Ellard

OK then got the set worked out. Might need to change the order but basically it.

• Carry On Experimental Musician / Titanic the Opera (medley)
• Hungry Jacks (Look Mum I’m a Video Artist Remix)
• Ken Burns Effect
• Putin / North Korean News Service
• Nurse! Nurse!
• Chocolate Caller
• I Know How to Abase Myself (Hillsong Blues)
• Seal

A lot of these are further refinements of the Wagga set, via the Perth set and now in Wollongong! Woo! I finally show my chopped up Wollongong TV shit in Wollongong, pity that I have pulled out most of the adverts because I got sick of them (hell maybe I’ll stick a few back in just because - it’s Wollongong).

But the first couple are new. I think I got carried away (ha) editing Carry On Doctor into single frames and used up what time I have left after being Professor Boofhead. But also I think it’s great that I can get so many hours of video art out of one 15 second Hungry Jacks commercial. Very green don’t you think?

Details - go here.

http://www.1-4inch.com/events.html

In saying that I don’t understand what’s generally known as the ‘right wing’ mentality, I’m not prejudging it, rather my own lack of understanding. Many intelligent and effective people obviously believe in it, and so there must be some substance. Only a fool decides their intellectual opponents are stupid, and deserves the drubbing they get. So, while this is about ‘the right wing’ it’s more about my attempt to understand.

What is the ‘right wing’? It’s not a single thought, so you have to read multiple authors, from Ayn Rand*, to this great comic by Steve Ditko. Although this is only one extreme of the position, I think ‘compassionate conservatives’ and ‘neoconservatives’ have different flavours. I can use it as example. In the ‘objectivist’ viewpoint there’s either a deeper thought that’s not clear, or it seems to come down to I’m great and I’m not sharing my hard earned stuff with those lazy assholes repeated in a 100 ways.

There’s one factor that’s carefully erased from the equation which I’ll call fate. You might scoff at such a concept, call it mystical. But is it any more mystical than the claim in these writings that anyone who strives will succeed? Strive, succeed. Take a look around you and the facts are not kind. There are good people at all levels of success and quite a few whose status is based on flatus. If that’s so, then Rand’s superman is a wonderful myth. She was smart enough in her Romantic Manifesto to state the difference between an ideal and a expectation. Others have not been so smart.

You have to start at home - I can definitely admit that my successes have involved support from a community that believed in me. And I can say that no matter how hard I scour it from my own judgements, knowing someone (not necessarily liking them) has affected how I judge them. The idea that effort alone is the key to success is a religious belief. Yet the basis of so much thinking in government and the community.

Here’s another factor - talent. Talent is a hard thing to define but I think we can at least accept that it’s there when you are born and not something that can be installed later - which is a skill. I think that the objectivists would agree that their supermen have talent. But then once you bring that in, you have to accept that some people don’t have talent. That is, no matter how many lessons, they’ll never be Picasso. If we’re going to divide people into classes on their skills it’s one thing - there’s always the chance to migrate. If we’re going to use innate talent then we’re using the ‘alphas’ and ‘betas’ of Huxley’s Brave New World and sliding from a moral position (work harder and you’ll succeed) to a hierarchy of physical types. To their credit few conservatives are prepared to go that far - at least in public.

Conservatism is often set in opposition to socialism which in some places is code for a moral failure. I find this strange, particularly in the United States which was formed by small mutually supportive communities based around a church. The ritual of ‘barn raising’ is illustrative. In the small rural community, the active men and women joined together regularly to build a barn structure (an essential for life) for one of their members. They did that knowing that next year it might be their turn to have the community assist them. In a country where many millions live, and work is not always physical, that process has streamlined into contributions of income. But it is at heart essentially the same. Next year it may be your barn.

It’s only fair to try raise some of the counter claims.

Sure, income distribution allows people to be lazy (Bismark designed it that way). Actually it allows people other than the wealthy to be lazy - wealth hasn’t been a very good predictor of hard work. The argument seems to be they are poor because they are lazy - as proved by them being poor. Just so.

The unfortunately named ‘trickle down effect’ has been in effect for quite some time now. The idea - give the leaders a lot more and they will provide more for all those below them. It seemed to have some basis over the years when things were going good. An extra million for the boss and the worker got a plasma TV. Right now when things are definitely not going well, why does this system have no connection with the downturn? Could it be that other more important processes have a larger impact than the bosses’ paycheck?

