The Economics of Colombo Traffic

A Beijing subway map

Traffic in Colombo is not pleasant. Leaving home at the wrong time can ruin your whole day. Do this for a while, and soon cursing behind the wheel everyday will likely give you grey hairs and a prematurely weak heart.

Blame The Cars

Tax reform, low interest rates and possibly increasing middle class incomes have multiplied vehicle imports faster than road networks can expand. The UDA has been trying to keep up, they’ve extended Marine Drive to Colpetty, opened up Bullers Road and have generally tried to fix things like perennially bad maintenance. Traffic lights and police presence has been increased, but still cars pile up faster than hungry people at a dansala.

I drive down Galle Rd often and it used to be that i’d invariably try to take Marine Drive to avoid evening traffic, but now i steer clear because of the massive wait at the turn off back into Galle rd. Similar situations are playing out along all of the major exit-entryways to the city. Baseline Road, Negombo Road and Kandy Road are veritable nightmares in rush hour. Let’s not even go near Rajagiriya, literally, you want to stay away from there when other people exit their offices. There are just too many. freakin. cars bob.

Don’t Blame The Cars

But blaming the vehicles is moot. There are good reasons why people feel they need cars. People are worried about getting to work on time, they also need to get there smelling good. So will drive if they can afford it, or paradoxically take a tuk tuk if they cant. As traffic increases, drivers get more and more frustrated and will wish for alternative ways to travel. But aside from moving closer to the city (an unthinkably expensive option for most) they have no other alternatives. This is absurd, but that’s just the way things stand now.

Public transport is unreliable, too congested, and completely ruins the attire of your average executive, discouraging most of them from opting for it. The lack of a cheap taxi network is also a problem. Tuk tuks, even metre tuks, are overpriced.

Building Our Way Out

The Defense Ministry/UDA (whats up with that? no one even talks about it anymore) has followed a strategy to expand capacity and increase efficiency by improving roads, building flyovers and increasing police presence. But it has only worked so well. In fact, capacity is so limited that everyone breaks road rules when the cops aren’t looking to get ahead. Our roads are ganglands, whatever you can get way with is legal, Gehan has a good post on driving and its malcontents.

The situation poses some interesting problems for urban policymakers. Things have come to a point where even the bureaucracy must realise that there is no building our way out of this, at least not in the conventional add-em-as-you-go fashion.

Trains have worked remarkably well in other cities. But Colombo’s existing train lines only circle the city and do not venture inside, making them just feed lines to hubs just outside the city centre and that too only from the North and along the coast.

The bus networks are mass market. And probably already transport double the amount of people travelling in cars. The recently launched Executive Bus service has failed to spark much interest. Again due to unreliability, irregularity, coverage gaps arising from the fact that they only traverse a single main route, and did I mention unreliability, the bus service can only do so much too. The much touted ferry service is also floating about aimlessly if you’ll excuse the bad pun.

Innovative work policies can help. Firms can rethink employment policy and offer the option of working from home. Or offer flexible hours to enable employees to beat traffic to and from work, like my new workplace. Individuals can also avoid traffic if they decide to leave early because not everyone will do it especially here where being fashionably late starts half an hour after an appointment.

Bring The Commonwealth Games to Colombo

A subway system would be ideal, as indi says, a good subway system can completely eliminate the need for cars. The Delhi Subway system cost somewhere around 700 million USD. Peanuts in comparison to how much we are borrowing for other projects of dubious worth. Maybe the Chinese can help us out with a loan and even expertise, the Beijing subway lines are superb; and are an excellent way of getting around in an otherwise smoky, congested city.

Both the Delhi and Beijing lines were conceptualised and hurried up because of the 2010 Commonwealth games and the Olympic Games respectively. The need to show off and provide seamless transport to attendees forced these cities to consider building what is probably the most efficient urban transport mechanism invented by man.

Colombo is the centre of the country still, the heart that pumps out all the country’s logistics. The main arteries of it are now getting clogged. If hosting big international games can bring a city a subway then Hambantota might end up getting one. But Hambantota doesn’t need a subway system, Colombo does. So bring the Commonwealth Games to Colombo, and build something useful to the economy in the process.

This is a policymaker standing on a minefield

But the relationship between expanding capacity and reduced traffic is not always direct. This study done by USCB shows that when capacity expands and some traffic is diverted through other channels, latent demand clogs up the free space. Meaning when more drivers take buses, people who took buses because the traffic was too much will start driving.

