Tag Archives: society

Used books and money left on the street

I have to get something off my chest that has bothered me for quite some time. To start I have to mention that my cousin wrote the fantastic book “Albtraum Sicherheit – Interessen und Geschäfte hinter der Sicherheitspolitik” (nightmare security – interests and business behind the politics of security). The book was available on Amazon from day one and also from day one there were offers for € 0,99 cents of used copies of the book. Leaving the question aside where those used copies came from I want to focus on a more capitalistic aspect of those used books.

Let’s suppose a book costs € 12.99 on the day it is published. Right next to it, Amazon allows a third party store to sell used books. These used books typically start at € 0.99 + € 3.00 shipping.

Why does the used book seller not operate with the following equation in mind:

  € 12.99 cost of the new book
– €   3.00 shipping
– €   3.90 (30% discount towards the price of the new book, assumed a mint condition)
————
€  6.09

This means that even with a 30% discount towards the original price of the book the used book seller could have a 5 times higher revenue to the tune of € 6.09 – € 0.99 = € 5.10

Can someone please explain to me, how it makes sense financially to leave this money on the table? You would still undercut the new version of the book. You would not even have to share the extra revenue with the author or the publisher (which I personally think is a shame, but that’s a different story).

Please leave a comment to get me to understand the thinking behind this!

Censorship – yes or no?

Is it censorship if I’m editing my own hosts file to block websites such as Facebook, Buzzfeed, Upworthy etc.?

I love staying in touch with all my friends, but these sites are really big time sinkholes. There needs to be a better technology to run our social interaction. One that isn’t based on sucking in more and more clicks. But one that is based on true interpersonal value (experiences, recommendations, empathy).

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Surveillance and free human beings

In the past couple of weeks we’ve seen where peoples’ desire for security will lead us: to the surveillance state, as has been revealed by the publication of PRISM.

For me personally it takes me back a bit to what happened surrounding the introduction of the SOPA and ACTA bills. Back then, if you remember, “the whole internet”™ went into an uproar unlike anything ever seen in the technology world. Google went black. Wikipedia went black. Reddit went black. The world pretty much ended according to people who are more than interested in removing any individual rights that may be in the way of the tech industry moving forwards.

Where is the outrage now? Where are the demonstrations now? Where is the political youth opposing this surveillance and promoting a free civilized society based on the rule of law? Unfortunately they are nowhere and here are my thoughts about why:

In the case of the copyright debate the primary reason for the outcry was, just as many colleagues had suspected all along, purely about the filesharing aspect of the privacy debate. None of the true political implications that came along with it. And all the talk about privacy and surveillance state and the likes where smokescreens in order to justify taking away the rights (and by extension the ability to monetize their works) of millions of authors in order to personally not be liable for watching TV series, movies and listening to music without paying for it. Because, in no way would copyright lead to what this article in the guardian talks about and I share a quick quote:

Lavabit has been told that they would face serious criminal sanctions if they publicly discuss what is being done to their company. Thus we get hostage-message-sounding missives like this:

I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on – the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.”

I have been of both sides of the copyright debate: when Napster came out I was just starting out in the industry and felt like the industry kept me out by design. I was happy that something “interrupted them” and “put them in their place” and defended it.

But after slowly making my way into the industry and starting to actually understand how the industry works, how the different institutions function (many of whom I still don’t agree with, but that doesn’t warrant taking away their right to exist!!) and what the struggle being a media creator supporting a family really means, but first and foremost: that the only thing I, as a media creator, have to sell is a license, I have felt the attacks of the copyleft movement to be intimately personal, vile and solely aimed at taking away my possibility to monetize my work. And for musicians and composers who don’t see the media industry as a “late teen/early twenties let’s form a band and play some cool parties for our friends” but as a way of making business with each other and who have spent countless hours practicing, studying, throwing away sketches, being unsatisfied with ideas (in short: artists struggle) it’s not quite as possible to just switch gears and work for a consultancy or social media consultancy company.

A lot of us (media creators) went into this field exactly because it is not possible for us or not desirable to live the kind of life where you have to give up a lot of your own personality and convictions in order to actively be popular and appeal to market interests. We’re all forced by market interests, that I understand. But there’s a difference with sticking to what you believe in and relinquishing it in order to “not offend”!

