July 2023 - net.wars

The music and the myth

“Do you know anything about the festival, the culture, and movements of the times?” a teenaged friend asked as part of researching Woodstock for an essay.

The reality is that until a few years ago Woodstock only existed in my head because of the movie.

At the time, I was 15. I knew it was happening; I recall hearing on my parents’ car radio that the festival, 100 miles north, was being declared a disaster area.

“Can we go?” I remember inexplicably asking. My parents were immediately dismissive. Smart: we’d just have spent hours pointlessly stuck in traffic.

And that was it, until 1971 or thereabouts, when I saw the movie as a college student. And *that* was it until 2009, when the late, great film critic Roger Ebert picked it for Ebertfest to celebrate the 40th anniversary rerelease, with director Michael Wadleigh present to explain the manual labor required to carve the movie out of 120 miles of footage and invent its split screens and other effects, using razor blades and tape. Today, it would all be done on computers in a fraction of the time.

My Ebertfest account reminds me that faced with the studio’s intention to cut out half his movie despite his contractual “final cut”, Wadleigh stole the film (see also Blake Edwards’ S.O.B. (1981)). He then got his agent to convince the studio that he would set fire to it and himself if they didn’t release it at the full length he intended. Thus was born America’s most successful documentary.

As you might expect, the artist I most remember is Joan Baez, who, surveying the 400,000-person throng while being told she’d close the night’s show, says, “Maybe there’ll be a few more people here by then. I don’t like a puny, little gathering like this.” Later, she brings the house down with just her voice on “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (timecode 0:48).

Soon after that Ebertfest I discovered I knew people who’d gone. The 40th anniversary landed it on the front page of the New York Times. When a friend’s high school-aged kids noticed it, he casually dropped the bomb: “I was there.” Yes, kids, your father was cool, once.

“Was it anything like the movie?” I asked.

“It was more boring. The movie was highlights. You have to remember, it rained for three days and there was nothing to eat.”

In 2018, another friend and I went to see an exhibit of art from Burning Man in Washington, DC.

The art was awesome, but my friend began fretting about the impact on the desert lands where it’s held (also, Fern’s departure point in the movie Nomadland). I explained that the crew spend a post-event month meticulously restoring the desert to pristine condition.

She seemed relieved. “I was at Woodstock.” Decades on, she remained conscious and ashamed of the damage to the surrounding area and the harm done to the local farmers. Most people, she thought, had forgotten that.

It is, however, documented in the movie. Wadleigh and his 16-camera team (which included a young Martin Scorsese) gave over 40% of the finished movie to interviews with organizers, audience members, and local residents. Over the days, the locals’ attitudes noticeably shift from welcoming to frustrated as the festival bursts its banks and gives up trying to charge admission, and supplies run out.

My friend was right, though; most people remember just the music and the myth. Few notable musicians missed it: Bob Dylan, despite living nearby at the time; Joni Mitchell, who later wrote a song about it; The Beatles; The Rolling Stones. Not in the movie were musicians booked to appear on substages, as I learned when one of my favorite folksingers, the late Ed Trickett, explained in interviews in 2016 and 2017 that he was meant to accompany Rosalie Sorrels on a rained-out sub-stage intended to feature folk music. His experience was certainly different from those starving in the mud: helicoptered in from the performer hotel.

But, as Arlo Guthrie said at the time, that’s not what I came here to talk about.

It is even clearer in retrospect how much Woodstock was shaped by protest against the Vietnam war. The organizers’ repeated pride that 400,000 mostly young people could assemble for three days of “peace and music” is a direct oppositional response to the violence elsewhere. The hair lengths some local residents comment on were as much about visually rejecting the military as rebelling against the clean-cut, nicely-clothed corporate workers their middle class parents intended them to be. This is the serious underpinning that made Woodstock more than a music festival, and gave extra juice to that giant audience shouting “FUCK!” as Country Joe McDonald introduced the explicitly anti-war Fixin’-to-Die Rag. Ebertfest’s 2009 theaterful joined in lustily.