Pushing it further - doesn’t there seem to be an element of sacrificing at an altar in this idea? Cut a chicken’s throat on the altar of Baal, or award an extra few million to the CEO, same primitive impulse to appease the irrational?

Perhaps some more reading will clear up these concerns. I’m still interested in the idea of ‘compassionate conservatism’ whatever that might be. Maybe it’s just another version of the vague ‘Third Way’ that seems to be replacing socialism in a few places. It’s easy to take an extreme but the language is so woolly in the middle it’s hard to keep an open mind.

* Disclaimer - always referred to by my parents as ‘Anus’.

In 1994, (it might have been 1993 it’s hard to remember…) Nintendo Magazine ran a spread on a forthcoming game. There was a bit of 3D and a few screen shots and some quotes for the team that was working on the title. 14 years later I am still struggling with the same game. That is, three years more than Duke Nukem Forever, which is supposedly the most hilariously delayed game of all time. We’re obviously not such a meme, but still win on pathetic.

What is this game and why is it older than some people you know? Why start it and why not finish it? Sit yourselves around the electric heater and we’ll have a tale.

We started with an idea loosely based around J.G. Ballard’s High Rise (stop snickering down the back it’s not pretentious - that’s an action packed tome well worthy of gamedom). Back then the idea was to have a series of rendered static images, between which the character would travel first person. The game Myst was a recent technical marvel and people were impressed by computer graphics with little bits of QuickTime to add occasional movement. This is what the magazine described, an adventure game. We were quite busy building 3D objects trying to match up the scale when DOOM was released.

I can recall quite clearly downloading DOOM from a BBS and seeing the 3D view, thinking OK that’s very clever - then moving my mouse and having it unexpectedly revolve around the screen. I don’t think I can convey how surprising that was. Followed by the thought … we’re fucked. DOOM was the death of polite little pre-rendered adventures. The team disbanded. (Greets to Jason and Fincher, nice you have real work now.)

VRML as a relic of Early Internet.

In 1996 or thereabouts the first free Virtual Reality Modelling Language tools started to appear on the web (BBS was now web… things used to move fast back then). SGI made the best tools but many different companies later joined in including Microsoft (with Chrome) and Adobe (with Atmosphere). It looked like a 3D version of HTML was on the way up and I started to try bits of code and some models. Back then display cards were not very powerful and a getting a vile green rotating doughnut up on screen was a big thing. VRML had one advantage - the sound handling was great, not only positional 3D audio but with cardioid sound from each source. However VRML had many more problems. No two authoring tools agreed on the format and what worked on one wouldn’t load in another. As an interpreted script VRML was slow, so slow that sounds would fall out of sync depending on the speed of the processor.

I showed off a few concepts at conferences at the time. The project was then called 1001 Recorders. The idea was to have sound sources that the player could hunt and collect and combine to make music - not unlike Fluid which was on the first Sony Playstation. Actually a lot like Fluid. I liked Fluid too much. When at a conference I was asked doubtfully why anyone would want to collect and combine music in 3D, it warned me that I needed a better basic reason for a game.

This is Early Internet.
People inventing solutions for problems no one has.

Trying to get sounds to sync was a big problem and beyond my skills. Even on the fastest machines there’d be a dreadful phasing, probably one reason why VRML was soon abandoned by everyone in favour of X3D - a simpler language with no sound at all. So I started to look around for a better underlying technology and found MPEG4.

Many paths, no truth.

These days people forget that MPEG4 was supposed to be more than a video format. It is multitrack and has a 3D channel, synthetic sound (based on CSOUND), sprites, text and much more. Probably because almost no-one could find a reason to implement the whole thing. IBM had a go, a few others. I was thrilled to think of 3D objects to which you could attach multitrack streaming sound - which would keep time. It really was like stringing speakers around a virtual space. And I waited for tools. And waited.

It became obvious that it was never going to happen. I switched to QuickTime and bought some software called Axel3D that could be used as a 3D track in a QT stream. Axel went bankrupt. I blew a grand on a system called Anark. Anark Corp. decided that airline safety was going to be their main focus and cut out their small customers, (of course airline safety is very Anarchic). I spent way too much on a zoo of different technologies. All dead ends.

