Heritage Above, Below and Elsewhere

Given the difficulties raised by preservation of data as cultural heritage, hearing of the creation of a Second Life Trademark and Patent Office leaves me cold: whether or not it's a reasonable response to a real problem, institutions of intellectual property  are  should be reflective of a careful balance between the interests of private entities taking advantage of the system and the benefits of the public for whose sake that system exists, and here I'm seeing a heavy emphasis on private interests. Although I haven't ascertained that there isn't a Second Life deposit library...

'Virtual' objects are very much capable of access and preservation (through duplication), so compared to, say, grand achievements of human engineering floating around in Earth orbit, they look like ready targets for archiving. However, those in virtual worlds are commonly either playthings or items of commerce, so maybe they haven't quite the glamour of remnants of scientific and technological endeavour that hang majestically in the vaults above.

I wonder whether virtual worlds can be considered to be or have cultures as the term appears in 'cultural heritage': certainly they have communities. My thought is that a virtual world can both have a heritage (which presumably has to be a product of actual community deeds, rather than part of any artificial history written for the world, unless the latter becomes the former too) and be a complex heritage object or collection of such objects for the 'real' world. That makes me think of 'cultures' versus 'humanity', where an object with value for a certain culture may also be alleged to be part of 'the common heritage of mankind': again an internal/external distinction might apply.

This is the cave labyrinth at Gortys, in Crete's Messara Valley: apparently the Hellenic Speleological Society has an ongoing project of examining, in effect, graffiti. A graffito isn't majestic either, but these have become objects of historical knowledge. Our Gortys probably exists on commercial servers somewhere. That's not automatically a bad thing, but I get nervous sometimes: the difficulty with both graffiti and items in virtual worlds is that at the time of creation they lack any aura of dignity.

Labyrinthine

Wandering into downtown Durham yesterday I was assaulted by Christmas; although not all shops have switched from their Halloween livery yet, which adds a twist of madness to the otherwise aggravating spectacle.

Mind you, with an architect claiming moral rights in a bridge and a demonstration of the worse-than-uselessness of the Sex Offenders' Register, perhaps there's been a surfeit of madness recently...

Animated suicide awareness, the trouble with copyright parties, and QR Codes

So, in a bid to defend against the festive cheer, here's a suicide awareness video. Actually, I'm not posting it out of ghoulishness: aesthetically, it's a fairly striking piece of work.

Perhaps it's a result of my being familiar with the UK and Ireland version, but until now I had no idea that World Book Day as designated by UNESCO is officially World Book and Copyright Day. Leaving aside the complexities of my stance on copyright, I find this dispiriting, and I'm glad the copyright aspect has been hitherto obscure. Let's just celebrate books: commercial books, public domain books, any books. Didacticism about a necessarily delicate and sometimes abused area of law may be as much a part of the party as clearing up afterwards, but one doesn't send 'Please come to my party and help clear up after it' invitations.

This is a QR Code for the URL http://faceofthemoon.blogspot.com/, created with an online generator.

I found a blog post called 'QR Code hits the UK' from about a month ago: I wasn't aware, but that probably reflects a lack of interest in 28 Weeks Later. Meanwhile... 'Forget QR Codes, Here Comes the ColourCode' (April 2005). Oh, what to do...?

While I peruse QR Code stampers, in the back of my mind thoughts of ROMhacks and the Voynich MS are combining to produce strange fantasies.

Stop Motion Post Haste

While reacquainting myself with Truckers I found that some people had uploaded other interesting morsels from the golden age of Cosgrove Hall. (TheMotionBrigades has a lot of stop-motion material, which I shall have to peruse later...) N.B. Apparently the Pied Piper video below (in verse, courtesy of Browning) is cut from a half-hour original.

The Key To a Poet’s Allotment

I wish it was easier to find material on the television series All Along the Watchtower... (I was thinking about Battenbergs.)

The search for Marie Torres, mildly emotional poetry, locking people up and misleading them

While looking at an Internet Archive Curator's Choice I ended up trying to find out more about the person credited with the rather dreamy cover art, and thereby stumbling into places formidable (and irrelevant) and wilfully innavigable (but relevant). My quest pretty well failed, although I suspect that it's the same Marie Torres who was a vocalist on Liz's 'Is There Any Love'.

Thinking about poetic tendencies towards soaring sentiment, towards the utter valuting heights of seething passion, towards the dramatic opening of the soul, I began to wonder whether there were any examples of just slightly emotional verse. Dramatic imperatives would seem to have invited quite considerable pathos, even before Romanticism was invented and when Sturm und Drang might have been taken for an offbeat weather forecast; and I'm curious to know whether any noted poet managed to retain the dignity of a stiff upper lip. Think what things might be like if we bathed in slightly miserable poetry...

The moon in its southing directly blent
Their grumpiness with their discontent.

...and it becomes clearer why we don't. (Immediately my comedic faculties sensed an opportunity: that isn't really what I wanted. I'm going to ignore the genre of greetings card poetry altogether: saccharine isn't what I'm seeking either.) But surely someone may have stepped boldly into the territory of the middlingly affectionate and the somewhat upset. And if not yet... why not now?

Quite displeased to find the bus was running late;
Sighing when my correspondents don't reply;
Discontented with a chipped edge on my plate;
Mildly pleased to see a fledgling sparrow fly...