By 1995, when Ebert rereviewed the movie for its 25th anniversary (he revisited it yet again on its 35th anniversary in 2005) the movie’s creation of the festival’s mythic status had become clear. Without the movie, as Ebert said, the festival itself would be a mostly-forgotten “rock concert that produced some recordings”. No publicly celebrated 40th anniversary, and if my friend’s kids ever did hear their father had been there, they would have said, “So lame”.

The only way I can imagine a modern event of similar impact would be if it took place in Russia and the audience was filled with people opposing the war in Ukraine. They would need a characteristic I’m not sure exists in the world any more: a real belief that ending all war was possible.

Illustrations: Aerial shot of the festival from Woodstock.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Follow on Mastodon.

Book review: Beyond Measure

Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement
Author: James Vincent
Publisher: Faber and Faber
ISBN: 978-0-571-35421-4

In 2022, then-government minister Jacob Rees-Mogg proposed that Britain should return to imperial measurements – pounds, ounces, yay Brexit! This was a ship that had long since sailed; 40-something friends learned only the metric system at school. Even those old enough to remember imperial measures had little nostalgia for them.

As James Vincent explains in Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement, and as most of us assume instinctively, measuring physical objects began with comparisons to pieces of the human body: feet, hands, cubits (elbow to fingertip), fathoms (the span of outstretched arms). Other forms of measurement were functional, such as the Irish collop, the amount of land needed to graze one cow. Such imprecise measurements had their benefits, such as convenient availability and immediately understandable context-based value.

Quickly, though, the desire to trade led to the need for consistency, which in turn fed the emergence of centralized state power. The growth of science increased the pressure for more and more consistent and precise measurements – Vincent spends a chapter on the surprisingly difficult quest to pin down a number we now learn as children: the temperature at which water boils. Perversely, though, each new generation of more precise measurement reveals new errors that require even more precise measurement to correct.

The history of measurement is also the history of power. Surveying the land enabled governments to decide its ownership; the world-changing discovery of statistics and the understanding they brought of social trends, and the resulting empowerment of governments, which could afford to amass the biggest avalanches of numbers.

Perhaps the quirkiest and most unexpected material is Vincent’s chapter on Standard Reference Materials. At the US National Institute for Standards and Measurement, Vincent finds carefully studied jars of peanut butter and powdered radioactive human lung. These, it turns out, provide standards against which manufacturers can check their products.

Often, Vincent observes, changes in measurement systems accompany moments of social disruption. The metric system, for example, was born in France at the time of the revolution. Defining units of measurement in terms of official weights and measures made standards egalitarian rather than dependent on one man’s body parts. By 2018, when Vincent visits the official kilo weight and meter stick in Paris, however, even that seemed too elite. Today, both kilogram and meter are defined in terms of constants of nature – the meter, for example, is defined as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458th of a second (itself now defined in terms of the decay of caesium-133). These are units that anyone with appropriate equipment can derive at any time without needing to check it against a single stick in a vault. Still elite, but a much larger elite.

But still French, which may form part of Rees-Mogg’s objection to it. And, possibly, as Vincent finds some US Republicans have complained, *communist* because of its global adoption. Nonetheless, and despite anti-metric sentiments expressed even by futurists like Stewart Brand, the US is still more metric than most people think. The road system’s miles and retail stores’ pounds and ounces are mostly a veneer; underneath, industry and science have voted for global compatibility – and the federal government has, since 1893, defined feet and inches by metric units.

The safe place

For a long time, fear that technical decisions – new domain names ($)(, cooption of open standards or software, laws mandating data localization – would splinter the Internet. “Balkanize” was heard a lot.

A panel at the UK Internet Governance Forum a couple of weeks ago focused on this exact topic, and was mostly self-congratulatory. Which is when it occurred to me that the Internet may not *be* fragmented, but it *feels* fragmented. Almost every day I encounter some site I can’t reach: email goes into someone’s spam folder, the site or its content is off-limits because it’s been geofenced to conform with copyright or data protection laws, or the site mysteriously doesn’t load, with no explanation. The most likely explanation for the latter is censorship built into the Internet feed by the ISP or the establishment whose connection I’m using, but they don’t actually *say* that.

