Good Bye Space CowBoy

So who is the Digital Liberian it is me and you (or is it I can never seem to remember the correct grammer) anyways the Digital Liberian is a scrounger and archiver. He is sometimes also a "pirate" but most importantly what he is;is an informed user and producer. He believes in free open knowledge and sharing what he enjoys as well as creates. It doesn't have to be a massive coded program, a piece of music or anything like that it can be a simple edited image of themselves wearing a funny hat.

The digital librarian believes in  a free and open internet and technological realm where it's okay to tinker and improve. The most important value to remember is to use the tools we have to spread knowledge and joy but never harm.

Enough of the pesudo sounding philosophy I believe these words from Andrew "bunnie" Huang encapsulate the point I'm trying to make in the following points from the afterword of Little Brother he is taking about hackers but I believe the same sentiment applies to the digital librarian 

Hacking Space By Mack Male

"Hackers are explorers, digital pioneers. It's in a hacker's nature to question conventions and be tempted by intricate problems. Any complex system is sport for a hacker; a side effect of this is the hacker's natural affinity for problems involving security. Society is a large and complex system, and is certainly not off limits to a little hacking. As a result, hackers are often stereotyped as iconoclasts and social misfits, people who defy social norms for the sake of defiance. When I hacked the Xbox in 2002 while at MIT, I wasn’t doing it to rebel or to cause harm; I was just following a natural impulse, the same impulse that leads to fixing a broken iPod or exploring the roofs and tunnels at MIT." 

 "However, the motivations of a hacker are typically as simple as “I’m an engineer because I like to design things.” People often ask me, “Why did you hack the Xbox security system?” And my answer is simple: First, I own the things that I buy. If someone can tell me what I can and can’t run on my hardware, then I don’t own it. Second, because it’s there. It’s a system of sufficient complexity to make good sport"

Digital Liberian Risk,Sharing Copy Right:Electric Boogaloo

Piracy does not hurt industry

In the sense that  if I find content I enjoy I will share it with others and one of those people is bound to put money into it tell their friends and etc. A personal example is in the case of Adam WarRock I enjoy his musical content and each year he hosts a donation drive in which those who wish to support him can do so by donating money. In return they receive an exclusive mixtape only available to those who donate as well as other minor perks like original artwork.

Public Domain Image

To add on to that I only discovered the band The Protomen through music piracy and last year when they played a show in my area I went to it. In order to support them that was the only thing I did in the week long vacation I had. Without the internet and file-sharing websites I would not have been able to find the music of this band and later on go to one of their concerts.

 I am not saying we should all just download content but if one really enjoys something they will find ways to support it.

 

It’s a moral panic of sorts no different than VHS recording movies and TV and sitting in one's car waiting for a song to come on in order to copy it to ones cassette player and share it with friends.

It just those same activities on a  larger scale.

Continuing on with Doctorow and piracy  I'd like to close him out with the following also from the introduction to Little Brother

"Finally, let's look at the moral case. Copying stuff is natural. It's how we learn (copying our parents and the people around us). My first story, written when I was six, was an excited re-telling of Star Wars, which I'd just seen in the theater. Now that the Internet -- the world's most efficient copying machine -- is pretty much everywhere, our copying instinct is just going to play out more and more. There's no way I can stop my readers, and if I tried, I'd be a hypocrite: when I was 17, I was making mix-tapes, photocopying stories, and generally copying in every way I could imagine. If the Internet had been around then, I'd have been using it to copy as much as I possibly could.

There's no way to stop it, and the people who try end up doing more harm than piracy ever did"

Pirate Bay raid protest image by Jon Aslund

 Speaking of harm a lot of these file sharing sites are fairly untargeted sure they host copyright violating material but they also host files that are under no copyright and violate no copyright laws. It’s like  bank being targeted because   a drug dealer or other suspicious person is  saving their money in that bank.

Also  lot of DMCA take downs and the closing down of sites for holding pirated material is kind of futile because once its on the internet people have downloaded it some have saved it to re uploaded while others have created mirrors of the content elsewhere.

Risk of the Digital Librarian

When it comes to digital texts though even though I currently have hundreds of them

maybe into the thousands I still only keep very few of them. Such as those I wish to share with others later or would be hard to find at a later date if I needed it again.

 

Sure I love a physical book but there is only so much space where one can keep them. I can hold a million books on my fingernail while holding that many books in a physical space would take an enormous amount of cost. Sure digital space has its limits too devices can only hold so much content but with the cloud you can't lose any of it. 

 

Image by Jorel314

Even if one chooses not to save the content to their cloud storage account it can be easily be re obtained after a few minutes or even seconds of searching because at some point someone else has also found the content and re-uploaded it most likely. Sure not everything can be found on the web but once content has been digitized its hard to destroy.

Sure the complaint about digital goods is that you can’t share them with your friends and others but that isn’t necessarily true. I mean sure various content has anti-piracy checks and other forms of DMR to make sure the content isn’t being stolen which is a noble intention people should be paid for their work.  At times though that stuff is more of a hassle to the consumer than the pirate.(On a side note in reality it’s copyright infringement and not “piracy”. Sure some of the people that download content off the net won't pay for it but that dose not mean everyone will do that.

