2012 is the year that the internet became a political force. What took so long? Well, the majority of us have surely been distracted by LOLcats and pr0nz.

Full disclosure: I work on issues at the intersection of technology, copyright and policy. In recent months, I’ve been able to observe firsthand the impact of internet-powered social movements. To wit: the unprecedented outrage around the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP (PIPA) stopped either bill from becoming law — something many in Congress assumed was a fait accompli.

Then there’s the immense pressure brought on Susan G. Komen for the Cure after the organization pulled funding to Planned Parenthood. The swift disapproval — again, largely web-driven — was so intense that Komen’s VP is now stepping down.

The “bitroots” blowback is hardly limited to the US. Public demonstrations are currently taking place in the EU over ACTA, an international intellectual property agreement that some think goes too far. Protests have spilled into the streets, with more than 20,000 people participating in Poland alone. But the real engine of dissent is online.

Powerful as this new form of protest is, it’s hardly perfect. Oversimplifications are common, which is to be expected when complex policy matters are condensed into viral action items. Still, there is one clear takeaway: the world’s netizens will no longer lay back while decisions are made that impact their lives, online and otherwise.

From my experience, I can say that the anti-SOPA/PIPA movement was broad and remarkably diffuse. Internet users are now stakeholders, and they have countless ways to share information and amplify their voices. And, although it would be incorrect to call them a monolithic group, they are perfectly capable of representing their own self-interests when push comes to shove.

It’s unfair to characterize the SOPA/PIPA skirmish as one between Hollywood and Silicon Valley (read: Google). While some major tech companies were certainly involved, most of the push happened at the netroots level. I’d say it went down something like this:

1. Tumblr saw the liabilities they’d face under this overly-broad legislation and independently decided to black out their pages in protest. This woke a lot of folks up right quick.
2. The Reddit community started paying attention, and more people became very well-informed on the issue (and got pretty pissed off).
3. Wikipedia joined the loosely-organized “blackout,” and in the process inspired millions more people to call their representatives. (I think Google put a widget next to the search field on their home page, but they didn’t go dark.)
4. Some of us goobers in Washington — completely outnumbered by the well-heeled entertainment industry goons — pointed out that a lot of constituents (including tens of thousands of copyright holders) weren’t comfortable with this legislation as drafted.

The true action came from internet users who found themselves in a position to push back against a fairly draconian set of proposals. The technology itself amplified their message to the extent that a bill that had already passed out of full committee in the US Senate was put on ice, and the House companion never even made it past markup. You can believe me when I tell you that this is a new dynamic in Washington. I’m not sure anyone has fully wrapped their heads around what it means.

So, are these movements merely lighting in a bottle, or the foundations of a new and lasting form of advocacy? Can these spontaneous yet incredibly potent movements be transitioned from something reactive to something proactive? We may have to wait a while to find out. For now, if I was the MPAA or the RIAA, I might consider internalizing the lesson, instead of blithely dismissing the movement as ill-informed, or worse, driven by tech companies.

What do you bet they won’t?

You can’t say the ruling Mullahs don’t have a sense of humor. In response to US demands that Iran return a RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone that went down over the eastern part of Iran, the country’s leaders have agreed to send back a toy version worth about four bucks.

The drone’s capture back in December 2011 sparked some debate in intelligence and military circles about whether to launch an operation to destroy it, or simply leave it in Iranian hands. The former was decided to be too risky, so the US ultimately chose to send a formal letter requesting the drone be returned. The same week they also sent letters requesting Justin Bieber stop being so damned adorable and for Tim Tebow to convert to Satanism.

Meanwhile, Iranian officials claim to have finished extracting data from the unmanned aircraft. They also plan to file a lawsuit against the United States in US courts for alleged invasion of their airspace. Good luck finding a friendly bench, fellas.

All of this makes one wonder why, with such sophisticated technology, there isn’t some kind of destruct mechanism on these drones. I suppose the lack of such a failsafe is why “military intelligence” remains an oxymoron.

Ah well, at least the President will have an interesting new paperweight for his desk in the Oval Office.

Regular readers will be familiar with Canadian futurist and ethicist George Dvorsky, whose excellent site Sentient Developments explores topics related to science, technology, human performance and the moral imperative to expand rights of personhood to certain non-human animals. We’ve linked to SD dozens of times over the years, and George was even good enough to let us do some guest blogging back before we got too busy to populate our own damn site.