The ongoing attrition at Twitter is exacerbating this feeling, as the users I’ve followed for years continue to migrate elsewhere. At the moment, it takes accounts on several other services to keep track of everyone: definite fragmentation.

Here in the UK, this sense of fragmentation may be about to get a lot worse, as the long-heralded Online Safety bill – written and expanded until it’s become a “Frankenstein bill”, as Mark Scott and Annabelle Dickson report at Politico – hurtles toward passage. This week saw fruitless debates on amendments in the House of Lords, and it will presumably be back in the Commons shortly thereafter, where it could be passed into law by this fall.

A number of companies have warned that the bill, particularly if it passes with its provisions undermining end-to-end encryption intact, will drive them out of the country. I’m not sure British politicians are taking them seriously; so often such threats are idle. But in this case, I think they’re real, not least because post-Brexit Britain carries so much less global and commercial weight, a reality some politicians are in denial about. WhatsApp, Signal, and Apple have all said openly that they will not compromise the privacy of their masses of users elsewhere to suit the UK. Wikipedia has warned that including it in the requirement to age-verify its users will force it to withdraw rather than violate its principles about collecting as little information about users as possible. The irony is that the UK government itself runs on WhatsApp.

Wikipedia, Ian McRae, the director of market intelligence for prospective online safety regulator Ofcom, showed in a presentation at UKIGF, would be just one of the estimated 150,000 sites within the scope of the bill. Ofcom is ramping up to deal with the workload, an effort the agency expects to cost £169 million between now and 2025.

In a legal opinion commissioned by the Open Rights Group, barristers at Matrix Chambers find that clause 9(2) of the bill is unlawful. This, as Thomas Macaulay explains at The Next Web, is the clause that requires platforms to proactively remove illegal or “harmful” user-generated content. In fact: prior restraint. As ORG goes on to say, there is no requirement to tell users why their content has been blocked.

Until now, the impact of most badly-formulated British legislative proposals has been sort of abstract. Data retention, for example: you know that pervasive mass surveillance is a bad thing, but most of us don’t really expect to feel the impact personally. This is different. Some of my non-UK friends will only use Signal to communicate, and I doubt a day goes by that I don’t look something up on Wikipedia. I could use a VPN for that, but if the only way to use Signal is to have a non-UK phone? I can feel those losses already.

And if people think they dislike those ubiquitous cookie banners and consent clickthroughs, wait until they have to age-verify all over the place. Worst case: this bill will be an act of self-harm that one day will be as inexplicable to future generations as Brexit.

The UK is not the only one pursuing this path. Age verification in particular is catching on. The US states of Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Montana, and Utah have all passed legislation requiring it; Pornhub now blocks users in Mississippi and Virginia. The likelihood is that many more countries will try to copy some or all of its provisions, just as Australia’s law requiring the big social media platforms to negotiate with news publishers is spawning copies in Canada and California.

This is where the real threat of the “splinternet” lies. Think of requiring 150,000 websites to implement age verification and proactively police content. Many of those sites, as the law firm Mischon de Reya writes may not even be based in the UK.

This means that any site located outside the UK – and perhaps even some that are based here – will be asking, “Is it worth it?” For a lot of them, it won’t be. Which means that however much the Internet retains its integrity, the British user experience will be the Internet as a sea of holes.

Illustrations: Drunk parrot in a Putney garden (by Simon Bisson; used by permission).

Solidarity

Whatever you’re starting to binge-watch, slow down. It’s going to be a long wait for fresh content out of Hollywood.

Yesterday, the actors union, SAG-AFTRA, went out on strike alongside the members of the Writers Guild of America, who have been “>walking picket lines since May 2. Like the writers, actors have seen their livelihoods shrink as US TV shows’ seasons shorten, “reruns” that pay residuals fade into the past, and DVD royalties dry up, while royalties from streaming remain tiny by comparison. At the Hollywood and Levine podcast, the veteran screenwriter Ken Levine gives the background to the WGA’s action. But think of it this way: the writers and cast of The Big Bang Theory may be the last to share fairly in the enormous profits their work continues to generate.

