So, let’s pretend that you’re an executive in an industry that, despite making hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, isn’t making quite as many hundreds of millions as you used to be. And let’s also pretend for a moment than 95% of your product is crap straight from an infected mule’s ass. And you’re pissed, see, because it turns out that some people have been wandering over to the mule with their own buckets. So in order to convince your customers to buy from you and not tap the mule directly, your brilliant new idea is to charge more money for the same amount of crap. Yeah, so. . . honestly, I forget where this metaphor was going, but the music industry is still run by idiots.

Because coming soon from Universal Music is the USB Single. You see, it’s like a conventional CD Single (which is already too expensive, because all you get is one good song and two shite songs, neither of which you want), except it’s going to be on a tiny little USB thumbdrive. And, if I know the industry, it will be loaded with enough Digital Rights Management as to make the fucking song unplayable. But the real kicker is that this little USB Single is going to cost almost twice as much as a CD Single. So you’re paying double the overcharge for one song, because it happens to come on a small plastic stick instead of a flat plastic disc.

Are you with me so far? Universal thinks this will be a big hit because, um, of the internets? And, you know, like, the web or something. You see, because people are pirating music not because it’s crap, or because it’s overpriced, but because of, uh, computers? So if they overcharge people for crap music, but do it on a little plastic thing that plugs into a computer it suddenly becomes cool again. Supposedly, the little USB sticks will come with movie files or pictures – nothing you couldn’t just include on a CD of course – and cost more because of it. The reality is that they cost more because USB sticks cost more than blank fucking CDs, and this is a dogshit stupid idea. But if there’s one thing the music industry knows, it’s dogshit stupid.

And this is exactly why public opinion is so squarely turned against them. It’s why, yes, people pirate music, and no, no one feels even remotely bad about it. Because the industry response to “You sell donkey crap and it costs too much money!” is “How much more would you pay for that donkey crap if it came in a small silver box?”

And while I am on the subject of public loathing for the music industry, I’d just like to take a moment to shoot to hell the notion that was recently offered by an RIAA lawyer that when you purchase a song, what you are actually buying is a license to listen to that song. And that if you want multiple copies of that song (for your car, your mp3 player, your home stereo, your computer and so on), you really ought to buy multiple copies of it. What they are talking about here is licensing. And I know licensing.

The model they are using is the software industry, where what you are buying isn’t the physical CD with the software on it, but they serial number and the license key (essentially “permission” to run the software). If you’ve ever had to enter in a serial number or product code after buying software (this is especially common with online games), you have purchased a product license. If you work in an office, all of your office software has a license associated with it. So you could own five hundred copies of the CD, but if you only own one license, you only legally can have the software installed and working on one machine. Hell, very often you can download the software and not own a physical copy at all. Valve distributes virtually all of their games this way via Steam. And every one of those games is associated with your account, which purchases the right to install and run those games.

Which is fine. But there’s a funny thing about all of that software. It’s mine. And I can prove it’s mine, because I have a fucking license for it. If my computer gets wiped out, and I want to re-install Half-Life 2, I can just hop online and re-acquire it. If I want to install Sam & Max on a dozen computers I can, provided I only play one at a time. And if I lose my copy of Windows XP, but I have my serial number, Microsoft will send me a new fucking copy of the CD in the mail. You try calling up a music label and request a new batch of CDs that you legally own the license to. Let me know how that turns out for you.

The music industry never sold their product as a licensed commodity, and still doesn’t until this day. They want all of the protections and extortions of licensed software without providing any of the advantages or support that comes with it. And without actually, you know, handing out license keys so that there is a concept of ownership outside of the physical copy of the CD. The music industry does not sell licenses. They sell products. Physical, material products. If they want to shift over to selling permission to experience content, that’s fine. I’d actually welcome that. But it’s going to require more than shady lawyering on their end to make that happen.

