Preaching to the choir
Only a few people, like Ed Felten and Larry Lessig, have been able to communicate particularly effectively with "outsiders" about what is at stake in the current copyright wars. And even they, when they give speeches, are mostly addressing people who already have at least a passing interest.
Fritz Attaway testified last week that most people would not even notice if the broadcast flag mandate were adopted. While I question this (I think they would feel the impacts, but not know to attribute them to the mandate, any more than most DMCA opponents know to blame Bruce Lehman for that statte), I do sense a serious division between, say, slashdot readers and the general public, or LawMeme readers and the general public, or Freedom to Tinker readers and the general public, or Crypto-Gram readers and the general public.
This was a gap that Cindy Cohn bridged, and everyone working with her bridged, with great success in the Bernstein litigation: even though the "general public" was not thereby enlightened, some corners of the Federal judiciary were enlightened, with extremely remarkable results.
Do you remember when operating system distributors in the U.S. didn't bundle PGP and SSH? I do -- it was five years ago. Thanks, Cindy!
Meanwhile, and famously, the entertainment industries are seizing a vast control over the kind of technology that's readily available to the general public. (Fritz explained at the Berkeley DRM conference that that was all the control they expected to be able to get.) At the same time, people who oppose this are spending hours and hours talking to each other. I'm doing that right this moment. I'm writing a complaint about what Bruce Lehman did to free expression, what he did to free software, what he did to research, and, as Will Rodger observed, what has happened to "intellectual honesty" about technology.
Not only will Bruce Lehman never read this complaint, but this complaint can never be expected to be interesting to anyone outside a circle of people who are already mad at Bruce Lehman.
I have a skepticism of the approach that grounds outreach in "consumer expectations", partly because, as Fred observed, we can't expect in detail things that haven't been invented yet, else they would have been. What we mean by "innovation" is that something we can't identify and haven't experienced is going to be found and is going to be of interest to us -- a peculiar faith indeed, and more surprising than the monument "to the Unknown God".
There are deeper reasons to be concerned about "consumer expectations", and the deepest of these is that they are so malleable. If CEA were to spend a billion dollars on TV advertising to say that you ought to expect to be able to do something, a lot of people would expect to be able to do it. Conversely, without marketing, or in the presence of a sufficiently clever campaign in the other direction, it would never occur to most people that they could "expect" to be able to do the things that new technologies could in principle enable.
In fact, this situation is constantly present outside of the copyright wars. We can do lots of things that we don't do, and there are constantly enormous struggles to redefine "normal" in people's minds. I'm alternately encouraged and terrified by the power of culture and popular opinion, since the world and human civilizations could logically be so different from what they are today.
As I was recently discussing with Rob Hamadi, and as Whit Diffie pointed out last year, we have expectations based on prior experience, but that doesn't really constitute an independent standard for anything. If we've been exposed to a particular lifestyle or technology, we may consider it normal and appropriate; if we haven't, we may not know what we're missing. If Universal City Studios had prevailed against Sony, the world and culture might have been poorer, but there probably wouldn't have been riots in the streets. (This is one of the frustrations of MPAA's argument that the popularity of DVD proves anything. As a technical matter, we could have had things much, much more capable and flexible; as a legal matter, we may yet someday. Already, implementers like the Videolan team in France are demonstrating some of the innovation which is possible outside the constraints of a DVD CCA license. But there are no riots against DVD CCA -- just a few small pickets -- because most people are usually prepared to choose the path of least resistance in the marketplace.)
And all this gets back to the observation about the gap, the gap which means that only people who already agree with me (or maybe one or two who are paid to disagree) are likely ever to read these paragraphs at all. I'm reminded of something I've quoted a number of times before:
Tum Africanus: "Sentio," inquit, "te sedem etiam nunc hominum ac domum contemplari; quae si tibi parva, ut est, ita videtur, haec caelestia semper spectato, illa humana contemnito! Tu enim quam celebritatem sermonis hominum aut quam expetendam consequi gloriam potes? Vides habitari in terra raris et angustis in locis et in ipsis quasi maculis, ubi habitatur, vastas solitudines interiectas eosque, qui incolunt terram, non modo interruptos ita esse, ut nihil inter ipsos ab aliis ad alios manare possit, sed partim obliquos, partim transversos, partim etiam adversos stare vobis; a quibus expectare gloriam certe nullam potestis."(Cicero, de Re Publica, VI, 20)
The key part of Cicero's image for me is the "raris et angustis in locis, quasi maculis, vastas solitudines interiectas [esse]", that they live in isolated and narrow places, practically spots on the face of the Earth, and vast deserts stretch between them. So we have human habitation reduced to little dots on a ball. Practically pinpricks on the surface of a ball.
