Johan Soderbergh’s new book is out and available via Amazon. While very pricey, which is really contradictory for such a topic, I have no doubt that this will be a significant book, as I’ve had the chance to read and hear Johan before. We hope to feature excerpts in our P2P Book of the Week program soon.

Here’s the blurb:

The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement demonstrates how labour can self-organise production, and, as is shown by the free operating system GNU/Linux, even compete with some of the worlds largest firms. The book examines the hopes of such thinkers as Friedrich Schiller, Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Negri, in the light of the recent achievements of the hacker movement. This book is the first to examine a different kind of political activism that consists in the development of technology from below.

Johan send us the following additional excerpt with information on the concept of ‘politics as play’:

“In Linus Torvald’s book about the invention of the Linux kernel, he states that hackers have become revolutionaries ‘just for fun’. The word ‘fun’ is here meant to smooth over any leftist conotations from the word ‘revolution’. However, the notion of hackers becoming revolutionaries just for fun would have appealed to the eighteenth century poet Friedrich Schiller. Disappointed by the failure of the French Revolution, he sat down to ponder over how to make revolution work better the next time. Friedrich Schiller saw the ‘aesthetic play-drive’ as the primary force which could foster a more wholesome human being, whose maturing would also carry forth and be able to sustain a post-revolutionary aesthetic state. Schiller meant that the aesthetic education of man was necessary to heal the rift within man caused by specialisation:

“[. . .] If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom.”

Both adherers and critics of Schiller have pigeonholed him in the tradition of romanticism. It would do Schiller more justice if his words were recovered from the fine arts scene and instead applied to the politics that flow from the ‘beauty of the baud’ and the play with source code in the computer underground. It was this kind of poet that Herbert Marcuse encountered when he begun his investigations into the liberating potential of art and play. Already back in the 1930s Marcuse contrasted aesthetics and play with the instrumentality and drudgery of labour. The argument in Hacking Capitalism is that hackers have invented a new mode of developing technology and organising labour that is subjected to the play-drive in Schiller’s and Marcuse’s sense. The politics of hackers has only partly to do with resisting copyright, censorship and Digital Rights Management. At its heart, the joyful revolution of free software development consists in the distance it places between doing and the wage labour relation.”

I’m far from being an expert in this topic, but I have been invited to participate in the Yale Information Society Project Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace, where I will speak in the panel on “Making a Name Online”, based on our experiences with launching the P2P Foundation from scratch.

Part of the exercise was responding to a number of key questions, to which other participants will respond as well.

Here is my response with some basic thoughts about Reputation Economies:

What are the new norms for cyber-reputation?

It is important to recognize that reputation is a manyfold and plural element, strongly dependent on context. The reputation in eBay, based on the trustworthyness of the financial and material transactions, cannot be simply equated with the reputation obtained in Linux through one’s expertise and engagement in the project, or to one’s quality as a host in a mailing list. A particular form of reputation may be valued in one context, but not in another. I would also distinguish internal and external reputation in the following sense. One’s engagement and contribution within a project creates a inner ‘reputational hierarchy’, but this reputation can only transpire on the outside by the overall reputation of the project itself. There is no necessary transmission between the internal reputation, which may only be visible to a inner circle, and an outside reputation. However, clearly, a good inner reputation, combined with the high external visibility of a project, may result in a spillover effect, whereby the inner reputational currency is translated into a concrete external reputation. For the outside world, a condensation and projection effect may occur, whereby only a select few leading contributors are recognized as the face of the movement. There is also a general reputational effect, whereby one’s participation in a known and reputable project, produces a general effect of identity creation and external recognition.

How do these depart from offline models?

Cyber-reputation lacks the face to face dynamics of the physical world, but that is not necessarily a weakness, and in any case, it is a mistake to separate the online world from physical realities, as these are both intertwined and part of the continuum of social life. Their relationship is complex: Face to face elements may indeed illuminate, but also, obscure reputational processes, for example, charm may be constitutive of an offline reputation, but may be an illusory element.

Cyber-reputation has the advantage of measurability and transparency. This does not mean an obligation that reputation necessarily needs to be formally measured, but rather that actions and contributions in the online world leaves traces, that can be judged by all. There is therefore a certain element of objectivity to online reputation.

How can reputation in one online system be transported to another?

