BigMother.dk

In what seem to be either a conceptual experiment or a desperate move of necessity in a new world order of me too indie musical marketing, the father of dub minimalism and it’s signature label ~scape, Stefan Betke, has created a MySpace profile for his Pole moniker. Even if he has tried hard to keep the design cool and calm (check out the minerally aesthetic picture and the fact thatit’s poleartist not polemusic), there’s still a long way to Pole’s classically minimalist cover art. Among the standard elements Betke is suffering under is ‘Band members’ (to which Betke has written “I edited my profile with Thomas’ Myspace Editor V4.4″) and a screaming yellow as the most suitably monochrome color Betke could come up with. It’s truly tragic-comic to see an iconic electronica avantgarder like Betke submerged among friendship and ‘thanx-for-the-add’ craving wannabes and the worst of web-Americana of MySpace. Brave new world.

But from a new principle of always bringing you at least one pleasant information per post (however misanthropic and gloomy it might otherwise by), note that Betke promises new material out soon. Moreover, Jan Jelink is also about to follow up his kraut-rock studies of Kosmischer Pitch with more organic stuff on Tierbeobachtungen (listen here) on the ~scape label. Ganz toll!

Update: Wired with another argument for the illusionary in sticking to old standards for privacy. Access to vast amounts of data and the possibility to socialize online means the end of control over your data. Quite trivial actually. But triviality has never been a corrective for emotions.

We’ve witnessed at lot of activity lately on the perpetual privacy issue. This time brought about by the initiative by the Facebook designers to allow for more systematic monitoring of the activities of other community members. Big deal I’m tempted to say knowing that some people take their social web life very serious. But I do find it utterly naive to cry for privacy on the web when great parts of this information infrastructure’s success stems from delivering access to information on everything. It seems like common sense that using the web widely might have consequences later on when the web is increasingly used to check people’s credentials and nature as this fresh piece from New Scientist describes. Yesterday I fell over these quotations by Paul B. Hartzog on Many2Many, which captures my feeling quite precisely:

[A]s David Brin points out in The Transparent Society, privacy advocates are typically hypocritical in that they want privacy for themselves and transparency for everyone else. Luckily, transparency doesn’t work that way. If surveillance, then sousveillance. If you can watch me, then I demand the right to watch you. The consequence of privacy is that only the powerful will be able to watch others. In other words, the powerful will have privacy and the powerless won’t. Think about it. When is the last time you were able to see a company’s credit rating before you engaged with them? They do it to you all the time… Privacy is an experience that people have which is not only illusory, but serves the interests of those powerful players who can, and do, violate privacy all the time.

Fighting over privacy on the web feel a bit like the music and movie businesses making a fuzz of loosing a few percentages of their bizarrely enormous revenues due to new rules of the web. Times changes and put wealth and fame into changing hands. Most demands of privacy is so asymmetrical and contextual that it simply seem ridiculous. So far the value of digital payment, mobile phone roaming and web surfing totally overshadows matters of privacy. Add to that, new democratic possibilities to monitor and report lying politicians, reporters creating their facts or companies committing serious social harm over the web with the speed of light. Of course it’s concerning when powerful surveillance measures are coupled with incompetent political paranoia and a legal system put on hold as in parts of the western world, but please put things in perspectives. And referring to old norms like the music-movie industry is futile. Learn to deal with a new reality pragmatically and trust the general rationality and innovation of humans. If privacy becomes a general issue, enough will revolt in an appropriate matter and restore an overall sense of fairness.

I’m just back in from a great meeting with the most convenient king, always-lovable Erlend Öye and his new act The Whitest Boy Alive. Jeppe called me in the mid of Sunday night working saying that his friend Erlend was in town and just put him in the door and the concert was in 30 min – if I had the time? No, I’m afraid I replied, but he luckily managed to convince me over a couple of fast SMS’. And what a nice concert with a lot of loyal Danish fans (and probably a lot of Swedes as well) and a band jamming considerable parts of the show. Gentle and full of love as the album (and everything Erlend does). And most of all the concert stopped at a very ‘I-got-some-quite-important- business-meetings-tomorrow’ friendly hour. As father to a little child I could really use more of that. Which reminds me, I need to crash now. Later!

Erlend in red (sorry for the lousy quality it wasn’t meant to be indie)

What a day. Even if I’m totally overstressed at work (no, Actics is not a work but a condition), hitting my Samurai.fm bookmark today was a blessing. The two first streams today is presented by Scape and feature Pole with band (picture) and Deadbeat. Nearly two and a half hours of high quality music – for free! I haven’t even scrolled down yet to see the other gifts. Go there, listen and enjoy a productive Friday!