There’s a truism in virtually any market that if you have to tell people why they need a product after you show it to them, your product is a dud. A product can do one of two things. It can address a pre-existing need that the consumer is already aware of. Food, for example. You don’t need to tell people why they need food in your advertisement you just need to tell them what kind of food you are selling. Or, a product can manufacture a need and then try to fill it on the spot. Restless leg syndrome is a good example of this, because up until that commercial came out, that condition was called “being a jittery bitch”. Hallitocis (a ten dollar word for bad breath) is actually a classic example of creating a need while advertising the product to fill it. Dandruff is a milder version of this scenario – more than twice as many people use a dandruff shampoo as actually have dandruff.

But USB Singles? No one has a need for that. It reeks of the hopefully already failed Ringle – a recent proposal where a consumer would purchase a music single along with the crappy, low-fidelity ringtone version for (here it comes again) twice as much money. Do you see a pattern forming here? Specifically, one where the industry keeps trying to sell its consumers products it doesn’t want at a higher price? Yes? Congratulations. That’s what separates you from a Universal Music executive.

If you have a Verizon Wireless account, and you do not want a metric fuckton of advertisements and marketing being directed at your person, you have less than thirty days to read the fine, fine print on the last packet of worthless paper they sent you, track down the toll free number to call, and opt out of the Customer Proprietary Network Information program. Or you can just call it from here, as the total call takes less than a minute.

1-800-333-9956

Basically, Verizon wants to sell your call information. Who you call, who calls you, how long you talk, and at what times – just for starters – to anyone with an expense account and too much free time. However, they’ve decided to label this selling of your personal information as a feature, as though they were giving away free call waiting, and hide that new feature in the fine print of the latest revision of customer service agreements that you never read because they are generally six thick pages of incomprehensible garbage and poorly thought out marketing.

The trick is, you’re already enrolled! And unless you take yourself out of the program soon, you’ll remain enrolled indefinitely. I’m really getting that creeping, Arthur Dent feeling here that satire has become some sort of psychotic sanitized performance art, a macabre dance of marketing and information overload intentionally designed to lull consumers completely to sleep so that we won’t have to undergo the unpleasant sensation of being knocked out cold before we get fucked in the ass.

And after you’re all done telling Verizon Wireless that being overcharged to send text messages every month is not an implicit agreement that you want your personal information being doled to every douchebag on the planet that knows how to set up a cold call center, you might just want to swing by their website and tell them exactly how you feel about the CPNI program. I’m going to try to get a direct number to call up and bitch at as soon as I can.

If you’re reading my blog, and you haven’t read Army of Dude from end to end, then you quite simply fail at life. I highly suggest navigating back to 2006 and reading it in chronological order, as it’s a pretty amazing, insightful, and rather touching read.

I remember it like it was yesterday. I think I always will. It was my last year of college, and I was dividing my time, rather unevenly, between living at home and stamping around up in the woods of Annandale. It was a Tuesday – I don’t know why I so clearly remember that fact, but it’s always one of the first pure facts that comes to mind. I actually slept through the collisions. The first thing I remember is my mother’s voice. “Aden, you have to wake up. Wake up. Something is happening. Someone is flying airplanes into the World Trade Center.”

And that was how the collective worst day of our lives started. For me at least. It seemed impossible, and for about the first ten minutes or so I was sure it was. I was positive that I was about to wake up, my eyelids snapping open in sickly repulsion from what absolutely had to be a nightmare and nothing more. That sort of thing doesn’t happen – except when it does. It wasn’t until the first tower caved in on itself that I realized the whole thing had gone so far that we could never come back from it. And as the second tower fell, burying steel and concrete, victims and heroes, I looked over the gaping edge of my life and understood that America was suddenly a very different country.

I’ve shown the graphic for today to a number of friends, and most of them wondered aloud if the symbolism wasn’t backwards. Many authors, pundits and journalists have described my generation as living in the shadow of September 11th. Usually, they are not actually from my generation, so I can understand why they get it wrong. The generation growing up now, the ones that were in grade school or even high school – they are growing up in the shadow of 9-11. They live in a world that is so infinitely different from the one that we lived in just a few years ago. But they are at that crucial age of learning what the world is and how it works, and the lessons they take away from that experience will be forever darkened by what that world has become.

