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From Consumer to Creator

The Lego Generation in the Digital Age

I spent much of my childhood playing with Lego. My parents were never at a loss for what to get me for my birthday. While soft packages were scorned, the hard, box-shaped packages with that very special sound when you shake them were always a hit. I quickly outgrew building fixed models based on other people’s ideas and started exploring the boundaries of what could be achieved with my imagination and my, unfortunately not as large as I would have wanted, collection of bricks. I would spend long afternoons building a spaceship that could transform itself into a moon base once it had landed, castles filled with secret rooms and traps, or weird machines that did a whole lot of nothing, but looked very cool doing it. Once built, I quickly lost interest though. For me, the fun part was not so much in playing with the things I built, as the creative process of actually building them. I know I was far from the only one.

Today I have replaced the Lego bricks with something else. Instead of small pieces of plastic, I am piecing together virtual building blocks of code on a computer screen. The basic desire to create, to use my mind and my hands to build something that no one else has done before is the same, however, the satisfaction when my ideas slowly become real no less exhilarating. There are important differences though. Whereas in my childhood, building my Lego contraptions was mostly a solitary activity, today I am working with like-minded creators, accomplishing together what we could never hope to achieve on our own. And we are doing this in a spirit of openness and freedom, sharing the results of our labour, our software, freely with each other and the rest of the world.

Thanks to the ideas that were first formalized with Stallman’s definition of Free Software¹, which have long since spread into other areas, such as Free Culture, we now have a conceptual and legal framework in place to foster this kind of collaboration and creative process, and the results are starting to show in a very big way.

For people who, like me, have grown up spending a great deal of time dreaming up crazy new ideas and trying to make them real with their hands and a finite number of bricks, the role as a consumer is not a natural fit. The notion of always receiving the creative works of others, only being allowed to play with the toys that others have built, feels strange. Yet this is how, for a large part, modern society works. A relatively small number of creators of software and culture try to convince us that their latest offering is what will make us happy, at least until the next big thing comes along. To make matters worse, the companies whose business is dependent on people constantly “consuming” their virtual goods have seen it in their best interest to start locking down their content by ever more sophisticated technical and legal means designed to make tinkering impossible. This is the digital equivalent of buying a Lego set that is not only pre-built, but where the pieces have been glued together.

The reasons why companies claim a need to lock down their contents are many, piracy being not the least. This discussion, and whether the countermeasures actually make economic sense, is a very large discussion all by itself that is better left for others with more knowledge of the area. One big issue I do see is that the companies value a creative work differently from society as a whole. For a record company or book publisher, value is proportionally related to the ability to monetize a given work. For society at large, the value of a creative work is something else completely, and something that is much harder to quantify. How do you determine the cultural value of a creative work? It would seem logical that cultural value is related to how many people come into contact with the work and how many new ideas it contains. But perhaps more importantly, a great indicator of a work’s cultural value is how much it is referenced, quoted and perhaps even remixed² (to borrow a term from Lessig) into derivative works, thus becoming a part of Culture in general. Based on this, it is my strong belief that the more controlled a creative work is, the less its cultural value will be as it becomes harder (or the barrier of entry becomes greater) to remix the work and integrate it with other works and other ideas in our shared cultural heritage.

Making the bricks play sound

My current involvement in Free Software is centred around the popular *nix (and slowly moving on to other platforms as well) audio player and manager, Amarok 2.³ This is something I am quite passionate about as it is not only an outlet for my own creativity and that of the other authors and contributors, but it also strives to be a hub that can help bring other forms of freely licensed creative content to a greater audience.

Much of my understanding of, and appreciation for, the areas of Free Software, Free Culture and indeed the greater issues of Free Society comes from my work on this project, so it is only natural for me to explore these issues through this lens.

One of the basic premises behind Amarok 2 is that there is really no lack of high quality free content out there on the web (or in “The Cloud” as the fashionable term seems to be these days). The main challenge is making people aware of its existence. Whether you are an “up an coming” band, radio station, record label or indeed producer of nearly any kind of cultural content not inside the “mainstream media”, one of your worst enemies is obscurity. With the vastness of the Internet, how do you get people to pay attention to you? You have to make yourself discoverable.

Amarok tries to accomplish this by making it easy to tie content from nearly any source into the core desktop application experience. Many of these sources will have content licensed under Creative Commons or similar licences, but this is not a strict requirement for inclusion of a service into Amarok. By making content available in a consistent way, and possibly tying content from multiple different sources together, the entire experience of discovering new content is greatly simplified. With the enormous potential audience, even the more obscure or experimental content, as long as the quality is high, is likely to find a significant audience.

