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| Some views on a paradigm |
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08 July 05.
This essay has been edited and aggregated into a longer work entitled Why Word is a terrible program. The artistic viewI believe that question of where the essence of a work lies is arguably the most interesting question one could ask of it. You ask `what moved me about this piece', and often don't have an answer. Its soul turns out not to be located in some atomic homunculus, but in the ineffable combination of a dozen individually lifeless elements.Informational products are well-suited to disaggregation and reaggregation, so the real contribution of the last several decades' worth of IT has been to give us a flood of works whose essence is not easily quantified. The paradigm of the product has moved from the book, which is a fixed, indivisible object, to the song, which is merely a brief view on something for which hundreds of other views exist. More than enough has been written on this. Wired Magazine has an article about remixing this month, which means that I'm about two years behind the times. Lawrence Lessig has built his career on the concept. Here's an inteview withe Negativland members. But I'm gonna keep writing anyway. The consumption viewRemixes were a problem before computers, of course---primarily to the completists. OK, so you bought Nine Inch Nails's Catholic album ("This one act of consecration is what I ask of you./ Ringfinger/ a promise carved in stone/ deeper than the sea." How did anybody ever take this guy to be satanic?) Now, do you buy the EP with a dozen remixes of "Head like a hole", or is the version on the album sufficient? Do you have to buy the Natural Born Killers soundtrack for the vaguely reworked version of that one song where the singer regrets having had sex? ('Grey would be the color/ if I had a heart.')The remix shows us that the concept of `a song' is meaningless, in a manner that the concept of `a book' is not. Most consider Penguin's edition of a book to be the same book as the Viking edition---you probably do have the single version and the album version of a few songs, but how many editions of your favorite novel do you have? The song has always been like this, by the way: even before multitrack recording, we knew that the sheet music and the performance must be combined to create the work, and neither is necessarily the true essence of the performance. At least back in the day, there was a single moment when everybody was in the same room and playing in concert. If somebody can find me a link, I'd be grateful, but I think Kevin Smith (director of Clerks and its sequels) said something like "Never underestimate the American desire to own stuff." He was talking about how downloading stuff online was a shadow threat because people don't just want a track, they want to own a shiny plastic box with liner notes and at least some sense of permanence.(1) But a view is almost by definition impermanent, and there are a hundred more where it came from--and thanks to ProTools(2) they're cheap to produce, package, and vend. There may be a fundamental, permanent root somewhere, marks on tape made when Trent Reznor's hands first gracefully caressed the keys of his Casio, but it won't be recognizable as the song we bought, and we consumers can't have it. Instead we get this month's edition of the album, which next month will be remixed and remastered with bonus trax. The sense of permanence from the goods we consume is gone. The workflow viewAudacity is a nice example of a program which is built around facilitating multiple views of a work. There's a visual representation of the sound and of course the noise the thing makes. The data is multilayered, and you can view/hear the final work with some layers processed, muted, inverted, et cetera. Users of the GIMP or Photoshop are familiar with the same process: there are all these layers, and each can be viewed differently, separated, processed. With both the visual and audio versions, the base version holds much more information than the final view. Databases have what is literally called a view, but even when you're not using one, you're still thinking in terms of the root data existing in the database and what's on the screen being a slice of it. The root data needs to be taken care of, but mangle the view all you want; it's disposable. HTML is plain text but then viewed via a cute renderer. File browsers give you a dozen perspectives on the same pile of bits. Almost all information processing in all media takes the views-of-base-data form. But there are three hard-and-fast exceptions to the paradigm: spreadsheets, word processors, and presentation software. There is a picture of the page on the screen, and that's the document. There are few ways to view the work differently when you're working on it than when the final output will be printed or displayed on somebody else's screen. With due creativity, you can find the outline view or other marginal shifts, but for the most part, these systems work by vehemently insisting that there be only one view. All of the document's information is present in all versions. And that, dear reader, is why Word is a terrible program (and OpenOffice.org at best a half-step better): it constrains the user in the classical paradigm of "one work, one view". How do we resolve the philosophical conundrum of where the essence of the work lies? Oh, it's right there on the screen. Can I distribute drastically different views of the same work to different people? They would just be two different works. When I present to the world congress, is there a clean version that I can use? Nah, just hit F9 to blow up your working copy to full-screen size. This is clearly what many people wanted, and most are happy with it. The two-bit philosophy questions of where the essence of the work lies evaporate; the conceptual structure of a root object which is viewed in different ways flattens out; our documents are just like they were in the 70s, but backlit. But being stuck in the seventies means that there is a clear and evident ceiling in efficacy, because the ideal view for working on a project matches the output view in only the most simple and lucky of circumstances.