Fearmongers

How long we have been subjected to the incessant talk about recession? A year? More? I have this unfortunate habit of listening to NPR in the morning, while eating breakfast, and then at dinnertime, so I have had plenty of exposure to the not-so-subtle message that we should all be very afraid. They have been laying it pretty thick, really. They've brought in economists, who confirmed time and again that things are so bad, they hadn't seen it that bad in their lifetimes... If it's not a recession yet, it's for sure just around the corner. Heck, they've been feeding us stories about the Great Depression! (So it's not about Recession anymore... It's the Great Depression we're staring in the face!)

What's with this fear-mongering? I know that the US economy is not doing great at the moment, and that the housing crisis is very real. But why do I hear glee in the voices of NPR reporters emphasizing the negative? Whenever there is good economic news, it's always followed by "but.." or "however..." It's approching parody, like the recent headline that read: "Gas prices are falling and why this not such a good thing." Sweet Jesus! We've been talked to ad nauseam about how the high price of gas is straining the economy, with SUVs clogging the dealearships, carmakers laying off workers, food prices going up, etc, etc. Now, when the oil prices seem to be showing a downward trend, we ought to be worrying that it is not a good thing after all! What the bloody hell?

The naive explanation is that "good news is no news" and that the media simply has to feed on bad news, and if there isn't any, it'll create it. However, I think that there is a deeper layer to it, and his name is Barack Obama. The media is so invested in having him win the presidency that it uses all tricks at its disposal to promote his candidacy, short of telling us straight to vote for him. I'm certain the talk of recession is a part of it. The more we're scared, the more we will be willing to embrace the "change" Obama is promising. There is very little doubt in my mind that, should he win, the word "recession" will quickly disappear from the media's coverage of the economy.

There is a precedent: remember the 1992 election, when George Bush the Elder was defeated with "It's the ecomomy, stupid!"? Back then the media whipped up the bad news about the economy, to almost immediately change its tune after Clinton's victory. It's as if the election magically cured whatever was ailing the US stock market. It's the same screenbook, different actors.

However, I do wonder if they are not going to overplay their hand this time. I can't be the only one who's noticing the pattern here. And there is also a different pattern that manifested itself in past elections: the media thinks that the American electorate is stupid and can be easily manipulated. Yet time and again they've been proven wrong on that score. I'm fairly positive it will repeat itself as well. Unlike the media, I have quite a bit of trust in the voting public.

Evil DRM

I have always believed in paying artists for their work. This included, of course, music. Except for a short-lived "lets give it a try and see what the fuss is about", I did not participate in peer-to-peer sharing. Early on I signed up for the subscription-based Musicmatch, and was pretty happy with it, occasionally buying songs and creating compilations for listening in my car. Obviously, I did not expect that I will end up feeling like a total sucker, thanks to that evil scheme that must have been concocted in the devil's head: DRM (Digital Rights Management).

I had misgivings about it from the very beginning; initially. Musicmatch restricted transfer of purchased songs to a limited number of instances (5 or 7 in a lifetime, if I remember correctly). I was not planning to buy an MP3 player any time soon, but I had a laptop and a desktop, which I used to replace every 2-3 years. This meant that only after two replacement cycles I would no longer be able to transfer my music to new machines. What then? Luckily, this was amended later and I could only have 3 "active" devices at any time, but I could "deactivate" a device, and transfer purchased songs to a new one. This looked like I could keep moving the music I owned from one computer to another for as long as I lived.

I had no idea that the licenses for my songs were tied to the service I bought it from: Musicmatch. So when Musicmatch was acquired by Yahoo!, I faced the real prospect of losing the ability to transfer my songs, unless I agreed to move to the new service, which would then continue to provide the licenses. I did move and for a while everything seemed fine, except that every now and then the DRM system used by Yahoo! would stop recognizing my ownership of certain tracks and would force me to re-license them. This was but the first circle of the DRM hell...

A few days ago I found out that 40 of my songs were no longer showing as licensed... My attemtp to re-license them produced errors that Musicmatch was no longer available... This, many months after I transfered my subscription to Yahoo! and all my songs to their DRM system.  What the bloody hell?? When I contacted Yahoo! customer service, the answer I received was that since these songs had been purchased from Musicmatch, they could no longer help me with licensing... Musicmatch no longer existed.

Well, I knew that! So I argued that I transferred to Yahoo! and expected Yahoo! to provide licenses for these songs, as I had been promised. This generated a response that "it does not matter where you transferred them. It only matters that they were purchased from Musicmatch". This is just too f..d up to comprehend! Imagine buying a CD from your local music store. This CD will play only for as long as that store remains in business. A new chain takes over the store and agrees to keep allowing you to play the CD, if you continue to buy music from them. Then, one day, you still have your CD in pristine condition, but it stops playing. You complain and hear, "Sorry, but you bought this CD from someone else. Can't help you".  If that's not getting screwed, I don't know what is...

So I feel like a total idiot for being honest and law-abiding, and getting suckered into the game of Let's Screw the Loyal Music Fans Who Actually Want to Pay Us Money. Would you buy a CD, whose playback depended on the existence of the store you bough it from? Or a car that runs only for as long as the dealer that sold it to you is still in business? You would not even consider such a deal, beacuse that would not be a deal, that would be a con. And that's exactly what was done to me (and countless other): we were conned. 

Now Yahoo! is getting out of the music business and offering its customers transfer to Rhapsody. I'm afraid that this will just push me deeper into the DRM hell, so I think I will decline. Should I reconsider my decision not to be a part of "illegal" sharing?  Well, if the "legal" side of this business means that I'm getting robbed at will, then I think the answer to that is not as simple as I thought it to be.

On blogging

It's been a long while since I've posted to this blog... Primarily because it was spring, and now it is summer, with so many better things to do than sit in front of a computer. Or worry about politics, for that matter. I've been going back and forth about whether to pick this up at all, trying to answer a seemingly simple question: why am I doing this? I am not a compulsive writer, so I don't really have to write. I also know that what I'm writing here can come back to haunt me. After all, I work at a university, where views like mine are probably in minority, or at least not openly expressed. Someone had already complained about my views, or so I heard... So I probably shouldn't write. Yet these are some of the reasons why I do post things on my website and on my blog: I want to try to find my voice and I don't want to succumb to fear, which seems to be permeating this society. (Note: I'm planning to cover this particular issue in a subsequent post).

I do a lot of thinking, and sometimes in a way too fragmented a manner, and writing helps me slow down, formulate my thoughts, think about something for a while, instead of jumping from one issue to another like a dragonfly on speed. I also want to assert my right to speak my mind. It's a basic human right, dammit! If what I write disturbs you, don't read it. There are mllions, perhaps billions other pages on the Web - go and find something you like. Disagreement is OK, it's even welcome. I don't claim that I know everything or that my views are not subject to change. They are, and I can be persuaded that I was wrong and someone else was right.  What are really hate are people who think that views different from theirs should be supressed, and people who hold them, punished. There are depressingly many such people in the United States. Perhaps fewer than in most (all?) other countries, but still...