That last line might have ended up as 'Mildly pleased to see a politician die': I'm finding it quite hard to avoid both deliberate and accidental bathos. I think part of the problem lies with how English qualifies adjectives: my softeners above are rather instrusive, announcing themselves too awkwardly. I believe there may be potential for capturing the soft emotions of a quiet soul, but one would have to employ greater delicacy with the language, and I suspect that the reader would have to be disposed to apply a suitably non-sarcastic tone of voice.

Unnerving quotation of the day: 'My concern is not about the number of days [of incarceration]. The number of days is a political decision, there's no logical answer as to how many days are ideal as a maximum.'

He's right to the extent that if people are to be locked up simply because more time is desired to investigate them, there is no logical reason not to imprison them for a year, a decade, life— and the phrase 'political decision' chills me. Why might we need to lock up suspected terrorists for longer, anyway? Apparently in case of people who fall unconscious for days during the period of incarceration. I don't think I've seen many proposed changes to the criminal law defended through such a blatant appeal to exceptional cases.

A researcher's quandry: how reliable is a Wikipedia article about fake articles in reference works? I wondered previously how easy it would be for legends to grow...

Something else occurs to me: is there any such thing as fake philosophy (as opposed to 'bad' philosophy, and to merely faking references or playing 'evil sister'; and not a reference to http://pub.ne.jp/solla/), and if so how could we detect it? Hmmm...

Regions

Being tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime leads to the conclusion that we need better funded public libraries as a matter of public safety. Holism is everywhere—

Valve's intransigence, the richness of culture, and someone's strange games with Arwings

Dubious comment of the day: 'Some of these users have subsequently purchased a legal copy after realizing the issue and were having difficulty removing the illegitimate keys from their Steam accounts.' As others have noted, this not only suggests that Valve's Thai/Russian products are illegal (or that in some weird Lessig-inspired fantasy world Valve's locks are laws) but also appears to accuse customers of criminality.

Philosophy, et cetera has a post on the value of culture to which I feel I ought to be able to respond, but which frankly baffles me.

Modern societies have developed such an incredible breadth and depth of culture that any one individual can possess only the slightest sliver of it. Should we view this division of cultural labour as a good or a bad thing?

There's too much submerged, really: what counts as being or being a member of a society, what counts as possession of culture, and how culture might be divisible. The question seems meaningful, yet richness appears to be treated as quantitive rather than qualitative, and that bothers me: the primitive and the sprawlingly developed culture don't differ just in scale. It's like asking whether village or city life is objectively better, perhaps. But more than that, it seems to clash with the experience of being thrown into the predicament of human life and born into a culture, large or small: one doesn't so much possess as absorb and become absorbed into it, whatever the scale.

More Unhylichkeit. This video is inspired—by some sort of dream, I imagine.

Nowhere to Hide

There may or may not be Atari game cartridges buried in the New Mexico desert, UFO research in the Nevada desert, and, apparently, the site of a Jawa village in the California desert. Not quite a latter-day Lost City, but it makes me wonder how easy it would actually be to keep an entire village secret.

Fairly hard in the UK, it seems, although an allotment might conceal it for a while. Then, perhaps, our secret village would either fall under threat like Brithdir Mawr or go the way of Taoyuan...

Taoyuan has come a long way since becoming the subject of a famous prose-poem book – Peach Blossom Shangri-la – by the poet Tao Yuanming (365-427 AD). Then it was described as a tiny, concealed village only connected to the rest of China by a long and narrow tunnel that had been discovered accidentally by a wandering fisherman.

These days Taoyuan is a fully-fledged county with a population of close to a million—rather better connected to the world outside, courtesy of telephones.

Nueva Germania, the colony founded by Aryanists including Elisabeth Nietzsche (the philosopher's evil sister), is another case in point. I have a copy of Ben Macintyre's Forgotten Fatherland – part biography, part travelogue – in which he recounts his journey into the depths of Paraguay in search of a settlement he wasn't certain still existed. It did, although the Aryan/Lutheran/anti-Semite/vegetarian fire had largely gone out: once the colony had collapsed and Elisabeth had returned to Germany, those remaining had more pressing concerns.

Fast-forward to 2005: 'a Wagner-loving San Francisco composer who is mounting a determined crusade to rebuild the Aryan dream and has sought assistance from Vice President Dick Cheney, two U.S. philanthropic groups, a Southern California town council, Bay Area artists, and a U.S. filmmaker best known for the underground movie Scorpio Rising and the book Hollywood Babylon.' Pay a visit, if you like. I wonder whether there are any lost settlements in the world without links to legendary philosophers, hints of their existence still gathering archival dust...

While researching this I came upon a musical act called Hidden Village: not really my thing, but interesting to watch.

The Post Without a Name

One disappointment in recent months was seeing that Waterstones (formerly Ottakar's) in Sunderland had reorganised and got rid of the Erotica/Astronomy shelf heading, which I always found rather beautiful.

Haunting beauty, the outcomes of anonymity, taking a knife to legal restraint, and castellation

Speaking of beauty, and to counterbalance all the political and work-related stuff presently on my mind, here's something fairly seasonal (and mercifully not a pumpkin) I chanced upon: somehow I feel like describing it as a dark romance version of the original Luigi's Mansion tech demo.

