Aslaug's Axe Shed

It’s Sunday, March 18th 2012. It is the day after St. Patrick’s day here in Dublin, and by now, the city is nursing its hangovers.

Everything is quiet.

Outside, once in a while, a Luas … the local tram-system … goes by. I have just closed my window, to keep the bitterly cold air out, and hopefully help my fingers thaw out, so I can write this.

I need you all to read this. Whether you are a frequent visitor to my homepage, one of my readers, someone who just follows my blog, or even a newcomer who has … simply dropped by, perhaps by pure chance.

Maybe you are an American. Maybe you’re English, Irish, Danish … It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you believe in, whether you are Christian, Buddhist, heathen like me, or atheist. It doesn’t matter if you are conservative or progressive, centrist or politically disinterested. I need you all to see this and learn of this.

A while ago, I wrote a post about bullying. I wrote it in the form of an open letter to the parents of this world, because speaking to children who are bullies themselves rarely works in my considerable experience. Today, I will write about another kind of abuse. One which is if possible even more damaging and traumatizing than bullying.

I want to write about sexual abuse.

I want to write about a brave young woman by the name of Grace, who is doing something remarkable, and I want to write about the people helping her do it.

Most of all, I want to make you all stop and think, and then visit Grace’s homepage on the internet. I did. I just spent the last ninety minutes there. And I am shaking all over. It is not easy to write this, because we as human beings, those of us who are rational, who are apalled, disgusted, angered, horrified by sexual abuse … do not usually have the capacity to understand the depths of human depravity, or the evil that we are capable of, as a race.

I heard about this, this morning when I listened to yesterday’s broadcast of Melissa Harris-Perry’s MSNBC show. I know many of you don’t watch that channel. I know a lot of you don’t even know what MSNBC is. And this is not about the show. It is about Grace and about Project: Unbreakable.

Grace is a freshman college student at the time I am writing this. She studies photography, and this has enabled her to create a remarkable photo-project, where she takes pictures of victims of sexual abuse, holding signs with the words of their abusers. It is meant to help break the silence and the unreasonable, senseless shame that is associated with this.

It is unreasonable and senseless, because the victim is not to blame. There is never … ever under any circumstance … a reason that legitimizes rape, incest or any other form of sexual abuse. It does not exist. It is a myth, perpetuated by people who either have something to hide themselves, or who are so lacking in basic human empathy, that they would do the world a favor by shutting up entirely. The only shame involved in rape, in incest or in any form of sexual abuse of any kind, lies squarely on the shoulder of the abuser, NEVER the abused.

But sexual abuse is like torture … something I have knowledge of from my own life. Not as someone who has ever BEEN tortured, but because I have known people who were subjected to the most dreadful forms of physical and mental torture. And one thing always … always repeats itself.

“It is your own fault”.

Spoken by torturers throughout the ages, in tens of thousands of horrible cellars or torture-chambers.

“Just do as I want you to do and the pain will stop. I’m your friend, I don’t want to do this to you. Help me help you.”

It is no different from what modern day sexual abusers do when they profess their love for their victim, or try to rationalize, in their own, sick minds, the evil they are inflicting on another human being.

“I love you. Just lie still and don’t struggle so much. Stop screaming. Shhh, I love you.”

I have a sour taste in my mouth. Grace’s homepage is full of pictures of people holding up signs. Many of them hide their faces, because they want to maintain their privacy. I respect that, but the reason why many of them want to do so is, in Grace’s own words because “victims of sexual abuse face a TON of stigma”. Why is this so? Why do so many of us think, that just because a girl was drunk, it was alright to take advantage of her? That it was somehow her own fault?

Does drinking too much alcohol write “Take me, I want you to even if I scream and cry” across someone’s face?

I don’t think so.

There are no excuses, and people who try to lay the blame on the victim should not only be ashamed of themselves …

They should know better.