Authors rights have given individuals the freedom to live their dreams, to break away from trodden paths, in essence to be truly free human beings. And that is, at least to me, the ultimate goal and worth fighting for.

It can wait.

Ich habe eben die halbe Stunde damit verbracht, diesen Film anzuschauen und wünsche mir, dass jeder der diesen Text liest, das auch tut.

Ja, mir ist bewußt, dass der Film ganz genau extra so gemacht ist, dass er unter die Haut geht. Das ist aber kein Argument, die Aussage des Filmes in irgendeiner Weise in Frage zu stellen.

Und wer jemals geliebt hat, oder jemanden, den er geliebt hat verloren hat, der weiß, was das bedeutet. Und dass nichts auf der Welt wichtiger sein kann, als die um sich haben zu können, die man liebt.

Do you really care about the effects of the web economy?

“Hiding workers behind web forms and APIs,” write Irani and Silberman, “helps employers see themselves as builders of innovative technologies, rather than employers unconcerned with working conditions.”

Here’s another quote from the article. This is from Fancy Hands founder:

Roden did acknowledge that so far, “the Internet hasn’t been some amazing equalizer that we thought it would all be.”

Read the article over on Salon.com

Startups: Innovation Through Inferiority!

I know I write this too often, but I’ve been thinking exactly what this article puts into the right words. Disruption is all fine and dandy, but what does it really do for a society and especially the middle class?

What this means is that Silicon Valley venture-backed startup companies generally make worse, not better products. Their main advantage is that they are cheaper and therefore more accessible to the average person, which enables populist-sounding marketing. So Airbnb is cheaper but worse than a hotel; blogs are cheaper but worse than newspapers; user-generated content in general is free but worse than professionally produced content.

Startups: Innovation Through Inferiority!.

Internet, media, marketing and honesty

Over the past 15 years of using the internet, one of the memes that always comes up is that of “connecting people” and that of getting to the bottom of things, the “spreading of knowledge”.

My experience is a different one: it used to be this way. I remember when researching about my canoo trip in northern Canada, I found lots of really useful pages of people who had done these trips before or who lived in the area and took pleasure in informing. This sort of research has pretty much disappeared from my life, because it’s almost impossible to find valuable information. SEO and bland content farming created a worthless web of information (pardon the pun).

Going hand in hand with this is the delusion of democratizing relationships because you can now directly “connect with your fans”. As this latest story on Mashable about George Takei’s ghostwriter shows, it’s the same as it used to be: the audience is falling for manufactured publicity from professional media creators, only now it’s even harder to recognize and the audience is actively helping to promote it.

I’m sorry, but this doesn’t strike me as a free thinking society but more of a blatant display of how sheepish humans can be and how important it is to be alert and observant.

American ambassador Chris Stevens killed in Libya protest over anti-Islamic movie ridiculing Muhammad

WARNING: the picture linked to below and in the article is very disturbing. Do not click the link to the picture, if you’re easily disturbed. I clicked it and it forced me to write this little article.

I usually try to stay away from world politics and the gruesome pictures and stories that float around. But I do have to get some thoughts out of my mind concerning this picture of ambassador Chris Stevens.

It’s terrible enough, that we have to see pictures of murdered people by mob violence, but what makes this particular picture so incredibly telling is the mobile phone stuck in the persons mouth carrying the ambassador to what I can only assume his last beating to death. Usually when we see pictures of injured human beings they are being helped by the people around them. But in this case the mobile phone stuck in the persons mouth doesn’t speak: “I’m helping this human” it speaks “let’s carry him around a little where there’s better lighting and where we can document our victory over this person”.

I am so disgusted and appalled by this, it’s hard for me to put it into words. And I wish we could educate more people towards staying away from forming mobs to attack individuals. It’s a horrible thing and we as humanity have the opportunity and the awareness to change this. But I have a feeling in order for that to happen, we have to get rid religion as a means to create a sense of identity. We have to get back to just seeing that we’re humans, that we have children and parents that we love more than anything else in the world. And that our neighbor feels the same way about their children and parents. If we can instill that sort of respect and compassion for one another then I feel we could possibly base our actions around achieving a greater goal of freedom together instead of against each other. In short, this is the concept of freedom that Kant was talking about.

But of course those ideals have to be embraced by everyone. Group think will prohibit this way of life.

American ambassador Chris Stevens killed in Libya protest over anti-Islamic movie ridiculing Muhammad.