I found this rather interesting talk recently, about a concept Eli Pariser, the speaker in question, calls ‘the filter bubble’.

In the talk above, given for TED, the home of more or less anything interesting on the internet, Pariser is talking about how personalisation filters on Facebook and Google are effectively spoon-feeding us news, entertainment and information which they and we already know we want to see.

This is fine if, not to Rumsfeld things too much, you think that what you know you want is all you will always want.  It’s for this reason that I never really got much satisfaction from using Pandora or Last.fm as radio stations.  Basically, they just played stuff I pretty much already knew I liked and wanted to hear and, honestly, I found that pretty boring.

I actually prefer someone playing me shit I don’t like from time to time, so I tend to far prefer blogs, radio shows, podcasts and things like that, where I know that I will be challenged at least from time to time.  Even so, with all the variety out there, and the depth available, it is still pretty easy to end up in a cultural cul-de-sac these days, surrounded by only a few different shades of the same colour, and thinking that represent variety.

Pariser talks very well (and there is more in this interview) about the power and the damage which this kind of filtering can cause, particularly if wielded by the likes of Facebook and Google, which are pretty much our windows onto the entire internet these days.

But people were doing this to themselves long ago.  I began to really notice it when I started reading political blogs a few years ago.  There were so many out there, it got to the stage where people were linking back and forth from one blog to the next to support their arguments, and it quickly became clear that a lot of people were getting all their political information and, often worse, their political analysis from inside a sort of walled garden of mutual reinforcement.

Now, I am horrendously guilty of this myself, so I am not accusing anyone exactly,  but I don’t think there’s any doubt that simply exposing your opinions, whether cultural or political, to people who will pat you on the back and agree with you makes them weak, flabby and kind of meaningless.

So stuff like Facebook weeding out things it knows we probably aren’t interested in, or Google tailoring my news results to standard lefty, middle-class fare really bothers me.  For someone as opinionated as I am, you might think I get annoyed when I am disagreed with, but really the opposite is true.

I actually like people disagreeing with me, assuming they have an actual argument to make, so just being spoonfed shit I already agree with ends up feeling a bit like being in some sort of anaesthetic dream conceived by Big Brother to keep us happy and docile. It’s amazing that we are actually having to go so far out of our way just to be disagreed with these days.

Plus, it reminds me a little too much of this comic, taken from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

[This week the Sunday Supplement has been provided by Jason of the popular and well respected blog; The Pop Cop, which was recently deleted by Google following unsubstantiated DMCA allegations.]

“This is the dangerous time. The moment of transition where, in sporting terms, the boy must become a man. There is bound to be hype as well as expectation. It will not be long now before people note that Tim Henman and Greg Rusedski aren’t as young as they were, and somebody will need to succeed them. British tennis is on a high but, if it is to be sustained, something of substance will have to be manufactured from its raw material. Andrew Murray is in pole position. What comes next, as much as anything else, is a test of his drive. The growing suspicion is that Andrew is the future of Scottish tennis.”

So wrote Simon Buckland in the Sunday Times on June 9, 2002 – less than four weeks after Andrew Murray had turned 15. It would be a further three years before he’d become familiar enough to be called “Andy”.

Buckland must have a huge sense of satisfaction looking back as the first national newspaper journalist to not just spot the potential for greatness in a kid so young, but stake his professional reputation on it. The Sunday Times doesn’t make a habit of printing 1000-word features on complete unknowns in their third year of high school. The article exists in the British Library as an undeletable piece of history that documents the earliest known mainstream reference to one of the most talented sportsmen Scotland has ever produced.

While I can’t lay claim to having published any predictions in The Pop Cop which have come to fruition quite so spectacularly, I did take just as much pride in trying to do what Buckland did, albeit in the field of music rather than tennis. Days upon days were spent scouring the underbelly of the Scottish music scene, trawling through MySpace links, frequenting obscure, dingy venues in the off-chance that mythical ‘next big thing’ would be tuning up.

