Sneakernet Samizdat and Our Precious Upload Bandwidth

[StefanX]

It's time to take the "best of" DU, DailyKos, Crooks and Liars etc -- and share it with our friends and neighbors and co-workers.

How do we do this?

It will have to involve burning CDs and DVDs and printing newspapers on our own equipment -- and possibly also setting up short-range "pirate" UHF, VHF, AM and FM transmitters (available for under USD 1,000).

The choice is simple: keep paying Fox/CNN/MSNBC/WaPo/NYT/Time billions of dollars a year to lie to us and betray us -- or replace them. Why do we keep giving their traitors our money? Why do we waste our precious upload bandwidth uploading their lies so we can all work ourselves into a frenzy watching them over and over? What if we used our precious upload bandwidth to, for example, make sure that EVERY AMERICAN SEES THE 23-SECOND STANDING OVATION WHICH LOWERY GOT AT CORETTA SCOTT KING'S FUNERAL (and which CNN and Fox have spliced out like it never happened)?

Students of the Soviet Union will remember the "samizdat" (Russian for "self-publishing) -- an underground grassroots media based on typewriters and carbon paper. (Xerox machines were banned in the old Soviet Union.) And many computer users remember the tongue-in-cheek high-tech term "sneakernet" -- this refers to carrying a diskette from one machine to the other rather than transmitting the data via the wires. (Kind of old-fashioned -- but hey, there's an upside too -- the NSA can't touch the "sneakernet"!)

Now, how many of you have a CD burner, a DVD burner, or a printer?

For a few dollars, we can take the "best of" DU, Kos etc and put it on CD, DVD or paper and drop a few copies off around town where people congregate. Some of us send $20 or $50 to a candidate or a PAC -- what if we spent that money on blank CDs, DVDs and paper and then every day we all printed the same messages on them and distributed them locally?

Have you heard of BitTorrent? This is a unique peer-to-peer file-sharing technology -- like Kazaa and Napster only with a twist: the MORE people want a file, the FASTER it is to download it. Yeah, sounds unbelievable, but it's true. This paradox is made possible by the brilliant "BitTorrent architecture" where anyone downloading a file also automatically uploads it as well. So, the more downloaders there are, the more uploaders there are -- and voila, the more sought-after a file is, the easier it is to get.

A really great BitTorrent client for Windows is utorrent. And then there's sites like

http://home.quicknet.nl/qn/prive/romeria/top25.htm

where you can find the "torrents" other people are uploading and downloading. Note that it's an offshore site -- far from the clutches of the RIAA (Recording Industry Artist Association) and the MPAA (Motion Picture Artist Association).

Sony and TimeWarner and the rest of the networks and cable companies and "content providers" HATE BitTorrent -- because it does what they do, only for free. It creates a mass media market, mass awareness of products and messages -- only it does it for free.

Now, it wouldn't be too useful of course to unleash a tsunami of blogs on the populace -- people might get overwhelmed trying to make heads or tails of all that information and detail and debate. One of the selling points of the corporate media is that the whole country's watching the same thing at the same time -- they keep it simple and there's a unified message which the whole community can share -- creating a sense of solidarity and togetherness. Much as we hate to deal with the lies on TV or in the papers, deal with them we do -- if only to keep up on "what everyone else is watching."

So, is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking? Does anyone else see how the collaborative filtering and distributed moderation of sites like DU and Kos and crooksandliars and canofun combined with the highly scalable mass distribution capabilities of BitTorrent could blow the oldtime media out of the water?

We have the best content -- we voted on it ourselves.

We have the best distribution system -- it scales up naturally and it favors solidarity.

All that we need now is a way to conveniently "bundle" or "package" our content into CD-sized 700-megabyte chunks and DVD-zized 4.7-gigabyte chunks or into PDF files that can quickly be output to paper and then xeroxed, folded and stapled.

I think you're all familiar with the amazing thing that happens when people raised on "corporate" media get their first taste of "grassroots" media -- they go absolutely WILD because it's the first time they've ever heard HUMAN voices in media.

So I think you can pretty well predict what's gonna happen when people finally get exposed to real people rather than to the ghoulish mediawhores like Tweety, O'Reilly, etc. People are STARVING for real media. Imagine the explosion of consciousness that will take place when our non-computer-tech-oriented neighbors finally get a taste of what we've been enjoying for on the web lately.

It's our responsibility to go "the last mile" and bring our message to them.

[hippiechick]

1. Sorta Off Topic Question

I've tried nearly a dozen times to load stuff from bit torrent sites and always get an error message about having a FLAC decoder. WTF does that mean, and where do I find one?

Thanks!

[StefanX]

4. Never heard of that

What BitTorrent client are you using? There are lots of different ones: BitComment and Azureus seem good and utorrent is good and small. I would guess different clients might handle that "FLAC decoder" thing differently. I would do a search for

bittorrent "flac decoder"

on groups.google.com and someone else probably will have an answer for this.

