Why SOPA is made of fail

I was talking on Twitter today with a friend about SOPA—as were most of us, I'm sure. Hot button topic. Really should have blogged about it about 7 hours ago, but I was at work and I needed to collect my thoughts.

Let me give you the Twitter answer: My thoughts are if SOPA passes, we're all learning to hack.

And now, I shall exposit.

Our notion, as a society, of timeliness is drastically shorter than any society before us. Hell, it's shorter than our notion of it was five years ago. We forget that. We also forget that we have a generation who have grown up with the expectation of instant access to information and media.

When a distribution system won't deliver on that expectation, that generation does what any innovative group of people do: They create a subsystem to resolve the issue.

That's what peer to peer sharing—piracy—is. Hacking a system that is no longer efficient for a growing majority of its users. And that is why no amount of legislation created by people who don't understand our evolving notion of timeliness will be effective against piracy.


Passing SOPA would be like legislating horseshoes to repair tires. Seriously, how does that help anyone? Horseshoes won't even fit around tire rims.

Another notion that's evolving is our sense of geography. The internet, aside from not being a series of tubes, is also not a physical space. It's everywhere. All at once. (Except, perhaps, China—but, guess, what? They're hacking what they perceive to be a broken system, too.)


Our distribution methods for digital media are still being based on practices that apply to distribution of physical media to physical locations. The generation that has grown up online doesn't think of availability as being defined by location—and they aren't willing to wait for people who still do. They seek their media out online because they want it now.

You know who's to blame for this? Us. We have trained them to expect that what they want should be instantly accessible. We have reduced their attention spans; we have diminished their ability to wait.

Us. We created this demand for instant access—and it is our failing when we don't supply it.

We can scold and rant about legality all we want, but it will never resolve either of these underlying factors. Piracy isn't simply about right and wrong. It's a far more complex sociological issue.

In fact, we often go out of our way to compound this very issue we're so dead set on oversimplifying. Example? Most mainstream media providers have obscured the breakdown of payment. You would be amazed how many people have no idea how little creators make off their creations. We need to do something about that.

Also, society's idea of ownership is evolving. If we believe we own what we create, then that means we can't punish those who create transformative art. Memes and fandoms are dialects of our shared digital language. They're forming meeting places for vast groups of people trying to survive our increasingly disconnected world. Nodes on our cultural network.

Canadians are experts at talking about the weather. We can have safe conversations involving the weather with just about anyone. It is the staple of awkward elevator meetings, line waits, and enforced family time.

Memes are a digital equivalent of "is it cold outside." They are often "safe" means of interacting with strangers in this everywhere space we all inhabit. They are ways of reaching out, of filling silences and sharing experiences. They are how we begin to tell stories to one another.

And many of them require a vocabulary dependent on media. If you cut off a person's ability to access the source material or deny distribution of it in a timely manner, you render that person mute during these "safe" conversations. You prevent them from being able to tell us their stories.


One might argue that piracy isn't related to free speech. One might honestly believe that people who pirate are using free speech as a way to defend stealing from one.


I probably won't change your mind. But I honestly believe as long as we continue to oversimplify and insist on only treating the symptoms, we will never cure the disease.

And the paint under my nails

Quickly, I have signed a contract that keeps me at my current role with Indigo until April 30 2012. This is good because it keeps me through the winter and allows me to see spring in eastern Canada, which I hope is even half as beautiful as fall was. It also allows me to be in town for a friend's release party and many brunches. Oh yes, and I may get a chance to complete my Indie Coffee Pass.

And now a self-indulgent post about writing, where I admit things that I probably shouldn't on the internet. Ah, well.

There is a draft that I have been writing around for more than a year now. It is the manuscript that I cheat on other manuscripts with. It's the thing that I set aside to draft The Lost Art of Killing Dreams. When one is revising, which is probably where I do the majority of the work, one forgets what drafting is like.