In the end, that sort of behavior only serves to illustrate one’s own insecurity. By distancing oneself from a victim, one hopes to not be involved. To simply be able to close one’s eyes and pretend the awful thing never happened, or at least that it wasn’t as awful as the victim, alone, frightened and emotionally and physically hurt, would have us believe it is.

There is a word for that.

Cowardice.

Imagine if one of your friends needed your help after that kind of experience, and you turned him or her away, saying “you were drunk, it’s your own fault”. How would you be able to look at your own reflection in the mirror afterwards? How would you EVER be able to call yourself a friend again … to anyone. Conversely, imagine what you would do if you found out your best friend was a sex-offender? Would you cover it up out of some misguided sense of loyalty?

Sex abusers are criminals. For the sake of a few minutes or a few hours of the most violating, selfish gratification on Earth, they ruin the entire life of another human being.

And they hide behind statements such as those found on the pictures on Grace’s homepage. Empty, hollow statements such as “I thought you wanted this”.

Or “I love you”

or “Your mother is absolutely okay with this, just don’t ever talk to her about it”.

We have all seen stories like that before. We have heard these kinds of statements and marveled at the sheer, unadulterated evil that form the basis of them. But they are easily forgotten, pushed to the back of our minds when we get them one at a time. But to get so many of them at once, as one gets on Grace’s page is numbing.

I urge every one of my readers to go to http://projectunbreakable.tumblr.com/

Remember, both men and women can be victims of this. Look at the pictures. LOOK at them. I spent ninety minutes there this morning, surely each of you can spare fifteen or twenty minutes of your life.

Look at them. And please, for the sake of decency and humanity, don’t ever even entertain the idea, that it might be the victim’s own fault.

It is Sunday, March 18th 2012 in Dublin. I have things to do today. Outside my room a beautiful, sunlit sky stretches all the way to the Wicklow Mountains and out across the Irish sea. I heard a blackbird singing, just before I closed the window.

And right now, all I can think of is how many people were hurt yesterday, when hundreds of thousands of revelers filled the streets.

Show Grace that you support her work. Show the victims that you are on their side, and that you care.

Stop thinking it is someone else’s responsibility.

It isn’t. It’s ours.

Yours and mine.

Thank you for reading.

I have had some time to think about this recently, especially after a debate with a friend, turned incredibly vicious on facebook recently. I am referring, of course, to the concept of internet piracy or the illegal copying of computergames, movies and music. In this post, I will be using computer software as an example, but the arguments I make would be valid for music or movies as well.

I’m going to keep this pretty short, or at least try to, but one argument my friend made not once, but repeatedly, struck me even while it happened as absolutely absurd. The more I have thought about it, the more I realize that this seems to be a general idea amongst pirates … but the number of adherents to this thought does not lessen its absurdity in any way.

The idea is as follows, and PLEASE be aware that anything between the hashtags does NOT represent my own opinion on this matter:

#”Internet piracy cannot and should not be prosecuted as theft, as nothing is actually stolen. A pirate hurts no one as he only makes a copy of something which already exists, leaving the original intact.

Furthermore, there is no guarantee that a pirate had any intent to purchase an original to begin with, and consequently, by making a copy he is not taking money from the owner of the rights to the original, since you cannot take money or value from someone, if you never intended to spend that money in the first place.

For that reason, Internet Piracy is in no way theft, and can never, under any circumstance, be prosecuted as such. At most, it can be prosecuted as copyright infringement.”#

This seriuosly constituted his entire argument, and at first I was so stunned by the lack of afterthought or legal understanding in this, that I found it hard to reply. Not because I couldn’t reject the concept completely … I not only can, but I WANT to … but because I had no idea that pirates use an argument that feeble to justify themselves.

First of all, Copyright Infringement is theft. It is explicitly the term used to describe the illegal use of intellectual property, belonging to someone else, without rendering due payment for it. Thusly, it means having used a service or a product for which payment is demanded in order to obtain rights of usage, without paying for it.

This, in any definition of the English language, constitutes stealing, a.k.a. theft.