Sometimes reality takes a while to reach the brain of a romantic fool:

• Real Time 3D over the web was a dead duck.
• I’d lost my vision - devising a reason for the technology rather than vice versa.
• Nevertheless it was urgent that I find a new mode of expression as music albums were dying.

Thinking back on High Rise it was suddenly obvious how that game should procede: The Sims Meets Doom. You socialise at parties meeting people and influence them (The Sims) into raiding parties on upper and lower floors of the high rise building (Doom). Taking two of the world’s most successful franchises and combing them will make somebody very wealthy - but it’s not going to be me. (You maybe - steal the idea!)

Meanwhile it was time to find employment and avoid starvation, and this was a very depressing period, because everyone (including you) has to realise one day that they just aren’t talented enough to follow up all their ideas. And the question needed to be rethought - why do this? What is the artistic merit? Is this something that will entertain anybody?

Arse Kick.

It was now the 2000’s and teaching was paying for food. I’d started to collect images that resonated - images that told a story. The idea was to create an ideal personal hell in which drama could take place. Evereybody has inner demons that energise their work and it was a question of finding mine. They included Tiger Balm Gardens, Fun Fairs, Aeroplanes, Pilots and more. But making a pinup wall is not enough… you need a kick in the arse. Or several. I got several.

• In researching a commercial video installation I looked into world fairs - particularly the 1930 New York World’s fair. And there was something very dark and mysterious there. World Fairs are Eros and Thanatos.
• I went back to university. I had to make up some video poetry for a course and in about a week (after all those years) came up with Lives of the Saints - drawing upon the images I had collected. Prominent was aircraft. This was obviously something that needed some further exploration.
• The Australia Council sent out requests for applications for an online artwork to be diplayed in Second Life. I hated Second Life and didn’t want to do it - then I had a dream about an aircraft graveyard and had a great idea… which I decided was not going to be in Second Life but…

And then I saw Bioshock. Never mind the game play, which doesn’t interest me much. The ATMOSPHERE. Lighting, music, design. It reaches some artistic level that makes a fantasy real. Obviously a game can be filmic.

3D is the problem.

Which inspired buying yet another 3D technology called Unity 3D which is very good, much better than all the tools I suffered over the last decade (and we use it at work so a good choice). But when trying to build the sets for my idea, the results just kept being flat… especially compared to Lives of The Saints. This is not the fault of the software - this is because after all this time I realised that what I want is essentially photographic. And every time I start to make it 3D modelled, it drifts away from this ideal. That’s a worry when you think about time (perhaps) misspent. Understanding can take 14 years.

Now I am working on photographs. That are immersive. And we arrive back at Myst. There’s many lessons here, one of them must be to stay true to the muse, and not the canvas.

Comment from Anonymous:

Aren’t you the same guy as Thomas Dolby? I thought I saw somebody say that on YouTube, just asking cause I thought I would ask you should make more videos for your Thomas Dolby stuff than the Ellard stuff cause I think it’s better! K.Thx.

Comment from Anonymous:

I wonder if you can help me. I have a university assignment due next week on ‘music movements of the 1980s’. I tried your web site (the tutor said it would be a good place to start) but I don’t really get what you are saying. Is it OK if I can send you the essay questions and you could write some stuff for me (I would rewrite it so that would be my words so that’s not like I was using yours or anything) about the topic???? It’s only 3000 words. That would be really fantastic! BTW my uncle really liked your band.

Comment from Anonymous:

so wtf U sound like afx twin stop ripping people off I hate all you fucking afx wannaBs afx is a REAL ARTIST U should make yr own music not try b AFX AND FAIL

Comment from Anonymous:

V I A G R A

Comment from Anonymous:

Hello! We are making an underground radio programme across all of Poland and into the Russia. We play only industrial sounds and hard music. If you wanna donate your music (must be hard! and industrial!) to be played by us you send your CDs to ***** at address ********

Comment from Anonymous:

I wanted to buy your Ear Bitten record from your website but now you don’t sell it. Why? I have been buying your stuff for years but you just lose a customer! Just when I have my money ready, you go and delete it and so I am going to OINK where I can get your music and not have to pay so next time think twice before deleting stuff you arrogant prick.