This creates a prior question: do they have to? Is it really necessary? I am far from convinced by this. Every project, community has different contexts, in which reputation can be gained, or lost. Because the online world is not isolated but co-constitutive of a same reality, persons do not necessarily come without reputation in a new project. This does not depend on any formal measurement.

How do you cash out?

It is important to distinguish the ethical economy of sharing and of commons-oriented peer production, which is non-reciprocal in nature and follows a process of self-unfolding, with intentional activities in view of monetization. If the link between both is not direct, then monetization is a ‘post hoc’ effect of indirect reputational, cognitive and relational gains obtained by engagement. If the link is direct, not only can a crowding out effect occur, whereby monetization displaces voluntary engagement but it can also corrupt value creation by transforming the absolute quality of peer production into the relative quality characteristic of competitive for-profit innovation.

Cashing out may be the wrong question, or should at the very least be context-specific.

It will differ in at least four contextual realities: 1) sharing communities a la YouTube, where the attention is cashed out; 2) commons-oriented peer production, where the commons is free but attending services can be marketed; 3) crowdsourcing approaches where minipreneurs do not produce for use value (as in the two previous models) but for exchange value. Sharism and communism are better served with benefit-sharing approaches, rather than revenue-sharing approaches.

Who owns one’s online reputation? Who owns the metadata?

The move to generalized transparency is a very strong argument towards an open social graphs, whereby the metadata would indeed be under the control of the users, who could modulate, a la Creative Commons, the degree to which they are willing to share their metadata.

How is reputation connected to the interoperability question? Should we have international standards governing reputation?

Yes, if reputation is indeed transportable, which I question, it should be exportable. The question is: who owns your reputation? Should you have veto power over its export, for example in case of a unfair negative reputation?

Invitation to the Equal Dignity Group Launch Seminar

Betsy Kawamura, (e-mail: kawamura@broadpark.no, tlf: 97 00 28 19) and Rune Kvist Olsen (Rune Kvist Olsen, e-mail: rukvol@online.no, tlf. 90 09 45 58) forwarded an invitation for the free launch seminar of the Equal Dignity Group.

Date: December 12, 2007, Time 12:00 to 16:00

Place: Norsk Taiji Center, Østre Elvebakke 1, 0182 Oslo, entrance vis a vis Elvebakken skole on the side-street of Haumannsgt.

The Equal Dignity Group has the pleasure in inviting you to our launch seminar where the vision of “The Equal Dignity Organization” (Den Likeverdige Organisasjonen) will be introduced and presented. The main goal and objective of this launch seminar is to create attention, awareness and consciousness about the application and implementation of The Equal Dignity Organizational Concept through sustainable institutional change in society.

Invitation:

The seminar will be processed in different sections where the pedagogical adaption is to pursue and establish participatory involvement through an integrated and interactive process. The different sections are as follows:

Section 1:

Presentation of the overall mission and strategy for the Equal Dignity Group.

Section 2:

The Equal Dignity Organizational model as a tool to prevent hostility, alienation and conflict by bringing in currently marginalized persons back to society as dignified and self-sufficient individual human beings. Conceptualization of The Equal Dignity Paradigm in the context of conflict resolution and potential applications for building new subjective relations through cooperative actions in institutional society settings.

Section 3:

The potential of application and implementation of the Equal Dignity Organizational Model in building and establishing new organizational models and enhancement of existing ones. Opportunities and challenges for currently marginalized persons in the Norwegian labour market. Target groups include children and youth from orphanages, survivors of gender based violence including trafficked-prostituted persons, previously incarcerated persons/released prisoners, asylum seekers, immigrants, drug dependent and institutionalized persons, persons of alternative sexual orientations, HIV+ persons and those displaced from political affiliation.

Section 4:

Conclusion and end of discussion. Future contribution by The Equal Dignity Organizational Concept. Plausible action plans in regaining equal dignity for stigmatized and marginalized persons in Norway. Promotion and communication of our vision and mission to various actual and potential participants (individuals and organizations) in Norway.

We hope you can attend our seminar and contribute toward the creation of an Equal Dignity Future for all persons in contemporary society.

Big media is scared of social media

There is another aspect to the recent TechCrunch stories (first one, follow up) about social media spamming that has not been focused on yet: the young entrepreneur/student who does all the dirty work has, as it seems, high profile clients paying him to do this. Comment no. 23 on the first TechCrunch story says:

“From LinkedIn:

Notable clients include: 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros Records, Fox Atomic, Walden Media, Yari Film Group, Nike, Oakley, …”

Interesting, isn’t it…? It looks like big media is scared, does not trust its own products and needs to play dirty in order to get the attention it seeks. This is the real story that we need to focus on! Forget the little fish, this guy still studies and, while I think he is wrong in doing what he does, he is still learning and maybe might change his business practices now that he sees how others think of him…?