I made the graphic look the way it looks because it is my generation, the twenty-somethings and early thirty-somethings, that carry that day with them. We cast the horrid shadow of that day in every light and feel it creeping beneath our feet at every step. Because we learned about the world when it was sane, and just about when it was our turn to inherit it, that world was shocked into insanity. Even the craziest amongst us were unprepared. We carry with us the memories of the lives we’d hoped to lead and never quite will. We are the ghost of what America might have been. We are so much shattered potential.

I don’t live very far from New York City – so close in fact that we never actually call it that here. Sometimes “New York” and sometimes simply “the city” as if to imply that when you live in close proximity to such an amazingly urban place, it really is the only thing you can think of as a city. It was utter panic and unmitigated terror getting in and out of the city for a while. People whispered in conspiratorial dread about bridge bombings, tunnel cave ins, power plant explosions – small scale armageddon carried out by the thousands.

I’ll never forget the first time I got back into the city. It was shortly after they’d started running buses through the Lincoln Tunnel. For those of you unfamiliar with the area, the approach ramp to the Lincoln Tunnel runs right along the water front, near Hoboken and Weehawken. The whole way down that ramp, you can see the entire skyline of New York City from Harlem to the Statue of Liberty. The Twin Towers had always stood out from that skyline, two great pillars of glass and steel reaching upwards, making even the other skyscrapers further north look like runts of the litter.

You didn’t see simply the absence of the towers. That would have been erie enough. What you saw was a giant column of smoke, hanging in the air in a way that was utterly unnatural. It was as though the most malignant storm cloud you’ve ever seen had been captured, funneled, and grated across the open sky of New York. It was days from when the towers came down and there was still this impossible twisting scar of smoke and dust and ash trailing southward for miles. Literally too thick to see through, like a wound bleeding into nothing. Granted, the media showed that stretch of debris and ash often over and over. But what most people didn’t see was that it hung there for days like a bitter pain that simply would not relent.

The media also showed you little camps set up around ground zero, walls lined with posters and fliers of missing loved ones. But what they could not communicate was the scope or the scale of it all. A city block in New York is a very different thing than in most other places. And in a place where you can get trodden into the concrete for not moving your ass across the sidewalk fast enough, there was this radial zone of utter discordance. Everything and everyone stopped. You reached out and helped a stranger not because it was the right thing to do but because it was the only thing you could even think of doing. You did it because you so desperately needed to put something right in the mayhem. You did it to drown out the shock. Because you knew at any moment, you might be the next person falling down.

I carry that day with me. I always will. It lives below my skin, ingrained in those parts of my body that never get recycled. It grows older and burrows deeper with each passing year. I stood right on the wild, bright edge and watched the world I was expecting, the world I was ready for and the world I’d grown into an adult understanding of, vanish. Like a cheap conjurer’s trick, as if to imply that it had never been there in the first place. No flourish, no buffer, just a sudden flash and then the realization that on September 10th, I’d had no idea what the world even was. I walk out of place and out of time, like a refugee from my own future. And while rolling years and heavy footfalls push me further from the day that the music stopped, I can always feel it stretching out to meet me. Passing with me. Anchored to that point when the world split open, and madness walked the streets of New York City.

Now, I will confess up front that I, myself, have never been to Africa. It just never came up. I’m aware of where it is, I’ve known a number of people who were born and raised in various parts of the continent, but I, personally, have never popped on over for a visit. Despite this fact, it has come to my attention that there are quite a few black people living there. Between Houghton-Mifflin, CNN, National Geographic, Eric Cartman or perhaps even Lethal Weapon 2, somewhere along the way I got the message. Many black people live in Africa.

As it turns out, this staggering pearl of wisdom is not limited to the United States. Over in Japan, where they also have cable television and access to globes, it is known that many black people live, as I’ve said, in Africa. So if a Japanese video game company (let’s say, oh, Capcom for example) were going to make a game that was set in Africa (where Africa /= Egypt), you might expect there to be many black characters featured in the game. Had Capcom developed a game set in Africa that was populated entirely by blonde haired, blue-eyed white people, it not only would have been strange, but it’s likely that a lot of people would have asked why they’d done such a thing.