Colombo being a very decentralized city doesn’t help. Public transport is simply not capable of reaching all the crannies where people need to go, most of the inroads can’t accommodate buses anyway. I work on Thimbirigasyaya Road and it’s barely wide enough for two cars. There is an expansion program going on but it had been in the works for over two years now, no results.

There is also mispriced congestion. Drivers don’t pay for the time loss they cause to others, and so will make inefficient decisions on when and how to travel. These ‘negative externalities’ are the social cost of congestion, and can result in little or no reduction in traffic.

Expansion in trains might divert commuters away from the bus service, because the latter is crap, while not affecting the amount of cars on the road. Deteriorating the bus service even further while causing no improvement to traffic.

So wuttudoo? Maybe an expansion in overall capacity, trains, roads and buses, thereby taking levels of capacity beyond ‘latent demand’. Together with innovative alternatives like carpools, office vans and flexi hours and urban planning focusing on centralized corporate space, these policies might help. What is really needed before anything else is a comprehensive study of the city by specialists (its much more complicated than it looks) followed by bottom up policy making to prevent us from arbitrarily building roads that lead to nowhere worth going slowly.

But all this takes intelligent policy making followed by quick implementation. And so far the Defense Ministry/UDA has only been implementing like mad, where the intelligent planning?

Milinda Moragoda has set out a manifesto here, in it he gives some vague outlines of a transport policy that are a bit vague. Aside form promising clean pavements it promises circular bus routes but fails to describe how they will be different from existing bus routes, which cover the city’s main highways pretty well.

#IndiaHate

Indian students get flak for being Indian

A lot of Sri Lankans proudly profess their hatred for India. Why? i ask. ‘Cause they’re arrogant’ comes back the answer. Pfft like Sri Lankans aren’t? Please. There has to be something else behind this mysterious hatred for our neighbors. Is it the bad English accent? The hot movie stars? The sledging in the cricket field? The economic success?

Wait hold on, you say, economic success? you scoff. Half the population is below the poverty line! you triumphantly espouse. Yes but a lot of them are now above it thanks to their economic policies, i say. India’s corporations are taking over the world. Educated Indians are enjoying better living standards. They are beginning to get some actual respect out there.

Their leadership is not something to envy. But at least their top rung have got their ducks in a row and seem to be leading the country in a direction. It doesnt matter here or now what direction, let it suffice that they have a direction, something that we seem to be lacking.

And Indian people, arrogant? I’m not sure about you but most Indians i have met have turned out to be quite nice. Sure they’re determined, somewhat materialistic and egoistic. But hello, we aren’t much different. We’re determined, mayhaps for the wrong reasons and terribly uptight about our identities. And besides, are the qualities to be hated?

Also isn’t blind hate what brought about the ethnic conflict in the first place? we hate without rhyme or reason, sense or sensibility, pride or prejudice (i had to throw that one in, sorry Jane) its like we’re shifting our angry eyes from the North to something further North. The big hulking neighbor we all fear, and so we all hate. Are we afraid of colonization? that claptrap the JVP sold us as propaganda to spark an ill thought out insurgency in the South?

Think of cricket. A lot of people want India to lose cause the simply ‘don’t like em’. They don’t know why or how. Their dislike is not a dislike that can be articulated. They just hate em. Well, haters gon hate. India is a strong team and if they win against us, I will still respect their win. This is a big moment for cricket in these parts of the world, and if Sanga and his boys pull through, all well and good i will whoop along with the rest of you. But if India wins then it’ll do a world of good to the confidence of a billion people. And that would be something i’d be happy to watch regardless.

Paper Obsolescence and Thoughts on Dung

Paper Love by shinymavis

Soon, paper would probably be obsolete in most of the forms it is used now. I think that’s good. Think of all the trees we’ll save.

Funny thing about that though. I never imagined how hard it would have been to predict the demise of paper. One Isaac Asimov short story i read still used calculators that spewed out typed sheets of paper in the year 2700 AD. And i can’t recall the specifics but this was after man had achieved things like comfortable deep space exploration, time travel etc.