Update: it seems that the domain leprincebleu.com has lapsed, but http://spoki.free.fr/ still exists.

It's roughly the analysis already popularised by Penny Arcade: that Internet anonymity is conducive to what we might politely term poor quality control. (I owe knowledge of this column to Maverick Philosopher, home of the most cast iron no-nonsense commenting policy ever written.) However, Prager (a) espouses a view of history which apparently excludes the anonymous pamphlet; (b) asserts that 'Websites should insist on listing names and cities of those who post comments' without explaining what verification procedures will guarantee the identity of Gordon Brown, Heliopolis; and (c) has apparently a very distainful view of the purposes to which anonymity might be put:

Some might argue that anonymity enables people to more freely express their thoughts. But this is not true. Anonymity only enables people to more freely express their feelings. Anonymity values feelings over thought, and immediate expression over thoughtful reflection.

Anonymity is not the kind of entity which can value anything: it simply widens the range of options (yes, to include some ugly ones) by lessening the need to seek others' approval. (Weblog comments tend to emphasise reaction over reflection simply because a lengthy analysis is probably best posted on one's own pages as a response.) One might as well say that reputation values conformity over thought, especially if one agrees that 'people tend to do what society says it is OK to do'—as the same article puts it.

More Terms and Conditions of utter lunacy—and the site isn't terribly convincing anyway. It says that people may carry knives in order to feel safe, but often they have their knives used against them: immediately I think, many states have armies for self-defence, but sometimes armies have been used against their own populations. People who carry knives for self-defence are already anticipating situations of dire peril; I just ended up feeling vulnerable, which I suppose suits the authoritarian sound of the Terms.

Theirs is a strange approach to copyright, too: 'you may not...modify the paper or digital copies of any materials you have printed off or downloaded in any way'. What penalty can I expect for scribbling notes on my non-distributed print copy, I wonder...?

Confused quotation of the day: 'I think the issue at the moment is that parents are unclear where they stand in terms of they want [sic] to work towards positive parenting, towards non-violent parenting, but the law doesn't give them that clear line.'

Finishing on a happier note, I'm told my father used to enjoy touring building sites. On the whole I don't see the appeal, but I'd make one exception. I'd never heard of this project before, and so was unaware that 2007 was the tenth anniversary of the site.

On a related note, I wonder whether An Culu has been bought yet.

Sudden Lust for SVG Webmail

Yesterday candidates for the post of John's Hall Senior Tutor gave presentations: I got the impression we'll have someone who excels in pastoral care, or someone good at coherent analysis, or someone with more evenly distributed but less outstanding gifts. Meanwhile ITS are still trying to shove Outlook Web Access onto people: the way they tell it, you get a calendar and lose equal functionality between browsers. All things recur eternally, and among them is 'This page best viewed in Internet Explorer'.

Moral luminosity in virtual worlds, a project update, bookselling in culture, and (in an otherwise rather dry post) counting baronial deeds

Whither shall we turn for moral instruction, with parliament pitted against the Children's Commissioner (who bizarrely enough is worried about 'send[ing] out confusing messages to parents about the acceptable use of violence across society'—'confusing messages' seeming to be what in academic circles we call a difference of opinion) and a nonetheless undiminished appetite for using laws to moralise? My reaction to the idea that we might employ virtual worlds for moral education is that any venue for interaction with other people is likely to provide morally relevant experiences, but when it comes to building the venue's rules to reinforce approved values, what these will probably do in practice is reinforce (enlightened) self-interest through a reward/penalty system (i.e. the Kantian hypothetical imperative). You can build normativity into a virtual world, to an extent (though you can equally well subvert it, as in the case of the Counter-Strike pacifists who stood around in a cordiform formation). While built-in normativity can probably be didactic, though, I can't envisage it bridging the gap between acting out and actually internalising moral values: I'd suggest that morality is what can demand that one rise above obedience to whatever path is laid down to be followed.

I doubt this was actually the understanding of 'values' intended, given the comments about discouraging consumerism. (I do wish people would read even a few paragraphs about moral naturalism versus anti-naturalism before telling us what values some work of craftsmanship projects: is it possible to simulate moral properties, or merely to imply their presence...?) Though what strikes me about the worry that 'all children will learn from these virtual spaces is that they are first and foremost consumers' is that that inference isn't necessarily false: it too is a path one has to choose to transcend.

Wired's article on the role of doujinshi in the manga industry takes a predominantly economic line on the question of copyright infringement: at one and the same time I'm happy to see the angle and a little disappointed by the lack of reference to cultural value. There's a levelling effect, I suppose: derivative works are dignified by their ecomomic utility, and in that way are shown to be not merely an adjunct. Yet praising the utility of doujin work to the wider market seems by implication to downplay the value fan work – not any particular work, but the practice of appreciation through adaptation – might have in itself. Here's a sliver of my draft work:

One question that can be asked about the value of a work has to do with the role of its derivatives: does their value affect that of the original? (If a work inspires many others we might praise it for that reason; there’s no obvious reason not to extend that praise to derivative works which reuse elements of the original.) Or not? (If book A, unexceptionable in itself, inspires a somehow objectionable parody B, it seems intuitive that B’s reception should not taint A.) A third possibility seems to be that what primarily bears value is the cluster of ideas, themes, phrases, etc. manifested in the original and its derivatives together.