As it turns out, populating their game with people who appear to actually be from the location the game is set in is a big no-no, especially if your character (as in most games) winds up shooting a lot of them. Enter Resident Evil 5, which is receiving a lot of “OMG racism” flak for exactly that reason. There is one particular blog that went off on a wickedly stupid tear on the subject, and I will not link to it simply because I don’t want the showboating attention stunter to get any more traffic than she already has.

Of course, the first three Resident Evils were set in the American Mid-West, and featured the indiscriminantly creepy killing of many white, white zombies. Resident Evil 4 was set in Spain (sort of), and the not-zombie enemies in that game were slightly more swarthy – dark hair, dark eyes, distinctly mediteranian looking. No problem there. I’ve played many games where the enemies were all Asian (Red Steel, for better or for worse, comes immediately to mind). And there seemed to be no outcry a few years back when those highly mediocre Desert Storm games hit the market. But RE5? A shit-fest of implied racism.

If the game featured dark skinned enemies based on the premise that you had to kill them because they were black, yes, that would be incredibly and embarrassingly racist. Even if the game featured mobs of black-skinned enemies who needed to be killed because they were dirty or impure or somehow less than human because they were black, that would also be racist (and in some ways, much worse). But the game features the enemies it does because of the location in which it is set, and the reason you have to fight these enemies is that they have been transformed from innocent people into vicious killers by an outside influence. Probably “The Man” come to think of it (where The Man = Umbrella Corporation). It’s only a matter of time before someone who isn’t getting enough web traffic decides that RE5 is a commentary of slavery. That’ll be a fun few days on Joystiq.

Of course, the other issue that seems to be upsetting people is that the central character is white. So it’s a white guy shooting black people. That he’s white because he was already white in previous games matters not, apparently. Though it does raise an interesting point. Suppose the central character was black. Would it still be racist? What if this newly pigmented hero was shooting packs of white people? And I mean, pasty-skinned white zombies, who were wearing Members Only jackets while playing water polo and listening to Toby Keith. Would that have sparked cries of racism?

Look, I’m not trying to defend racism or prejudices. I think they’re absurd, because if you really want to hate someone, all you have to do is get to know them personally – we’re all flawed enough to find an excuse. And I agree that there is still a shameful amount of racism in the world, even and especially in the Land of the Free. But stupid bullshit reactions like this do not fight racism. They trivialize it. They make it seem like an overblown joke. They excuse the real racism that hurts good, innocent people every day by lumping it in with this made up, oversensitive politically correct bullshit nonsense. Inventing racism where it does not exist furthers the cause of racism instead of diminishing it. And that is what is going on here.

But beyond the already terrible act of trivializing racism, reaction-spasms like this also make it harder to talk about the subject of racism in general. They add a finger pointing layer of obfuscation to the already murky and difficult discussion. They cause people to engage in verbal acrobatics to try to prove just how racist they are not, and those are exactly the sorts of acrobatics that wind up sounding like (you guessed it) racism. You don’t defeat racism by being a hypersensitive bitch, okay? And you sure as hell don’t fan the flames of self-constructed controversy just to get page views. Which is the only reason I haven’t suggested that assuming everyone else is racist might be, in fact. . . racist.

Oh snap! Bring on the flames.

At least, that’s what the AP bothered reporting to me today. It turns out that of the one hundred million accounts on Myspace, seven of them turned out to be unregistered sex offenders. Now, am I glad that they got caught? Of course I am. Do I acknowledge that there are some skeevy bastards on Myspace? Absolutely. But if you poll any given population of one hundred million people, you’re going to uncover just about every variation and deviance imaginable. You could probably find 7 necrophiliacs, 7 flat-earthers. . . maybe even 7 Bush supporters! Maybe.

The point, though, is that this likely wouldn’t have been a story if it hadn’t been on Myspace. Law enforcement did its job and caught some bad guys. Again, I’m glad to hear it. But if you think for a moment it would have warranted a full sentence, let alone an entire article, had it not had to do with “teh interwebs”, you’re sorely mistaken. It’s a non-story, disguised as news, designed to drive a wedge between old and young. Because computers are big and scary and strange. There are child molesters on your daughter’s cell phone and terrorists in your son’s closet. Be afraid. Be so fucking afraid.