(3) All of which is to say: I'm sick of my coworkers sending me gigantic data sets in spreadsheet form. Since the data can't be extracted from the view, I can't look at it differently from how they do. On the plus side, Apophenia now has a few nice spreadsheet-format to database functions. HTML gives us some hope for the future here, becuase the actual work is done in a markup language, and then there are hundreds of possible views of that marked-up text---and people have no problem with the concept. One person can read the work on his telephone, and one can hear it on her text-to-speech reader, and both agree that they've read the same document. The legal viewThe other impediment to the progress of the `root data with multiple views' paradigm is legal. A song consists of notes played by an individual at different intervals, written by somebody else, recorded by an engineer, who laid it down onto twenty-four tracks, which were then mixed down into a single song. The current court opinon is that three seconds of one of those tracks is a copyrightable work by itself. That is, every particle of a work holds the work's essence equally.In the long run, this is probably not a tenable position, because it is clearly not the case that any three seconds of any work hold the essence, as a host of samplers have shown (how about Tricky's "Pumpkin", or the Verve pulling from the Rolling Stones). It's sort of an unpleasant legal patch to make up for the fact that the correct law, which states that only those elements which hold the essence of the work may be copyrighted, is entirely untenable. [I guess any element of some works do all hold the essence. Can't remember the name of the video game, but it was about mobsters. At the beginning of the level, it plays the first three beats from Nino Rota's Godfather theme ("Speak softly", then it abruptly cuts off.) For the rest of the game, you've got that song stuck in your head. All very legal, because three chords does not a copyright make, yet to hear only the first three chords to the Godfather theme and not think the rest of the tune is impossible, for those three notes do hold the essence of the theme.(4)] Elements of a work are lifted all the time without the law getting involved. A few years ago, Jay-Z became a hit with stop-start basslines that are painfully undanceable, and soon every hip hopper was doing it. When you hear a song from the Eighties, you know it's an Eighties number, even if it's a B-side by the Thrashing Doves. [Really, they had a video on MTV.] Elements are emulated; nobody gets sued. A baseline rule for a good law is that it should be clear to the potential lawbreaker from the start, without the need for clarifying cease-and-desist letters. [More on this next time as well.] So if a work is not an atomic object like a book, but is instead a view on a dozen ineffable elements, how much imitation is a clear infringement? An alternate view? Seven out of twelve ineffable elements? As the reader can plainly see, we're screwed. The only clear line one could really draw is to say that direct imitation of the whole work is infringement and any less is emulation. But even that's a bit slippery---is 95% imitation an infringement? What if we just cut the fadeout? Is replaying the chorus fair use or enough to be considered the entire work? Reproducing an HTML document with a different CSS, or using one person's CSS on somebody else's words? So, here's my prediction for the state of copyright law fifty years from now: more bickering. Software patents, reverse engineering, all those other questions of modern intellectual property are a frigging no-brainer compared to the question of where lies the essence of a creative work, and that means that we can expect that we'll never have a resolution to the legal question of what constitutes infringement. (1) Compare with Prince, who said that music should be like a newspaper. (Again, two bonus points to anybody who can offer a link.) (2) ProTools is an audio mixing program, which has won many awards for non-descriptive, generic naming. Audacity does the same thing in a nice, communist package. (3) Ever notice how I make too many snarky parentheticals for my own good? In a multiple-view system, I can put all my expletives in comments that won't go anywhere near appearing in the final work. That is, a compounding failing of Word is that it won't let me insert the wealth of expletives that it inspires in me. (4) For those who are missing the nuance: play three chords from a composition on your Casio, you're OK. Play three chords from a recording of a musician playing on her Casio, you're a thief. More on this next time.
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