Comment from Anonymous:

FUCK U! R SHIT!

Comment from Anonymous:

Hey tom - we are putting together a showcase night in August for electronic bands and wondered if Severed Heads would reform for the night? We’d offer you a great support spot and we’d make sure that you got a split of any money we make on the night. One of us spins the alternative show on RRR at midnight on Tuesdays so we would be prmoting the gig pretty heavy beforehand - it’ll be huge! If you want to be involved then please sign up on our Myspace page - ********.myspace.com.au - see you there buddy!

Comment from Anonymous:

Can I get the Adenoids from you for discount? I do not wan to pay this much.

Fans of the music group Meat Beat Manifesto have sighed with inter-connected online relief with the recent release of the new album Autoimmune. ‘There was some pretty heavy rumours going around’, said MBM KLUB spokesperson Tim ‘Death’ Whinson. ‘Some blog had said that there was going to be changes, that the sound was going to be developed in some way. And that’s something we won’t tolerate’.

In fact, the fear has been ungrounded. The new album sounds pretty much the same as every album released by the band in over a decade. Tim explains over a burger at the local McDonald’s: ‘You get used to something. You rely on it to be the same. It means something to know exactly what comes next, to be able to know there will be a shortwave radio sample coming up at the end of the next bar - and it’s there. The world seems balanced. And fair.’

But surely listeners might want to hear refinements, developments, new ideas? Self confessed ‘lunatic fan’ Jesse Hartbutt disagrees, with low level wailing and a spastic head motion. ‘No. No. No. No change ever. If you want change, you find another band. You transfer your trust there. But MY band, no, it stays the same.’ She pauses for thought. ‘Or I hunt them down’.

We asked Tim to describe what it was that he expected. ‘Well at the start of the CD there always has to be an intro section, with some shortwave radio stations through reverb. Then there are high pitched filter sweeps through dub echoes. They can add a drum machine loop - but not too loud. A voice from an old movie has to mutter some heavy dialogue. That section has to stop with a big analogue delay and then join up with the next section which has to start with a big funky drummer sample. Then a bass loop. Only then can they bring in samples from a hilarious hard to find 70’s op shop record. Not before. Now we can have the shortwave radio samples back. There has to be a slight pause before we get the ragga vocals. This has to repeat. I mean it’s much more defined than that, but I’m keeping it simple for you.’

Surely this is proscriptive to the point of autism? ‘Yeah well I’m proud of that spectrum. As is everybody I know’.

To be fair it’s not just the MBM fanatics that have strong expectations. We talked to Bertrand & Gertrude Shuddle, a couple that are dedicated to downloading experimental music from the net. ‘I have 600 hours of experimental music stored on my hard drive as FLAC files’ says Bertrand. ‘I have catagorised it into Jazz Experimental, Classic Experimental, Japanese Noise and Minimal Synth’. So what of those recordings that don’t fit these catagories? ‘I delete them’, he sneers. ‘They are not experimental enough’.

Next week we’ll be looking at the new boxed LP set from Throbbing Gristle - ‘52 weeks live at the Cheese Factory’. Until then, this has been Alternative Music News, brought to you by Pepsi.

Dear one man and his dog. I apologise for this delay in sequential rubbish.
Rubbish has had to wait while useful things are done.

• Term starts soon, and I am coordinating a wide swarth of video and sound subjects at KUNST KAMP. This means appearing to be sensible, running spreadsheets, typing up memos and carrying impressive amounts of paper up and down the corridor. Especially the last bit.
• I am supposed to know about everything from Elastic Audio in Pro Tools to Expressions in After Effects to camera matching in Maya and today I answered a tricky question about macro lenses in Sony Z1P cameras without dribbling. Brain hurts.
• Got a gig coming up which I have decided is going to be CARRY ON ELECTRO ACOUSTIC MUSICIAN. It has so far involved cutting together every scene with Kenneth Williams in it to get the noises. Next step will have to be MaxMSP you know it makes sense.
• Worked out that real time 3D cannot successfully handle a field of 100+ derelict 747s. And it looks shit. Decided to use QuickTime VR in combination with 3D objects (how?). Did an experiment with rendering a cube in Cinema 4D plunked it into QuickTime VR and it looks good. Figured out a way to do quadraphonic sound. Realised that most places that make QuickTime authoring software listed on Apple’s site went bankrupt years ago, but found an Australian company that still handles it yay.
• Yay Pants.
• I carried so much paper up and down the corridor they hired me again for next year.
• Been a while since I showed this:

Then:

• Teacher: Learn these passages from the Bible by heart.
• Student: I shall sir, but may I enquire as to the reasoning?
• Teacher: This is the way it is done by all, and ye shall not quibble upon it.