If you look through the many Scottish music blogs (and there seems to be a new one springing up every month), you’d probably come to the conclusion that, in comparison, The Pop Cop wasn’t exactly overflowing with such recommendations and tip-offs – and you’d be right. When you have spent three years building up a blog to the point where people are actually paying close attention to what you write (and, believe me, it took at least two years to feel that was the case), a certain responsibility comes with it. There’s nothing more tempting than publicly declaring “this band will blow you away/change your life”, but the moment you do so, you dangle a very dangerous carrot. If it proves to be false hope (yes, I know taste is subjective, but still…) and a reader loses faith in your judgement, you are screwed, because judgement is the single most important quality in your control as a music blogger.

However, last week’s crushing turn of events made me realise that the one thing that was not in my control was history. All it took were a few anonymous, unjustified complaint letters for 35 months of work to disappear into an internet black hole. Unlike Simon Buckland, if any of my predictions for stardom prove accurate, there will be no record of it. All I can hope for now is that The Pop Cop blog will be remembered. And if just one reader discovered a love for an artist they’d never heard because I wrote about them… well, I’d be pretty fucking gutted. Just one?!

Seriously, though, it was a blast.

* The full explanation of The Pop Cop’s demise and the campaign to recover its work from Google can be found here.

* A Facebook group called ‘Get The Pop Cop back online’ can be found here.

* The Pop Cop is on Twitter here.

I don’t know how many times I have to go on about it, but the way digital law is shaping up in the Twenty-First Century is pretty scary.  It’s really not difficult to explain why it’s so stupid, either: we are basically looking at a world of outsourced law enforcement, with the enforcement put in the hands of one of the interested parties.  Does that need any more explanation as to why it is so hilariously, surreally idiotic?

The other aspect, of course, is that with this outsourcing the law is effectively being policed on the landscape of corporations’ terms and conditions, with no semblance of due process, and no obligation to their customer whatsoever.  This means that if Virgin Media decide to disconnect me from the internet because they have received complaints about illegal downloading of copyright material on my account they can do so and I have no recourse – they can of course choose to provide their service to whomever they choose.  However, given my whole business entirely depends on access to the internet, I’d like to be pretty fucking certain they made some effort to establish the veracity of any accusations they used as a basis for depriving me of it.

Similarly with blogs, of course.  Scottish music blog The Pop Cop was recently summarily deleted by Google on the basis of duplicated and factually inaccurate accusations of copyright violations.  The way the Digital Milennium Copyright Act works (and believe me, our own Digital Economy Bill is worse) the accusers are immune from punishment for making fallacious accusations.  Also, Google is immune from prosecution if it simply removes the material in question, irrespective of whether or not the accusations have any merit.  And the person whose work is subsequently vandalised has absolutely no legal comeback whatsoever precisely because the DMCA law is specifically designed to remove actual law enforcement bodies from the process of enforcing the law and putting it into the hands of massive companies with a major vested interest in the dispute itself.  Surely absolutely any lawyer in the land would laugh their arse off at anything so obviously corrupt.

So the Pop Cop was removed for attracting repeated, and inaccurate accusations of copyright infringement despite never having the opportunity to point out that these accusations had no merit. This is guilt by accusation, new internet laws are full of it, and it is a seriously important problem for our law-enforcement because suddenly all concepts of right to due process of law and the assumption of innocence have been swept away, all because a few major media companies are terrified of the internet and too lazy to innovate to engage with it.  This has very far-reaching social implications indeed and we should all be strongly aware of what it represents: major companies want the right to punish us outside of the law whenever they see fit, and without consequences for themselves.  That is fucking scary.