George is also the Chairman of the Board at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies as well as the program director for the Rights of Non-Human Persons Program.

We’re happy to count George among our personal friends, which makes it that much more fun to tell you about his podcast, which we listened to all the time back in the day. Besides the cool discussions, we were always really impressed with George’s choices in music for the program. (Dude’s got some big ears!) Now the podcast is back in full force, and we encourage you to check it out. The official feed is here; you can get it through iTunes right here.

Another pal, Michael Nordstrom (aka Nerdstrom, aka Mondhexe, aka fifty other things), has taken his obsession with über-legendary kaiju character Garamon to an absurd and fairly fucking awesome new level. Already the proprietor of fan site Garamania, Nerdstrom is now attempting to become Garamon.

We’re not kidding.

Check out the Kickstarter page for The Becoming of Garamike project, through which Nerdstrom is attempting to raise a mere $2,200 to get a couple of pro sculptors and makeup artists to help him, erm, make the transition. Here’s the official description:

Yes, at last… no longer content to merely document and celebrate the world’s favorite clunky, crusty, fish-lipped, oil-belching, high-rise-wrecking meteorite monster… I, Michael Nordstrom (Nerdstrom), Proprietor of Garamania, being of warped mind and highly costume-tolerant body… have decided to becomeGaramon (actually, Garamike).  Working with ultra-talented professional sculptors/make-up artists Michael Ridge and Michael Turner and a whole lot of alginate, foam and silicone, I will be alchemically transformed into a being as outwardly Garamonic as I could ever hope to be. Our design honors the original suit while adding some cutting-edge components (including the face, which will be a form-fitting silicone masterwork of Gara-expressiveness).  Our goal is to complete work on at least the initial phase (head, hands, feet and tail) by the opening night of GARAMANIACAL, the all-Garamon, all-Pygmon art show I am curating for FOE Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts (the current image for this project is a section of an incredible painting by Jason Edmiston, which will be on display at the show).  On opening weekend, my hope is to be a Gara-transformed barker and ballyhoo-er, stomping the snowy streets of Northampton to connect the public at large to the show, turning them on to works of Garamonstrous art that they didn’t even realize they needed in their lives (but they do… they definitely do).  The funds you contribute will help us meet this goal, as well as further us on the road to completing a full suit in the foreseeable future.

Backers should know that this will not be a short-term transformation.  Once granted the powers of Gara-becoming by Ridge and Turner, I will be able to become my Gara-self at any time, night or day… I plan to fully inhabit this suit, mustering all of my performance experience to truly bring it to life as a Gara-character unto itself.  Just as Jandek was Ready For The House, I am Ready For The Suit. I have a slew of mindbenderly projects in mind for my Gara-persona… YOU, the audience, will:

THRILL! at the sight of Garamike hosting a delightfully art-damaged musical variety show, to be produced for local cable access (also to be broadcast online);

GASP! while watching Garamike deliver gripping, novel musical performance art happenings to delight and inspire legions of like-monstrous folk (again, to be captured on video for cable and online broadcast);

GUFFAW! at frequent photoplay amusements featuring Garamike, to be posted to Garamania… and much, much more!

This may sound strange, but is it really any weirder than, say, Dolly Parton’s face in that thar new singin’ contest movie?

Best to both of our buds in their quest for excellence!

I live in Washington, DC and work in tech policy (as it relates to creative content). This means I have the dubious privilege of seeing how the sausage is made when it comes to the laws that shape our digital future. Increasingly, I’m witnessing a convergence of some pretty hairy issues that previously had limited public impact. And, for better or worse, policymakers — domestic and international — have started to pay attention.

There are three core concerns that will have an outsized effect on how we all experience technology. The first one encompasses the other two, which are of nearly equal importance. Bookmark this page, and we can talk about it in 10 years (provided we’re all still here).

1. Internet freedom
2. Intellectual Property Enforcement
3. Data Privacy/Security

Before I explain how these issues are converging, let’s look at what each means individually.