Now:

• Teacher: Here is Maya, you’ll be learning that.
• Student: OK, but why Maya?
• Teacher: It’s the industry standard.

Don’t be hard on poor teacher, it is the industry standard. But in tonight’s programme we’ll be asking just what makes something the industry standard? Sex? Drugs? Enormous space ships piloted by toads? Or something less obvious?

Industry standard applications are at first glance an ill sorted lot. For every prissy convoluted overly complex video editing tool there’s an almost Neanderthal audio suite. But after some reflection and much alcohol we can start to invent a common thread. As with Shakespeare’s villains we have a noble figure of humanity, troubled by a fatal flaw, which eventually leads to their failure.

Maya.

If you make 3D for a cinema there’s a 90% chance you use Maya. (Unless you’re one of those crazy bastards that uses Houdini because you also like riding your sports bike off a cliff onto a moving trampoline.) Recently Maya was bought by Autodesk because they wanted to lose money on two major applications instead of just Max.Yes, the leading 3D animation tools lose money hand over fist - the ones that actually sell are the ones that professionals would not touch with a stick. Here we can post a rule:

Rule 1: if it’s easy to use and very affordable it can’t be the industry standard.

The quality of Maya can be seen time and time again in the results. A nobleman among programs. But look at the interface:

Here we have dynamic menus, pop down menus, pop up menus, radial menus, ’shelves’, dialogues, and a really really bad case of iconitus. If this was a teenager it’d be ‘edgy’ or just ‘pimply’. Now I have very little experience with Maya so far and I may be yet to understand but either this interface grew over years of tinkering or the person that invented it has florid hebephrenic schizophrenia. Either way it breaks so many usability and educational concepts it needs a specially minted medal.

Pro Tools LE.

It’s been said before - it needs to be said again. There is a moment when you are teaching Pro Tools when you have to explain that if you have an hour long programme to bounce down and it’s due on air in 45 minutes, it’s Game Over. The student looks at you like you are insane, knowing at least 5 other programs that will export that audio in 5 minutes and asks, what is this?

You’ve got two ways you can run this message. Official: Pro Tools HD is hardware based and LE has to fit in with that and besides running the mix through the hardware insures always that what you hear in the mix down is what you get - no surprises. Alternative: That PT needs to pass that signal through that big fat blue dongle called an M box to make damn sure it’s a legit copy of PT. The student looks at you like you’re a tool either way.

When you get to RTAS, they are questioning you again. Yes that’s right, the effects that you use in Pro Tools only work in Pro Tools. Yes, industry standard means no one else in the industry uses them. No I am not a tool, kindly refrain from looking at me like that.

Rule 2: there has to be some convoluted reason why it won’t work with anyone else’s software.

Fortunately, Apple has come up with Audio Units as part of their ‘we are the computing equivalent of North Korea’ strategy. They make Digidesign look good. Speaking of Apple:

Final Cut Pro.

Most common question in any FCP class: why do we use this when every single other application we use is by Adobe? I have Premiere, why can’t I use that? Can I do this at home on Premiere instead? I tried barking at them but recently a stony silence showing lots of teeth seems to work best.

No kids, you have to pretend that the Pr isn’t next to Ae and Ps in the dock. Final Cut is the industry standard, and it’s much to do with a fight between Apple and Adobe over Intel versions that by a process of attrition let Henny Penny reach the top of the coop. Besides Final Cut is fun to use - it comes with games! Adventure game: move your mouse slowly over the interface looking for hidden features! Puzzle game: using the resize bar at the bottom of the timeline, puzzle out which way the timeline is going to zoom. Gambling game: which way will the fields in your PAL video export flip this time? Wish it came with a shoot ‘em up.