Demographically, that's not quite true, if it ever was, and physically now we have the ability to come across the cosmos in a little under an hour (well, almost!). We can even read the regular commentary of an Iraqi living in Baghdad. But how many people are doing that?
I have this strong sense of a general lack of outreach and a general insularity -- maybe I should say "macularity". We have the technical infrastructure to talk to millions of people, but somehow lack the means of getting their attention.
I went and spent hours two weeks ago giving a detailed presentation about tech mandates at SVLUG, which may have been useful in the sense that many people in the audience may have been able to do something with that information, but I suspect every single one of them already opposed tech mandates and anticircumvention and already knew what both of those things are. If I walked down the street in the Mission, could I find anyone (except that one guy in a Debian t-shirt over there) who knows what anticircumvention is or even what the difference between a copyright, a patent, and a trademark is?
Fritz is right to say that people in that situation won't know the broadcast flag is there, but wrong to suggest that they won't be affected by it.
In the past, I've thought that it's a serious problem simply that technical skills are today such an unusual and specialized thing to possess -- and that the concepts of programming and communications technology are not yet public knowledge. I've been influenced by the "literacy" metaphor to say that today we have a problem in that most Americans know how to read and write English but not yet how to read and write computer software. And there is in principle no reason to believe today that people who can be taught to read English cannot be taught to read Python. There are just enormous practical barriers to actually making this happen.
Most of these barriers are themselves cultural, not physical. In other times and places, people have learned skills which are much more different from what they routinely learn here and now than is computer programming! In Soviet Russia, the level of understanding of mathematics and physics demanded of ordinary students -- and, as far as I can tell at this tremendous remove, actually exhibited by them -- was astonishing.
But of course, it's one thing to insist that 70% of Americans, or Chinese, could be literate enough to write their own computer software (or that 70% of some population could be literate enough to write their own letters) and another thing to try to imagine how that kind of literacy could actually be developed, and exactly what else we would have to give up to make it happen. I could try to start teaching a weekend class, which, absent some kind of incredible marketing genius, would presumably attract exactly those children who already self-identify as technical. Perhaps they would be the proverbial "low-hanging fruit", and perhaps that means that this is exactly the right idea as a first step.
I do have a fear, which I've expressed many times here, that as long as programming is seen as esoteric, difficult, magical, and to be performed only by specialists, there will never develop a relationship to technology which makes it a subject of useful substantive discussion rather than nervous jokes by most people. And as long as software is seen as a commodity, delivered in a box and opaquely, it will never be widely recognized as speech deserving useful first amendment protection even if someone's economic interests are at risk. It seems essential to me that there should be a broad transformation in which harnessing the remarkable power of computing to any individual's purposes be made just as routine, and just as insisted upon, as literacy in natural languages.
Then we could forget, as programmers all seem to have forgotten, that spoken language predated written language, or that written language was a product of someone's conscious effort; we could rediscover these things, and be astonished by them, and speculate on their implications.
I would welcome other people's suggestions on what might be possible either to promote any of these transformations or to try to deal with the macularity problem and stop everyone from preaching to the choir all the time. Wars ought to be a sobering reminder that a failure of effective communication doesn't just mean bad political outcomes at the ordinary scale, with a loss of freedom that you can nonetheless survive -- it means children torn into little pieces in front of their families, prisoners raped and tortured, and everyone nearby breathing poisons even if only conventional weapons are used. It means the original sense of collateral damage: not lawful copying prevented in the pursuit of suppressing unlawful copying, but civilians blown up in the pursuit of destroying military targets. And all that means, as Cindy would be quite literally the first person to remind me, that how many people learn to program is not the most important issue in the world.