It's sloppy and messy and paint gets on the floor, all over your hands and clothes, and under your nails. There is a lot of clean up involved in revision. Not to mix metaphors, but drafting is all about constructing a frame. There's always a point for me where I realize the frame I've built doesn't fit the true shape of the story. One can outline and think they know what a story's about, but it's the writing—the mess-making and building—where one realizes that they were probably wrong.

About 50,000 words into anything, I start to see what the frame needs to be. There's always multiple things that I'm doing in a story, all the questions I'm answering and the talking points I want to discuss. But there's a moment when I realize the way to string all of them together. It is one of the moments of clarity where I identify what is "wrong" with the draft. (Beside that it's unfinished.)

The tricky thing about Eight for Wishing is that it started as its own thing, then it was a reluctant companion for The Tale of Ariake, and then I realized it was logically a sequel. It was this story that nestled around and wove between TALE; it was an alternate filter through which to view that world and its characters. But when you do a sequel, you need a chord that connects the stories together and reason for having it.

I was talking to a friend earlier about this draft, and I said there is a character a reader meets in TALE who has his shit relatively together in comparison to everybody else. He has some things he has to deal with and confront, but he's in a place where he can do that quite a bit easier than the other characters. And the question that I started asking when I returned to throwing words at this first draft of Eight for Wishing is Well, how did he get that way?

That lead to understanding that this second tale I'm trying to tell isn't an epic love story of two younger characters who exist on the edges of the first manuscript. No, it's an epic bromance between a character who barely features in the first story and a character who the reader thinks they know. Because there's a whole other life this character has that we don't see in the first story.

As for if this grand experiment will ever be read by anyone else, I don't even know. Its the follow-up to something on submission, which brings in a whole other set of additional reasons that it may never see mass consumption. But I don't really write first drafts because I want other people to read them. That's a second or third draft.

I write like an oil painting. Not the gossamer way of a Rembrandt, either. I mean a Van Gogh—all those textures and colors you see, that never quite dry and are never quite finished, are layered upon each other more and more and more until they form a cohesive image. Beneath them, painted over and over and over again remains the under-painting, but you have no idea what it looks like.

Honestly, that's a good thing. You don't want to read my rough drafts. They're a lot of vague shapes, mostly blocks of colors, and very flat.

I probably will never be a clean writer, with smooth transitions between draft. Fortunately, by the time other people see things, all those brushstrokes look like they're meant to be there.

One simple, good day where all is new again.

They say in Japan that how you spend the first day of the new year sets the tone for the entire year, and if that is true then I shall spend it relaxed, content to be where I am, and occasionally delighted. At the very least amused at my obliviousness that causes me to get off at the wrong station, and then trust that I've got time and another train is coming and I needed to dispose of my coffee cup, anyway.

I'll be up before the alarm goes off, and somewhat overdressed, and spilling out into the neighborhood before it's afternoon. I'll have time and be early instead of feeling like I'm running late.

It's also going to rain a lot, but I'll have an umbrella or it won't be more than a few drops that don't amount to much of anything. It won't be as cold as it looks, and people will be in better moods for it. I'll listen to music and laugh with friends and have my expectations exceeded by allowing things to be what they will. Maybe I'll miss a phone call or two, but that's what voicemail is for.

There will be proper breakfast, even if it happens at 3:30, and I'll write and I'll blog and be well-rested enough to be optimistic about what comes tomorrow. To believe there will be enough time in the day to fit it all in without straining.

And maybe I'll lose that clear-headed certainty that it'll all work out eventually or forget to look for what's open when everything appears to be closed. But I had it today, which means I can find it again. Right now that's really all that matters.

I told a friend that maybe 2012 would be the year that I didn't push myself to keep going until I stumbled down dead from exhaustion, as I feel like I've been doing for the past two years. I felt it particularly the past few days while I admitted defeat at the hands of a cold.