When a software-company (and I remind my readers, that at the moment I work for such a company, but that regardless of that fact, this is my actual, personal opinion), produces a piece of software, be that a computer game, an operating system or software like for example the Microsoft Office package, tens of thousands thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands, of working hours have gone into it. Hundreds of people have been employed for a long time to create the product. The production costs are likely astronomical, but because we don’t see a finished building, a new ship in the harbor or a squadron of airplanes fly past us, we tend to forget that this is the case. However, it IS the case. Many, many hours of work have gone into the production of this. For something like a major operating system, not hundreds but tens of thousands of people are involved in its creation, not in one country but all across the globe, where production is spread on on programming teams, testers, support staff and gods know what else. It is a massive, monumental effort that I have truly come to appreciate in the past year or so.

It is also … most importantly … an investment.

So when the finished product is complete, and the new version of this program is available for sale in any computer store out there, there is a price-tag attached to it.

After all, the incredible production-cost has to be made good, and the money spent on paying the many people involved in the development of the product, has to be brought back in, preferably with a profit. This, after all, is how market economics work.

What a pirate is doing is saying, when he decides he wants for example the new, up-coming Windows 8 without paying for it, is “thanks for spending hundreds of thousands of hours developing this new piece of software. But because I don’t know if I’m going to like it or not, I’m not paying you for it. I’ll just make a copy of it and use it anyway”.

It doesn’t matter if we are talking Windows 8 … an operating system … or the much-anticipated, up-coming game called Mass Effect 3 (which is pure entertainment). What matters is that no payment has been rendered.

But what if that person did not want to go out and buy it anyway? This is the crucial second half of the argument. What if the pirate is simply making a copy of something he would otherwise not have bought?

That is no excuse. If he does not want to pay for the use of the product, he doesn’t have to pay. Despite all rumors to the contrary, Microsoft representatives do not actually come into your living room and threaten you at gunpoint to buy their latest product. There ARE alternatives to Microsoft’s products on the market, and people are absolutely within their right to choose to use those instead. Nobody FORCES anyone to buy Mass Effect 3 or any other new game coming out. If you don’t want to pay for it, then don’t play it. It is NOT A HUMAN RIGHT to have free access to all new software developed, NOR SHOULD IT BE.

Computer programmers, tech support people and software vendors are people too, with families who need clothing and feeding, and mortgages that need paying. There are massive, massive costs involved in creating these things, and when people simply make a copy … they are in fact stealing the rights to use the program from those who own the interlectual property.

That is why Internet Piracy is theft. I don’t care if one wants to mince words and call it “copyright infringement”. In the end, an internet pirate is a common thief, taking something without paying for it.

Let me make an example that you may think is utterly, deeply hilarious. About a year ago, before I left Denmark, I heard a news-story on the radio which dealt with a rising culture amongst young people, who thought that they could go to really mega-expensive stores, and buy a new suit or a new dress, then wear that suit or dress for one night at some wild party, and then return it for a full refund, even though the clothes had clearly been worn, and in some cases damaged. These kids thought they could sue the stores for refusing to give them a refund. After all, most stores have a “return within a week for a full refund”-policy, and they had returned the clothes within that time-limit. They were outraged, furious and feeling legitimately insulted that these stores would not simply take the clothes back, regardless of the state of the garment, and provide a full refund.

I’m pretty sure there isn’t a person amongst those coming to this page, who wouldn’t consider this downright laughable. A return-for-refund policy is and always has been conditioned on the state of the object purchased. You can’t buy a vase, smash it on the way home and go back with the broken shards and expect get a full refund either.

But this is what a growing group of especially young people think they are entitled to doing.

It is, in a twisted way, the exact same kind of thinking that tells people that it is okay to make a pirated copy of a program or a computer-game. They don’t feel they should pay for something they never INTENDED to pay for to begin with.

But they still want the right to use it.

There’s a very old saying for that, about cakes and eating them … or in the Danish version, wanting to exhale while keeping a mouth full of flour.