[hwmnbn]

2. OK, I followed you all the way until....

actually delivering our content to the people who need it most. I can see making flyers and pamphlets from PDF files and distributing them around town.

I'm also willing to burn my computer's ass off making CDs, but where do we distribute these CDs filled with content "where people congregate?"

How and where do we make people watch the videos and listen to the radio shows?

Please forgive my newbie-ness about this. But can we podcast or broadcast other people's radio shows?


I'm with you that grass-roots is the only solution. If I can be trained, I damn sure will help. :headbang:

[StefanX]

3. Excellent question

I'm just brainstorming this along with you -- here's some ideas I have.

I used to live in some big cities, and all over town I would see people selling CDs and DVDs in subway stations and on busy streets and corners. And in lots of cafes, laundromats, bars, restaurants or in entrances or at cash-registers in stores, I'd see stacks of newspapers (and the occaional stack of CDs -- usually from AOL!). Plus the newspaper boxes on the street corners, either giving away free rags or waiting for you to put some coins in. So these two options are out there. Stuff could be distributed for free, and/or it could be paid -- I think there's lots of interesting solutions that could be worked out here -- including a paid system where profits get divvied up among authors, announcers, editors, voters and distributors. Nothing wrong with us getting paid (or paying each other) for our work for a change.

How do we make people watch or listen to this content -- easy, we just make it WAY BETTER than the existing corporate content. Most of us have already seen how grassroots media (with collaborative filtering) ALWAYS leaves corporate media in the dust. I think this is a major result we've seen from the social software experience of the past few years -- a loose grassroots network of reviewers usually does a better job of identifying good content than a committee of corporate suits.

As far as your question "where do we make the people go to watch the videos" -- as I said, we either sell stuff or drop it off around town where all the other brochures and free rags are being dropped off. An important ingredient of this whole thing (which I should emphasize more) is that we should explicitly rely on the "ratings" mechanisms (recommending on DU, modding on KOS) to try to mostly publish the stuff that's already been proven to be popular. I think popularity would then skyrocket well past any of the current pablum being dished out by the fascist corporate media.

Let a thousand Air Americas (and Howard Sterns and Pacifica Radios and WBAIs) bloom

I'm actually not all that up-to-speed on podcasting although from what I've seen, I'm already convinced that it's a big part of the solution. There's a site (recently bought by Yahoo!) called WebDJ where people create playlists on the web and use RSS to syndicate them. I think this is going to do for audio/video what RSS did with text (and Yahoo appears to think so as well). The way blogs and syndication sites are replacing newspapers -- I think that when you apply RSS to playlists of audio and video you're going to see the web start replacing network TV and cable as well as terrestrial radio -- plus it will be able to take on Sirius and XM: think of a social software package linking together remote writers and em-cees and suddenly you're doing what Jackie Martling and Robin Quivers and Howard Stern do in their studio with their laptops and headphones and wires. Ditto for Air America -- I think we're soon going to see real-time web-based creating, editing, filtering/ranking and distribution very soon.

As a first step, all I'm suggesting is bundle the stuff so it fits on one disk and then saturate our towns with it. As I said, we can sell the disks and papers -- or just leave them under windshields and in restrooms or in bus stops. Eventually I'll bet some clever people are going to remember that there's some people in Berkeley who offer instructions on pirate TV and radio kits (build a transmitter for under $1,000) and I think this will end up being part of the mix too.

There will be plenty of enemies who will try to knock this down. No corporation is going to like it, and the FCC will claim authority to regulate what goes on the People's airwaves. I'm not a lawyer, but I'd I do know they are the PEOPLE'S airwaves and I think sufficient legal cover could come from initiating citizen actions revoking corporate charters and impeaching FCC commissioners when they inevitably try to assert control over our electromagetic spectrum. As I've said, the law specifically states that this spectrum is a public good held in common. Currently, corporations license it -- and if they aren't good corporate citizens (which they clearly haven't been lately), the law has provisions to revoke those licenses.

But as I said, selling or dropping off CDs, DVDs and paper around town is the main idea for starters -- plus I'm hoping short-range broacasters would get involved too. As long as we use collaborative editing and collaborative filtering to identify popular content, and as long as we use massively scalable distibution systems like BitTorrent and PeerGuardian to get a uniform and popular message of solidarity out there, then I think success is pretty much automatic because that's exactly what the fascist enemy corporate media has been doing up till now with POISONOUS, BORING content. People really WANT to hear what everyone else is thinking and talking about today -- that's really the main function of "media". DU and KOS and BitTorrent combined with cameras, mikes, DVD burners, CD burners, printers and transmitters can do this much cheaper and better than the corporate media is doing it.

This will take a lot more ideas and work but I bet 95% of the software and hardware (and shoe leather!) is in place.