For our Kickstarter campaign we have four main pledge levels. At $50 you get a Physical GIF along with everything you need to play it at home: the strobe, the plastic GIF disc and frames, and the hardware. You can choose from three designs that scott created, BMX Biker:

Elephant-Rabbit Costume Party:

and New York Fourth of July:

For a $100 pledge, we’ll send you a kit with all three of these Physical GIFs.

We’ve also recruited four amazing animated GIF artists to design special limited edition Physical GIFs: Ryder Ripps, Nullsleep, Sara Ludy, and Sterling Crispin. More info about these artists on our project page At $250, you can reserve one of the Physical GIFs from any of these artists. We’re going to be working with them to explore materials and techniques for turning their designs into Physical GIFs. We’re hoping that they explore some of the limitations and possibilities of this new medium. Each of the Physical GIFs they produce will come in a limited numbered edition with documentation from the artist.

And at the top pledge level, we’ll work with you directly to manufacture your own custom Physical GIF from your design. We’ve only made five of this reward available because we want to be able to spend as much time as it takes working with you to turn your animated GIF ideas into physical reality.

We’re incredibly excited about this project and can’t wait to see how people react to it. Head over to Kickstarter right now to give us some help: Physical GIF on Kickstarter. Thanks!

In the most recent On the Beat, Celia Hirschman advocates for the Musician’s Union to take a more active stand for musicians’ rights online. In a world where only 42% of internet users say they pay for music, she argues, the Union has a responsibility to advocate for musicians’ “right to be paid for their efforts anytime their music is played”. She notes the failure of legislative attempts to extract revenue for musicians from peer-to-peer file sharing, mp3 blogs, and CD burning and lays the blame at the feet of the Union as the primary organization that represents musicians.

I agree with half of this argument. The Musician’s Union has been embarrassingly lax in fighting the real battles that matter for artists in the modern music distribution landscape. What has the Musician’s Union done to stop the labels from cheating artists out of revenue from iTunes downloads? How about to stop them wasting their shrinking budgets on glamorous perks and inflated short-run corporate profits rather than developing new artists with the possibility of long and successful careers? Or what about to force them to hire people who can figure out new business models that fit the new technology?

None of these battles receive the slightest mention in Hirscman’s critique of the Union. She ignores the losses artists have suffered by being forced into vastly inequitable relationships with labels and instead highlights the ways in which the industry has failed to fully extract revenue from new forms of music consumption and fandom.

This wrong-headed focus on enforcement over transformation is symptomatic of the problems plaguing the record industry as a whole. Hirschman’s catalogue of Union failings closely resembles a punchlist of RIAA complaints and talking points. Focusing on missed revenue from new forms of fandom while the music industry’s entire distribution and profit model sinks into irrelevance is like getting upset over a spilled glass of champagne on the deck of the Titanic.

This mistake derives directly from the principle that Hirschman articulates in the piece: that artists “have the right to be paid for their efforts anytime their music is played.” This same idea was proposed recently by Peter Kirn at Create Digital Music:

Recorded music has value to consumers. And, in business, if something has value somewhere, it’s a business.

This is a core principle of the industry’s thinking right now and it is obviously, palpably false. In middle school, when a friend played me Sebadoh off of a walkman that he’d smuggled to school, transforming me in a single moment into a lifelong fan of indie rock, was that “theft”? Should Sebadoh have gotten paid?
When I worked at a local patisserie I used to play my favorite CDs throughout my shifts and would often write the band names and album titles down for intrigued customers. Should the shop have had to track and regulate everything we played so they could pay royalties to the artists?

This last is something of a trick question since enforcement of this kind of public performance royalty is something for which Hirschman specifically lauds rights-enforcers like ASCAP:

If you walk into a restaurant, nightclub or boutique and hear music playing, chances are very good a performance-rights organization have demanded compensation. These rights societies literally go door-to-door to insure their members get paid for music

Hirschman could not have this issue more wrong. ASCAP contacted the patisserie while I worked there saying they’d observed us playing music controlled by their members and we had to either cut it out, sign up for a very expensive pay service they were offering, or face a lawsuit. The business owners felt like they’d been shaken down by the mafia. Their response was to stop playing ASCAP music altogether and instead to put together a library of local music which we had explicit permission from the artists to play without royalties. Maintaining this library was a lot of work and we rapidly fell back into the old system of playing whatever we wanted, including ASCAP music, without permission, but now in an environment of greater fear and resentment. I would bet that a similar story holds for most places you actually visit beyond corporate chains: if you walk in and hear good music playing it is either local or in explicit defiance of an ASCAP threat.

