Architectures of control

We should strongly resist building architectures of control in public service. They empower the petty, and promote the bureaucratic over the human.

This is why I oppose what the BBC is doing with its content protection.

The humane solution is not to regulate these architectures, but to remove them.

But, first up, another architecture of control: train ticket barriers.

A couple of months ago, I went to Paddington to meet my wife and child off the train. I wanted to help them off the train, with pushchair, luggage and all. But the guard at the ticket barrier prevented me from so doing.

It wasn’t his fault. He was just doing his job, that’s just the way things work, no-one is allowed through. Can you just wave me through, I want to help my wife off the train with the pushchair? “No, I can’t do that”.

Not much harm done, but real human moments missed – waving hello, waving goodbye, being there to carry someone’s bags. All in the name of fare-protection. All for my benefit.

I don’t want to overstate what happened. Martin and his family had a much worse experience than I did.

But, these are not systems that encourage kindness. These are systems that create bureaucrats and pettiness, and all manner of knock-on grief.

Typically, these systems are put in for the benefit of the majority. They’re well-meaning. That makes it much harder to argue against them. You’ll be characterised as not having taken seriously a certain issue, in this case fare-dodging, or as trying to promote a minority’s interest at the expense of the common-sense majority case.

No cost-benefit analysis covers these human stories – what cost do you attach to waving good-bye to your family as the train pulls out, or to helping an elderly relative find their seat?

But I’m convinced, these are things that we should be accounting for. Our progress is better judged by its humanity than by the technological prowess of the Oyster card.

Incidentally, I was reminded of another, much worse aspect of this system, reading this article about Kids Company:

Some of the solutions may strike others as not so much flexible as perverse. For example, when Kids Company clients kept being arrested for assaulting London Transport staff, Batmanghelidjh’s solution was to issue them with free travel passes. But the arrests ended almost overnight.

So, to the BBC’s content protection shenanigans. Opposing these doesn’t make me a pirate, any more than I’m siding with fare-dodgers above.

Again, rational, well-meaning folk think that exercising levers of control (in this case, on copying culture) will provide a net benefit to the majority. And, again, there are real human, and loving, stories to consider.

Here’s one: my wife’s cousins moved to Italy when they were young. My wife’s family set up an shuttle service of video tapes. Every week they’d video a selection of children’s TV and send the tapes to Italy; the next week they’d get the tapes back and record another selection to send – they couldn’t afford too many tapes.

This was kindness and contact and real. But, under the cost-benefit analysis, it’s piracy, too.

My Dad would wheel out a cine-projector at my birthday parties and play copied Woody Woodpecker cartoons to my invited friends.

Again, an awful piratical move, but human and real.

Video-tapes are awful inhuman, revenue-destroying, copying machines. But they’re also the Will Hay films my grandparents taped from the TV and watched again and again and again. On a twenty-year-old TV that needed no bureaucratic permission to watch them.

Anyway, you get my drift. None of these things show up in cost-benefit analyses of copy-protection. But they must. We should demand that these stories are taken account of. In fact, I would demand that for public service they should be the starting point of decision-making.

Even if the current architecture is mild in effect, it will spawn bureaucratic pettiness; it will serve as an example for anyone who wants to ratchet up the control dial in future; it will ultimately hurt us all, in a million petty little ways that just won’t show up on the balance sheets.

I can’t believe that the people asserting this control don’t have their own, personal examples of sharing culture. Of bootlegging songs from the top 40, or albums from their friends, on to cassette tapes. Of watching a copied video tape so many times that it was a snowstorm of noise. Of being given a mix-tape by a loved one.

The BBC is complicit in rolling out an architecture not based on kindness or on human stories, but on bureaucratic cost-benefit analyses. And we must resist that. We should consider all the kindness these systems kill.

If you have any stories of how copying content was a kindness, please leave them in the comments below. I’d love to be able to submit them the next time Ofcom has a consultation.

Tags: architecture of control, bbc, DRM, train tickets