The iPad: Rivalrous and Excludable Time Machine of Life… or Dead Hand of Corporate Kleptocratic Death?!

[This piece was going to be a short one before I talked about some other stuff. It's just eaten my day, and it's still not complete or entirely right, but hey: that's blogging...]

The iPad has arrived, and there are loud halloos and cries of joy and horror and all the usual noises which greet an Apple product. Cory Doctorow hates it, Stephen Fry loves it. It’s gorgeous. I want one. For the first time ever, in my life, I may take leave of my senses sufficiently that I will actually buy a first generation Apple product. I have never done this before because you have to be a lunatic not to know that the second gen will be vastly improved and the one three years down the line will make the initial offering look like something built by Acorn in 1981. And yet, I want one.

Of course, part of my delirium is predicated on the belief that the iBook store, for all its flaws, may be the vehicle for an ebook explosion – and I won’t get to be part of that just yet, because iBooks aren’t coming to the UK until some indeterminate moment down the line. Amazon’s Kindle app seemingly will work, which is slightly random. It’s also unclear to me thusfar whether it will be possible to import ebooks purchased outside the Apple system, as it is with music. It bloody ought to be, for sure, but that may be one of those things which happens as time goes by. In fact, a lot of things about the iPad suggest that while it’s a gorgeous bit of kit, it will be a bit annoying and restrictive at first, just as the iPhone was. And just as the iPhone was, it’ll still be ten times better than anything else out there…

Step back aways; Cory’s objections centre on how tightly locked down the iPad is – and more important, how closed are the systems behind it which make it more than a pretty electronic Etch-A-Sketch. To him, the lack of tinkerability is culpable. It infantilises, denies ownership; it disconnects the student from an understanding of the electronic world; discourages creativity in favour of consumption; conceals or at least fronts for a bowdlerisation of content; and false prophets its way into the hearts of the mainstream by being a shiny sticking-plaster-and-aspirin answer to a lot of complex and important questions.

And all that is at least partly true, although in some interesting ways I want peer at in a minute. I’m not arguing with Cory so much as I’m looking a bit more broadly or from a different perspective.

But step back aways: the iPad is a time machine, and that is why it delights conventional content industries.

The two key words here – and they’re unusual in any other context – are rivalrous and excludable.

Rivalrous goods are goods whose use by one person excludes use by another. Excludable goods are those where access to them can be denied those who do not pay. The market for these kinds of goods is easy to understand and easy to maintain. You either have a product people want or you don’t. If you do, you set the right price and you sell, and you continue to do that for as long as you get more out of the financial equation than you put in. You advertise (classically speaking) up to the point where you get £1.01 for every £1 of advertising. (In the real world, of course, companies hew to a somewhat more rigorous definition of profit. But you see the point.)

Digital goods are neither rivalrous nor easily excludable.

Unless someone comes up with a locked-in item of awesome gorgeousness which is tied so tightly to the digital apron strings that it re-establishes the status quo and no one cares because it’s so goddam hawt. Which is what Apple does. This is their genius. They make stuff which has burning flaws in some respects, but which is so good in others that you will happily accept the restrictions and disadvantages. And this is what publishers need to remember, as well as consumers, in embracing the Apple aedifice: the only entity guaranteed to profit in a deal which involves Apple and is designed by Apple is Apple. Otherwise they would not be at the table.

No one puts Apple in a corner! :)

Yeah, cheap shot. And you loved it.

So the point is that the iPad and its surrounding infrastructure artificially perpetuate an old, pre-digital business model. Now hold your breath and try not to scream while I say that that is not inherently bad. Not all change is good change, not all change happens at a pace which is good for humans and the institutions which make the world. In fact, a lot of the time, change happens on a timescale which is either too long for us to appreciate or too rapid for us to deal with. We create our world in weird, rather unhelpful ways, as a consequence of our need for and lack of understanding of abstractions. We frequently get squished by continental plate shifts in its make-up. We have, both physically (automobiles & roads) and culturally (corporations & markets) created entities which are stronger and more dangerous than we are and which can destroy us if we interact with them directly without great care.