Makes me think of all the strange things that could happen to things we take for granted. For instance, what if we discovered teleporting systems to transfer our feces to the middle of the sun? Think about it. Fifty years ago there was a guy coming along with a bucket to collect your refuse from the hole in the ground that was in a corner of your garden. Today you sit comfortably right inside your house and take the flushing mechanism for granted. Fifty years down the line, you’re blaming last night’s sushi for that particularly disturbing solar flare.

So while the life you could have led fifty years ago seems rather unappealing and icky, a space age you would look back on the toilet that flushed and loose his breakfast. And you thought the flushing toilet was the best thing since the French revolution. Shame on you.

Admittedly however, the development of the toilet is incremental. Its not a complete paradigm shift like Paper to e-ink or say VHS to DVD. Change in everyday stuff we take for granted can be the hardest to predict or just plain imagine.

Kicking Over the System

-label for your textbook

What if there was a different way to live? What of all the waste, over consumption and reckless consumerism is only a side effect of what we are taught? What if we could change the world if only we were taught things differently?

Economics is a study of the behavior of people. But it also advocates what the behavior of people should be. And this normative aspect of the subject is used to dictate policies of countries and has come to represent everything the world as a whole is aiming for; namely GDP.

If the world turns where the economists point then theoretically, if the economists point in a different direction, the world should follow. There’s a huge hue and cry being made about the recklessness the current global economy is showing towards the environment. Traditionally this fuss is primarily created by white people in rich countries, the rest of us are too busy trying to figure out policies that will feed our populations. But the white people have a point.

Take the Kick it Over Manifesto for instance

Imagine you are riding comfortably on a sleek train. You look out the window and see that the tracks end abruptly not too far ahead … The train will derail if it continues. You suggest the train stop immediately and the passengers go forward on foot. This will require a major shift in everyone’s way of traveling, of course, but you see it as the only realistic option. To continue barreling forward is to court catastrophic consequences. But when you propose this course of action, others – who have grown comfortable riding on the train – say, “We like the train, and arguing that we should get off is not realistic.”

These guys think that the world is being deluded by its own stupidity. And that economics students must revolt against their professors to fight what they call the ‘Thought Control in Economics’. This is essentially the continued teachings of neoclassical principles to students whereas those very principles are now being proven to be very bad for the world.

Concepts like consumerism are essential for GDP. And in the haste to increase GDP we don’t give two hoots for the ‘ecology’. Another idea is the idea of true cost, that is assigning the true cost of producing something; including the costs incurred to the environment in production, transport, overheads etcetera. Interesting concept, but practically iffy.

I think the fundamental question to ask is whether the world is greedy by nature and is economics simply giving a face to that greed by setting greedy goals? Or is it actually economic teaching that has made the current system so greedy?

If a change in economic attitude must come, from where must it come? Who should initiate it? The professors? The politicians? Maybe like Friedman said, true change will only come with a crisis. This is something that everyone needs to get with, for it to work.

So if you believe in changing the system go to http://kickitover.org and sign the manifesto. Can’t say it’ll do any good, but you might  feel cooler because the site looks very nouveau hip, if that’s your thing.

Endangering the Pavement Hawk

-there’s money to be had on the pavement

 We all bear a secret grudge against pavement hawkers. Maybe one of them cheated you, or intimidated you when you were a kid or was rude to your mom or felt your bum or whatever. Pavement hawkers wouldn’t really rank high on our lists of favourite people.They clog up the streets, the block access to legitimate shops, they scream in your ear, they pollute and they conjest. The city is a lot less refined looking cause of them.

Many (mostly on the side of the government) hail the current drive to clear the streets of Colombo of pavement hawkers as a bold move heralding our entrance bid to become one of Asia’s more developed economies. Others snidely remark on other various measures that are adopted to clean up the face of Colombo before the IIFA awards, like the uncharacteristically ultra-efficient road painting going on in the Negombo road.

But there is no denying that illegal pavement hawkers are a problem, and must be tackled,  indeed it won’t be fair to say that this is  clean up effort prior to the Indian invasion so to speak. The government has been doing this for some time and not only in Colombo, but current methods strike me to be too symptom oriented and not actual disease focussed.

Impulse Purchase

To provide a viable solution to your average pavement hawker, we must ask; what makes it profitable to be a pavement hawker? Most pavement hawkers probably make barely enough to eke out a living at that. But they do that primarily out of catering to impulse rather than actual needs. Think about it, whenever you bought something off the pavement, it was out of impulse wasn’t it? Unless of course, you actually set out from home looking to buy a pen torch that can also write in five different colors, cheap/fake Ray-Bans and Rolexes or wierd fake mustaches and beards harking back to the era of ancient Sri Lankan kings.