Internet Freedom
This is the mother of all tech-policy debates, and the one with the most potential to impact every facet of your online experience. The internet is essentially a packet-switching information exchange network that uses a simple protocol to allow all these interconnected machines to “talk” to each other. Its process is, by and large, neutral with regard to content. This is what has allowed it to become the most powerful engine for democratic speech in the history of humanity. That speech may very well be 90 percent LOLcats, but it also includes political speech and practically every other flavor of expression. In the United States, this means that our First Amendment rights are automatically ported over to this digital conduit. That may not be the case with other countries, which is why you see a lot of high-falutin’ talk from the State Department about the importance of maintaining global networks where free expression can flourish.

Unfortunately, recent American trends giving corporate speech unparalleled weight means that your own online speech could depend on how deep your pockets are. This is the crux of the so-called “net neutrality” debate, in which the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) want to charge a premium for the faster delivery of content, sites and services. Without clear rules of the road, speech that does not benefit the ISP’s bottom lines — or those of their corporate partners — may be delayed, or worse still, blocked. There has been progress in achieving at least some protections here. But these rules — promulgated by the Federal Communications Commission — are currently in danger of being stripped away by Congress.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the FCC established separate rules for the “wired” web vs. internet accessed on mobile devices. This distinction, to me, is arbitrary and pointless. There is ONE internet, regardless of how you connect to it. Having a tiered internet for wireless may end up impacting those whose speech has historically been at the greatest disadvantage, as underprivileged and minority communities are more likely to access the internet via mobile devices.

It will be very interesting to see how the American virtue of free expression plays out on our domestic networks, especially as we promote open technology platforms as a means of democratic participation overseas.

2. Intellectual Property Enforcement
Wikipedia defines Intellectual Property (IP) as “a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized… common types of intellectual property rights include copyrights, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets in some jurisdictions.”

IP is big business. REALLY big business here in America. Which is why there are so many large stakeholders pushing for stronger intellectual property laws on the internet. I have no problem with this in theory, as I am a copyright holder myself, and believe that I should have exclusive rights over how my expression is capitalized upon in the marketplace – that is, for a limited term, which was the balance struck by Congress when it devised our laws governing this part of IP. There are different rules for trademarks and patents, on which I am no expert. So I’ll stick with what I know.

Increasingly, copyright law is coming to loggerheads with the consumptive behaviors of internet users. This is something I’ve written about and spoken on extensively in my professional life. In the interest of space, and without picking sides, I can say this: rightsholders are currently pushing hard on Congress to pass laws that, to my reading, look like blunt instruments when it comes to protecting IP online. And by this I mean legislation currently proposed could, at worst, restrict legitimate speech and compromise the underlying security of the internet. For further details, I point you to my DC colleagues, Public Knowledge. (Full disclosure: my wife works for them.)

3. Data Privacy/Security
Which brings me to my final issue, data privacy/security. Again, I can’t claim to be an expert here, but on the other hand, not many can. Here, we have everything from domestic defense to corporate espionage to individual rights and even First Amendment concerns. Some may have heard Eric Schmidt of Google‘s statement on total data transparency being the key to informational security. I’m sure the NSA would agree, so long as they are the ones with “total” access to the data. I bring this up because at no other point in history has informational privacy been of such import — perceived and actual. I can remember people on the street where I grew up being hesitant about having their name listed in the phone book. Now, everything we do and say online leaves a digital trace. Before you get yourself in some Philip K. Dick psychological tailspin, keep in mind that there’s a big difference between personally-identifying data and non-personally-identifying data. The former can be used to target, track and harass individuals; the latter is basically why Amazon knows what books you might be interested in reading next. Still, there is a lot of grey area with regard to how this information is collected, shared and exploited. And, at the moment, US privacy law is a patchwork of state-by-state regulations and jurisprudence. That might not be the case forever, as Congress has shown interest in establishing a federal privacy standard. Obviously, that could cut both ways.

Data security is the other side of the coin. Here, we reach the queasy intersection of defense, espionage — corporate and state — and hackerdom. Much of what occurs in the world of data security happens privately, or though private-public contracts between government and IT wizards. Obviously, any breach of US information security comes with pretty severe (domestic) penalties, but that doesn’t mean that hackers here and abroad aren’t trying to break into our informational infrastructure every second of every day. A serious breach is practically guaranteed, as is the subsequent crackdown. I believe this is what is referred to as the “Internet 9/11.”

