What to expect for the remaining century

Web censorship by police agencies, terrorism of the music industry against ordinary people and other scaring stories indicate that society changes dramatically these days. These changes are in my opinion hopelessly underestimated by most. But what exactly is happening? I'll try to explain it with some examples from history.

Technological developments are triggers for social changes
It has been always like this: If a new technology appears, it offers both chances and challenges. Chances to solve some problems of mankind come always along with the challenge to use it responsibly. If you look back in history, you'll find many examples, where inventions resulted in revolutionary changes of society.

6000 BC
One of the earliest known examples for this phenomenon is the invention of irrigation around 6000 BC in Mesopotamia. It triggered the following chain reaction:

• Farmland became more efficient allowing a higher population density
  
• Higher population density results either in self-extinction, mass exodus or a better organization. The Mesopotamians were smart enough to choose the latter.
  
• Suddenly there was some essential infrastructure (the irrigation channels), which had to be maintained. People who maintain irrigation channels cannot work on the fields at the same time, so the division of labor had to be invented
  
• If you have division of labor, you need trade
  
• If you have trade, you need money
  
• If you have money, you need mathematics
  
• Money and trade hardly work if you don't invent some alphabet
  

What looks like an amazingly fast transition from an archaic rural society to an urban civilization is, in my opinion, simply a result of some smart farmers no longer wanting to wait for rain.

20th century
The beginning of the 20th century was characterized by by lots of revolutionary advances especially in electronic communication (radio and TV), transportation (cars and airplanes) and manufacturing (mass production). Some of the results follow:

• Ordinary people could more easily stay informed about political affairs. Without a well informed population modern democracy is impossible.
  
• What we call a global society today, became possible through electronic communication.
  
• Many cultural genres, e.g. music styles, are no longer local (or national) phenomena but global ones.
  
• In years where the weather sucks (from the farmers points of view) people no longer have to be afraid of famines (today's famines always have political reasons). This feeling of safety has a large impact on human mind and society.
  

As you might see, the technological revolution at the beginning of the 20th century was an important trigger for the development of the so called Western Civilization we are so proud of today.

Irresponsible uses of 20th century technology were European dictatorships (which utilized the then new electronic mass media for propaganda) resulting in 2 World Wars (made possible by the newly invented cars and planes).

The biggest challenge of the 20th century was not to start a nuclear war. Before, all weapons ever developed were eventually used. The atomic bomb was never used in a war by any nation except one.

Beginning of the 21st century
The beginning of the 21st century was characterized by masses of ordinary people beginning to use the internet. Many argue, that the internet is just another means of communication like the ones we had before. This is completely wrong imo. All mass media we had before were unidirectional (few content producers serve many consumers). The internet is multidirectional (every content consumer can also be a producer). This is a completely different topology of information flow with possibilities far beyond everything we had before. Just look at some examples of what was achieved by now:

• People write an encyclopedia, which is larger, more up-to-date but not more incorrect than any paper-encyclopedia you could buy before.
  
• 1000s of computer nerds spending their nights in front of their PCs wrote one of the world's best OSes.
  
• In times of war or unrest, gagging orders no longer work
  
• No matter what absurd theories you believe, you'll always find like-minded people.
  
• Some internet movies become more popular than some commercial Hollywood productions.
  

Future developments
Some things I see coming:

• Internet communities can make big achievements even though they are mostly self organized. Politicians are afraid of self organizing structures because they fear to become superfluous.
  
• People, who work voluntarily on self-organized projects, will no longer feel the need to be ruled by politicians.
  
• Big record companies will die out, because they terrorized their customers and ripped off musicians. Even Paul McCartney let Starbucks merchandise an album already. Also they still follow the obsolete model of few producers serving many consumers. Only small manufacturers of vinyl disks will survive (at least as long as there are DJs who know how to use them).
  
• Traditional newspapers will become superfluous because they cost money and the 12 hour delay due to the printing time will be unacceptable for most people.
  
• Traditional radio and TV-stations will die out because people don't want to read programming schedules anymore. They want to see and hear what they want when they want.
  