An example of a source that is now integrated, and the one that actually got this idea started, is Magnatune.com.⁴ Magnatune.com is a record label that tries to do “fair trade” music, treating both artist and customers with respect. One of the things this means is that customers should be able to listen, in full, to any album before deciding whether to purchase it or not. Magnatune.com not only provides these preview streams for all their content, but also a structured way of getting access to it from third-party applications. So within Amarok, it is possible not only to browse and listen to each and every album from Magnatune.com freely, as much as you like, but also make purchases directly from within the application. Many other Free Software applications have now included the Magnatune.com content as well, making it a classic case of “if you free it, they will come”.

Amarok 2 includes many other sources of content already, such as Jamendo.com,⁵ LibriVox.org⁶ and others. So as soon as a new user launches Amarok, these are immediately available. Perhaps much more powerful than this however, Amarok 2 provides the ability for people to add their own content in a relatively simple way.

One of the key issues to adoption of a scheme like the Amarok 2 service framework is the barrier to entry. In order to spur adoption, this should naturally be as low as possible. In an attempt to overcome this, Amarok 2 makes it possible for third parties to add services using simple scripts. This means that with very little knowledge of code, it is possible to add content to Amarok. Coupled with Amarok’s integrated system for downloading new “service scripts”, this is a potentially very powerful feature.

Celebrating Diversity

To be completely honest, the possibility of adding services to Amarok using scripts did not start out as a grand vision of empowerment. Few such things do. But as the work progressed and interested people started contributing scripts, even before Amarok 2 was ever officially released, it started to become clear that it had great potential.

A concept that has become quite clear to me lately is that though some content might be limited in its scope of appeal, due to language, topic, genre or a host of other reasons, this does not make it collectively less important. In fact, the sum of people interested in content like this might well exceed the number of people interested in some of the services with more broad appeal that are already integrated. This is in essence the idea of the “long tail”⁷.

There are however two main issues with “narrow” content of this kind. First of all, it is unlikely that any of the regular contributors to a project like Amarok will be motivated in adding sources of content far outside their own areas of interest. Secondly, including content that is too narrow in the default installation is not desired. 99% of the users are not likely to care much about Danish radio stations, and having too large a list of services installed by default is likely to cause confusion. Also, everything that is included in the default install will have to be maintained by the Amarok developers, taking time away from other development work. This is where the scripted services really show their worth.

Using the scripted service framework, people have already created a host of services for national radio stations, access to the BBC’s and NPR’s archives of freely available (but unfortunately not always freely licensed) materials, a service for a site running a monthly vote of the best Free music, and the aforementioned LibriVox service (which is included in the default distribution as an example of what is possible using scripts). All of these services can be browsed and installed from within Amarok and the content becomes instantly available.

Having localized or niche content easily available in an integrated form is interesting in a number of ways. Generally, in the Free Software and Free Culture movements, we have a tendency to be very Anglocentric. That is, most development work takes place in English, and this spills over into the kinds of content that we generally include in the standard distribution of an application like Amarok. For many people though, who speak poor or no English (or simply have no interest in English language content) this makes the application less appealing. The availability of third party scripted services providing easy access to local content, such as local or regional radio stations, can potentially do much to overcome this issue, making Amarok feel more “native” to non-English users. For instance, having the service providing a comprehensive list of Danish radio stations would be a great selling point for my parents, who, even though they speak perfectly fine English, generally only listen to Danish radio. And getting Amarok into the hands of more users expands the potential audience for the other integrated services, not the least of which is the Free Culture based ones. This example is based solely on my own work with Amarok and the integrated services, but the underlying mechanics apply far beyond this limited scope.

Which neatly brings me back to the Lego bricks.

Empowerment

One of the truly great things I see in the advent of Free Software and Free Culture is that it is getting a nearly unlimited amount of interesting bricks into the hands of creative people to build even more interesting stuff. This overcomes many of the financial and social barriers of entry that have traditionally made it difficult or impossible for “ordinary” people to create and disseminate high quality cultural works, software and so on, without the backing of a large corporate entity. The flow of culture, traditionally one way from the few to the many, is becoming much more many to many, peer to peer. While this new wave of peer-generated content might not supplant the traditional media industry any time soon, the amount and quality of Free Culture and Software available has long since reached the tipping point of becoming a viable alternative to many people in many cases. You can now run your computer using only Free Software and have a very functional setup, and you can have a life filled with great music from one of the many online sources of freely licensed music.

For most, this creation of new culture will be unpaid, but the instinct to tinker and the gratification of being a creator and not merely a consumer is a great motivation for many. And of course, as with all other things, the people who are most skilled will find ways to make money from their works, even if they are freely licensed.

I don’t know what it will take to create a truly free society, but I have no doubt that a large amount of Free Culture and Free software “bricks” will go a very long way!