And let’s be honest, this is not about deleting some fourteen-year-old’s diary (although that might actually attract more sympathy and highlight the act of cultural vandalism being perpetrated here) this is three years of actual work supporting the music industry of Scotland – the very thing he is being attacked for undermining.  This is the bit that is just fucking ridiculous.  Labels like mine do not have access to the BBC, we don’t have access to Q or the NME and we can’t get our bands on Jools Holland or the bill at Reading, and we can’t afford to fly them to the States to do a tour, so independent, not-for-profit bloggers and podcasters are the lifeblood of our business model.  Without the opportunity to reach a wider audience which these sites represent we have no way of getting our artists’ music out there, and we are fucked*. You are not ‘protecting music’ by silencing its most passionate champions, you are doing just as much harm as the people who you think you’re fighting, if not more.

Imagine if someone accused a painter of copying a few of their pictures.  You might investigate their work to see if the accusation held water, and you might perhaps force them to acknowledge the debt to the other painter, and you might even compel them to hand over a percentage of the profits they made from that particular work.  What you would not do is turn your back and allow the accusing party to go to their house and destroy every single one of their other paintings on the assumption that they wouldn’t make such an accusation if it were without merit.  And yet, because this is the internet, that is considered acceptable, because let’s be honest this is exactly what has happened to Jason.

Now Google are partly to blame here, but only partly.  I have no idea why multiple complaints has to trigger the deletion of a blog rather than a review with the owner of precisely what the situation is, although I presume that simple man-hours would be the barrier.  But if you think that spending a couple of hours of your time establishing whether or not someone is a criminal is not something you can be arsed with, then you have serious problems.  It is not hard at all to establish the motives of a music blogger – it is usually obvious within the first post or two.

The wider issue here is one of the law, and the way it is being written at the moment.  Currently almost every single law being written in the internet space is copied and pasted from the wish lists of major corporations whose sole desire is to ring-fence their vested commercial interests.  Politicians are going to have to get pretty fucking savvy pretty fucking quickly because they are having rings run around them at the moment, and we are staring down the barrel of some of the most cock-eyed, store-bought legal travesties in recent history.

There is a Facebook group here which you can join to support Jason and help pressure Google into giving his site back, and it would be hugely appreciated if you could email support@blogger.com and tell them what you think.

*Of course, the major labels will be more than happy with that, as the fewer independent channels available the more they can own the ones which are left, and the fewer independent record labels starting up and building an audience, the less competition they have, and they are thus protected from the annoyance of having to improve their product to remain competitive.  I am not entirely convinced, however, that lazy companies should be able to use the law to reinforce what now essentially becomes a cartel, and immunise themselves against having to compete in a free market.

It’s hardly surprising that I find myself saying that Google have turned their old motto, Don’t Be Evil, into something of a sad parody, rather than the idealistic mission it once used to be. It’s also a little sad that what prompts me to write is not their spineless compliance with internet censorship in China, but something a little closer to home.

Ed, writer of 17 Seconds, is the latest to fall foul of Google’s draconian, utterly corrupt and morally bankrupt policies towards copyright. A year or so ago Ed wrote an in-depth interview with Glasvegas, back when the band were shopping about a few rough demos, barely more than a whisper on the lips of a few of us up here in Scotland. Yesterday Google deleted that interview from his blog. The whole thing, without permission, without dialogue, without warning: they just deleted it and told him it was gone.

The reason they gave was that it had been the subject of a DMCA complaint from Columbia Records, presumably on the basis that the interview write up contained links to long-since removed mp3 files of Glasvegas early demo recordings of songs now on their debut album. Despite the contemptuous, disgusting nature what both Columbia and Google have done, I can’t even feel angry about this; just depressed. But this is wrong in so many ways it’s difficult to know where to start.

First and foremost, none of you should ever pay for a Columbia product ever again. Fuck them. If you feel you can’t live without their music then just download the bastard stuff illegally, better yet just live without it, but under no circumstances give these chiselling vipers a cent of your money ever again. Could someone who knows more about this correct me if I am wrong, but there is to my mind no way whatsoever that they could own the rights to those demos, which were recorded and circulated for free long before they were ever involved with the band. Read the rest of this entry »