 

Roger Wallis is a professor in Sweden and the witness for the Pirate Bay in their trial. Wallis and others in the academic field have done research on piracy and its effects on industry. The conclusion is that “piracy” does not really hurt industry but in some cases strengthens its.

Even Doctorow has this to say in his introduction to "Little brother"
 
"People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band."

Doctorow on Piracy video from the Guardian

http://tinyurl.com/lr6yd4k

Interlude:The Digital Nomad

The Digital Nomad is defined as individuals who don't have permanent office and work on the web. I'm not a digital nomad in the traditional sense but I believe I am one in the fact that I only need my various gadgets and I'd be ready to set sail to anywhere in the world. Image by  szwerink

Adam WarRock By keri.

I'm all about mobility/portability and being able to experience content at a moments noticed when desired I love services like Google Drive and One Drive (formerly Skydive) that allow me to carry all my work with me anywhere I go. The synergy of all my devices is an amazing thing I can start reading an article on my laptop and don't have to stop or re find it apps like pocket allow me to save articles and other web content in the cloud and access it later where I left off on my phone or if I want to read it on a screen closer to my laptops then I can switch over to my kindle fire.

The sleek design of the Kindle Fire allows me to stuff it into my jacket pocket or that of my hoodie so I can carry it along easily without hassle while my phone and Nintendo 3DS fill my pockets. My laptop can stay at home when I don't want to bring it with me even then though a regular backpack and my jacket pocket are all I need to have access to hundreds of books,comic books,music, games and whatever other content I'm interested in viewing.

The full discography of The Smiths,hundreds of tracks by indie rap artist Adam WarRock, the greatest hits of Queen,Kiss,The Beatles,Rush etc you name it I probably have it. Currently and officially my total of music amounts to 8,907 different files or 34.8GB. At this point in time it is a bit off though due to the fact that I sometimes download music files and put them on my phone rather than getting out my portable hard drive and storing them on there.   

Name a popular video game of the recent past and not so recent past and it's probably loaded up on my laptop as something I'm currently playing or on my portable hard drive possible for future use.

(Can't Embed this video for some reason)
City Beautiful-Adam WarRock

Digital Librarian Part Deux

After a while my trusty desktop withered away  in the corner as a relic of an era gone by.

Before entering the 8th grade I got my first laptop times were good I had moved away from dial up and had discovered the wonders of wireless internet of course at the time I didn’t know I was  leeching off the neighbors wifi. (Since then I’m currently on my 4th laptop my current prized possession)

Image By Sinchen.Lin

 

This period though is a pretty naive and uneventful time in the world of my media use. My true jump into the the world of the digital and technology came during high school. 

 In New York city high schools are divided into different interest there also supposed to specialize in are you're given a book to look through to help you make a decision. Conveniently the one I decided on was close to home but that wasn’t my main reasoning the other was it’s specialization. It was the High School of Computers and Technology. 

Author Unknown

Purportedly we were going to learn Computer Maintenance,repair,networking and other such skills. Which all things considered we did. 

My transformation into a Digital Librarian began there. The things available to do on the school internet access were pretty limited   eventually individuals found a variety of ways around school restrictions.

UltraSurf Proxy Image by denharsh

 The most prominent of these methods was a program called Ultrasurf a free digital proxy. Ultrasurf was a hot commodity one could bargain with others if inclined to. Aside from Ultrasurf other digital commodities were traded like Windows 7 tiny,various games and other software. 

Most of the time trades were one sided you asked and received other times exchanges were made but overall the philosophy on software was that it was available to flow freely. 

 

(Couldn't find better quality video of this. In context this is a clip from Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger a Japanese TV show in which characters can transform into various Super Heroes. As an aside this show was something I really got into during this period and I'm still quite  heavily obsessed with it. Using various file sharing sites and fan translations I mange to keep up with this show and a variety of other foreign TV shows some current and some not so current.)

I didn’t realize it at the time but looking back it now this time and experience is what birthed me into the digital librarian. The individuals I associated with had heaps of various games and software they kept archived that they shared with others and just accessed when needed. Before I meet them I was scared of torrenting and digital downloads due to horror stories with the RIAA and MPAA suing individuals but that fear went away and now torrents and file sharing are like second nature.

(The documentary highlights the trail in Sweden of  the Pirate Bay founders the biggest peer to peer bit torrent  tracker in the world.)

Original Image by Tooby Doo (The text in this image is a reference to a segment in the documentary Pirate Bay:AFK. 

) 

 

 

 

(On a  another aside note  later me and my core group got jobs at the school as Mouse Squad (don’t know what that stands for till this day) which allowed us to gain access to the administration wifi connection  as part of our privileges nicknamed “GOD”)

Image From Waiting For The World

                 

How I became the Digital Librarian

Starting out in my youth or younger than now I should say. All I had was  a CRT monitor with a desktop that  had Windows XP installed that later  in its life cycle shut itself off randomly at times. All I had where 10 hours of internet access from Netzero that I consumed like it was potato chips. I did the thing most do at this relatively young age search for games to play on the internet. I searched for things I could download and Stumbled Upon (Unintentional Internet pun)  various Abandonware sites. I downloaded a variety of games downloading as many as I could at a time to try out and play with. Most of these I can’t really recall. 

