I recently attended a show with bands whose sound would not be out of place in 1978, though it’s likely none of the band members were even around for that. I certainly wasn’t there, being born in 1983. How is that people like us, born too late to see bands like Joy Division or Bauhaus in their prime can go find acts and hear albums in 2013 that sound like they could have rehearsed right next door? The Internet, and the growing digital archives of music stored on remote servers by amateur archivists, and shared with fans, old and new, the world over.

Some have bemoaned this as culture simply recycling itself at the expense of creating something new. Others bemoan the death of what we assumed to be monoculture. I see it as a way for culture that didn’t get its due the first time around, or culture that was forgotten too soon, to have another moment in the sun with an appreciative audience. This is not a zero-sum game. We can (re)discover the fruits of our cultural past without giving up the future. The more culture we have to pull from, the more possibilities open up for recombination and experimentation. That is the path towards the creation of something truly new.

Something that often gets overlooked in the discussions of music piracy on the Internet is this: The Internet has become a way for older, little-known and little heard music, to find a new audience. While RIAA executives tut-tut about One Direction’s latest album being leaked on The Pirate Bay, little known blogs and even lesser known curators track down long out of print records, cassettes, and (rarely) CDs by artists and bands outright unknown to most of the world. Without them, we might never know this music existed.

The recording industry doesn’t care about these blogs, or the people discovering their music, and I mean that in the literal sense. It’s not even on their radar. Much of the music these blogs curate and share are by acts long defunct at best, and often independently released. If they are on a label, either the label itself is defunct, or its “intellectual property” owned by a major label through acquisition upon acquisition upon acquisition, to the point where that label probably doesn’t even know for sure what they have the rights to. In all of these cases, the music is out of print, making it unlikely the artist will ever see any more money for it, if they can even be tracked down in the first place.

This is stuff that might fall through the cracks, were it not for the concerted efforts of the folks behind Mutant Sounds. Their efforts give the old music new life, and it extends far beyond the web. What was once the risky province of curious record collectors digging through bins of dusty, musty vinyl now becomes a free-for-all of discovery and re-discovery. [1] The Internet is the world’s greatest used record store, bar none.

With one exception, I have not discussed political issues on Sanspoint. While I will do my best to continue this, some political opinions will slip into the following essay, due to this essay’s topic. It comes from a conversation with a co-worker about Rand Paul’s filibuster over drone strikes on overseas citizens. I expressed my apathy towards the issue—if drone strikes stop, that’s fine. If they don’t, oh well. Then, I found myself thinking about a decision I made a couple years ago, to stop reading most political news—one I still stand behind.

I realized there was a pattern in a lot of political news, especially on the Internet. There was a false debate, predictions of doom and gloom, finger-pointing, and a distinct lack of any actual information beyond communicating the current state of some bills. During the Presidential election in the United States, the media’s regular attempts at manufacturing yet another scandal, and the endless horse race of campaigns only turned me off further. I switched it off, only occasionally checking Fark.com’s Politics page because of the amusing headlines.

What happened was what I’ve come to term “outrage fatigue,” though it looks like The Onion beat me it almost a decade ago. When you’re constantly getting angry, it’s hard to sustain it for long. It’s a waste of my energy. Now, I find I understand a bit more those who remain staunchly a-political. They’ve developed a disconnect between what happens in the world of politics and their own personal lives, and for the most part, they’re right. Beyond voting, which I do, there’s not much else that expressing mere outrage is going to accomplish. [1]

Since then, I’ve chosen to disconnect from most news. The little news I consume directly comes from either NPR’s five-minute morning news podcast, 5by5’s The News podcast, or links posted on social media. When something in the world happens that requires my attention, it’ll find me.The important stuff rises to the top, the unimportant stuff (mostly) falls away, and I don’t have to spend my time endlessly reading about the latest apocalyptic calamity to befall anyone or anything, mixed with celebrity gossip. Giving up news doesn’t mean living in a bubble, it means focusing on what’s important and letting only those things in.

Another day, another security breach.

This time, if you’re out of the loop, it was Evernote, one of those services that holds a lot of people’s very personal data. They claim the only thing the hackers got away with was usernames, e-mail addresses, and encrypted passwords. [1] It’s the latest in a string of high-profile hacks into large, data-rich companies like Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. Evernote handled it well. They’ve reset everybody’s passwords, pushed out application updates to help users with the job, and were up front and honest. Though I don’t use Evernote for much, I’m comfortable maintaining my relationship with the company.

It does however, have me thinking a bit more about my data and protecting it. Mat Honan’s hack is hopefully still fresh in everybody’s memory, but it’s the sort of thing that’s unlikely to happen to an individual. What’s more likely are hacks designed to just pull a lot of aggregate data about people. That’s where the money is. After that, the database just needs to be shopped to the highest bidder, who can then decide how to use the data. The attacks can then begin on high value targets which occupy a neat intersection between “easy” and “lucrative.” Most of us need not worry about that, but that’s not a reason to put our guard down.

Think about this: you doesn’t even need to decrypt a password from an encrypted databases. You can just compare the hashes to lists of known passwords and their hashes. Find a match, and you’re off to the races, able to log in anywhere that person used the same password. It’s like buying a bunch of combination locks for your home, all set to the same combination. Crack one, and you’ve cracked them all. If you’re lazy enough to use a password like “abcde12345” for your Evernote account, your gMail, and your bank, you’re in trouble—and were in trouble before the hack happened too.