The even bigger threat? AI that makes it possible to capture the actor’s likeness and then reuse it ad infinitum in new work. This, as Malia Mendez writes at the LA Times, is the big fear. In a world where Harrison Ford at 80 is making movies in which he’s aged down to look 40 and James Earl Jones has agreed to clone his voice for reuse after his death, it’s arguably a rational big fear.

We’ve had this date for a long time. In the late 1990s I saw a demonstration of “vactors” – virtual actors that were created by scanning a human actor moving in various ways and building a library of movements that thereafter could be rendered at will. At the time, the state of the art was not much advanced from the liquid metal man in Terminator 2. Rendering film-quality characters was very slow, but that was then and this is now, and how long before rendering moving humans can be done in high-def in real-time at action speed?

The studios are already pushing actors into allowing synthesized reuse. California law grants public figures, including actors, publicity rights that prevent the commercial use of their name and likeness without consent. However, Mendez reports that current contracts already require actors to waive those rights to grant the studios digital simulation or digital creation rights. The effects are worst in reality television, where the line is blurred between the individual as a character on a TV show and the individual in their off-screen life. She quotes lawyer Ryan Schmidt: “We’re at this Napster 2001 moment…”

That moment is even closer for voice actors. Last year, Actors Equity announced a campaign to protect voice actors from their synthesized counterparts. This week, one of those synthesizers is providing commentary – more like captions, really – for video clips like this one at Wimbledon. As I said last year, while synthesized voices will be good enough for many applications such as railway announcements, there are lots of situations that will continue to require real humans. Sports commentary is one; commentators aren’t just there to provide information, they’re *also* there to sell the game. Their human excitement at the proceedings is an important part of that.

So SAG-AFTRA, like the Writers Guild of America, is seeking limitations on how studios may use AI, payment for such uses, and rules on protecting against misuse. In another LA Times story, Anoushka Sakoui reports that the studios’ offer included requiring “a performer’s consent for the creation and use of digital replicas or for digital alterations of a performance”. Like publishers “offering” all-rights-in perpetuity contracts to journalists and authors since the 1990s, the studios are trying to ensure they have all the rights they could possibly want.

“You cannot change the business model as much as it has changed and not expect the contract to change, too,” SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said yesterday in a speech that has been widely circulated.

It was already clear this is going to be a long strike that will damage tens of thousands of industry workers and the economy of California. Earlier this week, Dominic Patten reported at Deadline that the Association of Movie and Television Producers plans to delay resuming talks with the WGA until October. By then, Patten reports producers saying, writers will be losing their homes and be more amenable to accepting the AMPTP’s terms. The AMPTP officially denies this, saying it’s committed to reaching a deal. Nonetheless, there are no ongoing talks. As Ken Levine pointed out in a pair of blogposts written during the 2007 writers strike, management is always in control of timing.

But as Levine also says, in the “old days” a top studio mogul could simply say, “Let’s get this done” and everyone would get around the table and make a deal. The new presence of tech giants Netflix, Amazon, and Apple in the AMPTP membership makes this time different. At some point, the strike will be too expensive for legacy Hollywood studios. But for Apple, TV production is a way to sell services and hardware. For Amazon, it’s a perk that comes with subscribing to its Prime delivery service. Only Netflix needs a constant stream of new work – and it can commission it from creators across the globe. All three of them can wait. And the longer they drag this out, the more the traditional studios will lose money and weaken as competitors.

Legacy Hollywood doesn’t seem to realize it yet, but this strike is existential for them, too.

Illustrations: SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher, announcing the strike on Thursday.

Watson goes to Wimbledon

The launch of the Fediverse-compatible Meta app Threads seems to have slightly overshadowed the European Court of Justice’s ruling, earlier in the week. This ruling deserves more attention: it undermines the basis of Meta’s targeted advertising. In noyb’s initial reaction, data protection legal bulldog Max Schrems suggests the judgment will make life difficult for not just Meta but other advertising companies.