It's New Year's Eve. It's my first New Year's Eve in Toronto. But I'm staying in and forgoing celebrations because I'm not well enough, and I'm starting on the whole not pushing myself to exhaustion resolution a little early. Little sad because I had plans—and I've not had Plans for years—but it's an arbitrary declaration date. (A widely accepted one.) We'll save the celebrations for the lunar new year and let 2011 tiptoe out quiet as it came in.

I went home for Christmas, and it was strange. It had only been about four and half months, but it felt like a lifetime had passed. (To be fair, it feels like I've lived and died several lives this year.) Maybe it's Toronto. Maybe EST just has more space for cramming things into it than PST does. I don't know. Maybe it's the growing and stretching and bone-breaking to heal properly that big changes bring.


I was sitting in the airport on the twenty-third, waiting to board the flight to Vancouver, when I received news that I'd officially have a job until April 1st. Which is good, because I feel like I'm starting to get a grasp on what I do while I know there's still so much more I can learn. Been around long enough to know an opportunity when it's presented, and I have a fine one here that I am very grateful for.

The way that I had dealt with the move was to call it temporary. It was less frightening if I didn't have to think of it as long-term. And that's a bad habit that I've developed over the past few years—not treating things like they're temporary, but treating things like they don't deserve the chance to be long-term. Like they're time-passing placeholders until my life starts again.

Because I did a lot of time-passing. A lot of waiting. The thing about optimism is that we forget it doesn't mean sitting on our hands waiting for good things, it means going out and finding them. We find what we seek, and I've decided that I sought stories of discontentment for long enough.

I think life started back in August, when I stumbled into Toronto with two suitcases and a countdown in my head of how long until I left. I don't know who that countdown was really for, because I like it here. I like my job. I like the people I work with, and I like that there are people to spend time with and things to do and I can get to where I need to go on my own... and if I'm staying in, I like that it's because I've chosen to stay in.

There are things I don't like, and things that aren't perfect, but that's everywhere. The good outweighs the bad. Tonight, I hover at that halfway mark between begun and completed, halfway out of the dark with the daylight growing, and it's ok that there are so many, many things to do because there's a whole new year to do them... and they can wait until tomorrow.

Tonight there is quiet, and tea, and the blissful glorious doing of nothing more than healing and regrouping. Thanks, 2011; I think it best we part here, amicably as we can, and go our separate ways.

Today—well, yesterday—no, I guess today since I'm meant to go turn the clocks back at 2 am—I wrote nothing. Let me state that proudly: I wrote nothing.

I went out and met with a room full of ladies who blog, and we talked about books and there were prizes and it was welcoming and inclusive. My tribe is also found in places other than conventions held in compounds befitting a YA dystopian novel.

Then I met other friends and we kicked about the city, all east of University/King—which is not very East but always seems so far away to me—and ended up at Spadina/Bloor then at Bay/Bloor. We did not walk the entire way, but enough that my mood had improved significantly by the time we were done.

Our adventures weren't really successful, as we found the coffee place after it had closed. But sometimes the looking is more important.

Counting

I was going to talk about World Fantasy Con, but I haven't finished processing it. You can go read this interview I did with Marissa Meyer about authors and cons.

I've been thinking about moments and memory. Neil Gaiman read this story at WFC called "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury," and I can't get it out of my head. The concept was what if one person had the responsibility of keeping an entire thing alive—what if that person forgot say, Ray Bradbury, and as a result everyone forgot.

The story unnerves me, because I don't think one person should have that kind of responsibility. There's a difference between calling something back because one person remembers it, and declaring it's the responsibility of that one person to do so. Can it even be their responsibility if no one else is aware such a responsibility could exist?

Here's another scenario: What if you met someone and you forgot you met them, because you meet a lot of people and you can't be expected to hold all of those people in your head. Does the meeting cease to have happened? Because I remember, and it still means something to me. I'm not Amy Pond-ing here—others witnessed this meeting and I know at least one of them remember, too.

Although, there are times when I do feel forgotten. But I haven't given into to the notion that I don't exist yet.