One of the arguments about digitisation is that ‘the Market demands it’. Leaving aside that what that really means is just that people diffusely want it and haven’t really thought about it much, and that capitalising it and abstracting it is a way of making it sound like a natural force rather than a desire, the Market is a tit. It is a petulant, fearful child. A week watching the fluctuations of the Dow will tell you as much, even if you haven’t already hoisted it on board when Iceland became crown price of notional wealth during the sub-prime boom and then turned out to be the emperor of ruination when the crash came.

The Market is a jackass.

More than that, it’s a cold razor. It has absolutely no concept of value beyond the concept of sale price. It does not do well with intangibles. The promise of internet culture, as I’ve said before, is a vast democratisation. I don’t see that promise being fulfilled by the direction in which the web is presently heading. I see money being made by large companies like Google (and yes, Apple). I see the cottage-industry-content site getting less likely, not more. Copyright, with all its flaws, is how small people can prevent large entities from running off with their work. It has completely been hijacked in some areas and it has lost the respect of the people. All the same, it does need upholding or revitalising in some form, because without it there’s only the big, vertically integrated outfits who can profit from content. And that’s not the dream at all.

So, look: some of the institutions which are presently getting pounded by the internet are actually helpful, positive ones. They’re not just money machines. Journalism, for all its flaws, is a massive good in our society, and while some internet journalism is excellent, the industry doesn’t yet have many entities with the necessary resilience to sustain legal challenges resulting from controversial stories. It doesn’t have many with the infrastructure to pursue a long term investigation. Sure, some individuals will do these things, because they are brave and magnificent and mad. But Wikileaks, for example, is still funded by a lot of conventional media as well as by donations.

Conventional fiction and non-fiction publishing is a little less obvious, but I think it probably does in various weird ways sustain cultural life. Certainly, publishers often publish books they probably wouldn’t if they were in the pure profit business. Those books will get squeezed if publishers can’t monetise their industry effectively in a digital market. Yes, of course, they should find new models, and they will. They need to come to understand the internet – as do policy makers, who are depressingly ignorant about it, as Steven Timms will no doubt now acknowledge.

But publishing is not only meeting the digital age, it’s meeting the commercial one; it’s going from the industry I knew as a kid which was almost a handshake trade, in which personal relationships were a big part of the thing and any number of houses were owned and run as family firms. (“Oh, dear me, we loved that book,” I seem to recall a senior editor lamenting over his cigar, “but it was far too filthy for the aunts…”) And although the trade has come a long, long way since then, there are still bits of impracticality in it which are part of its goodness and run alongside the sluggardliness which is its present danger. Publishing has, by comparison with other content industries, a shockingly narrow profit margin. The trade as a whole here is probably worth less than one James Cameron blockbuster (I mean the budget, not the profits). There are ways to increase that – focus groups, product placement, and so on – and many of them absolutely suck. They are the same things which have brought you the mainstream Hollywood of recent years, and resulted in the good movies coming from Indies. You do not want them near your favourite writers, many of whom are constitutionally unsuited to dealing with them and would rather eat broken glass than learn the dark arts of demographic targeting, in which they are right.

My point is that for book publishing, as for journalism, the iPad appears to be a lifeboat. It most likely isn’t, or isn’t nearly so much as everyone is hoping. Apple, as the music and movie industries will tell you, is a perilous friend. Still, a breathing space while the marketplace actually comes into being for ebooks is probably a good thing: the ethos of internet commerce, of course, is to leap from a plane and invent the parachute before you hit the ground. Fine for bold new startups, less good for established companies on whose existence entire towns depend. For our entire history, we’ve been bushwhacked by changes in technology, theory, and science which have altered the way we live. For the first time we’re getting on top of the curve; we know these are not givens or natural laws but interrelated consequences. We can choose now whether we want – for example – high quality news. Good information. And we do. We know we need it – without it, our governments do ridiculous and vile things and our financial markets go kerplooie.