Another thing I'm trying in concert with this is noting that collections of objects can have a value which depends on their organisation as well as their members' isolated values (e.g. libraries, archæological sites), and building up from this to look at the possibility of ascribing heritage value to very large and complex activity like the Web, or indeed fan communities: fanfics offer a good example of what role perceptions of value can play. If (original work + derivatives) is taken as the paradigmatic unit of cultural value, then we have a potential heritage-based criticism of intellectual property maximalism.

Not that there's a disconnection between culture and economics. When it comes to the German practice of forbidding books to be sold at a discount, one commentator concludes that 'economic and social policy also impact what gets read, and by whom'. The question of whether it's 'better that more people read fewer books or that fewer people read a lot of different books' seems on first glance to amount to enumerating tokens versus types, as though the effect of a person's reading habits was on that person alone, but of course such a difference in education and enculturation will have a much wider effect, and one that substantially defies calculation. Not so much the law of unintended consequences as the law of limitlessly subtle ones. All of which creates quite a minefield for cultural ethics...

They do things differently in Westminster: mathematics, for example. Lord Brooke...

Has received answers to 0 written questions in the last year — above average amongst Lords.

People have made 0 comments on this Lord's speeches — above average amongst Lords.

Now I know how it comes about that every party claims the others' sums don't add up.

Barristar Ocean

The question of philosophers' dress sense has made it onto the Philosophers' Carnival. Go on, guess how I dressed to write this. Or imagine me in elegantly flowing silk robes and artfully dishevelled Victoriana.

What RPG battles sound like, the short end of the stick, Games and culture and games, and legal theory... in space!

I chanced upon Chris Hurn's site, and am quite enjoying the samples, although I thought a few bars in 'Pathfinder' were just a bit too Uematsu-esque. I quite like the RPG-style 'battle theme': it's true, that is a recognisable genre...

Reading a news report according to which a 'study found that pædophilic males were shorter on average than males without a sexual attraction to children' is a disconcerting experience, not out of personal nervousness of course, and not because I think a moral panic about short men is likely, but because... well, with the same article mentioning 'previous research from this team that found pædophiles have lower IQs, are three times more likely to be left-handed, failed school grades significantly more frequently, and suffered more head injuries as children', this is probably not a happy time for diminutive, left-handed men who didn't do well in school.

The actual question whether there's any biological basis for this psychological phenomenon is worth asking, so I'm not knocking the research, and clearly it should be reported; indeed, I'd sooner see this than a 'media effects' story. (This is probably the wrong type of story to influence policy.) But it would be so terribly easy to spin a sensationalist headline out of this...

Some mildly uplifting news on the cultural heritage front: the Commons Public Accounts Committee has said the government ought to reveal just how much has been siphoned off from the Heritage Lottery Fund to pay for the Olympics, and the government 'said it would consider the MPs' recommendations'. Actually it must be a fairly happy state of affairs for the government: the question of disclosure acts as a distraction from that of how the (unknown amount of) money should have been used.

On a brighter note, Kotaku has posted quite an uplifting story on the preservation of video games at the Library of Congress. There are some interesting coments about the practicalities of preserving software: 'The only way we can make sure the stuff stays alive is getting it on an active computer system with demons monitoring it that make sure we're not suffering bit corruption'. The article also flags up the complications introduced by intellectual property, which is good to see on a gaming news site: basically it says archivists need the support of publishers. That's not altogether reassuring.

From the University of Mississippi Law School comes a weblog devoted to legal aspects of aerospace. Remember when space was the final frontier? (Okay, let's pretend.) There's a blog. About law. About space. I know there are important and maybe even interesting legal questions involved, and I'm not cut out to be a frontiersman, but the romantic in me is disenchanted this evening.

Fixed: Size of the Balloon

As patch release notes go it's hard to beat 'fixed: size of the moon' and 'fixed: the two Policemen appear to stare at the ground', but my favourite has long been 'Rats will not squeak while gently being drained by female players.'

Balloon accessories, procrastination (n.), and the 'Arwing in a bottle' video

There are so many occupations that can be so much more complex than one might idly imagine. You've played about with helium balloons? Likewise, but probably neither of us used a balloon sizer or a balloon spacer. This stuff is 'designed by Balloon people for Balloon people', and although that sounds a touch cultish certainly impressive things can be done with balloons.

I notice that many of these links seem to bring up balloon.co.uk, leading me to wonder whether some fearsome monopolist might be at work consolidating the industry. It's not as though I'd expect to have heard...

I now have a Wordie account: a nicely elevated means of procrastination, and more fun than a fairly glitchy site deserves to be. Squidpunk needed someone to add it, after all.

Besides—I will rise above vocabulary level 46.

Sharing and enjoying the... unhylich?

Heat and Light

Sharing my name with, among numerous other people, someone who lunches at Her Majesty's pleasure owing to a conviction for violent assault, I have to sympathise with Kenji Ito, not to be confused with Kenji Ito, Kenji Ito or Kenji Ito, all of whom ride high in Google's search results. The problem seems to be quite acutely grasped by Kenji Ito, who may be the least self-aggrandising person on the Internet.