And this story is a parable of what’s wrong with focusing on enforcement. Enforcement alienates consumers and tastemakers. It tarnishes the reputations of artists and the organizations that should represent them. It forces natural music consumption and sharing patterns underground. Possibly worst, enforcement distracts artists and the industry itself from solving the huge existential issues that they face.

There is one piece of information from Hirschman’s piece, however, that does hold out hope for the music industry if they do ever overcome these distractions and decide to face the real challenge of transformation: 42% of internet users pay for music. That’s an enormous number. How many internet users pay for news? Or search? Or social networks? I don’t hear anyone in these businesses complaining that their industry is in decline. That’s an enormous number and it reflects the incredible amount of passion that exists for music online. If the industry can’t find a way to transform that passion into a functional profitable business, it won’t be because because the users outfoxed their enforcements efforts. They’ll have only themselves to blame.

Tagged: music, industry, on the beat, Celia Hirschman, kcrw, enforcement, piracy, riaa

While the question may seem especially timely with all of the hullabaloo around Bill Gates’ recent retirement announcement, what I’m really interested in are the companies dedicated to the public good — Wikipedia, Linux, Craiglist, etc.. Each of these entities was created by a single charismatic figure who held the goal of making some big positive difference in the world. Each depends on the coordination of a large community of volunteers for its continued functioning. And each is, in turn, depended on by millions of people around the world.

What would happen to each of these companies without their founders? What plan do they have in place to ensure their continuity? How realistic does that plan seem and how well does it line up with their values?

Let’s start with Linux. The volunteer programmers that make up the Linux project are organized into a rigid hierarchy based on the different technical divisions of the software and culminating in Linus Torvalds, the project’s Benevolent Dictator for Life. Torvalds has sole commit access to the Linux kernel trunk. In other words, he has final and absolute say over all changes made to the heart of the operating system. In practice, of course, Torvalds relies heavily on the project’s core committers, technical experts deeply versed in the arcane corners of the code, whose changes may not be fully comprehensible even to him because of their obscurity. He doesn’t read every printer driver and graphics card interface. While his technical decisions are occasionally questioned — a few groups and individuals with ideas for radical different directions for the software have even split off from the main effort from time to time and there have been bitter fights over process — no disagreement has ever been so heinous as to actually fracture the project at the cost of overall productivity and compatibility. The UNIX wars seem gone for good.

The obvious downside to the Benevolent Dictator for Life model is the high level of dependency it creates on the Dictator. Or, as one of Torvalds’ chief lieutenants Andrew Morton phrased the problem in a lecture on IT Conversations : what would happen if Linus got hit by a bus?

Basically, the answer is that Morton, and others in the Linux leadership, would act as stewards in the short run while a “high commission” was convened to select a new dictator to take the reins.

This strategy seems to pose a couple of problems. Obviously, opposing candidates for Linux Dictator would represent, to a certain extent, different visions for the technical future of the project. Maybe one leader would emphasize the move towards the desktop and slicker GUI tools while another would be associated with attempts to optimize Linux for its ubiquitous life on the server. At this point the broad adoption of Linux in so many different environments — exactly what makes its continued healthy development so important — means that it also servant to many different masters including a large number of highly powerful corporate interests with big stakes in its direction (IBM, anyone?). What if the high council reached a stalemate or if its choice was unpopular with a large percentage of the Linux constituency?

If history teaches us anything, it’s that transference of dictatorial power means major trauma for most societies. With changes of kings, whole nations have changed religion, gained allies, begun and ended wars. Since dictators’ policies are generally not so subject to the will of the people (usually a popular dictator is just about as effective as an unpopular one) societies governed by them tend to do all their changing at once between regimes. This makes for long periods of relative stability (or stagnation) punctuated by brief bursts of violence and chaos.

Now, while I’m not predicting that Linux won’t outlive Linus — it is too important to too many for that to be likely — I would argue that its social structure almost guarantees it a major shake up somewhere along the line.

What about Wikipedia and its founder, Jimmy Whales? In a recent talk at the Long Now Foundation, called Vision: Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture, Whales explained the intricate collaborative processes involved in maintaining Wikipedia as well as the important role his dictatorial power has sometimes played in maintaining them — like by promising to ban a large group of skin heads who were plotting to take over the site to twist it to their own message. Whales is skittish about the personal exercise of this kind of power and has gradually worked to wrap it in institutions that involve representative, democratically chosen, groups of Wikipedians in making all important decisions.