Some of you are wondering what I’m going to say about the shootings in Virginia. The answer is that I’m not going to say a terrible lot, because there’s not a terrible lot that we know about the situation, the circumstances, or the shooter. We have the outlined sketchings of what might one day resolve into facts. And it is neither my place nor my right to fill those facts in, or to turn them into a narrative. Especially not one that just happens to further my own political opinions.

It will come as a surprise to none of my regular readers that Jack Thompson is already blaming the shootings on video games. He does this routinely, and then finds out afterwards if the shooter even played them. I don’t know if he did or not. It’s not relevant anyway, and it should be roughly on the five billionth page of the List Of Things We Should Know about these killings. I refuse to even link to him, because I don’t want to give him the Google cred. Dr. Phil apparently agrees with Jack, and this is reason enough to shun that bald headed hack like the no talent moustache transportation system that he is.

There are also a lot of people using this as an excuse to debate gun control laws. This has to stop as well. Those of you that hate me because I’m supposedly a bleeding heart liberal might be surprised to learn that I’m not in favor of most gun control laws (probably not for the same reasons as the NRA, but that’s beside the point). They are written with absolutely no logic, without an understanding of the realities of the world, and they primarily criminalize the tool that is used to carry out the crime rather than the crime itself.

The best thing I can say about gun control laws is that they give law enforcement a pretext upon which to detain or arrest a suspected criminal. The problem with that system is that it forces me to rely on law enforcement to apply those laws intelligently and reasonably. Occasionally it happens. Usually it does not. But what’s important to understand here is that gun control laws, the way they exist right now, do almost nothing to effectively keep guns out of the hands of criminals. And they do even less to prevent tragedies like the ones we witnessed in Virginia (the shooter reportedly was wielding a pair of legal-to-purcahse hand guns, though I can’t verify that with absolute certainty).

Do I think there should be laws concerning gun control? Of course I do. But they need to be reasonable and logical. In fact, I view them in much the same way I view any other prohibitive law we have in this country. I see gun control as being linked to the war on drugs in a very different way than most people do. That they both ineffectively and pointlessly punish otherwise lawful citizens by criminalizing something for everyone because our government is too impotent to actually deal with the realities of the situation, and our society is too fucked in the head to even have an open discussion about it. Prohibitive laws fail in any free society, and actually cause more crime than they prevent. They allow for a black market to exist in place of a fair and regulated market (not to mention a taxable market), and that is the source of the violence.

But no law, prohibitive or otherwise, can cut to the core issue of what happened in Virginia. It wasn’t a matter of access to weaponry or access to media. The truth is that we don’t know what it was a matter of access to, other than society in general. I’m not going to say this guy was pushed over the edge, because maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he had a perfectly normal life, woke up one morning and decided to kill thirty-two people. We just don’t know what or why right now. And all those empty suits and gaudy perms specu-punditing twenty-four hours a day add nothing to the discussion, but detract greatly from those last few shreds of what makes us a civilized society.

The people who truly make me sick (and usually it takes a few days for this to start happening, but I guess the 24/7 cycle demands stupidity at greater and greater speeds) are the ones that start holding their bits and pieces and talking about what a bunch of macho bad-asses they would have been if they’d been at the scene. Mcjoan over at DailyKos has already called out the first two hacks, and there will be more to come. What’s great about free speech is that it allows every voice to be heard. What’s tragic about it is that every voice includes a couple of blowhard back-line gladiators like these two. Whenever the Old Media starts crying about the lack of journalistic standards of the New Media, these two sad, self-indulgent shitstrutters alone should be enough to make them gag on their own shame. Make no mistake, Derbyshire and Blake are the sorts of people that I’m supposedly not as good as. I almost wretch just having to type that.

I normally allow for pretty un-moderated comments here at adennak.com but in this case I am going to make an exception. If you want to talk about violent media, I’ve got a backlog on the subject and there’s always more to come. If you want to talk about gun control, there will definitely be posts in the near future to reply to about that. If you want to talk about Old/New Media, it comes up regularly as well. If you want to use this outburst of raw violence to further your own political ideology, do us all a favor and go fuck yourself.