-Gone kit and assembling it right there and then with his help, and the second, meeting the people from AltLab, Tiago who I had met before at Twittlis, and Catarina, who were demoing their Makerbot Industries open source 3D printer.

Putting 2 + 2 together, I managed to challenge Catarina to design and print an enclosure for my assembled TV-B-Gone, right there at Codebits!

TV-B-Gone inside an enclosure printed on a MakerBot Industries CupCake CNC.

If you have your own 3D printer, you can download the model files here, and print your own TV-B-Gone enclosure!

Kids, *this* is the future, and you probably saw it here first!

Bad marketing, bad PR

Let me start by saying that I think the user experience provided by whole Apple ecosystem is second to none: from their Mac OS X computers to the iPhone, and how everything works together. Quoting Sir Winston Churchill, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” – this is my personal experience with Apple, not perfect by far, but better than anything else I’ve ever tried.

For the iPhone, Apple chose a business model of selecting carriers to associate with, and sell the iPhone as a whole experience instead of merely a device, including data plans and their special visual voice mail. Only with carriers that accepted their conditions, from subsidization of the equipments to profit sharing contracts. Not all carriers accepted this and some of us only had the choice of either not having an iPhone or changing carriers.

This happened until Apple, by the laws of some countries, became legally bound to supply operator-free versions of the iPhone. They complied with the laws, and the iPhone is sold unlocked in several countries, including Italy, from where my own iPhone was imported from.

Everything worked great, including the tethering option (connecting your computer to the internet using the iPhone) since the upgrade to iPhone OS 3.0, to the point that I decided to cancel my separate data-only contract that I used with a 3G USB modem to connect my laptop to the internet, and asked my carrier to upgrade the data plan on my voice card from 1GB to 3GB a month. It was a win-win situation for me, as I would pay less, and carry only the iPhone for everything.

Well, it worked well until last week, when the iPhone OS 3.1 upgrade showed up. As a legal user of the iPhone, and never having it jailbroken, I never really bothered to check if such upgrades would break something. My belief was that Apple would only add new features and make things work better, as they have been doing since I bought my iPhone almost one year ago. With the 3.1 upgrade, tethering stopped working. It just disappeared from the options.

After looking around for the reason, I found this page. Apple changed the way the iPhone accepts the tethering configuration, and now requires the APN in the carrier bundles to be signed, meaning that tethering will only work with the Apple associated carriers who allow tethering explicitly.

I have nothing against certain carriers forbidding tethering, it’s their own policy. But this change by Apple has meant that I have a legal operator-free iPhone (for which I paid much more than a subsidized and contract-locked iPhone) with a voice+data contract with my own carrier that allows tethering, and yet, I can’t.

I decided to wait, and seek clarification on Apple’s own support forums, on this thread. What pushed me over the edge to write this post was that they deleted my last message, citing that

“Your post was removed from Apple Discussions as it contained feedback or feature requests. These areas are intended to address technical issues about Apple products. Although your feedback is appreciated, unfortunately these forums are not designed for it and your thoughts/concerns will not get the attention they deserve.“

which is laughable, considering what is already posted there and the message that was deleted:

In the end, the real reason Apple sold operator-free iPhones is because they were made to by the legislation of certain countries. And because the AT&T data network is bursting at the seams (and they still want to push the marketing mantra of “unlimited” data plans), they forced Apple’s hand into cutting the problem by the source – just kill tethering in general. Apple’s solution, to allow tethering at all with their partner carriers who allow it, was to cryptographically sign the APN strings in the carrier bundles. Which left everyone with legally unlocked phones out in the rain if they don’t work with partner carriers (like myself).
I can understand why they did it. It just means they’re not worried about losing the fringe share of unlocked customers, who represent a tiny percentage of their sales.
If Apple doesn’t solve this (and I repeat, I think the percentage of users affected is not enough to force them to re-think their strategy), our only recourse is legal. They advertised an important feature, it worked perfectly with unlocked phones for a while, and then they removed it.

I think this whole incident is just bad marketing, and bad PR. Bad marketing, because they’re pushing an important feature such as tethering to sell the iPhone (saying “check your carrier for availability” – mine supports it), and then removing it, even if it only affects a certain part of their customers; and it’s bad PR because instead of saying to the owners of legal operator-free iPhones “please wait for a solution, it is coming”, they’re just passing out the message that they just don’t care. I know they didn’t want to have the obligation to sell unlocked iPhones (as it goes against their business strategy), but it’s not nice to be on the receiving end of this treatment.