The US isn’t just playing defense here. I’ve followed closely reports of how the administration very seriously considered a cyberattack on Libya’s air defense network in the lead-up to the NATO engagement. We ultimately decided against it, likely for a combination of reasons: one, we may not have wanted to be the first country to open the Pandora’s Box of cyberwar; two, we didn’t have enough time to pinpoint and exploit weaknesses in the Libyan network before airstrikes were scheduled to commence; and three, there were lingering legal questions about whether cyberattacks are considered “hostilities” subject to Congressional oversight within the War Powers Act. I guarantee these questions will soon be answered one way or another. And this will undoubtedly impact the evolution of global information networks.

All three of these issues intersect in myriad ways. The economics of digital entertainment is related to open networks vs. walled gardens, and also bumps up against data privacy/security on both the consumer and corporate end of the spectrum. Participatory democracy depends on open tech platforms and access to robust data pipelines and mobile spectrum. Overly-broad IP enforcement has the potential to limit exactly that openness while sending the signal to other nations that censorship is OK. Digital networks can also be exploited by despots (and even less-nefarious governments) to monitor the speech and movement of a populace. And around and around we go.

Taken together, as they are destined to be, these three issues represent the last tech-policy debate. How we respond will shape human interaction for decades, if not centuries to come.

The passing of Steve Jobs has produced an avalanche of tributes, most concerning his profound contributions to consumer technology. No doubt the man’s innovations — from personal computing to desktop publishing to portable music listening — impacted lives around the globe. But it was his view of his own life and its impermanence that I find the most interesting.

Since the news of Jobs’ death was announced, my Facebook wall has been inundated with tributes and anecdotes about the genius behind Apple. One persistent post includes a snippet of Jobs’ 2005 commencement address at Stanford:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs was a Zen Buddhist. An early pilgrimage to India may have been the catalyst for his spiritual investigations, which he apparently continued even as he scaled the peaks of enterprise. Jobs didn’t advertise his Buddhism, but it very clearly informed his views of death (and life). I can only hope his practice brought him a modicum of peace as he transitioned out of this existence.

I am not going to sanctify Steve Jobs as some kind of technological Bodhisattva. He was a capitalist, first and foremost, and one who had an interesting relationship to control. Yet what we imagine Steve Jobs to be — aesthetic wizard or industrial authoritarian — are merely our own projections. If there is anything to be observed from his creations, it is an emphasis on cutting through the clutter. This is a uniquely Zen approach to Buddhism, which in turn can only be described as the technology of non-attachment. Interesting, then, that Jobs’ legacy is built on creating desire for mechanical devices. How to reconcile these attributes?

We will never know what it is like to have been Steve Jobs. But we can admire his views on impermanence, which seem to have motivated him to not take a single moment for granted. Perhaps his work was merely ego-fulfillment. Maybe it reflected a deep understanding of form and function within multifaceted manifestation. The important thing is to see the above as ephemeral states within an equally ephemeral continuum. And it seems as though he did.

I want you all to read a story in The New Yorker, called “How to Be Good,” which concerns the work of moral philosopher Derek Parfit. You will need a subscription to read the full article, or you can pay for one-time access. I think it’s worth it, particularly for those inclined to self-awareness but averse to mysticism. Heavy stuff, but necessary if we are to overcome the fundamental neurosis that affects our species, namely an awareness of mortality and a need to find a purpose behind our existence. Because we all die. How can we figure out how to live?

I write this post on a Mac laptop, with two mobile Apple devices next to me and a desktop iMac in the other room. I suppose that is a testament to how Steve Jobs’ innovations have become a part of my life. But that’s just window dressing. I prefer to think that he understood something more fundamental about what connects us: impermanence. No one knows but Steve, and he’s not talking. I suppose he already has.

It has been noted that this is no ordinary economic downturn. One of the reasons it seems unlikely that the American economy will emerge from current conditions anytime soon is that there are no sure bets for growth. Some would suggest that we can magically repair the damage by reducing the deficit; not a bad idea, but this will have a negligible impact on, say, jobs — especially in the short-to-medium term. How did we get here? An almost religious conviction in systems that should have been recognized as unsustainable.

This has happened before, albeit on a smaller scale. The bad news is, when a collapse of this size occurs, recovery doesn’t happen overnight. Just ask the music industry, which has been trying to go back to its heyday of control and collusion for more than a decade. The problem is, the more they cling to their old systems, the worse it is for the actual creators. Just like the more policymakers attempt to peg progress to Wall Street’s whims, the more American workers are imperiled.