This entire post may not be making any sense because it was all half-composed in my head like three hours ago, when I thought it was important and worth sharing. Now I'm not so sure, so maybe whoever was supposed to be in charge of remembering the importance of meeting people you admire has forgotten it and all of reality has been rewritten as a result.

*

Throughout October I warmed to the idea of NaNo, of documenting and metrics and public check-ins. Accountability, thought I. That's what I'm missing. Then I went to WFC and I looked around and I reconsidered the whole idea of NaNo.

I think NaNo has something to it. Something good, but it gets lost in this more prevalent idea that words written during one month are somehow more important than words written during 11 other months.

I'm tired of feeling resentful that I don't write (fiction) all day and post to Twitter how many words I've written. I'm tired of feeling like I should be entitled to write (fiction) all day and post to Twitter how many words I've written. This prickly under my skin feeling has been all week long, and it was today that I realized the cause. November is when publishing and I break up for the holidays, because publishing has more than enough writers waving their wordcounts around the internet.

*

I don't know how it's November, when I can't remember September passing. Yet, I feel like September was three lifetimes ago and this November is an alien one fallen through time and belonging to a distant year.

There are still leaves on the trees and sun slanting between the buildings downtown to paint the sidewalks. I've been walking from the office to the halfway point of my commute then climbing on the streetcar. The walking is doing wonders for me—not crushed in a streetcar with more people than seats and space, not standing at a stop waiting for a streetcar with more space than people to arrive. I walk and I listen to music and I see things. I hope the weather holds so I can keep at this.

Because I missed the walking and the mountains and the ocean nearest to me being the right side of the continent—which is actually the left side if you're looking at a map. I had all that and stars in San Diego. I missed it enough to wonder about moving back to California, even with the US in its present condition.

Still, I think about staying long-term in Toronto. Catch myself making plans—I'd like to be walking all the way home by spring—and wondering what the place will look like in six months, a year, or two.

Maybe that's how roots set. Maybe it occurs in increments, in little ideas that allow the possibility in. Other days, home feels a long far journey from here—a discovery that hasn't happened yet.

*

You know how the Doctor and Amy laugh? The mad, joyful laughter shared between friends of not believing what just happened even though you were there and it happened?

I laughed like that with a friend at WFC. Laughed and laughed at the sheer impossibility of how a situation mirrored a previous situation. Laughed like we were in on the joke this time. Laughed like it didn't matter if the whole world heard us.

Laughter. It'll save the world.

Not-writing

I am who I am

made by all that came before this

sights from the side of the highway and my life in different cities I've lived.

—Tanya Davis, "Made in Canada"

I'm not-writing a book about Toronto in that way of sneaking up on the idea when it isn't looking and pinning it to the page. Maybe it's presumptuous having only been here for two months. But I like the romance of discovering a city for the purpose of capturing a sense of it, wrapping it up in ideas, and turning it into something mythic.

For the past two, nearly three months, I've been making a collection of ideas about Toronto. I thought, surely if I keep stuffing them into a jar—don't worry, it's got air holes—they have to mingle and become something. For the longest time, I could feel the ghost of it haunting my peripheral vision. If I waited, if I was still and then turned quickly enough, I'd grab hold of what it was.

I have many, many fragments of what it is not. What it was. What it won't be any longer. I think it's a fable, a strange surreal folk tale wrapped in allegory and wanting to say something about community, about seeing the world in that magic-shrouded way the young can see places.

I think it also just wants to be weird and wonderful and not shackled to reality, not forced to give way to what is in lieu of what would be cooler if it was.

It'll probably get away on me; I'm going to let it.

Here's a paragraph of what it wasn't—not quite, but close:

Someone told me once that every city you live in will always get compared to the first city you called home. It’s inevitable, because cities want to mark you as their own. They want in your head and your blood—that’s the reason why different people fall in love with different places. Cities are an endangered species—there aren’t many of the giant sprawling omnivores left. Now it’s all communities, boroughs, neighborhoods. They say it’s because there isn’t anyone strong enough to channel all of that—to hold the entirety of a metropolis inside their heart.