Such impulse products rely on supply to create demand. If it’s there, you buy it. If it isn’t there, you don’t. So, obviously the ideal places to sell products such as these are places where people gather. The sellers must go to the buyers. The market must literally be in the way of the potential customer. It more or less relies on this characteristic to survive. Hence the inherent nature of your average illegal pavement economy.

An Impotent Solution

So far the solution for these people has been to relocate them to shopping mall like buildings that accommodate them in concrete stalls in a many storeyed building. The building is located in a busy area of the city, sure but hardly in a place where customers frequent it. Therefore the businesses soon fall apart or return to the streets to survive. Current solutions are impotent, they only result in higher unemployment (and by extension possibly crime), wasted public funds and space.

A potent solution

Obviously, all current pavement hawkers will not be able to continue hawking viably while also following laws and regulations. Limited spaces can be provided in existing public infrastructure that can tackle the dual problem of getting them off the streets and also providing adequate livelihood. Shop spaces in the Borella underground is a good example. Maybe space can be given in major railway stations and bus stops but that will only mean that a very few of the currently afflicted will be able to continue work.

A potent solution must be a more dynamic one. It’ll involve a lot more reasearch into rooting out root causes and the studying of the communities involved. What causes people to enter into the pavement trade? Lack of opportunity, education; what? Is there any way their entrepreneurial capabilities can be directed towards a more productive industry that will also help build a more robust economy?

But is the government ready to undertake such deep study and come up with such solutions? are they even capable of it? Maybe a think tank should handle it. These imo, would be great areas for reconciliation work to take place. After all the potential for conflict, suffering and hardship is very high. This kind of intelligent reform, if it were to materialize, should definitely signal our entry bid into Asia’s list of top economies.

Popping Pills

Chill pills, that is.

I am at a point where i’m making some big life decisions as a friend would put it. Calling it a life decision rather displaces the whole thing into what i like to call white objectivity. Only purely because such thought seems to find a lot of origin in Western philosophical teaching. This is the type of objectivity typified by a materialistic, temporary, ‘just-do-it’ view of life. But it also makes the description fit rather well because i too am a materialistic, temporary and just-do-it type of person.

Materialism

We are all materialistic, temporary and just-do-it people. We are materialistic when you define materialism simply as acquisitions –  removing the condition of actually owning something tangible. What is ‘tangible’  itself takes its definition based only on human perception. Achieving a higher state of mind therefore, can still be tangible to the mind and in it wanting to be possessed by someone it is also materialistic.

We all want something. And that makes us similar. A Seven Series and nirvana may seem two broadly different things, but striving in the direction of what he wants is what a monk has in common with a business executive.

Temporary

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how temporary human existence is eventually. The realization hits hard when it comes but is easily forgotten. Even Iron Man, faced with a potentially fatal chemical infection, muses on how short life is. But then of course he miraculously discovers a new element that can cure him and synthesizes it out of thin air using nothing less than the lab equivalents of cutlery. Then he’s back to lasering drones and driving Audi sports coupes, all thought of karma destroyed in dreams of immortality. Im sorry of i spoiled the plot but if it makes you feel any better, the movie has good stuff in it that i haven’t mentioned; like a killer performance by Mickey Rourke.

Just-Doing-It

Sometimes we all just do it. faced with decisions that can go either way, the gut gives us direction and we move. overall that might be a good thing. But some baseline of a direction or plan is necessary. Just doing a jump off the rooftop of the world trade center may be spontaneous, but that’ll prolly be the last jump you ever do.

So pop some pills, sit back a little, life is not really a race to see who can make the most money; it’s something else. Some chilling will help us find the answers, at least, some chilling will help us figure out in which direction the answers lie. Seeking them out could be a whole different story but some contemplation and reflection never killed anybody, not directly at least.

The Wild Vanni Calling

Vedda, Sri Lanka, 1977. Photo by laserlandsson

Looking for something to do for four days come 31st of December. I’ll be hornswoggled if im gonna spend 31st night at some boring party.

I’v been reading about the jungles of the Vanni lately. The book is R.L. Spittel’s Savage Sanctuary. Its a story concerning the Veddas written specifically for the purpose of giving life to the anthropological data that was heavily mined by British Colonial scholars during the 19th century.