If you want something in this world, you need to pay for it.

I agree that you should be allowed to make copies of things you own originals of. If you own a movie and it is on your shelf at home, I see no good reason why you should not be allowed to make a copy of it on your laptop so you can watch it somewhere else. After all, you DID pay for the rights to watch that film. But making a copy of something that has a price-tag attached to it, without paying that price is not an easy way to escape the label of thief.

Because in my opinion, and under the letter of the law, it is still theft.

I play computer games.

There, I said it. I play computer games. I do, in fact, play a lot of games. And I think it is time for a post about games like the ones I play. This may be of utterly no interest to most people, but there IS a point to this. One I hope some of you may stop and think about, if nothing else.

First of all, I don’t play all types of games. Shooter games tend to do very little for me (with one very notable exception which I will get back to shortly), and puzzlegames bore me to tears in almost all cases.

I play strategy games, but apart from the classic Civilization-series, which I love to bits, what I want is a story. The writer in me craves a great, epic tale that I can take part in, even as my miniaturized units are moved around the screen. Some games are better at this than others, obviously, and some game worlds speak to me to a greater extent than others. This is also why some games, like the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series speak to me. In fact, Mass Effect is the one shooter game I do enjoy, as it tells an absolutely captivating story.

But recently, I came across this strange concept that I had never given much thought.

“Computer games as art”.

This is scoffed at by many. It is as if this somehow has to be looked upon as an inferior thing, like something as trivial as a /game/ can’t possible be artistically done, or hold any real, cultural value. I think this is a grave mistake, and here is why.

If you look back throughout history, art has changed dramatically, even fundamentally, many, many times. When Picasso helped to introduce Cubism, people considered his art terrible, vulgar, tasteless … even ugly. Today, his paintings are sold for sums that stagger the imagination of most of us. One paintings of his will sell for many times what any of us will make in an entire lifetime of work. It is possible to go back further, of course, and to spare you all the boring list of examples of sculptures and paintings that one might come up with, I’ll settle for jumping back a LONG way, to ancient Greece. Pre-classic Greek sculpture is stiff, archaic (in fact that is what it is called … archaic art), and while often incredibly beautiful, it is not lifelike. It is possible trace the evolution of early art in certain sculptures, where suddenly an artist has attempted to create lifelike musculature on a male statue, but still keeping the statue itself in the same, rigid pose as most archaic sculptures, with an enigmatic, unknowable “archaic smile” on its face. It is a period in art spanning hundreds of years, with practically no change.

We might look at music as a different art form entirely. The songs played by ancient Romans and Greeks are almost universally lost to us now, although some interesting studies are made in trying to recreate them. But we don’t have to go back that far to see how fast this particular area moves. Just look at the 20th century. This is the century that started with men like Shubert and Liszt being the hottest thing on the block, and ending with Eminem and Metallica. In between, we had Swing, Jazz, Rock n’Roll, Funk, Pop …

The list is almost endless. If you doubt me, go to Facebook and try to look up the different subgroups of Heavy Metal. You don’t have to listen to the music if you don’t like it, but simply look at the sub-genres. They are practically legion, and that is simply one example.

My point is … art changes. And while it may seem ridiculous to us nowadays, where we as a society are more or less indifferent to female artists getting up on stage wearing outfits that would make your average porn-star whimper about indecency, and where male performers routinely sing about sex in explicit terms, Elvis Presley was considered utterly, completely amoral when he gyrated his hips on TV. The Doors were blacklisted from Television for singing “Girl we couldn’t get much higher” on a live show, where they couldn’t be edited, and the Beatles … now considered practically the most mainstream and “nice” of all early rock n’roll bands, were seen as youthful rebels with terribly long hair when they started out.

Yes. Long hair.

I’m not talking about the late sixties John Lennon with flowing locks and a beard to shame Father Christmas, but the fifties version of the same young man, with hair that covered the top of his ears.