Had anyone made the connection, the music industry’s response to its paradigm shift could have told us a lot about how to deal with the financial meltdown. The root causes are more similar than not: a misguided belief in the ability to engineer permanent growth. In fact, Peak Music was a part of the very same Wall Street philosophy that pushed us to the brink of disaster.

The record industry in the 1990s was rapidly consolidating, with large multinational corporations getting into music as a portfolio-enhancing diversification. From there, executives sought new ways to produce shareholder growth. The music business became like the movie business, but instead of s’plodey movies with big opening weekends, you had spendy boy bands with huge debut Tuesdays. Manufacturing consumer consent was fairly easy, especially with distribution locked down and broadcast media owned by just a handful of companies. You could practically plot a year’s returns with just a handful of guys in a room.

With radio a hyper-concentrated market dominated by payola and retail under the thumb of the major labels, the consumer became trained to accept what was spoon fed to them. $18.98 a CD with a single good song on it? No problem!

Then the unexpected happened. The Internet came along.

The recorded music industry, like Wall Street following the banking crisis, had no clue how to respond. Most kids, when they find out that there is no Santa Claus, go through a period of grief and disaffection, but then they get over it. The music industry has been trying to find a new Saint Nick for more than a decade. I worry that our policymakers will do the same with the American economy.

The old ideas won’t work. That’s the nature of paradigm shift. You can’t build anything lasting according to the previous blueprint. No matter how hard you try, no matter how much money you throw at the problem (or at policymakers), any edifice constructed using the old engineering will not stand. Sure, you can prop it up for a little while, or set to rebuilding over and over and over, but the exercise is ultimately fruitless. Eventually, the way forward will reveal itself, but the will be little continuity between the old and the new, other than the fact that the replacement construct will eventually fail, too.

Repeat after me: you cannot engineer away failure.

But you can prolong the mighty crash by accepting the natural rhythms of growth and contraction. Had the Wizards of Wall Street not entered the dangerous game of financial derivatives, we surely would have experienced recession-like events, but there’s would have been far less danger of a total systems collapse. Had the music industry focused on offering the best product in a reasonably open marketplace, they may have been able to retain some consumer loyalty when the internet came along (their response to the technology itself is its own separate topic).

At the end of the day, the true tragedy is who bears the brunt of these traumas. In the music business, it’s largely the creators (though I do know for a fact that a lot of good people in the industry lost out, too). With the overall American economy, it’s the majority of the public.

None of this was an inevitability. Something for the next generation of wizards to consider.

There’s an interesting article in today’s New York Times about organizations that pay people to write positive online reviews, as well as the groups that are trying to figure out a way to keep these fake reviews from flooding internet retail and advisory sites.

Increasingly, companies are relying on customer reviews from sites like Yelp, Amazon and TripAdvisor to sell their products or attract visitors to their establishments. No surprise, then, that a business of “fake” endorsements would spring up. Now, the web is cluttered with reviews that, though written by real people, are not genuine in their support or are composed by friends, family or those who have been paid to write them. Often, these reviewers have never even read the book or visited the hotel in question.

The NYT piece is worth reading, as it talks about what’s being done to counteract this trend. But even if we do figure out a way to stem the tide of fake reviews, it would do nothing to prevent bias or inaccuracies in personal reviews. Like many librarians who work in collection development, I frequently look at the review breakdown of books on Amazon before deciding on what to order. Working in a small library with a limited acquisitions budget, we have to choose carefully what titles we purchase. And, while we try to focus on what people want to read, as opposed to focusing only on quality books, we are of course affected by reviews, both critical and personal. In fact, I often look more carefully at negative (1- and 2-star) reviews to see why people did not enjoy a particular book.