What we bloggers, podcasters, vloggers, indie film makers, social media entrepreneurs, indie media publishers, P2P specialists, open-source coders and all those who think playing fair is not a luxury but a necessity (and of course the right thing to do) – what we all need to do is to stand up and let big media, Hollywood, the music industry, the MPAA, the RIAA (or is it the MAFIAA…?), let all of them know that:

• their time is running out
• we are prepared to play fair – as long as they are prepared to play fair
• we are powerful and we are everywhere: we have our blogs, podcasts, vlogs, social networks, mailings lists, forums, zines, mags, news networks, indie media distribution channels and of course free and open-source operating systems, office packages, 3D software, content publishing solutions and so much more
• we have the money because we are the consumers, they depend on us, not the other way round!

A consumer’s ultimatum

To further illustrate what Hollywood and the music industry is up against here the full comment from a digg user on a recent story titled “The Pirate Bay Cancels OiNK Replacement“.

Before reading any further note that:

I do not necessarily agree with everything that this digg user writes.

I personally do not download Hollywood movies from P2P networks for mainly one good reason: I almost stopped caring about Hollywood movies at some point after seeing “Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones” and “The Matrix Reloaded”. Those who were unfortunate enough to spend their time and money to see those movies will know what I mean…

Also: the following was a comment made on digg.com and the author uses rather strong language! But I do think it is funny and a very interesting read for anyone who tries to sell music or movies to consumers:

You know what! Seriously fuck the MPAA & RIAA.. Here is why.. they
are so far behind when it comes to distribution of their content.
Recently, I’ve tried to make an effort of purchasing the movies and
music I’ve downloaded off bittorrent, and that’s alot of content that I
was willing to legally purchase. I saved up to 1,000 $ and was ready to
pay back my dues. I was only paying for the stuff I enjoyed, and stuff
worth purchasing. That is the beauty of bittorrent.

**Sorry fellow diggers for my grammar, swearing etc.. english isn’t my first language and im a lil bit high…

Conclusion

The music industry and Hollywood still don’t get the internet, they now use dirty tricks to push their content on sites like YouTube, consumers are ready to write lists of demands to “MPAA, RIAA, IFPI, whoever you 4-initials bitches are” and let them know that “If those demands are not met by let’s say mid 2008, I am purchasing 4 2TB WD External Hard Disks, and you’ll never see a penny from me.“

Maybe it is time for Hollywood to focus on what they used to be good at: making good movies that people care enough about to buy tickets and DVDs…? Of course good movies need good scripts. Coincidence that right now there is this tiny little disagreement between the studios and the script writers…?

Hollywood, learn your own lessons: “If it’s not on the page it’s not on the stage.” Spamming YouTube won’t help your business.

Music industry: people stopped buying your music not because of BitTorrent but because there was nothing worth buying. Look at your content, look at your “stars”. We stopped caring. A while ago.

And think twice before spamming our networks with your content in the future!

Think twice before stealing someone else’s chances of having the “most viewed video” of the week.

Think twice before stealing our time when you make us watch content we don’t care about.

We, the internet users, we the bloggers, podcasters, vloggers and all the others now know your dirty tricks and we will watch you and document all of your moves. The recent TechCrunch article was only the beginning. Be sure of that.

hollywood, music industry, mafiaa, youtube, spam, social media, indie, media

The economic programs of all Greek parties – whatever their political spectrum is- recognize only one dominant form of relation that organises the production of value: money-oriented labour. The Right wing includes the partisans of the mediation of markets, which are actually operating under an asymmetry of information leading to a serious multidimensional crisis, while the Left wing contains the partisans of the mediation of state’s mechanisms that regulate the reciprocity through hierarchical and bureaucratic systems. Both wings are being considered as inadequate by the wide masses. Nowadays the dilemma Left or Right seems pretty vague and implausible.