Literature changes. While there are great constants in literature, and we still laugh at Shakespeare’s comedies, it is because the jokes he told are timeless and deal with ever-present truths of the human condition. Regardless, no one would write the way Shakespeare wrote and get published nowadays. Imagine the much-hyped Millenium trilogy … a series of books so popular that they were made into world-wide smash hit films, and which are now getting a remake via Hollywood … getting published even twenty years ago? Unthinkable, and I am not even referring to the computer-themes in the story being impossible at the time. Or Harry Potter, perhaps THE defining series of books of the turn of the millennium when it comes to literary mass hysteria. IMAGINE someone writing those books in the mid-1800′s and trying to get them published? Just imagine.

Ain’t gonna happen, bucko.

So yes, art changes. And I think it is problematic to scoff at something like computer games. It is part of the aforementioned human condition that tastes change and evolve, even over the condition of one lifespan. When I was a child and a young teenager, I listened to the same pop-songs as my peers and I thought they were great. Then one day, someone played a Metallica-song called “Battery” to me, and I was forever changed.

These days, I do something called “Classic of the Day” on facebook, where each day sees me posting a new piece of classical music. Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Beethoven, Albioni, Vivaldi … the great classical composers get airtime on my facebook page. So my tastes have changed quite dramatically. These days, I am one of those weirdos who can RIGHTFULLY claim that my tastes go from Heavy Metal over Edith Piaff to Classical music. So tastes change, and with it, the very conception of what “art” is.

So why not video games?

If a story told in a game can be enthralling, deeply engrossing and keep the player coming back for more, again and again … even playing the same game again and again to get reminded or to find new details they hadn’t noticed before, why is this different, in its essence, than a person going back to a beloved book, over and over again, finding new meaning and new insight with each new read-through? A well known example would be the great classical actor Christopher Lee, who spent so much of his career doing B-list Dracula-flicks and who only came into his own later in life … a man practically revered nowadays for his amazing skill on the great Silver Screen, was a real life friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and still, to this day, reads the Lord of the Rings every single year, and allegedly still finds new nuances, even after all these years.

Why is this different, than someone going back to a game every few years to replay something they thought was amazing and engrossing?

Art is in the eye of the beholder, and while I personally consider games like Grand Theft Auto to be absolute trash, others may enjoy them, just as I wouldn’t voluntarily sit down and read certain books that others find deep and engrossing.

When movies went from black-and-white to color, some people scoffed that now the detail would get lost and no one would notice the amazing acting anymore. When “talkies” came out with “The Jazz Singer”, it was absolutely ridiculed by a large number of screen actors who felt that only silent movies were proper art. But without talkies and without color on movies, we would not have had classics like “The Shawshank Redemption”, Brannagh’s “Henry V” or the Star Wars films, just to cover a wide spectrum in one go.

For me, computer games may be art, and it may be trash. I am not saying that every game released is worthy of enshrinement in the Smithsonian or similar. I am saying that some of them tell stories that are so well crafted and so well written, and so engrossing that you genuinely end up wanting to know “what happens next”. You want the character in the story to succeed, not so much because you want to succeed yourself, but because you end up feeling something for the fictitious person on the screen, not unlike wanting to just read the NEXT page and the NEXT page in a good book. Just like a great movie or TV-series may rivet you to the seat, unable to get up even if you DESPERATELY have to use the bathroom.

We as human beings are endowed with this amazing, wondrous thing that is an active imagination. Some people do not like fiction much, and that is fine, but without fiction, without imagination, we would not have music which is practically always themed, and rarely around real life events. We would not have movies, and television would be reduced to a domain for newsreaders and documentary programs … both of which have a very real and very important place to occupy, admittedly. We would, in fact, never have created civilization, as every step forward is made by men and women asking themselves that incredibly important question “what if …”

Wanting to make something better which doesn’t exist just yet. The very notion of an “idea”, of “innovation” is the process of making something where nothing exists.

