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When thinking about buying and selling music and films, we often attempt to point to the work of art as separate from the container we buy it in. It’s as though we think one can buy a song without any physical manifestation– perhaps just the ideal of a song. I would contend that reproduced works of art do not exist except for their containers.

This is in contradistinction to original works of art, because they are singular, they are the work itself embodied. This is the unique value of owning and living with real works of art. The viewers relationship is with the work, rather than the means of reproduction. Over time the containers through which we reproduce music and film have changed. From a business perspective, it has been effective to have each work recorded on to a small portable format that can be packaged and sold.

As the methods of reproduction change, the recording formats change– and we buy the next container. It’s at this point that you’ll generally hear the complaint that a particular piece of music has been purchased in many formats over the years. But of course, that’s all there is. There is no recorded music outside of the containers in which it’s sold. To hear actual music one would need to attend a performance.

We’re currently seeing the transition from a physical container to the digital container. Suddenly the purchaser owns a master file than can be placed on multiple devices and copied on to material formats like DVD and CD. This radically changes the economics of the entertainment business. The business used to be the production and sale of units. Marketing and distribution were keys to success.

We can see from examples like Google and Facebook that providing the entry and orientation point for the Internet can be highly lucrative. If a user chooses to pass through your site on her way to any and every destination, you can change a small fee for billboards on that road. A small fee combined with the volume of traffic that passes through Google equals a compelling business.

No company or product has emerged that holds an analogous position to recorded entertainment product. The leading contenders are probably Apple’s iTunes, TiVo and probably Amazon. The “recording industry” is busy defending the old model in the courts. This is a classic sign of the end of a business model cycle. Unable to compete in the markets, they turn to the law to encode their models (See buggy whips).

As the container as format moves to the digital, a new container emerges. The player is now the thing. It’s the iPod, the iPhone, the laptop, the television, the car stereo, the satellite radio player that is the other new ground for innovation. Two good examples of this are the Chumby and Dave Winer’s new FlickrFan. The television is a much more flexible output device in the age of HD flat screens, and Chumby is a classic simplification play. The iPhone and multi-touch creates an almost unlimited platform for software created user interfaces; freed from mechanical user interfaces (KVM) the field is open.

Organizing, curating, editing, programming, sequencing, suggesting, categorizing, collecting on a theme: these are the value propositions in the new landscape. Can it be done algorithmically? Should it be? Amazon often provides comical suggestions based on the attention and gesture data they’ve collected. Steve Gillmor has created an iPhone site that filters news based on sets of selected editors (professional and amateur). Jason Calacanis and Mahalo are attempting to provide curated search results, but maybe search isn’t the thing that people are really looking for. Maybe it’s the curation itself.

There’s been some talk recently about creating permanent archives of personal digital content. I wrote a post recently about how the digital artifacts of our day might look exactly the same in 2,000 or 10,000 years. The digital doesn’t age the way the analog does. In 1999, NASA found that it couldn’t read the data from the 1975 Viking space probe– the formats were obsolete.

Then I read an article in the NY Times about the preservation of films and the cost of preserving digitally produced films. Turns out it’s much more expensive to preserve the digital. DVDs and hard drives require constant maintenance and care to assure the quality of the data. More than $200,000 per year to preserve the digital, under $1,000 per year for the analog. Once the data is messed up, there’s no good way to fix it. We can use digital techniques to fix analog films, but you throw away a scratched DVD.

The human ear can tolerate and compensate for analog distortion, but digital distortion is just plain creepy. A DVD that skips and smears images across the screen completely ruins any unfolding narrative. We’ve reduced the cost of producing films and music through digital technology, but have we also created a era of fragile data that will be entirely lost to future historians?

The analog can be lost and forgotten, left in an attic in poor conditions for years, and still tell us a story when it’s discovered. The digital is simply unplayable. DVDs and CDs start to break down after 30 years. There are claims that with archival treatment they can last up to 100 years. But without archival methods (freezing for instance) CD-ROT can cause a CD or DVD to start breaking down after a few years. The digital has the potential to be eternal, but it may end up being the most ephemeral of all.