Although negative reviews are more often written by “real” people, that doesn’t mean they are better. As anyone who reads Amazon customer reviews knows, many of the negative posts are reactions to either the price of the Kindle edition or broad objections to the content. It must be very frustrating for an author to see many negative reviews of his or her work based solely on the price assigned to the electronic version by a company with which they have no direct involvement. The problem of objecting to content is equally frustrating: any book on politics, for example, will feature scads of negative reviews from those with opposing ideologies. It’s safe to say that very few of those reviewers have given the title an honest, objective read. Another example is teen literature, where books that have any content that parents could possibly object to — basically any book ever written for a teen audience — are reviewed as trash or even pornography. I came across a good example at work this week: one reviewer of the teen fantasy novel Once a Witch, by Carolyn MacCullough, a book which is, by all reports, far tamer than many other similar titles, spoke of “nasty garbage and filth” because the teenage character drinks, smokes and there is a mention at one point of a condom.

It is easy to object to a review like this, because it reflects an attitude that is out of touch, old-fashioned or ignorant. Yet as a librarian, I must be aware of and sensitive to the many opinions that differ from my own. The fact is that many parents would likely agree with the reviewer.

One benefit of a review like this is that I can read it, decide that most teens are already aware of cigarettes and condoms, check the responses to the negative review, and make my own decision about purchasing or reading the book. At the same time, a parent who may object to the depiction of teen drinking or smoking, or who may think that the word “condom” is what makes teens want to have sex, can find out that these things are included in the book, and avoid that title for their kids. While I may disagree with this decision for many reasons (the kid will still find the book if she wants it, the arguments are unrealistic, etc.), I as a librarian need to at least pretend to respect the parent’s decision.

What do you think, friends? How reliant are you on online reviews? Are you scared off by negative reviews? Do you think you can tell a real review from a fake review? Do you write fake reviews? Tell us!

Let me just say up front that I’m thinking of starting a “free ideas for Hollywood” series. I have a lot of concepts for movies and TV shows, but little interest in shopping them. Plus, some of these ideas are really dumb. Which means they’re perfect for any major motion picture studio.

Hollywood is pushing hard for stronger intellectual property enforcement due to “rampant piracy” on “the internet.” But instead of feeling bad for them (or entertaining their more ludicrous proposals to lock down the web), I’m giving them free, unfettered use of my own intellectual property. Hey, it’s the least I can do!

The following is an idea for a movie that I think will be boffo at the box office. It pulls something from the world of telecom policy, but as they say, “write what you know…”

SPECTRUM: A HORROR FILM TREATMENT

Possible tag lines: “Beware of early termination.” “He’s dialed into your fearquency.” “Meet Buzz: He’s a real dead wire.”

Premise: Cody “Buzz” Maddick is an occultist serial killer condemned to death for the ritualistic slaying of more than two dozen people. Along with his co-conspirator girlfriend, Devina, Buzz is a member of a deranged satanic cult that believes that blood sacrifice is key to immense power in the etheric plane. Devina explains how all this works in an early flashback scene, where the two are preparing to murder a teenage girl. She tells Buzz that, by positioning electromagnetic devices around the victim, their connection to the etheric plane will be amplified. When enough astral doors have been opened, they will be able to cross the threshold and dwell in a perpetual state of evil exultation.

When Buzz is arrested for his crimes and sentenced to death, his girlfriend (who has thus far evaded any charges) tells him that she will cast a powerful spell at the precise moment of his execution. But nobody except the prison warden knows that Buzz is to be killed using an untested new method: powerful microwave radiation. A bill has passed in the Texas state legislature that would make this means of execution legal. Yet due to political pressure, the governor has yet to sign it. The governor and the warden go way back — they’re part of the same secessionist group — and the warden has been assured that he can go ahead and flip the switch on Buzz and everything will be just dandy. He tells his execution staff that the killing is a go. “You boys will just love it,” he says. “The beauty is, no mess! Them my-crow-waves cook ‘em right from the inside, just like a reheated burrito!”

Buzz is executed as planned, and his girlfriend casts her spell. At the moment of his death, we see his murderous soul converted to electromagnetic energy, which shoots up through the walls to the top floor of the building, blasting skyward via a huge radio antenna on the prison roof. We hear demoniacal laughter.

The killings begin anew. Buzz is now a spectral being who manifests through radio-capable devices, just long enough to dispatch his victims in clever ways. Meanwhile, his girlfriend, Devina, is finally brought in by the law and imprisoned while awaiting trial. Buzz now has a reason to eliminate key witnesses, including family members of his original victims.