R.L. Spittel (1881-1969), who was a surgeon by profession, lived among the Veddas for many years. He studied their habits, spoke to them, lived with them and walked the jungle trails with them. The Veddas are said to have migrated to this part of the world during the stone age before the tectonic plates shifted and we parted ways with India. They drifted down from the sun beaten trails of Central Asia, following the wandering beasts down to the lush jungles of this piece of land and chose to remain here forever islanded when the earth broke into pieces afterwards.

So if this land ‘rightfully belongs’ to anyone then it belongs to the Veddas if precedence is your metric. But thank God its not no? Otherwise we’d all be hypocrites.

Spittel’s story follows the life of Tissahamy, the famed Wildman. Though Spittle lived and studied after the time of Tissahamy, he was able to painstakingly put together the story of the latter’s life through the acquaintance of his son and others who knew him.

This very word; ‘wild-man’ conjures up visions of a different species. Its like the difference between a wild cat and a house cat; you simply can’t place these two side by side and call them the same. And they were a savage bunch. At least Tissahamy was. But they were also capable of the type of love and caring that optimists believe typify human nature. They were forest dwellers and even in the mid to late 19th century they had largely dissipated and assimilated into what passed for civilization then. By the 1930s Spittle writes; ‘today, no pure Vedda exists’.

Spittel’s Map

The story of Savage Sanctuary takes place in the jungles of the semi arid zones; the area East of the the hills and petering North towards Maha Oya. Mainly the Uva province. The jungles are described as lush yet not overcome with rain. They are full of wild beasts like sambhurs, monkeys, leopards, bears and elephants. Many exciting accounts of hunts and battles with bears are described. Leopards will attack only if you surprise them while they are making a kill, when their blood lust is high. If you meet one just after it’s killed it will growl at you and slink off, that is, if it sees that you are not afraid of it. Bears on the other hand are right bastards, they will attack you the moment you surprise them. They look like boars to the untrained eye but are deadly fast and can crush your face with their sharp claws.

All this excitement running through the pages into my veins makes me want to take off to the Vanni right now. I’m not pretending i want to meet leopards and bears though, or even hit up on an elephant in the dark and get trampled to death. Things have changed in those jungles now i guess. But the war must have done the most damage of all. How do you chase away a land mine just by showing it that you are not afraid?

The Futility of Science

Western society holds ‘science’ in high esteem. That said, even Eastern society holds it in high esteem. So do individual human beings, and so do i. But science is a futile art, it is a means to an end and not an end in itself; but die hard ‘belief’ in it has driven the human race to the edge of destitution.

What is science? Simply put, it is the cumulation of all human knowledge; amassed for centuries from the beginnings of current civilisation. All logically provable facts and figures fall into this realm of certainty; and certainty is something that we humans cannot seem to do without. But certainty, while being commendable, has taken the guise of perpetuity, and that is not at all good.

‘Believers’ of science not only see it as the come all, but also the be all of existence. This in itself is a self defeating philosophy; for scientific theory is constantly changing and being renewed, what science does not know today, it may come to know tomorrow; science itself knows that it is merely a neophyte in the vast unknown, but its blind believers unfortunately, usually leave their sense behind when engaging in so called ’logical reasoning’; which, to them, is simply a process of deducing what is proved by mainstream sciences, and what is not.

They discard what cannot be proved and embrace only what is proved beyond a doubt. their philosophy is this; if it is not scientifically proven, it doesn’t exist.

Is this a bad thing? Well of course it is! It is only the very belief in the unknown and the unprovable that drives Science forward in the first place! If all scientists thought like laymen, scientific institutions the world over would simply shut down. Why? because if anything that science hasn’t proven does not exist, then that means science can never prove anything else, because nothing else exists to be proven. So why continue with science at all?

Geddit?

But this mass illusion is not the fault of science. Actually, ‘science’ is not futile at all. It facilitates the advancement of the species so i’ll drink (a non-alcoholic beverage) to that. No. In my opinion it is the people, the mainstream public; their fear of the unknown and the subsequent effects of ‘groupthink‘ that leads to this breakdown of critical thought.