Coincidence? Rose Mary Woods erases 18 1/2 minutes of the Nixon tapes, Steve Gillmor claims that the 7 minutes of quiet at the beginning of a Gang de Gillmor podcast is meaningful silence. Will we ever know for sure if the silence was simply silence– or was erased on purpose.

Some think that Gillmor concisely explained attention and gestures during the missing minutes. Others believe that Gillmor has never recovered from his youthful dalliance with Nixon’s personal secretary Rose Mary Woods. While Gillmor was never able to reconcile himself to Woods’s politics, the heart wants what it wants. Since that time, erasure and silence have had a strange hold over Gillmor.You can judge for yourself by finding the Gang podcast on Facebook. Gillmor’s absence from the rest of the Internet is simply another example of his obsession with not speaking, not linking and recording silence (erasure). 

Is reality noumenous? Unknowable? How can Kant live with himself? 

In the movie business, the cost of production placed power in the hands of the producers and “money men.” While essential, writers are at the bottom of the totem pole. The strike has proven how essential they are. Apparently actors don’t make up the words they say.

Writers are starting to understand how the cost of production has changed, and most importantly how distribution models have changed. After all, that’s what this strike is all about. Shows redistributed through the Internet require some payment to the writer. It would be very interesting if the point of contention became the method by which writers suddenly owned the production process.

A closed system can be a portal to openness through the network. This is a fundamental change in where the opportunities for software application development will be located in the future.

In the era of the desktop computer, an executable program needed to reside on the local computer hard drive and take advantage of the tools offered by the operating system. Access to APIs and documentation defined how open a system was. Ability to alter, or improve the system, to better support an application was a further sign of openness.

This same paradigm has been used to think about the coming age of the teleputer. Pundits and hackers cry out for access that is analogous to the desktop OS development environment. They don’t seriously attend to the possibility of a radical shift away from the hard drive to the cloud. This idea is a riff off of Steve Gillmor’s recent post.

A Short Interlude:

Upgrading software and maintaining compatibility through multiple versions on a desktop computer is one of the top usability problems of the desktop environment. The installed executable application model creates infinite complexity at the point of least understanding and ability to cope. Think about what happens when you move that complexity back into the cloud and give responsibility for managing it to the application developers. A “computer” becomes simple for the user, and as complex as the business model and developers of the application can support.

Tim O’Reilly, in his NY Times Op Ed piece, asks Verizon to open their platform in the same way that the computer is open— either on the desktop or the server. Although he coined the term “Web 2.0″ for his conference, he doesn’t seem to really understand the implications. The new path to openness is laid down by Steve Gillmor when he writes about the “hard drive” vs. “the cache.” With HTML/Ajax, Flash and Silverlight, small runtimes can be present anywhere and everywhere. The future of application development is against these small runtimes in the browser and single purpose network connected applications that make use of a subset of browser capability.

It’s an avenue to much greater user acceptance and uptake; and it removes an element of complexity from the local machine. This is how you dramatically reduce the hours of work required to maintain a computer / handheld device. Those who demand access to your computer and teleputer so they can load it up with the code they’ve written are not necessarily doing you a favor. They are probably just setting you up for a future moment when your phone will crash beyond your ability to repair it.

Resist the forces of complexity that wear the guise of “openness.” Closed systems can support both simplicity and openness via the network. Open systems support potential complexity at the device level and openness via the network. Open systems like Linux will enable closed system CloudBooks that will achieve simplicity, reliability and openness through the network.

The digerati scoff at Doris Lessing’s Nobel speech for the sections that refer to the Internet and ‘computers.’ The Internet and computers haven’t made them dumb, therefore they haven’t made anyone dumb. While it’s certainly possible to do interesting work with the tools that computers and the network provide, Sturgeon’s law always applies. Why would it surprise anyone that a medium with so many inputs would contain a lot of crap. If the network didn’t contain a lot of crap, why would we need so many tools to filter it?