Street lights, scholastic Polizeiwissenschaft, and politiconeologophobia

At the time of writing, one of the editors' choices on the Internet Archive is Ornamental Street-Lighting: A Municipal Investment and Its Return, a brochure from 1912 America. I wondered whether there might be any modern street light enthusiasts, and of course there are: better yet, the site I found specialises in the street lights of Derbyshire.

It was always road lights that made an impression on me, with their soft red glow in the early evening turning to proud yellow in the night: if there were catseyes on the road, better still. I never gave much thought to street lights, but maybe I should.

News travels that 'children are being tracked by micro-chips embedded in their uniforms in a trial at a secondary school'. Now, look at the sources quoted in the Times article. For the opposition, a campaign group called Leave Them Kids Alone. For the proposition, the headmaster and a government spokesman. All worthy interviewees, but there seems to be some perspective missing: one which is no doubt not possessed of the most magisterial judgment, yet undoubtedly the one with the greatest personal interests at stake...

There are many circumstances in which it makes sense to coin new words, and activism can be one of them, but I wonder whether -phobia is perhaps getting blunted. Not necessarily because its connotation of 'irrational fear' is inapplicable outside a diagnostic context (although there is a tang of trying to clothe one's didacticism in the authority of scientific- and medical-sounding terminology), but because I suspect this lurches towards a contest of connotation in which the aim is no longer to reach agreement, or even to disagree about matters of fact (deferred to tomorrow), but to sculpt the language of the discourse into forms with strategically favourable insinuations.

Of course, there is the argument that that's actually inevitable—

What Would Svengali Do?

'As planned, the Metroid editor “Editroid” is being released a month later than planned. (Meaning today.)' (ROMhacking.net, yesterday.) My scheduling can be like that too.

Two very different art styles, an unfortunate choice of words, 'social skills' instead of 'media effects', and the potential for a cultural dystopia

Thanks to an incidental post on the VMS mailing list I've learnt about Fraktur, Pensylvania folk art with its orgins in German culture and notably Gothic lettering. It's worth a look just for the name.

Speaking of artworks, {feuilleton} has a post on Michiko Hoshino's Borges-inspired creations: I like her vision of the Library of Babel, but for the most part her work doesn't feel... playful enough to remind me of the man who inspired it. It is, however, starkly impressive in its own way.

Scary quotation of the day: 'We are fighting for power, but only for power over people's minds.' I hope this is just an unfortunate translation.

I learn from GamePolitics of research suggesting that it 'is not the cartoons that make your kids smack playmates or violently grab their toys but, rather, a lack of social skills'. Awkwardly enough I'm a sceptic about social skills; on the other hand I'm not a sceptic about the gradual development of linguistic competence in children, so maybe I shouldn't worry about the term in this context.

I'm habitually dischuffed with the paucity of state support for culture, but yes, that support has its downsides when the government tries to use the arts as instruments of social policy.

New Labour's political outlook... is rooted in a chronic insecurity about the public's alienation from the political process and a nervousness of what we might get up to, unsupervised. The role of artists, according to this mindset, is to help government 'connect' and 'engage' with (or in other words, infiltrate) the lives of ordinary people... As such, every single person who works in the state-funded arts sector... is expected to fit their work around Labour's agenda of integrating the 'socially excluded'.

The law of unintended consequences is likely to be a problem for any practical recommendations to which my work might lead, and I can't very well ignore that just because I'm working at a fairly high level of abstraction. Maybe it would be a worthwhile side-project to write a short dystopian narrative fleshing out how a holistic ethics of cultural heritage might go horribly wrong in the hands of intrusive politicians...

rhubarb-rhubarb.tk

Some referrer links are disappointing, but thanks to my fooling around and someone searching for 'kupo kupo' I've had some amusement: kupo-kupo.tk produces a 'would you like to register this domain?' page, complete with related search terms in a cloud.

For amusement, I've decided to register the domain names kupo-kupo.tk and rhubarb-rhubarb.tk, and have them point to this post; since I registered for free, though, they'll expire after ninety days unless at least twenty-five people use them. Plus they stick an advertising banner on the top of the page. But still... kupo kupo!

‘My thought is running out of my head’

Good times: the Rare Witch Project site returned to life a few days ago after surprising me with its upgrade downtime, and now Chrono Compendium has interesting news on the Chrono Cross investigation front. WIPO is still entertaining. I've learnt about the International Organisation of Book Towns. Things not having to do with Brussels or my mercifully flexible deadlines are going well—

Candles for cultural heritage, pages not found, mighty oaks of questionable parentage, and the fruits of failure

As must be obvious on investigation, I love cultural heritage. I love people who understand what it is to love cultural/creative works. So everything points towards my finding it right and natural to hold a candlelight vigil in remembrance of the despoilation of the Iraq Museum. And yet... something seems not quite right, and on reflection I think what's bothering me is that, edited together and put on YouTube, it looks like an act of public performance, an attempt to persuade other people that heritage is worthy of mourning.

My favourite 404 page, seen I forget where, read something like:

'404 not found':
What a disappointing phrase.
Instead, here's haiku.

It's an established theme, but I haven't found that one again, although Charles Dean's is similar.