Even so called ‘intellectual circles’ show extreme aversion to sprouting what they consider to be mystic, insane, unprovable mumbo jumbo out loud. So instead of original thought, their members prefer to recycle only what their gurus of science have proven to be true beyond a doubt; they build their lives on the seemingly solid foundations of established truth. But what they choose to ignore is the soil that these foundations rest on; soil that is also known as the great unknown.

Some examples; God, the meaning of life, the fate of the human after death, the nature of the life force; our very being, the very workings of our minds and brains, the construction of the universe in its totality, morality etc. The list of scientifically unproved and unknown things go on and on. ‘Respectable society’ abhors such heretic; because respectable society doesn’t have answers to questions like that. It has carved itself a system that thrives on ignoring the greater unknown, it is a system that only grows with the growth of science.

God is disruptive. Death is disruptive. Admitting the existence of a human soul is disruptive. ‘Faith’ is disruptive. Religion is criminal. Belief is unnecessary where facts exist. And where facts exist, non-facts become fabrications and lies. And the system is built on lies. Lies full of facts.

That is not to say however, that most people do not believe in at least some aspects of the unknown; most do, and on a conscious level too. But the nature of the world is such that everyday life has forced these thoughts into the edge of the subconscious, and the public lives in a state of doublethink; constantly holding two contradictory beliefs in mind simultaneously, while accepting both of them.

Thoughts?

London Mystic - Leonard - Art

Porno; the capitalist ideal?

Commentary, The Porn Bust, by Doug French, for Mises Daily

There is $3,075 spent every second on adult material, according to CNBC. Each second, 28,000 Internet users are viewing porn; and every 39 minutes, a new adult video is being produced. Not only is porn being made for DVDs and the Internet but also for your iPhone or Blackberry. You never have to leave home without it.

“[T]he tenuous legal status of the industry has made it difficult for it to use copyright laws to inhibit competition,” Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine explain in Against Intellectual Monopoly, “and so as technology has changed, pornography has become a cottage industry with many competing small-scale producers.”

As the CNBC special pointed out, “the peep show has come to you,” and anyone willing to have sex on camera can be a porn star, and anyone who can post a video online can be a producer. Plus, Vivid’s Hirsch says his company is constantly playing defense, as people copy Vivid’s material and post it on their sites.

Back in the 1960s and ’70s, when Penthouse and Playboy magazines dominated the industry, the average Joe or Jane didn’t want to slip on a raincoat, head for the seedy side of town, and try to slink into the adult theater unnoticed. Given these barriers, the supply of porn was restricted and those who wished to have it would pay high prices, which generated huge profits. As Boldrin and Levine explain, competition was weak, and the dominant firms in the industry thrived because

“the main technology for reproduction and distribution of pornographic materials consisted of glossy magazines and movies circulating through the chain of X-rated movie theaters.”

According to CNBC, $2.84 billion (out of roughly $13 billion) in annual porn revenue comes from Internet sales.

Boldrin and Levine believe a case can be made that the early growth of the Internet was due to the replication and distribution of pornographic materials: “Online pornographers are usually among the first to exploit new technologies — from video streaming and fee-based subscriptions to pop-up ads and electronic billing,” the economics professors write.

Their bold experimentation has helped make porn one of the most profitable online industries, and their ideas have spread to other legitimate companies and become the source of many successful and highly valuable imitations.

As a result of all this decentralization, porn stars are earning less and less. and wages are dropping down to ‘opportunity wage’ levels (wages they actually should be earning, with market distortions removed) as opposed to millions per film earned by movie stars in Hollywood, which are economically ‘unfair’ in terms of effort put into earnings and in terms of their reflection on price levels.

So despite the constant outrage and occasional legal hassles, the lack of copyright enforcement in the pornographic movie and entertainment business creates “an industry that is more innovative, creates new products and adopts new technologies more quickly, and for which the reduction in distribution cost has resulted in more output at lower prices and a more diverse product,” write the authors of Against Intellectual Monopoly.

Inefficient, outdated product providers that fail to satisfy customers go out of business — to be quickly replaced by smaller, nimbler, more innovative competitors. Customers are able to receive a higher-quality product that is cheaper and provided in more mediums, thus making it more convenient to consume.

And for those who don’t want it at all, it might as well not exist.

This is the way capitalism is supposed to work.

Beautiful. Almost a lab experiment on what can happen when an industry is allowed to completely roam free. The only disturbing aspect in this whole thing is the lack of regard for intellectual property. Which opens us to the crazy notion that intellectual property stunts progress much more than we perceive. Although i admit that it is necessary to encourage innovation in the first place. 