Basically, Whales is gradually transforming Wikipedia from a benevolent dictatorship into a constitutional monarchy, with the eventual goal of making of himself a figurehead. And he’s said as much, here quoted from his own Wikipedia page: “I’m more like the Queen of England — my power is decreasing over time. Soon, I’ll just wave at parades.” In contrast to the Benevolent Dictator for Life model, Constitutional Monarchy is extremely messy. It means a contradiction between formal principles and practical reality: a sovereign monarchy overseeing a country that’s actually governed by a democratic parliament.

In a way there’s an even more interesting parallel between Wikipedia and Great Britain: their reliance on common law, a process whereby rather than intentionally writing down and formalizing them all at once in some variety of constitutional process, a society allows its rules to accrue gradually over time through the settlement of disputes by courts or magistrates. Both Wikipedia and Great Britain base the resolution of new questions on past consensus, which is, in turn, built on a core set of community values: the Magna Carta for Britain, for Wikipedia the Neutral Point of View.

So, what future does this structure bespeak for Wikipedia without Jimmy Whales? Well, constitutional monarchies aren’t completely immune to the inheritance problem we discussed in the context of Linux. The death of the monarch will still likely mean significant instability, though in the best case scenario it could mean largely a cultural shakeup rather than a practical one. If Whales manages to make Wikipedia’s emergent governing structure independent of him, he will still retain significant importance as a cheerleader and public image tender — he’s the voice we hear defending the site every time a new moral panic about its accuracy sweeps through the mainstream media. And this is not an insignificant role since the morale of Wikipedia’s many editors and maintainers plays is so important to the site’s quality. As far as I know, Whales hasn’t named a successor or to put in place a system for picking one in an emergency. He should. No matter how he sees his importance in Wikipedia’s day to day governance.

And, finally, what of Craigslist and its founder Craig Newmark? The organizational structure Newmark created may be the simplest, the most robust, and the most traditional. Craiglist is the town square: a place for merchants and shoppers to find each other, a forum for announcements and advertisements to find eyeballs, and a venue for barkers, yarn-spinners, and soap box-standers of all stripes to harangue passers-by. Like town squares, Craigslist’s structure is pretty much the same everywhere, but its content is hyper local, mostly arranging transactions that take place in person: apartment rentals, job interviews, and dates, etc.

Because Craigslist’s social function is so time-tested it requires of Craig little evangelism or politicking. He needn’t explain to anyone the site’s raison d’etre (it’s obvious on first glance) or defend it from critics (it doesn’t really have any). Instead, Craig is a little like an ascetic saint leading a simple life of sacrifice to set an example. He does customer support. He’s like the public minded senior citizen (maybe an Elk) who organizes efforts to pick up litter and paint park benches.

In many ways, Craigslist seems the most sustainable of these three organizations. While Craig’s passing would be mourned, little to none of the site’s operation is dependent on him. Someone would still be required to make large scale decisions like which new cities to cover and how to pay growing hosting bills, but Craig has traditionally made those decisions simply by responding to demand. He puts up new sites for cities when enough people ask for them and he figured out how to pay the hosting bill by polling his users about what policy they wanted to see. A new leader could likely step into Craig’s shoes with little fanfare or difficulty. There’s always a town square whether or not the city father who first helped erect it is still around.

To conclude, I thought it would be interesting to set these three strategies for longevity off against the dominant one to which they present alternatives: the publicly owned for profit company. When I started writing this post, I intuitively included Google in the list of companies I planned to discuss. It took me a minute to figure out why it was the odd man out: while Google’s mission seems broadly in the public interest, as a publicly held company its objective is by definition solely to make money for its stockholders.

And there lies the rub for using the publicly-traded company as a strategy for longevity. Over time, and especially in the absence of the charismatic founders, the markets will wear away any of the company’s objectives which are not explicitly about profit making. After all, that’s its job. While Google’s one hundred billion dollars of market cap value do a pretty good job ensuring its existence for at least the next dozen or so generations, the ideas and principles that differentiate it from all the other companies in the Dow are necessarily on a timeline for destruction, or at least homogenization.

And as strategies for longevity go that doesn’t seem like the greatest tradeoff.

Tagged: craigslist, wikipedia, linux, google, founders, whales, newmark, torvalds, die, longevity