Abandonware Logo By Frédéric DE GOMBERT

( Abandonware is a product that is  no longer supported by its owner/manufacture but is still under copyright law. By this definition Windows XP will be Abandonware in   February 2016

since support for it will end in January of that year)

The two that stick out the most are the original DOS version of Sid Meiers Pirates as well as his lesser known game Covert Action. What gravitated me towards them I couldn’t really explain at the time. Now in my wise age of 21 years-old I can now know what gravitated me to those games  that even at the time I played them were fairly old having been produced in 1987 and 1990 respectively. These two games just had endless re-playability and were not linear in any sense of the word.

Box Art for Sid Meier's Pirates released in 1987 (There are other versions of this game in existence such as Pirates   Gold in 1993 and modernized version in 2004. I haven't experienced those versions of the game I do plan to play the 2004 release but I don't think it will top the initial first encounters with the game. Original Image by David  Broadman

 

In Pirates I could wander the caribbean for ships to plunder then after I was satisfied with that I could marry the governers daughter  and retire happy. Alternatively I could try and live a life within the law trading at ports and only attacking ships my country was at war with as a privateer. 
 
 
While in  Covert Action I was an agent of the CIA designated to track down and dismantle terrorist organizations and nefarious individuals. I could go on high speed chases  or patiently surveillance my targets apprehending them when the moment was right.  I recall never being the best super sleuth spy or even as successful as Blackbeard in my privateer career but that didn’t matter and still does not.

  

When reflecting on the past these two silly little games shaped a lot of my habits and use of technology and media.  After a while my trusty desktop withered away  in the corner as a relic of an era gone by. Looking at a lot of the content I use now a lot of it is open-source or copyright free while some fall into a grey line of fair use since I don't intend to make a profit but to share and mostly just for personal use. I prefer my software and hardware to be able to be customizable and not locked into propriety  form factors.  It just like the games of my youth in which I can do anything I wish in the context and limitation of what the tools can do.

To Be Continued 

                                            

Digital Libarian Countinued

The digital librarian hopes to preserve knowledge and spread it to others. “For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy.”  (Doctorow Introduction Little Brother)  Doctorow here states that every writer fears obscurity and that success or failure  isn’t a measure on people giving away stuff but about knowledge

Botherhood Of Steel by Sauron94

(The text on the image comes from the tenets of Kopimism a religion in a similar vain to that of the satirical Pastafarianism.)The logo on the image is the logo of the Brotherhood of Steel a fictional group in the world of "Fallout". They gather old world technology in the post Apocalypse and also have scribes that scavenge for Pre apocalypse books and information. In order to keep it safe and preserved.")

Doctorow’s statement here  about writers also applies to other producers and consumers of content everyone’s biggest fear is obscurity. The digital librarian as the informed user/producer tries to prevent this by sharing and re-purposing content. The digital librarian is much like one of those elder wanders in bad post-apocalyptic SC-FI  guarding and sharing cultural knowledge as well as finding new purposes for it.

What is The Digital Libarian?

If I were to define myself in the context of our digital age. What  I would best describe myself as is a digital librarian with sprinkles of the digital nomad inserted throughout. I can’t get enough of digital storage I have lost countless flash drives and store content in a variety of places then I can count with both hands.   

                                       

(When talking about being the Digital Librarian and sharing and producing content I can't help but imagine a blank room like in this scene in the matrix where one can create and re purpose at will. That's a topic for another time and a bit too William Gibson.)

What is a Digital Librarian?

A Digital Librarian is a scrounger and an archiver.  I believe it’s someone who is sort of like the human version of the Google spider(s). They archive websites plus other content for both immediate and later use.

It’s not just the mindless hoarding of digital content even though it may sometimes feel like it. In marketing terms the digital librarian is an influencer with the ability to introduce others to new products and ideas that suit their needs. The digital librarian is the informed user and producer.   

“Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.” (Doctorow Introduction Little Brother)

"Re-purpose Content" Original by opportplanet

Doctorow understands the digital librarian and his/her  purpose to accesses the collective human knowledge as well as share it. He also can help explain the digital librarian as an informed user and prouder.

Even though this next statement is in the context of eBooks I believe it applies to other text and knowledge as well  

“EBook's are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it's in their nature. And many of those copies have a destination, a person they're intended for, a hand-wrought transfer from one person to another, embodying a personal recommendation between two people who trust each other enough to share bits.”  (Doctorow Introduction Little Brother)

My version of  "Re- Purpose Content:

 

Doctorow here states that the digital librarian wishes to experience and interact with his tools as someone who shares knowledge and finds knowledge to share. This is an intimate and personal thing where the digital librarian is allowing access to the information  and knowledge he/she has spent hours scrounging and archiving.  The digital librarian is the informed user/producer because he/she believes in  sharing and free nonrestrictive use to archive, alter, share, copy etc.

 

 

  To Be Continued