In this case, as in the case of the music industry, the market is often too big and diverse for intellectual property laws to be completely enforced. This still leaves room for partial enforcement which gives enough incentive for initial innovation and production but importantly, an intellectual monopoly is absent. Maybe a sort of market driven bending of the law is what is needed to create more innovative, responsive and non monoplistic industries. But it is a fantastic balance and IMO impossible to get right except by fluke.

Media Ethics Epic Fail

Flattering art by The Puppeteer

‘The Media and the Government is Bigger than you or me’ is a ridiculously defeatist statement. A budding journalist once told me this. Are they all this brainwashed? What is our worth as human beings if we continuously bow down to the way things are and never question accepted norms and their irrationality?

Some of you out there may be system puppets, dancing on the strings of ‘everything they tell you’; but I believe most people, when mentally able, are free thinkers; capable of removing themselves from the bog of the present and looking at humanity’s historical footprint.

The world has always been doing only one thing; consolidating. And what have they been consolidating? Power. Democracy as a concept is insanely awesome. Democracy as a practice is a shit pile. Yes, even in the US of A. its home.

Media ethics, at a fundamental level, ties itself down to the side of the government. The truth will not be told if a country’s ‘defence’ is compromised. The truth will always bow down to the primal human instinct of consolidation. The truth will always be biased to power and not to the people. That would be fine if in reality the people were in power, but the modern nature of democracy largely makes that impossible. Therefore This fundamental media ethic mostly serves the purpose of the subversiveness of governments.

The truth will not be told if the media deems it sensitive to taste (the WTF ethic). Like images of human flesh blown into pieces and blood splattered walls are ‘sensitive’. In other words, the media imagines the public to be wussies. The war reporter has balls, because he’s a foreign correspondent, but they’ll be strung up beneath the butt hole of Great A’tuin if the average Joe can take it.

Saying; ‘a few people died..’ is less impactful than showing the full brunt of war; the dying and screaming and horribly deformed children etc. The public may start feeling slightly differently about the war if such was the case. But screw public opinion; this is a democracy. The public can’t think. The masses are asses.

The media reserves the right to decide what fantasy is and what it’s not. If they percieve that some neo radical thinker will create turmoil by messing up the norms and by endangering the interests of their stakeholders, this ethic gives them room to deem it ‘fantasy’ and call the guy who said the world was a ball an ignoramus.

The media shall not invade privacy, even though it may conflict strongly with freedom of expression.

The overriding absurdity should be plainly obvious to anyone reading these sets of ethics. On what moral background do they base concepts like ‘sensitivity’, ‘taste’, ‘privacy’ and ‘public interest’? Is the media the apostle of God to know what is Right for its Fellow Man?

Nope. The concepts that Media Ethics are based on are subjective beyond belief. For example, something that is ‘sensitive’ for an American voter will be exactly what the father of the suffering kid with no leg and a ripped off midsection breathing his last breaths in Iraq will want them to see. Confronted with this ‘dilemma’, the media takes a side; objectivity goes into the dustbin.

These are the core values of the media. Every journalist gets them drilled into their brains when they train. From such subjective and hazy guidelines, can an objective truth ever arise? Can the ‘media’ in its current form ever not fail epically or otherwise? The media and journalism isn’t about truth. Its ethics have let it make the truth anything it wants it to be. The danger of media ethics is that it leaves ample room for non ethical activity.

Think.

Moving on to Better Things

And on to what the morphology (yes, do look it up) of the media is; it is that branch of journalism that is governed by this set of easily adaptable ethics. It is like a fill in the blanks bible (and there aint no saints out there to save you), it is that industry that sells ‘truth’ influenced by external interest making it nothing much more than propaganda and advertising.

The media needs a makeover, it is good to see new media coming in ever more strongly to take its place. I hope this is the beginning of a change for the better. The old establishment media is failing as an industry. Its myopic view of itself as the pinnacle of integrity cannot last much longer. It must change and yeild to a new wave of creative destruction* hitting it (and its set of wtf ethics). Or die and let the world move on to better things.

*A good paper on creative destruction from an industry point of view is Theodore Levitt’s Marketing Myopia (a very interesting read no matter what your background). Also check out the work of Joseph Schumpeter.