404s are an artform.

Something has occurred to me that I may be able to develop for my research: last year there was a dispute in which the 'new' Acorn Computers, who bear no more relation to the Acorn of ARM/RISC OS fame than today's Atari does to its departed namesake, succeeded in wresting the domain acorncomputers.co.uk from its owner, whose site had offered information on RISC OS-related companies following (the original) Acorn's bailing out. A lot seems to come down to the mysterious perceptual value of 'brands', and I wonder whether, given the assumption that Acorn the elder has some heritage value, there might be a heritage argument against an attempted brand transplant.

I write that, and moments later I get a link to this...

It seems I missed the excitement in the press earlier this month about that flight of poetic inspiration, A Tragedy; I read about it years ago, probably in either The World's Greatest Mistakes or The Book of Heroic Failures (or the latter's tenth anniversary sequel, published nine years later before anyone noticed the mistake). (It seems there's an unrelated book on failures which I haven't seen...) Given its fascinating content, The Book of Heroic Failures sold rather well; since it contained a membership application form for the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain, applications poured in and the club disbanded on the grounds that 'even as failures, we failed'.

It was thanks to the Heroic Failures that I also learnt of a book on the 'morbid curiosity' section of my reading list, Two Hundred and Fifty Times I Saw a Play: apparently it's featured in a list of bad writing, though perhaps it recorded a worthy experiment. Some of the things on my 'wanted' list are very bad indeed: it's their special way of bringing joy and intrigue.

Cultivating Melancholy Early

I've found pictures of Duckworth Square before it was demolished on grounds of general dereliction (though its record shops seem to be remembered). For some reason this makes me happy. Modern urban delapidation has an ambience all of its own: not the romance of an older ruin, but a kind of weary poignancy.

On a related note, and to compensate for the current volume of philosophical remarks, this is a poem called 'A View From a Train Window' and was written a few years ago. It's certainly among my juvenilia – apparently the singular is juvenile, which wouldn't work in written English – but it's of no use to anyone languishing on my hard drive. Though I wish my younger self had picked a word that fitted the metre better than 'forlorn'.

Dismal landscape, and dreary:
Smeared with mud piles, smothering greenery.
Stale sky, vacant and weary;
Rust-covered ruins in cloud-covered scenery.

Entered Land of the Pylon:
Forlorn and faceless in cheerless weather.
Chimneys, and grey fields a mile on;
Barges with paint peeling, huddled together.

Buildings shabby and battered;
Rust and decay in the faltering light.
Grimy windows, some shattered.
Faded paint fades with the falling of night.

Having suggested earlier that the idea of governmental legitimacy might be best done away with, I'd like to expand and clarify. First I should note that there can be ambiguity in talking of legitimacy: if I say that the Queen is the legitimate head of state, for example, that may mean that under our constitutional arrangements the person who is the de jure head of state is in fact she who is de facto head of state, or it may be an endorsement of the legitimacy of the monarchy. When I question governmental legitimacy it's using the second sense: I assert that a government may govern in accordance with law (and the laws may be just), but that I'm not sure anything is gained (except perhaps complacency) by predicating legitimacy of the institution of government.

The difference from anarchism is presciptive: denying legitimacy doesn't entail any reaction. It's quite compatible with a pragmatic defence of government, where I simply suggest that having established its utility there is no obvious reason to introduce legitimacy.

It occurs to me that I may have come across as quite the anti-democrat in that earlier post; in fact, I'm simply reluctant to apply the term 'democracy' except where there exists a vigorous ethos of public debate and resolution.

My question on the Escapist fora remains unanswered...

Suppose you could pick any person to write an article about who's arguing some variant of the position that violent games can be dangerous, without having to worry about marketability, political relevance, etc. Whom would you pick? If I want to take on a thoughtful, cogent position, whose would you recommend?

...so I'll add to it. When I was looking into media effects for my B.A. dissertation, I looked through quite a lot of attempts at settling the matter experimentally, and some (often dire) material in Hansard and other political sources, but when it came to serious philosophical challenges... Susan Hurley (a professor at Bristol until her death last August) did some work in the area, but basically she took the reality of media effects as a neurological fact and then inquired into the implications. As for other names springing to mind... George Gerbner, perhaps? In his case I'm not sure there's enough empiricism to support the storytelling.

Otherwise I'm still looking, and while that's strategically advantageous and what a sceptic about media effects might expect, it is annoying when one faces a nebulous array of variant 'just so' stories, second-hand psychology and unrelective MacKinnonisms. Working in this area brought it home to me that the worst arguments are often the hardest to refute, because it's not clear what's required.

By Your Powers Combined

After walking through some crossfire I don't feel in the mood for polished writing up, so in a bid not to lose any more time I'm jotting some more informal notes.

Hooray!/Aaaugh!

What I need to emphasise is how holism is supposed to work here: of course in asking about the worth of $object one refers to its role in a wider culture, etc. What I want to argue is that the wider culture is the primary value-bearer.

The first point I can make is that a collection of objects can have a greater value than the aggregate value of its components – there's some work ono the breaking up of library collections that nicely reflects this – and so we can readily say that the collection has value. Without wanting to delve very much into mereology, the identification of discrete objects to regard as value-bearers actually looks quite artificial, especially when we can talk about the archæological value of a broken shard of pottery.