Death scenes might include the following:

Buzz comes through a victim’s tablet computer. She is using an eReader when Buzz appears in a social network chatbox. “Buzz wants to chat,” the message says. The victim keeps trying to close the window, to no avail. Eventually, Buzz’s face looms large in the device’s screen, until he managers to stick his head out and bite the victim on the lower lip. He pulls several times, smashing the victim’s head repeatedly into the screen until she dies in a burst of plasma (blood and electronic) and glass. As the screen goes dark, we hear Buzz’s disembodied voice: “That’s my kind of face book.”

A couple is getting frisky in bed in a remote lakeside cottage. An old boom box is positioned on a bedside table. An upbeat pop song comes on, something along the lines of Katy Perry. The girl interrupts the foreplay to turn up the radio. “I love this song,” she says. The boy looks annoyed for a second, then they get back to business. Suddenly, the Katy Perry track is interrupted by crackling, then a scratchy vision of “Walking After Midnight” comes on. Annoyed, the girl shoves the guy aside and starts fiddling with the dial. The song is on every station. “What is this shit?” she exclaims in desperation. Buzz’s voice cuts through the airwaves. “What’s the matter? You don’t like the classics? Maybe you prefer something more… cutting edge.” Weird light begins to emanate from the speakers, until Buzz appears before them, with whirring, electric saw blades for hands. He does his sick business and then disappears.

A day trader is using a cellphone. He’s trying to tell his wife he’ll miss his kid’s soccer game, while firing a useless subordinate on the other line. While switching between calls, he ends up on a channel with Buzz. “Please hold while I disconnect you,” Buzz says. The day trader stares at his smartphone in disbelief. At that moment, buzz appears on all of the many computer monitors in his office. Buzz then manifests at the center of the room, with the Wall Street index flashing all over his semi-corporeal body. “Buy low, die lower,” Buzz says, as he crushes the day trader to a pulpy, mangled mass on the floor that briefly gives off sparks.

Meanwhile, an investigator is banging his head over these new murders. But he begins to discern a pattern. In each killing, he notices the presence of spectrum-powered technology. On a hunch alone, he reaches out to an expert in wireless telecommunications, who comes along to a fresh murder scene. At a key point, the expert says, “I think he’s traveling from place to place using the electromagnetic spectrum.” Not wanting to accept what he’s hearing, the detective replies, “Is that even possible?” Without missing a beat, the wireless expert answers, “It is now.”

And that’s basically all I have. Surely that’s enough for some studio-contracted screenwriting hacks to thread together into something marginally cohesive. Like I said, it’s pretty fucking dumb. But that doesn’t mean it’s not potentially profitable!

So c’mon, Hollywood, why not bring Buzz to life and start a whole new horror franchise? I promise I won’t sue…

[My amazing intern at Future of Music Coalition, Scott Oranburg, wrote this overview of Spotify, which I thought was too cool not to also post here.]

OK, we can admit it: we’ve been pretty pumped about Spotify for a while now. The mega-hyped European music service has been been making tracks across the pond for a couple of years, but it was beginning to seem like a US launch would never happen. Now, after securing license agreements with Warner Music Group — the lone major label holdout —  Spotify finally has the greenlight to open shop in America. For US listeners, Spotify offers a 3-tiered payment plan: Listen for free with advertisements (limitations, like listening hour caps will be introduced in six months); get unlimited ad-free music on your computer for $5/month; or get unlimited ad-free music on any computer and mobile device for $10/month.

We decided that it was well worth plunking down the ten bucks and taking the unlimited service for a ride. Why not? We’ve been waiting a while. In fact, when Casey Rae-Hunter interviewed Spotify founder/CEO Dan Ek live at the 2009 Future of Music Policy Summit, the Swedish entrepreneur said the service would launch later that year. Better late than never! (Casey also just spoke to American Public Media’s “Marketplace” about the US launch; check that out here.)

First Impressions
It’s really fast. And it works really well. And it sounds really, really good.

Although subscription on-demand music services have been around for a while now, none have managed to capture the same buzz as Spotify. We’re not naming names, but some initially struggled with clunky interfaces, iffy catalogs or weak marketing (or a combination). Meanwhile, Spotify seems to have been running on all cylinders in Europe right out of the gate. Our feeling about the American version is that it’s the real deal.