The price of that is finding ways to maintain the institutions which produce it. Paywalls, iPads and the like… they may be bad compromises, but I’ll take them until someone can show me a way which will definitely keep the information flowing and not leave me at the mercy of advertiser-driven, pusillanimous drivel.

The iPad is not easy company for technologists. Cory’s not the only one who doesn’t like it. If you want open-source appery, you work with Google’s Android system – and people will. Although Android has problems of its own; Google made it hackable and that’s lead to Android phone handset makers letting evolution diverge so far that not all apps work on all Android phones. But of course, the iPad isn’t for technologists. It’s for everyone else. It’s not a 3rd Device, it’s a first device.

The people I know who want an iPad – the people who want one who are interesting for wanting one, unlike me, which anyone who has ever met me would have known after about ten seconds of the launch video – are not neo-Luddites. They’re people who are perfectly capable of working with a computer, but have no interest in knowing about command lines or finding a Hex Driver. They never, ever want to have to resolve domain name server issues. (If you’re wondering whether I know that a Hex Driver is a tool and not a piece of software or you understand why that bit in italics is funny, you’re not who I’m talking about.)

This does not make them stupid or even lumpen. It means that they want an interface which is intuitive rather than one they have to learn, because actually why the hell should they have to pay for a device and then take a course in using it? It means that they are the people who are content to drive a car without knowing the mantra of the four stroke engine cycle. They would rather not change a tyre.

They do not care about technology in that way.

I have a feeling, though I don’t know, that Cory would say that they should; that to be ignorant of technology in a world which is created by and dependent on it is to surrender to the sea. He would (again) be right. But most people simply do not care, just as they don’t think about where Coltan comes from when they buy a cellphone. Telling them that the iPad is infantilising technology is like telling them that they shouldn’t drink alcohol and eat red meat. Sure. But who wants to live forever apart from Ray Kurzweil and that lunatic who wrote about the ninjas and the mimes?

And the thing is, the iPad might – just might – be bigger than that. I do believe that the present ignorance of science and the tendency to fail to engage with technological issues in a social context – the civil liberties implications of the Digital Economy Bill, for example – is going to cause us a mountain of hurt. BUT… I think devices like the iPad may end up being the cure. When you can use a Layar to look at your world and see issues you care about glossed for you in front of your eyes, and when you can use a site like 38 Degrees to find out what to do about it… if you can combine that with the kind of access to government data which Tim Berners-Lee is presently working on… well then, you may just have then beginning of an informed electorate and a citizen democracy which can really do something about the world in which it lives – rather than dealing with it through singular, harassed, occasionally venal representatives culled from the vanishingly small group of people who want what looks to me to be the crappiest job for a hundred miles: Member of Parliament. You might even be able to get past representative democracy to a more direct form without ending up with capital punishment, low taxation and high spending.

Somehow, this thing fits the mood. It’s a now-now-now device, instant on, instant off, don’t wait don’t think don’t learn just touch and go. I don’t like that way of living, but it’s what we are at the moment. Maybe we can surf our way to a better place.

I’m not saying the iPad is going to usher in a golden age. That’s a ridiculous idea. I’m saying that it and things like it are the start of a road which could lead to a better way of being social animals. And if that happens, I think it may be more important than the loss to Makerdom Cory is worried about. I also think that you can’t hold a maker down. A kid with that skill will find technology; there’ll be plenty to play with. The rest of us will learn about it later and work out our own accomodations.

Whatever the case: it’s here, and it’s an object of lust, and it is going to reshape the content marketplace. It already has. And it seems to me it’s shaking publishers into action, too.

Good enough for a bit of tech which was born a couple of days ago.