All the same, talking about the value of whole fields of human activity looks like a different k. of f., because we're dealing with a different sort of value. That potsherd has archæological value, i.e. it (in concert with other objects) opens up possibilities for archælogical knowledge. We can then ask what the value is of archæological knowledge, and clearly that's a different sort of question. I know what I'm trying to get away from: when the question arises of the defensibility of some copyright-infringing piece of fanfiction, for example, I want to say, don't just ask about the benefits and malefits arising from the existence of this specific piece, look at the role it plays within a fanfic. community. As for whither to go thence...

Well, I'm concerned with the value of something called 'cultural heritage', so probably I associate the archæology of a culture with its heritage, then say archæology has heritage value. There's a certain kind of historical knowledge involved, say, which plays a role for that culture (which could be 'human culture' as well as more localised culture). So now we face the next question, how do we account for the value of enculturation?

I'm fond of quoting the statistic that there are at least 164 definitions of'culture'; I want broad compatibility. Anyway, I can't keep playing with a regress forever; and by now I've started asking, value for whom exactly? If I start appealing to people's pleasures and pains, for example, I've just taken a circuitous route to Utilitarianism. So, in the first place, this is where the (transgenerational) community comes in. Culture and community aren't really separable: the culture is an emergent phenomenon, if you like, of community activity. So one possible line of argument would be that if communities benefit individuals, then preserving cultural heritage and making it publicly available serves that benefit.

Yet... that still feels like a hidden shift away from the value of heritage qua heritage. (I keep returning to the thought that if you don't inwardly understand why libraries are worth preserving, for example, you're soul-dead to begin with. I have some sympathy for Ian Bogost's comments about the possible importance of gaming, too.) Also, maybe it's a mistake to focus on the whole instead of the parts, as though it existed in some transcendent realm.

So I'm returning to my earlier question: what's the upshot of treating high-level agglomerations of activity as primary value-bearers? Well... what do we do when we ask, should $artwork be prevented from leaving the country? We apply the Waverly Criteria, of which the first is the most obviously cultural; all three are concerned with the significance of $artwork. But there are loads of artworks about which we never ask the question: we concern ourselves with individual works which we hold individually significant. Now that may not be mistaken, though what I've noted about collections should give pause for thought, but it does suggest that some sort of prejudgment is going on.

The working principle (also reflected in the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, with its language of 'outstanding universal value') seems to be that there are certain works which are lynchpins of cultural value, and I don't really want to argue with that. But to begin with there have been criticisms by archæologists of the Waverly [Waverley?] Report's containing 'no mention of assemblage, context or provenance, which are all now key concepts in archaeological theory and practice'. Besides the effects on (in this case archæological) value the context of an object can have, there are interrelations between objects, and here inspiration and even the making of what are legalistically termed derivative works comes to mind. I think it's a natural enough thought that a work which has inspired many others thereby accrues, or is thereby revealed to have (on account of its latent potential), increased value thereby, since its existence is a necessary condition for theirs; and so insofar as we value them at all we must value the original work by association. But... what if we took the whole family of works as the value-bearer, perhaps more valuable than the sum of its parts?

It makes some sense: a family of related works, a cluster of related thoughts in the Great Conversation, standing together as a coherent phenomenon. Even where there's no obvious lynchpin work, a whole set of works – historically interesting penny dreadfuls, for example – might make a valuable collection. ('These five fingers. Individually they are nothing, but when I curl them together into a single unit, they form a weapon that is terrible to behold.')

Okay, what might it mean in practical policy terms? Lynchpin works will still be identifiable and recognisably important; but there might also be 'lynchpin collections'. The most notable policy changes would probably be elsewhere; predictably I'm thinking of the public domain. Which is perhaps a suitable stopping point—

Darkness

This quiz is meaningless even by Internet standards but I like it, even though it tells me I'm Heidegger (as opposed to Kant/Mill/the early Wittgenstein). Though I think 'darkness' should have been an option for every question—

There's to be a minister for students, along with 'an independent National Student Forum which will advise ministers on student issues' and will no doubt be a shining beacon of reflective representation, just like NUS. When other news is concerned with 'go[ing] beyond the point of acceptable debate' – a strange thing to say in preference to 'being untrue' (or taking the opportunity to suggest that we aren't actually very capable of measuring intelligence) – no doubt carefully guided 'student juries' will be a great help in policy-making: a sort of ersatz public, because real public debate might get out of hand. The rest of us can always write to our MPs...

There seems to be a great appetite for this approach to participation... in Westminster: the formal structure seems to receive priority over what actually gets done. This perhaps reflects the marvellous myth that elective democracy annoints members of the Commons and government with a sort of glamour called 'legitimacy', which beyond the pared-down sense of 'not being there illegally' is one I'm thinking we might be better off not applying to governments. (I have some ideas for a short story about a city state in which holding high office is a capital crime, and those leaving it have to plead for public clemency: consequently all the rulers are either noble or mad. Which seems to imply that it would make no difference...) Since the government relies on the magic of electoral 'representation', any body created in a bid to connect with the public has to participate in the same magic first and foremost; but then the emphasis comes to be more on formal structure than on saying insightful and reasonable things.