However, according to P2P theory the fore mentioned dilemma can be redefined giving totally new content in the vision of the Left and transform radically the markets of the Right. In other words the future is distributed: moving towards new property forms, which are neither government-owned nor individual. Peer production and property are emerging from the interstices of market economy resembling the lava surging out of the crater covering the old land and gradually creating a new one. Abroad -beyond Greek borders- Commonism already forms the immaterial world of production because of immaterial abundance. New dynamics of human relations – P2P – constitute a new way of social organisation away from the sphere of profit maximization, while producing value. The institutionalisation and the enlargement of the Commons as well as the guarantee of a decent survival through a general -universal- guaranteed income could be regarded as feasible political objectives (contrary to the enlargement of state). In the institutional level the new vision transcends representative democracy and aims at the adoption of peer governance. The participative democracy cannot flourish within a system that reproduces and extends the economic inequality, because there is no wide participation if there is no secure prosperity.

The recent electoral result signals the conservative resultant of Greek society; certainly enough it can be claimed that the Left has failed. The conservatism runs horizontally through the political spectrum and some Right perceptions dominate even in the Left. However, the percentages of the weak parties have considerably increased showing the need concerning an alternative solution/paradigm to come to the fore. Globally people start disputing the illusive sense of freedom in terms of being free from something, and they understand the real freedom in terms of engaging, creating and self-expressing. The emancipatory P2P movement, and the sociable Web, which are not just ‘children’ of the technological (r)evolution, express a deeply shift in the epistemology and ontology in culture, and offer the means to solve the global problems. As the dynamics of P2P are still feeble in Greece, the support of all the forces that ensure better conditions for distribution is crucial. The Greek government adopts Microsoft software as the official software of the country, whereas a few people adopt the open/free software. Many are unaware of the questions related to software patents and knowledge’s copyrights, while some others start faintly speaking about concepts such as creative commons and copyleft. Furthermore, there are efforts to adopt more participative forms of organisation, in contrast with them who still believe in a limited representative ‘democracy’.

Our aim in Greek P2P blog is to spread the P2P message over Greece and to make clear how peer processes differ from the traditional processes of the market economy. The first Greek newsletter was conducted and sent last month, and till now more than 30 people (amongst them there are more than 10 people from the Greek academia) have been subscribed to it.  Moreover, we created the main wiki page for the Greek language  that contains numerous translations and original articles written by Bauwens, Papanikolaou, and others. Also, within December the extensive essay “P2P and Human Evolution”, translated in by George Papanikolaou, will be published at the Greek wiki. Aspiring to a community interested in discussing about P2P theory and the tangible solutions that it can offer, we are thinking of creating a Greek mailing list as well as launching a series of podcasts. In addition to this, we are examining the possibility of founding an official not-for-profit P2P organisation. We will keep the foreign public of P2P foundation informed about our initiations and results coming from our effort to spread the P2P message through this blog.

One of the other interesting presentations during the Nottingham Peer Production Workshop was Tere Vaden’s intriguing presentation entitled a “Critique of Cybercommunism“. This title is misleading as Tere Vaden actually points out that people in favour of free and commons oriented approaches shouldn’t be satisfied with using tools owned by centralized corporations.

Tere makes an important difference between four stages of freedom: 1) closed approaches; 2) Single-Free approaches based on sharing on proprietary platforms; 2) Doubly-Free approaches involving the production of a real commons; 3) and finally Triple-Free approaches where the infrastructure is owned as well.

In his own words:

“triple-free peer production (whether in free software, media, education…) includes the ownership of the means of production down to the level of electricity, the physical infra etc. I’m thinking of Gandhi in South-Africa: when he with his colleagues wanted to start a newspaper highlighting the racial/economic/legal issues, they could not get it printed (economy + censorship), so they bought a printing press and moved with it to the country where they grew their own food & wrote & published. I’m thinking that something like this might in the long run be necessary if we want to escape the dependency & falling back of peer production to waged labour.”

Here is the full graph:

Daniel Pinchbeck has posted a stimulating analysis on how we could and should approach social change. His longish posting is well worth a read. Here, I’m posting the conclusion, as he proposes a non-confrontational approach which “engages and absorbs the enemies”.

My own contributions to a renewal of the emancipatory tradition have been posted here by Robin Good.

In the ensuing discussion, there is an intriguing reposting of the description by Dr. David Martin (M-Cam) of a scenario for a coming financial meltdown, slated to start with Christmas and culminating in a crisis in March 2008.