People Magazine is only published once a week, but on the Internet it’s possible to immerse oneself in celebrity gossip 24 hours per day. It’s possible to focus on one’s obsessions to the exclusion of the rest of the world. We sometimes call it the echo chamber. The network doesn’t require that we challenge ourselves, it’s happy to endlessly feed our gluttony. Do we even view it as gluttony? Do we think of it as one of the seven deadly sins? It’s a vision out of Dante, a machine that feeds itself, a hunger never sated. Is the Internet post-moral?

We laugh off an old lady’s comments about the Internet without really thinking through the deep rivers that run underneath. It’s as though we really believed that time started on January 1, 1970 at 12:00 GMT. (and that the Apocalypse is scheduled for January 19, 2038)

 The Metropolitan Museum’s new Greek and Roman section is a revelation. When looking at the work you are deeply impressed with the power of the classical forms. But the other thing you learn is the sculpture, that today is simple white marble, was painted to simulate human appearance. The effects of time have uncovered the classic form in the work.

I wonder how the digital artifacts are our time will be viewed in 2,000 years. Presuming the file formats can be properly decoded, time will have had no effect on them. Color won’t fade, text will be just as readable, layouts will be intact. No noses lost, no missing arms, no papyrus scrolls with faded writing.  The digital will appear dated by language, hairstyles, turns of phrase and clothing. But the viewable artifact will appear exactly the same in 2,000 years, or for that matter in 1,000,000 years.

I spent the last week on holiday in New York City. While I was walking around with an iPhone, and still somewhat connected to Twitter, my focus was on looking at the art and design that serves as the foundation for Western Civilization. The digerati, while filled with a certain type of creativity, they lack any real sense of history. That’s a big generalization, but in a general sense it’s true. There are a number of threads that were spawned by my trip. I hope to capture a few of them here before they return to the aether.

The Frick had a show of the portraits of Hans Memling a few years ago. It was a small show, the Frick doesn’t have a large exhibition space for shows, and there aren’t many Memling portraits still in existence. At the time, I spent more than an hour with those faces. On this trip, I had to seek out the portraits. Some are in the Frick’s permanent collection and their are a few at the Met. These portraits present humanity to us in a manner that seems to have been lost. Memling was born around 1435; the portraits deliver us the visages and the souls of people from that time.

In thinking about the wonderful creativity of our time, and the vast power of our digital tools, we have nothing to match what Memling accomplished. And these works must be seen directly in person. No form of reproduction can convey their power—in this sense they are the anti-digital.

The temptation of total surveillance is always there, for government and for business. Marketers want the ability to know everything about everyone’s behavior, tastes and buying patterns to target offers and advertising at us. The more they know, the better they can target. Although most businesses need to do more than preach to the choir, they need new converts.

Facebook’s Beacon takes users for granted. Users love Facebook and they love what they can build within the Facebook platform. Love is a strong emotion, and when it is betrayed it can behave in unpredictable ways. Social networks are fragile and Facebook took a big risk with Beacon. More and more, Beacon is being viewed as a betrayal of Facebook’s users. When you think about the valuation of a company like Facebook, the real value is in the love and respect of the users. The technology is a wasting asset that has nominal value. Facebook risked everything with Beacon. The steps they take to recover at this point will determine the future value of the company.

The idea of “love” as a factor in value and valuations came to me from two directions. I heard former quarterback Steve Young talk about what made Bill Walsh’s 49er Superbowl teams so special. Young cited a number of factors, but added that the feeling of love and respect among team members as a key ingredient. It was a conscious coaching strategy that Walsh used to build a winning team. The other source is a talk given by Clay Shirky on software applications, Perl and community-based developer support. His idea is that a strong community can be a more dependable resource for application support than a commercial firm in the business of selling support services. This is certainly true of the Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby communities. It’s also true of applications like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, and libraries like Prototype and Jquery.

You’ll often hear people joke about the special ingredient in some recipe being ‘love.’ We laugh, because we think of love as being insubstantial, in some ways without physical presence or value. But if we take it for granted, the joke’s on us.