• With no unidirectional mass media left, controlling the information flow will become impossible. As a result, Dictators and conspirators will have a hard time.
  

We see, that today's elites have enough reasons to try to control the internet. Actually there are 2 possible outcomes:

1. They learn that their undertaking is doomed to failure and try to arrange with the new conditions before it's too late.
2. They will continue trying and the WWW will move from today's client-server model to strongly encrypted p2p technologies like freenet.

I personally would prefer option 1, but in either case they'll lose.

Challenges
As said before, new technologies also bring new challenges:

• Computer expertise becomes more and more important for ordinary people. In the last century, learning to read and write was already a good start of the career. Today, knowing to use a computer mouse is at least as important.
  
• The fact that in the internet everyone can be content provider naturally results in a large percentage of bullshit. The preselection of information, which was done by editorial offices of the traditional mass media, must now be done by the consumer. The advantage of unfiltered information comes along with the task to decide yourself.
  

Even if you don't agree with my theories explained above, you know at least where the title of my blog comes from :)

If you agree with what I said, you'll like this movie.

Music from everywhere - everywhere

Project goal was simple. Available audio sources are

• Vinyl records
  
• Analog tapes
• CDs
• Radio (analog and internet)
• Music files in all gmerlin supported formats on 2 PCs

All these should be audible in stereo in all parts of the apartment including balcony and bathroom. Not everywhere at the same time though and not necessarily in high-end quality.

This had been on my wish list for many years, but I was too lazy to lay cables through the whole apartment (especially through doors, which should be lockable). And since there are lots of signal paths, the result would have been a bit messy. Dedicated wireless audio solutions didn't really convince me, since they are mostly proprietary technology. I never want to become a victim of Vendor lock-in (especially not at home).

When I first read about the WLAN-radios I immediately got the idea, that those are the key to the solution. After researching a lot I found one radio which has all features I wanted:

• Stereo (if you buy a second speaker)
• Custom URLs can be added through a web interface (many WLAN radios don't allow this!)
• Ogg Vorbis support (so I can use Icecast2/ices2 out of the box)

The block diagram of the involved components is here:

Now I had to set up the streaming servers. The icecast server itself installs flawlessly on Ubuntu 8.04. It's started automatically during booting. For encoding and sending the stream to icecast, I use ices2 from the commandline. 2 tiny problem had to be solved:

• Ubuntu 8.04 uses PulseAudio as the sound server, while ices2 only supports Alsa. Recording from an Alsa hardware device while PulseAudio is running doesn't work.
• For grabbing the audio from a running gmerlin player the soundcard and driver need to support loopback (i.e. record what's played back). This is the case for the Audigy soundcard in the Media PC, but not for the onboard soundcard in the desktop machine.

Both problems can be solved by defining pulse devices in the ~/.asoundrc file:

pcm.pulse
{
type pulse
}

pcm.pulsemon
{
type pulse
device alsa_output.pci_8086_293e_sound_card_0_alsa_playback_0.monitor
}

ctl.pulse
{
type pulse
}

The Alsa devices to be written into the ices2 configuration files are called pulse and pulsemon. The device line is hardware dependent. Use the PulseAudio Manager (section Devices) to find out the corresponding name for your card. If your card and driver support loopback, the pulsemon device isn't necessary.

Some fine-tuning can be done regarding encoding bitrate, buffer sizes and timeouts. When I optimized everything for low latency, icecast considered the WLAN radio too slow and disconnected it. More conservative settings work better. Encoding quality is always 10 (maximum), the corresponding bitrate is around 500 kbit/s.

Mission accomplished

The future from the last century

When I was younger (in the 70s), I spent a lot of time reading books about the exciting things to come in the year 2000 and beyond. We were supposed to have at least one permanent moon base, public transport with Cabin taxis and underwater cities. And of course peace, happiness and prosperity all over the planet.

Today, it's a bit disappointing to see that none of these things actually became true. Humans seem to be most innovative when it comes to better weapons or more effective Vendor lock-in.

Technical advances must go hand in hand with advances of the human mind; everything else is doomed to failure. Maybe the internet (which was not mentioned in my children's books) can help here.