As Alex Scroxton explains at Computer Weekly, the ruling rejects several different claims by Meta that all attempt to bypass the requirement enshrined in the General Data Protection Regulation that where there is no legal basis for data processing users must actively consent. Meta can’t get by with claiming that targeted advertising is a part of its service users expect, or that it’s technically necessary to provide its service.

More interesting is the fact that the original complaint was not filed by a data protection authority but by Germany’s antitrust body, which sees Meta’s our-way-or-get-lost approach to data gathering as abuse of its dominant position – and the CJEU has upheld this idea.

All this is presumably part of why Meta decided to roll out Threads in many countries but *not* the EU, In February, as a consequence of Brexit, Meta moved UK users to its US agreements. The UK’s data protection law is a clone of GDPR and will remain so until and unless the British Parliament changes it via the pending Data Protection and Digital Information bill. Still, it seems the move makes Meta ready to exploit such changes if they do occur.

Warning to people with longstanding Instagram accounts who want to try Threads: if your plan is to try and (maybe) delete, set up a new Instagram account for the purpose. Otherwise, you’ll be sad to discover that deleting your new Threads account means vaping your old Instagram account along with it. It’s the Hotel California method of Getting Big Fast.

***

Last week the Irish Council for Civil Liberties warned that a last-minute amendment to the Courts and Civil Law (Miscellaneous) bill will allow Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner to mark any of its proceedings “confidential” and thereby bar third parties from publishing information about them. Effectively, it blocks criticism. This is a muzzle not only for the ICCL and other activists and journalists but for aforesaid bulldog Schrems, who has made a career of pushing the DPC to enforce the law it was created to enforce. He keeps winning in court, too, which I’m sure must be terribly annoying.

The Irish DPC is an essential resource for everyone in Europe because Ireland is the European home of so many of American Big Tech’s subsidiaries. So this amendment – which reportedly passed the Oireachta (Ireland’s parliament) – is an alarming development.

***

Over the last few years Canadian law professor Michael Geist has had plenty of complaints about Canada’s Online News Act, aka C-18. Like the Australian legislation it emulates, C-18 requires intermediaries like Facebook and Google to negotiate and pay for licenses to link to Canadian news content. The bill became law on June 22.

Naturally, Meta and Google have warned that they will block links to Canadian news media from their services when the bill comes into force six months hence. They also intend to withdraw their ongoing programs to support the Canadian press. In response, the Canadian government has pulled its own advertising from Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram. Much hyperbolic silliness is taking place –

Pretty much everyone who is not the Canadian government thinks the bill is misconceived. Canadian publishers will lose traffic, not gain revenues, and no one will be happy. In Australia, the main beneficiary appears to be Rupert Murdoch, with whom Google signed a three-year agreement in 2021 and who is hardly the sort of independent local media some hoped would benefit. Unhappily, the state of California wants in on this game; its in-progress Journalism Preservation Act also seeks to require Big Tech to pay a “journalism usage fee”.

The result is to continue to undermine the open Internet, in which the link is fundamental to sharing information. If things aren’t being (pay)walled off, blocked for copyright/geography, or removed for corporate reasons – the latest announced casualty is the GIF hosting site Gfycat – they’re being withheld to avoid compliance requirements or withdrawn for tax reasons. None of us are better off for any of this.

***

Those with long memories will recall that in 2011 IBM’s giant computer, Watson, beat the top champions at the TV game show Jeopardy. IBM predicted a great future for Watson as a medical diagnostician.

By 2019, that projected future was failing. “Overpromised and underdelivered,” ran a IEEE Spectrum headline. IBM is still trying, and is hoping for success with cancer diagnosis.

Meanwhile, Watson has a new (marketing) role: analyzing the draw and providing audio and text commentary for back-court tennis matches at Wimbledon and for highlights clips. For each match, Watson also calculates the competitors’ chances of winning and the favorability of their draw. For a veteran tennis watcher, it’s unsatisfying, though: IBM offers only a black box score, and nothing to show how that number was reached. At least human commentators tell you – albeit at great, repetitive length – the basis of their reasoning.

Illustrations: IBM’s Watson, which beat two of Jeopardy‘s greatest champions in 2011.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Follow on Twitter.