Daniel Pinchbeck:

“The immediate need for the progressive community is to articulate a positive agenda, along with tactics and strategies for bringing this agenda to fruition in the shortest time possible. The main thrust of the “Left” in the last decades has been criticism and complaint. This has failed to create a powerful attractor or an organizational infrastructure for social transformation. As the Dalai Lama put it, everyone wants a better life. If you can show them how to get there, they will follow. The Left has failed to achieve this simple task. Regeneration of the movement requires a new visionary paradigm that integrates the spiritual shift made by the counterculture since the 1960s with a compassionate and egalitarian program that has tangible solutions to offer to a broad spectrum of the populace.

Considering the proponderance of military force, there is no hope for violence as a tool of social transformation. Any radicalized program should focus on an absorptive strategy that neutralizes its potential opponents by engaging and transforming them – a Tantric approach, that sees no dualities nor enemies. If we are going to save the world situation from pitching over into the abyss, the media – especially the mass media – has to be intensively repurposed to beam out a new paradigm that integrates sustainable practices with inner transformation. The mass media could be used for the “production of subjectivities” focused not on the toxic “American Dream” of omnipotent ego, competitive greed, and endless material abundance, but on sustainability, interconnectivity, community, and psychic development. By my reckoning, this unlikely reversal has to happen in the next few years.”

Interesting contribution which appeared on the Oekonux mailing list, by Stefan Meretz:

“To me the term “antagonist” seems to be an holy term of traditional working class movement, at least a religious term (Marx: “fetish”). It says, that the struggle can only be “solved” by transcending capitalism. So if you fight inside capitalism, say for higher wages, then there is a tiny seed of transcendence in it. It describes a picture of hope, and I understand this very well, because I followed this hope for some time.

However, it is not real. Workers and capitalists are opposed to each other, but not antagonistic. They fulfill (of course: opposite) roles inside a common framework of self-valualisation of capital (“making more money from money”). A free society is a society, were this “framework” (based on the alienated cybernetic self-valualisation) has qualitatively changed. — This btw. was one of the important insights the Krisis-Group gave me.

And if you look in history, it was never the case, that the suppressed and fighting classes gain the power, but those classes, who changed the “framework” by bringing a new mode of production into live practically. There were class struggles, but for example the new bourgois class in feudalism instrumentally used the fights of farmers and craftsmen and the need of the ruling feudal class for weapons for their wars. Both, farmers/craftsmen and feudalists, lost, capitalists prevailed.

The “new” never came into live by purely overtake the power, but the other way around: by bringing a new mode of production they overtook finally the power.

Thus, the “new” was never simply “subversive” to the “old”, it always was functional for the “old” at the same time. This is the basic idea of a “germ form” or “seed” of a new.

This brings me to some more philosophical thinking.

It helps a lot, when we don’t think in opposites excluding each other (“Hey, decide: which side is true?”), but think the opposites as a source of the real movement. Peer production is at the same time subversive and functional for capitalism. The state at the same time supports and suppresses free software etc. This must be (and is) the case, otherwise it cannot be a germ form.

To me it seems clear, that peer production is not by itself a final form of a new production mode, it is only a contradictory form of the movement between the new and the old. This raises the question, what the “new” is, what the core determinants of the new are, but I put it in the background for a while, to bring the attention to a second import point.

When two antagonists fight, then the solution seldom is, that one prevails and the other vanishes. Moreover, this is never the case, when the two antagonists are moments of one common, thus being not arbitrarily opposed, but necessarily. The new qualitative step includes both “contents” of the antagonists in a new form, where they are at the same time present and vanished. Present means, that their “sense” was kept, vanished means, that they don’t exist any more (in german we have the term “aufheben”, I don’t know the english one).

So, my questions are:

- what is the new (mode of production)?

- what are moments of this new?

- where do we find these moments inside the old?

- how does these moments of the new support the old?

- where are the limits in supporting the old?

- in which way show the moments of the new their potence inside the old?

Richard Poynder asked me an interesting question:

“What are your views on artificial scarcity in virtual environments
like Second Life (which now has its own patent office)? Does this
imply that in a world of molecular manufacturing we will see the same
thing? That we will never realise a post-scarcity economy?”

My reply is the following:

“I think we carefully need to distinguish between the material world, where we need to re-fund for depleting rival goods, and the immaterial world, where such is not necessary, and in in my view, counterproductive.