And no, I’m not going to boycott Apple’s products, I’d be the one to lose, and neither am I going to seek legal recourse. If the situation is not solved soon, I’ll just revert to my previous solution of having a separate data plan. This is more of a warning to prospective buyers – you either buy the iPhone from a supported carrier or you might face surprises such as this one in the future, even if you do everything “by the book” and buy a legal operator-free iPhone.

The Singularity

When people discuss the Singularity they tend to gravitate towards either of the extremes: from “it’s not going to happen!” to “how can it not happen?“. This puts the focus on the quantitative aspects of the overall question (which can be interesting), and draws us away from the multitude of even more interesting qualitative discussions. Regardless of the true slope and curvature of the evolution of technology, and if it will reach (or not) some kind of vertical asymptote, there are so many things that have happened, are happening, and that we will see happen in our lifetimes, and their impacts on the human experience (and human identity).

With the gradual birth of organized science and education, and the migration of that new knowledge and methods into practical technology, science and technology started leveraging themselves into a much faster pace. The invention of written language, the creation of mathematics, the Gutenberg press, and countless others. These events were the true beginnings of what the discussion about the Singularity is all about: what we create affecting its own creation. Creating tools that allow us to create things that were impossible before.

And the pace has increased a lot. One of the most amazing characteristics of humankind is our blindness to the dichotomy between what we perceive as stable and evolving. Let’s use 60 years as a measure. Today, 2009, someone who is 60 years old was born in 1949. Some of those 60-year olds might be reading this article via the internet, on their laptop computers, while flying on an airplane, and not finding it strange. Yet, when that person was starting to learn about the world, household computers were pulp science-fiction, commercial aviation was the domain of the very rich, television was a relatively new technology, medical imaging was limited to x-rays, and nuclear fission was a brand new weapons technology.

Using the same measure, in 1949, someone 60 years old was born in 1889. Those people were born in a world where they probably didn’t have electricity at home, used animal powered vehicles for their local transportation, going to the moon was science-fiction, and medical diagnostics were almost based on external observations only, and nuclear fission was not even a theoretical possibility.

If we kept going back, 60 years at a time, it would be even more evident that the pace of technological evolution is becoming faster and faster, and that at some point in the past, the speed of technological change was so gradual that people lived in the assumption that when their lives ended, things in general wouldn’t be much different from when they were born. Apart from the cyclical turmoils of civilization, the way people did things improved (or sometimes regressed) very slowly.

This is the quantitative discussion I mentioned at the beginning, that while being essential, is simply the mise-en-scène for the even more interesting qualitative discussions – not trying to simply guess what is happening and why, but the impact it had, is having, and will have on the human experience, in all its facets.

A few of the themes to discuss, in no special order:

• the evolution of the economic systems into post-scarcity – we’ve evolved from mere survival, where almost everyone in a society had to contribute work to achieve enough to stay alive, to a point where those essentials are guaranteed by a very small percentage of society, and the rest either work on things that aren’t essential, or are unemployed. And the trend is not stopping – is the economy evolving to the point where the only scarce goods will be space, energy, and raw materials? Are mega-corporations meant to disappear in favor of smaller and more agile economic entities?
• education – with the increase of the availability of free knowledge, will it affect how people learn? Will it mean that people have a smaller core of formal education where they learn how to learn by themselves? Where effective skills will mean more than having attended a certain formal course in getting a job? What new parts will teachers play in this evolution?
• sociology – we’re witnessing a fast evolution of society’s mores – such as the question of homosexual marriages, the part parents have in their children’s education, the equality of opportunities for men and women. Is this a separate phenomenon from the evolution of technology and science, or are they connected?
• philosophy/religion – the dispute between the scientific and religious worldviews (for those who can’t conceive a common ground) is becoming more intense, witness the evolution vs. creationism debate in the USA.
• psychology – if the pace of change is increasing, what will be the impact on individuals? People have been living more competitive and faster lives since the early 20th century, will this trend continue or will more people sidestep it by living less “formal” lives (less income, more free time, etc)?
• law – with all these changes, the legal systems are ever more out of sync with reality, e.g. – copyright law vs. ease of reproducing media; child/parent relations vs. new paradigms such as sex changes, homosexual marriages, etc. Will legal systems evolve faster or become irrelevant?

So, as you see, the “why” and “how” are as important as the “when” and “how fast”. That’s why, together with kindred spirits, I created http://wiki.oneoverzero.org – which serves as a place to think out loud about these issues and create new discussions. We also have a very informal evening every month in Lisbon for a few hours of open discussion. Please join the discussion, either offline or online, all points of view are welcome!