I wonder what will this be used for: Scanning crowds for brands and logos

From BBC News:

"The Metropolitan Police is looking into technology which can automatically identify branded logos on clothing...The concept is being considered by Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville of Operation Javelin, who project manages the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office roll-out programme: a pioneering effort to turn the analysis of CCTV into a forensic discipline like fingerprint or DNA analysis...'What they do is they tend to go out in a kind of uniform, if you see a kid in a brand of 'hoodie' you can be pretty sure he'll be wearing that same brand of 'hoodie' the next time he commits an offence.'"

I guess when they say the clothes make the man, they really mean it.

Programs like these raise some pretty big issues: is spying on an innocent citizenry inherently bad? Even if used for good? How do we keep the technology and/or access to the already established systems out of the hands of those who would 1) do us harm, or 2) use the information against our will to achieve any number of ends (including marketing to us)?

I am by default opposed to systems—particularly government-sponsored systems—that collect information about my person without my explicit permission in order to advance their own cause. I'd like to just be left alone. But, of course, that's now impossible in this day and age. So how do we come to terms with a program like the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office?

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I know the whole thing creeps me out.

[full story via Murketing]

Unmarketable: Read This Interview

From Anne Elizabeth Moore, author of Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity:

"...those of us that actually are dedicated to ethical, sustainable, and autonomous cultural production—is really tiny, and kinda lonely, and we’re rapidly running out of beer. And all we can do when we run into each other is sigh deeply."

Read the whole interview with her on Murketing; it's worth it.

A Serious Blow to Internet Censorship?

Right on the heels of my recent post about internet censorship comes what might very well be a solution. Picidae is an project created to bypass governmental spying and censorship via the internet. The project has seen a mild flurry of publicity across the internet as it nears release, and now as I try to load the site once again, I get an internal server error. Uh-oh.

The program (which, I believe, was developed by someone in Germany) is based on the technique used by governments like China in which a user's internet habits are tracked as they enter information online. Typically, censoring governments log search engine entries and URL entries, and if the offending site is restricted the user either is denied access to the site or gets their internet connection shut down completely. So, for example, Googling "Tiananmen democracy movement" might either return very few results, or shut down your internet connection.

Picidae allows you to enter an URL via their servers, and returns an image map of the target URL, as opposed to an html page. The links remain clickable and simple forms can still be filled out (so you could search Google all day long).

It's a brilliant concept, a potentially revolutionary system. I can only hope that the inability to access picidae.net at this moment is due more to some kind of access overload than to something more insidious.

[Edit: The Picidae site appears to be up and running now.]

The Commoditization of Creativity

An interesting interview on Murketing, and the cheap art in limited editions it discusses, has me thinking (again) about the role of experts and commoditization of creativity. Our economy has embraced the "idea as artifact" so enthusiastically that we keep overlooking some really important things:

1. People who produce ideas (a.k.a. creatives) are being transformed into production lines. This results in commodity ideas that are less organic, less researched and more simplistic. The ideas are, in fact, often crappy or hogwash.
2. Access does not equal quality. Just because something is online, or available cheaply, doesn't mean it's worth owning or reading or believing.
3. Who owns all these ideas?

It's the last question that worries me. I'm no copyright expert but I am a writer. And as a writer, I consistently bump up against publications who want it all—all rights, that is—and don't want to pay for them.

As a designer, too, I see this. Clients don't know the difference between a useage license and copyright ownership. In other words, they don't differentiate between the finished product and the creative process used to produce it. Now that everyone can "create," there is no longer a distinction between the challenges of problem-solving/thinking/experimenting/innovating and a factory assembly line.

Of course, this argument begs the question: isn't a mass-produced artifact the fruit of someone's creative idea? Not really. It may have been when it was just a prototype, but once it becomes mass-produced, it becomes a commodity.