We understand physical security well enough, but the paradigms behind it don’t work as well in the digital space. Computer security is still in its infancy. It’s hard to copy a real key. It’s easy to look up the hash of a password. There was a time when data security meant having two floppy disks with the same file on it. If one went, you still had the other. If you were really paranoid, you could encrypt it, or use a password. The most sophisticated forms of computer security in common use rely on a physical token. For example, I use two-factor authentication with my Google account. Logging in on a new machine, I have to not only input my (huge, complicated, 1Password-generated) password, but also provide a number from the Google Authenticator app on my iPhone. It’s an extra layer of security, only bypassable if someone has my phone, as well as my Google password.

Ultimately, I don’t think our data is any less safe now than it was before we started living “in the cloud,” it’s more that the nature of the dangers has changed. We’ve given up worrying about losing data for the worry that data will be in the wrong person’s hands. It’s up to us to decide if that’s a tradeoff we want to make, and it’s a decision that will have to be based on both the companies we trust to hold and secure our data, and also what data we ask them to secure. I don’t know if most of us put a lot of thought into what data we put out there, but it’s something we all should think about more.

Whatever you’re looking for, it’s easy to find a bad review of it. Type a company, or a product, or a band, or anything into Google, followed by “sucks,” and you’re guaranteed results. People can wax poetic for pages about what is bad, what’s worse than bad, and why anyone who likes a certain thing is wrong, wrong, wrong. Since it’s so easy to toss out vitriol over stuff that “sucks,” there’s little value to negative reviews. Reading Roger Ebert’s review of Freddy Got Fingered is a great entertainment value. When buying technology, it helps to know if a lot of people opened the box to find the item won’t actually turn on, but there’s little beyond that. If the number of one-star reviews outnumbers the number of four and five star reviews, that’s all you need.

It’s still easy to get caught up in the negativity vortex around opinions on culture, technology, and politics. That’s because it’s easy to be negative. To embrace and love something is much harder. I’d rather read someone’s effluent praise of a product or album than a million negative reviews that boil down to “shit sux.” These aren’t going to change anyone’s opinion on matters that are religious in nature. Remember, nobody thinks they’re stupid, and everybody has their reasons. Unless someone’s choices directly affects you, your opinion is nothing more than that. If only we all could agree on that…

And at the risk of stirring up some partisan sentiment, I have to admit that I have only rarely ever heard anyone say they love a Microsoft product. They may like it, prefer it, or exist anywhere on a spectrum that only rarely goes into “love” territory. The same emotional attachment that attracts Apple fas is the same thing that repels its vehement detractors. And you can replace “Apple” in that sentence with nearly any other divisive item. Some suggestions: “Justin Bieber,” “cities,” “football.” They stir up the tribal instinct, the narcissism of minor differences, and split us into “us” and “them.”

Nobody talks up things they don’t really have an opinion on. Nobody sings the praises of beige. The extremes of love and hate are what drive us to share opinions, for good or for ill. It’s the things we love, however, that say more about us than what we hate. However, sharing what we love opens us up to the attack from the haters. That might explain the apathetic way some people discuss culture, politics, or tech. Better to not express a strong opinion any way, so as not to rile anyone up. That’s all the more reason to glom on to those people who sing the praises of what they love to the world. They share their true self, not the posturing avatar of what they want to be seen as. Even if you don’t agree, they are the ones worthy of your consideration when evaluating anything.

To me, this disparity of evident motives is the most parsimonious way of evaluating the respective merits of opposing sides in any debate. If one side has no evident self-interested agenda beyond truth or fairness or the public good, that’s the side you should probably be listening to. Climate-change alarmists seem motivated either by evidence (in the case of the few people who actually know what they’re talking about—climatologists and geologists) or by faith in scientific consensus; climate change deniers seem motivated either by naked, mercenary self-interest (in the case of the oil industry and its flacks) or by a more general hostility toward inconvenient data (in the case of the Fox watchership). Gun advocates’ fervid idealism in defense of the Second Amendment reminds me of the uncharacteristically teary-eyed patriotic sentiment with which pornographers cite the First. Yeah clearly firearms are protected, in some sense, under the Constitution, as is freedom of expression. As a cartoonist and a writer, I’m kind of a First Amendment hard-liner. But in all honesty I have to wonder whether, if Alexander Hamilton or James Madison were to hear about the mass execution of schoolchildren in Massachusetts or happened to catch Busty Backdoor Nurses on hotel-room cable, they’d agree that this is just what they were envisioning.

— Tim Kreider

I try not to talk politics on this site, mostly because I’m convinced that writing about politics on the Internet is a waste of your time and mine. This is exactly, however, why I want to link to Tim Kreider, who is not only a far, far better writer than I, but also writes about these topics in a fair-handed way that few ever do, while leaving ample room for debate and counterargument. Tim’s cartoons are often not as fair-handed, but that’s the nature of cartooning as a medium. See, for example, the artwork that opens up his piece.

All politics is a give-and-take discussion, and the entire thing falls apart when nobody, but nobody, is willing to step out of the ideological pit they’ve dug themselves into. This is no more apparent than in debates such as gun control, abortion, and any other argument where rights are to be given and or taken away. So much of this is viewed as a zero-sum game, and so precious little of it is. This is yet another reason why I don’t post political stuff on Sanspoint—I don’t want to get dragged into the debate, launching volleys from my ideological foxhole, and causing collateral damage to my readers who don’t want to get involved either.

No matter where you stand on guns, and I’m not telling you my stance, read Tim’s essay. It’s not just good political writing, it’s good writing. I feel the need to link to it from that alone. Its subject matter is almost secondary.