In Alfirin's analysis 'this step has the feel of all those patronising student committees in schools, where school children jump to the chance to change things and have their opinion heard, failing to realise not only that they will have no more attention paid to them than before, but also that they are being used as part of a propaganda war to make the school look better'. So long as the consultations are merely decorative, manipulated affairs they won't change anything, so they'll merely be an annoyance and a net cost; the government is in any case adept enough at hearing what it wants to hear. But I worry that a government which doesn't always know what it wants to hear – remember the famous obsession with focus groups in the early Blair years – might actually look to student juries for inspiration and fool itself the more effectively into thinking it heard vox populi. Bad prospects either way.

I keep meaning to post a short note on Digital Rights Management (yes, a nakedly biased link), so here it is: if I recall my Hampsher-Monk correctly, before about the era of Locke 'private property' was understood to be rightly that of the King, and granted to his subjects on a sort of lease, revocable at his pleasure. When I see it observed that DRM makes ownership look more like rental, I reflect that in a way this is merely turning the clock back, and wonder in what other ways the technology of the future might let the future resemble the past.

‘Off moth-eaten echo’ / ‘Of the menace of hot’

So what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? It seems the wisdom of crowds was put to the test once. Turning to the wisdom of computing machines, an anagramitising program makes me both 'Debtors drone' and 'Sober trodden', which hasn't exactly made my day. Anyway—

"Ordinary citizens wouldn't know what to do with eternal life," [Marvin] Minsky explained... "The masses don't have any clear-cut goals or purpose." But scientists, who work on problems that might take decades to solve, would appreciate the extended lifespans, he says.
InventorSpot, 'Transhumanists to Upload Brains in Pursuit of Immortality'

One half-expects a 'Kono sekai wa kusatte iru'. Anyway, philosophers can string out arguments for thousands of years. Seriously: I think I can see the point he's trying to make, but he's conflating the teleology of a vaguely defined group with (supposedly) that of individual researchers. In practice things are murkier, as encounters with bids for public funding show.

As regards the plan to collect deranged Terms of Service, here's news of a prime exhibit. [Update: I'm enjoying the /. comments.] It's actually quite a cunning piece of wording: 'We do not permit you to view [our HTML] code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so.' Note that they don't actually say the law forbids viewing the source, merely that they don't authorise it.

More bad news in academic funding, according to a note sent to the PHILOS-L mailing list:

The UK Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills want to end funding for students who have an existing qualification at or below the level they wish to study (equivalent or lower qualifications = ELQs) in order to give the money saved - in excess of 100m to other priorities. They have not said what these are, but have stated that on the grounds of "fairness" first time students should come first in a tight spending round... Thus subjects which learners are more likely to study later in life, when they are already qualified in some other subject, and which are unlikely to attract support from employers, will be differentially affected... The principle of the 'strategically important and vulnerable subject' is also one that should worry many academics. In this exercise, it is being imported as a criterion for denying funding to one group of ELQs, whilst giving it to another.

The Master of Birkbeck College has raised concerns about the effect on the part-time sector. A consultation and a petition exist, and may or may not be more effective than the ministrations of a cargo cult.

Convolvulus

More Polizeiwissenschaft in the news, with the suggestion that there 'has to be public consent' on the crusade against obesity, while 'placing more pressure on mothers to breast feed' is a policy option: presumably this is some other public than the individual.

Meanwhile: contrary to legend you can find RISC OS ROM images on the Web. Emulators seem not to like them, though.

The worry at Public Knowledge is that YouTube's new filters might cause a wider shift: 'Google’s acquiescence to the content industry is likely to become the industry standard—you must filter out copyrighted content, regardless of whether you have Google’s resources to build your own filter'. In an unusually optimistic frame of mind I'm wondering whether it might also be a step towards a de facto registration requirement: if the filter didn't catch it, presumably nobody bothered to submit it for fingerprinting, so presumably nobody cares enough.

The story of Shun Akiba and the mystery beneath Tokyo (noted by Web Urbanist recently) is a few years old, but new to me. It's the kind of sketchy breadcrumb trail – certain subtle observations, tentative hypotheses, a mundane enough setting to make the conjecture seem not implausible – that makes it less easy to scoff at than many conspiracy theories. Someone commenting on the linked article was reminded of the creation of a fake location through falsified documentary evidence, and both articles remind me of Uqbar. Slight yet uncanny clues can be so destabilising: even when you know what that pamphlet really is, if there were a more determined and better backed conspiracy of falsification, could it not plausibly succeed in like manner?

In his paper 'The Hegel Legend of "Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis"' Gustav Mueller writes: 'The most vexing and devastating Hegel legend is that everything is thought in "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis."' This, he alleges, is not backed by the original texts, but constitutes a process of lazy copying with its origins in a course aiming to explain Hegel to Kantians. Such papers encourage a healthy scepticism about the reliability of one's textbooks. Then there was the need to rescue Nietzsche's reputation from his sister; there, again, we thankfully have the writings Nietzsche published himself. Pity those pre-Socratics whom we know largely through Aristotle. Legends can be scary things, growing like bindweed. Perhaps Borges was la zizanie: sometimes, under the influence of his Author of the Quixote, I like to play at asking what a text suggests if a sub-Cartesian demon is credited with influence.