Rule 3: Overcoming arbitrary behaviour of industry standard tools provides teaching businesses with income.

Actually if you just want to edit video efficiently use Vegas.

Photoshop.

Ps is the good guy. The prince charming. If you ever grumble about photoshop then you need to be forced to use an alternative for a few days. That will learn you. If you are very bad we’ll make it The Gimp.

Quark.

Actually this is a cautionary tale. When I was a layout grunt, there was Quark. That was it. When Adobe first brought out Indesign, there was good natured shaking of heads. Everybody used Quark. The printers used Quark. What would you do with Indesign? There would be nowhere to get the damn thing printed! Just as I was ‘being made redundant’, a job came in from somewhere in Asia. An Indesign file. My job was to remake the whole thing in Quark, but we had to get Indesign to open it. It was a bit like Illustrator so that was alright, but no one more senior was going to touch the filthy thing.

Rule 4: Industry standards can change mighty fast.

Not that I am saying I have 8 million dollars to spend. 8 million dollars is just a figure from nowhere OK? How am I going to spend it?

Make A Feature Film.

8 million dollars would only buy Mel Gibson’s lower regions. Our Nicole wouldn’t even attempt her robotic grimace for that much. Our Russ wouldn’t stop singing for more than that. 8 million bucks is what a Hollywood production spends on condoms. And if the film was made in Australia no one will go just to keep up a long standing artistic tradition. You’re dreaming. Making a feature film is a fantasy best kept within the walls of funding councils and kunst kamps.

Start A Record Label.

So that’s; sign a band, put them in a studio, design a package, run a campaign, press up thousands of discs and have it uploaded to a torrent before they even reach a shop. Why not just record your armpit farts and upload that to a torrent? Because you’re going to get just as many listeners, and they’ll all agree that your first armpit fart was better. Record labels are just banks, they loan to make recordings instead of houses. But these days, musically, everybody is living in cardboard boxes, thinking how cheap it is.

Start An Arts Collective.

Being the sugar plum fairy you’ve decided to share your funds with all the local artists. They’ll be able to get the latest gear for nothing and set up their studios in a big warehouse you’re going to buy. It’ll be just one big happy art commune - just like was intended for Apple Corps and American Zoetrope… two great ideas which kept kleptomaniac junkies in hockable goods for a while before the plug was pulled. Yessir, there’s a lot of ‘artists’ out there. If you do go ahead with this always remember to turn the doors around to hinge outwards so they’re harder to kick in.

Burn It.

Famously the KLF took one million pounds in cash and tried to burn it. Surprisingly, it was hard to burn. Unsurprisingly, once the drugs wore off and they found themselves older and fatter with kids, they wondered what the fuck they had done. And the electricity bill is due this week.

Start A Venue.

I don’t know which city you might be in - in this city there’s no venue between tiny and enormous. Every now and then a bright spark gets the idea to start a new venue. For those acts which are between tiny and enormous. God bless them but the question needs to be asked - just why did that kind of venue cease to exist? A little research goes a long way to solving the mystery of the disappearing 8 million. It’s a conundrum wrapped in police uniforms, insurance claims, drug packets, liquor licenses and lots of letterheads. And a lot of nights where the audience is smaller than the number of people in the band.

Give It To The Poor.

Once you hand over 8 million dollars to the poor you’ll be considerably poorer. Save the trouble.

Start Building A Really Weird Ass House And Then Die.

Thank God you’re starting to make some sense. I thought it was going to be stupid all night. This is excellent and two places - the Winchester House and The House On The Rock - by their mere existence stop me from jumping on a knife. Everything good is here - crazy people, deranged architecture, spooky mannequins and steam machines. When I think about what’s wrong with my nation of Australia I would start here. No immensely rich loonies and their Raptures.

Fill The Centre of the City With Jelly Beans.

When I was younger this seemed a noble aim. I quite liked the idea for the start, where everybody is thinking ‘cool - jelly beans’, to the end where several tonnes of disgusting multicoloured jelly lies rotting in the sun for days afterwards. The pay off would be some newspaper article calculating how much money was lost by local businesses due to the city being clogged up with jelly. If somebody asked me what typified the culture in which I live, it would be that type of article. ‘Boy pats dog, businesses lose 5 dollars’. This seemed a great idea until I realised that its exactly the kind of image that an advertising agency creative would think was clever. And I was working in advertising.