We should not scoff at new definitions of art. We may not always understand it. We may not always think it is worth spending time, money and effort on. But that does not mean it is not art to other people. I don’t understand or bother with Performance Art myself … a man jumping around one one leg on top of a skyscraper, wearing a yellow spandex suit, shouting “I’m sent by the Gods of the Tortelini-people!” while throwing animal feces into the air and trying to catch it with his head is not my idea of art, but to others, it is a sublime expression of the transitory nature of life and the meaningless of existence (I wonder if Sartre would have understood it …).

And who am I to tell them that they are wrong?

We are all individuals, and what is art to one man, may be tripe to another. Computer games should not be dismissed for that reason alone. Work goes into them, and deep thought, and a great deal of writing. And frankly, some of the stories are good enough to keep people not only coming back to the same game, but buying the sequels as well …

Not unlike a good movie.

And not unlike a good book.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case.

Today, Wikipedia went black. So did numerous other pages with free information on the Internet. As I am sure most of you have heard, the American Congress is on the verge of passing a bill called SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA is a piece of legislation created by old men who have little or no working knowledge of how the Internet truly works (remember a few years ago when one of them, now admittedly retired, angrily exclaimed that the Internet was “a series of tubes”?) and who believe that they can wave legislation around and magically fix what they perceive as a problem, using nothing but their righteous anger.

Don’t get me wrong. I consider Internet piracy reprehensible. But I am old enough to remember a time, when computer games suffered from inflated prices, and where every kid I knew copied games between them, because it was the only way to afford them. I remember those times, twenty years ago. A few computer game developers caught the hint and decided to lower their prices, or at least freeze them, and the net result is that a new computer game today, costs less or the same as it did in 1993 when I got my first PC. These days, I buy games. I don’t copy them, and I wouldn’t dream of having a copy of a computer game on my machine, unless it was freeware.

Regardless, internet Piracy today is a problem. When people go “Oh, I want to play that game, one moment while I download it”, it turns my stomach. It really, genuinely does. They are the reason why the games are still as expensive as they are. The same with movies. Or music. Gods know it’s hard enough to make it as a musician but at least in the case of music, several bands are sharing music freely now.

And let’s face it, in the case of music you can turn on the radio and listen to it for free.

Yes, you can watch movies on the telly as well, but you have less choice in the matter then.

Bottom line is, piracy is a crime. Simple as that.

But what SOPA does is punish everyone, even people who have never broken the law. It makes the sharing of information almost impossible.

And I will prove this with one simple example, which may sound ludicrous or exaggerated, but which is fully possible and covered under SOPA.

Let’s say your cousin has a child of three. This kid likes to dance. Your cousin thinks this is hilarious, not to mention quite cute, and so uploads a video he has shot of his kid, dancing around the room to an old Beach Boys classic. The clip goes viral, because frankly, the kid is adorable. Within a month, he has 50.000 views.

Your cousin has an ex wife who doesn’t like him. She sees the video and, seething with indignant rage, she contacts the authorities.

Next thing you know, your cousin is slapped with a lawsuit for having played copyrighted music without permission on the Internet worth a certain amount per hit … so 50.000 times maybe a dollar fifty (possibly more, doubtfully less). His homepage is closed, and he may find himself on a black list, unable to get a new internet connection from a regular Internet Service Provider.

All because he thought he had an adorable child, who likes to dance, and he wanted to share it with the world.
Or another example. Let’s say you post photos of yourself at home, with a poster in the background. You bought the poster legally. But because you have now shared it with the world, you are slapped with a fine for copyright infringement.

Think these are extreme examples?

This is exactly what SOPA has been created to prevent.

I am not a member of the group called Anonymous.

But I support them in their struggle against this.

We must all refuse to accept SOPA. I will through civil disobedience if it comes to that. This is a matter of protecting the right to free speech and free access to information. The Internet does not belong to anyone, least of all the United States government, whether that government is led by a Republican or a Democrat.

This is something we as free people must not and should not accept.