But the key is that we have to ensure the freedom to share and cooperate. This does not preclude anyone from voluntary creating markets such as in Second Life, as an extra option. Similarly, the Creative Commons approach guarantees freedom to share, not an obligation. Only through such freedom to chose, can we unite people around the need for more openness/participation etc …

The situation re molecular manufacturing would depend on how big the need is for refueling the raw material, and the cost involved, I suspect that it is a material process, and therefore involving some form of scarcity, and in any case, before we get to true abundance in that field, it is safe to assume that we are dealing with scarcity.

Making the same assumption for second life is mistaken however, there the artificial scarcity is simply a voluntary capitalist game in a context which does not ‘need’ it, but as it has the advantage of creating some form of monetary economy around it, it is naturally that it will be attempted, even though it will slow down the sharing mechanisms.

From a peer to peer point of view, I am heartened by any form of distribution of any means of production, for example social lending, but if they insist on keeping the same usage of for-profit practices, then progress is only very partial, as it then simply replicates existing processes. Note that the wikipedia, though operating in abundance, has similarly chosen to opt for scarcity, i.e. the deletionist movement, with poisonous effect on the community, which has stopped growing, and with deleterious effect on the content quality, which can only use approved academic material …”

So to reply to the main question:

1) the post-scarcity economy is already there in the immaterial economy, no need to reach it

2) in the material economy, it is a long long way off, if ever it materializes

3) therefore the more interesting question is how the two logics will intersect

In this context, the practices of the emerging open design movements are interesting to observe, as they are tackling with that very intersection.

Stanford Spammer On TechCrunch…?

It is still not quite clear to me whether the recent TechCrunch article “The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos” is some “clever” publicity stunt (as some comments suggest), or if indeed the author means and does what he claims to do.

It is an interesting article, so read it and make up your own mind about that one until Michael Arrington from TechCrunch will post his views – should be interesting because he writes in comment no.3 “I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.” and in comment no. 5 “I think it would have been better to have published this anonymously, and certainly without the links to Dan’s business.”

So for now I assume that this is not a fake or “clever” marketing campaign and that Dan Ackerman Greenberg, the author of the article (“co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group and lead TA for the Stanford Facebook Class. Dan will graduate from the Stanford Management Science & Engineering Masters program in June.”) is really the social network spammer he proudly claims to be.

To be fair: of course individuals as well as companies have tried to game video sites in the past. The techniques the author describes in the TechCrunch article are not really new, some of his tips like “Title Optimization” would even make sense – if only he would not suggest that lying, cheating and faking is a good thing as long as you get many views for your videos…

Highlights From A Viral Marketing Lowlife…?

From Dan Ackerman Greenberg’s article:

“Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos.”

“Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users.”

“Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. So do we. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video.”

“Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.”

And he concludes:

“The Wild West days of Lonely Girl and Ask A Ninja are over. You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever.“

This is of course totally arrogant and so narrow minded – and not true (watch the brilliant Chocolate Rain – 11 Million views so far). If Dan Ackerman Greenberg is for real I wonder what they teach their students at Stanford – it seems that business ethics is either not part of the curriculum or that Mr. Greenberg missed a couple of those classes…?!

Those Who Defend Spamming…

Maybe even more interesting – and shocking to me – are some of the comments made on TechCrunch and some of the other blog posts discussing this/what appears to be a social network’s spammer article. If it now all was to turn out to be a “clever” publicity stunt there will be some bloggers who’ll have quite a bit of explaining to do. But this would also be an interesting scenario – a bit like in “The Wave” by Morton Rhue.

Also interesting: as the Times Online reported back in February “Fake bloggers soon to be ‘named and shamed’” (Shlashdot discussion) some of the practices that Dan Ackerman Greenberg seems to promote could be illegal in the UK from December 31 2007 onwards…

Of course laws and regulations can not be the only answer to social network spamming. More important I think are entrepreneurs who feel strongly about ethics – and they exist: Richard Branson (Virgin Records/Airlines etc.) is one of them. He is of course not related to online video in any way, but a good example for an extremely successful businessman who feels strongly about ethics and the choices he makes.

I always keep coming back to TechCrunch because Michael Arrington is also someone who repeatedly brought up the issue of business ethics on his highly successful blog. So it remains to be seen whether this was all a publicity stunt to uncover the tactics of social network spammers or, as I tend to think, the Stanford spammer is real and so is his sad business…

viral, video, techcrunch, stanford, spammer, web 2.0, youtube, ethics