Fly Around America Shooting Celebrities With A Sniper Rifle.

This is appealing until you release how much they would love the attention.

Buy The Rights To Expensive Software And Make It Open Source For Everybody.

Wait, you’re losing me.

Buy The Rights To Open Source Software And Make It Expensive.

Much better.

Children gather around - do you know why a PC is called a PC? It’s a Personal Computer. It means that once upon a time we used ‘dumb terminals’ connected to a server, and that’s where the applications were stored. You would ‘time share’ on the ‘mainframe’. We got rid of that shit. It was called the ‘personal computer revolution’. Children, do you hear them talking about ‘cloud computing’? Do you hear them say that some new revolution is coming, where we connect our machines to some mainframe at Google and do our work there? Do you say, but didn’t we get rid of that just 20 years ago, why are we going back to the old system again?

Because there are people that have decided they will make money by doing this, and they have convinced tools of the media that ‘old ways’ must go. And they want to dip into your private data.

But big, complicated operating systems such as Microsoft’s latest, Vista, aren’t necessary in the Web Age, where applications are delivered for free and on demand — often without users even being aware of it.

No, I do not want to write my documents on Google. No, I don’t want my health records kept by Google. No, I do not want them to have my CV, a photograph of my house, my shopping habits. I do not Google searching my photographs on my desktop or anywhere else. I do not see why my work should be sent on a round trip between the USA and my house, wasting time and resources.

I do not want any company having anything to do with me ‘without even being aware of it’.

And that’s the problem. As more and more of what Windows does moves up into the cloud-into Google’s always-on, give-’em-whatever-they-want-for-free servers-what becomes of the company that Gates built? The smartest move Gates could make right now is to get out of the way.

When a journalist uses a phrase like ‘moves up into the cloud’ to mean ‘data mined on a large corporation’s mainframe’, they should not be allowed to write on any matter of current technological culture. They are a tool, not only in their dull metallic clunk, but in their moronic enthusiasm to soft sell some matter of corporate warfare as a fluffy puppy shaped cloud.

He says ‘the Web Age’, completely mindless of how, like ‘the Space Age’, this kind of dog’s froth is the sad soiled remnant of some dead end fantasy, soon to be parodied. Try it yourself: say ‘A Space Age Product!’. Now say ‘A Web Age Product!’ and feel the mirth.

The smartest move this journalist could make right now is to get the fuck out of the way.

Joel Stein at Time.com wrote:

Skwerl, 27, is in a punk band and used to work for Universal Music. Now he works for a Web marketing company. “Among my friends, I’m the guy known for getting things no one can get,” he says. “I’m just that rabid for information.” Skwerls are the people who make the Internet useful. To everyone but record companies.

The article is about stealing an album by Axl Rose, about whom I have no warm feelings but that’s not the point. Stein downloads music from an album that has taken 14 years of drunken indecision to make. He makes much of how it only took ten minutes to download. People like Stein make a lot of numbers like years and minutes - they always get excited about storage size and bandwidth, because that’s how they measure things - I have 30,000 songs on my iPod, I have 3 cars, they cost me this much, my wife is D cup. A consumer, basically. That’s it, nothing more.We are being written at by a consumer.

But the figure I am most interested in is the mythical Skwerl, who is in a punk band and used to work for Universal. The funny thing is how, as you add details to this character, they become increasingly shallow. They have have a funny name, they think they are ‘punk’ some 30 years too late, they used to clean the kitchen at a record label, so they are ‘in the industry’ and now they send out spam about a club night, so they’re into web marketing. Perhaps this myth is Joel Stein’s idea of ‘cool’ and that’s very possible seeing as these are the kinds of things that consumers list as being ‘cool’. But I think Skwerl exists, because I have met his innumerable clones. These are the cliches that have slowly but surely dragged everything beautiful, exotic and artistic down into an animated flash banner with a hip hop loop. They are the people that ’share’ other people’s work and think they are adding something to the world. They are the people that use words like ‘punk’ with no fucking idea of what it once meant and why. They are people that never take a dump - they ‘blog about toilet culture’.

I just want to make sure that both of these people know the utter depths of my contempt for them, their ideas, and what they stand for.