The entire interface feels incredibly familiar from the moment you login. The program itself looks a lot like iTunes, which many users have navigated for years. Playlists are stored to the left. Libraries are shown in the middle. Search bars are up top. Volume and playback controls are at the bottom. You can star songs or albums you like, and you can look back into your play history. And, Spotify’s unique caching and piecemeal streaming system makes everything play instantly, as if it were actually stored on your hard drive. Actually, the loading time was noticeably faster than our external harddrive on USB 2.0, and the quality on par with — or superior to — most of the tracks on iTunes or floating around cyberspace.

But the real “aha” moment comes when you realize just how expansive the Spotify catalog is. Search almost anything, and it’s right there for immediate playback. Choose entire albums or single tracks. Check out artists’ “top hits” before delving deeper into their catalog. And you can browse related artists’ discographies while you’re at it. It’s pretty much all the music you can imagine, immediately accessible and totally legal. The interface is fast and easy. Almost everything can be dragged-and-dropped, while playlists, libraries and even local files on your hard drive are immediately accessible with a single click.

Mobile Access
The iPhone app is pretty killer (Android is on the way). Over WiFi, Spotify feels just as good and plays just as quickly as it does on a laptop. The interface still isn’t quite as intuitive as that of an iPod Touch, but it’s pretty close. But more importantly, the 3G streaming is unbelievably fast compared to similar subscription services like MOG or Rdio. Spotify’s caching system is very robust, so much so that playback is totally consistent if you start an album and let it play straight through. There’s no telling exactly how long the cache will run (for example, imagine losing service on the subway for a few stops), but from our initial use, it seems very rugged. Of course, the caching has to restart when skipping between songs, so 3G definitely has some limitations when compared with an MP3 player with local files. (Local device downloads, which last as long as you subscribe, pretty much solve this issue.)

Deeper into the Interface
OK, so maybe we’re just a bit giddy, but Spotify seems to actually change the music-listening experience, too. Think back to when you first got an iPod: all the music you owned was on one device, and it synced with your computer pretty seamlessly. Suddenly, everyone had their music with them at the gym, in the car, on flights, etc. Music became further entrenched into all of our lives, and that was in pretty much everyone’s best interest (unless that music wasn’t paid for). It seems that Spotify is now offering a similar evolution in the listening experience.This isn’t just because Spotify eliminates frustrating load times, duplicated files, missing cover art, corruption errors, shoddy external harddrive connections, over-capacity listening devices, or waiting for downloads to finish. Rather, Spotify’s real impact may extend beyond the polish of the interface; it may come from the way we can share music with each other.

The potential here seems unprecedented. Because all of this music is in the “cloud,” Spotify users can subscribe to others’ playlists, email songs, share tracks on Facebook or integrate with other third-party products like Turntable.fm. A decade after the MP3 revolution, Spotify has now made legal and streamlined the music-sharing process. While writing this, we literally asked around the office and on Facebook about new music suggestions. All was immediately searchable and streamable. From there, we could post favorite tracks to Facebook or throw ‘em into our Turntable.fm queue for more people to discover. We even sent recently played songs to Mom, who is still listening to music suggestions from Mother’s Day 2009.

Spotify is well-integrated with Facebook, too. And, while previous social music offerings haven’t really taken off (like Apple’s Ping), Spotify’s social features have tons of potential. Went to your friend’s dance party last night? Great, check out her Spotify playlists, and grab the tracks immediately and legally. Share them with more of your friends following your playlists, throw them on your queue to listen to on the way to work, and then pick up where you left off once you sit down at your computer. From top to bottom, Spotify works really well and really quickly, and it creates a fluid music-listening experience that for many, may even trump Apple.

Impact on Artists
Of course, our primary concerns are about working musicians. We love to see new technology improve our experience with music, but we don’t want it to be at the expense of songwriters or performers. Fortunately, Spotify is completely legal, and pays rights holders (including musicians). Right now, the money coming to artists from such services is nothing like selling merch at shows, but it is a revenue stream. (In fact, independent musicians may fare better than major label artists due to contracts and “recoupables.”) There’s no way to predict whether subscriptions will eventually displace album sales — download or physical — and it’s also unclear how that shift would affect the music community as a whole. Still, it’s nice to see something that we think can legitimately “compete with free.” The rest comes down to user adoption of the premium service, licensing issues and contracts. We’ll be keeping an eye on all of these developments (and both ears on our Spotify).