Wednesday, October 10, 2007

John Piper on Atlas Shrugged

Here is an excellent article by John Piper reviewing Atlas Shrugged on it's 50 year anniversary.

If you haven't read Atlas Shrugged you should, I had a very similar reaction to is as Piper describes in his article.

In his perfect Piper style he very eloquently explains the truths and the major flaw in Ayn Rands philosophy, mainly that it rejected that God was real.

I can perfectly relate to Piper's reaction to the book:

I was attracted and repulsed. I admired and cried. I was blown away with powerful statements of what I believed, and angered that she shut herself up in what Jonathan Edwards called the infinite provincialism of atheism. Her brand of hedonism was so close to my Christian Hedonism and yet so far—like a satellite that comes close to the gravitational pull of truth and then flings off into the darkness of outer space.


Rand particularly impressed upon me the reality of Justice in the universe, yet she rejected God. Ultimately her definition of Justice was subjectively based, although she didn't see it that way because her premise for reality was wrong. Ayn Rand said in Atlas Shrugged:

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.


I wish she would have taken her own advise and checked her premises on her description of reality and realized that without a sovereign God to set the standard for Justice and righteousness then pure capitalism is as idealistic as pure communism. The ultimate stumbling stone in coming to this conclusion is that the only way for the justice of a sovereign God to be satisfied would be through the execution of an infinite punishment for sin. Since it would be impossible for us to bear this punishment and live, most simply reject the idea of a just God, or the idea of humans being fallen beings, instead of embracing the truth of the work of Christ on the Cross.

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Radiohead, record companies, and ramblings...

As you may know the band RADIOHEAD is releasing their latest album for free over the internet, and boy are they getting a lot of press about it. Now I think radiohead is a great band, there's no question there, it's just that with all this press about how they're sticking it to the record companies by releasing this album for free (actually the customer gets to set the price they pay), well I don't know if I really buy it.

Lot's of artist put out free music and work on the internet and accept donations for the work. This is also a very popular practice in open source software development. But you don't see these people making the news because of their charity, and bravery, and stick-it-to the man-ness, usually they just struggle to get noticed, no matter how good they may be.

The thing is that the only reason this is a big deal is because radiohead is a hugely popular band. And how did they become hugely popular? Could it have had a lot to do with major record companies promoting and marketing their material for the past X years? So now the band is just basically stabbing the people who financed their rise to fame right in the back by using that fame as a means to promote what their doing now with their "by donation" album. Not to mention the insinuation to up and coming artist is that "hey you can make it to, just be like us", when in reality, without some very inventive promotion no artist will make it, especially with this model.

I know that some think it's the essence of rock and roll, "sticking it to the man", but I don't really see it that way. I see it as exploiting the success that was the result of a system that they were happy to use to get rich but now that they are rich and popular they don't want to be a part of it. It's not that special, artist, authors, and software developers have been doing this for years and with alot more integrity...well I say integrity, I don't really know the hearts of the men in radiohead, all I'm really saying is that what they're doing is not all that special. Because of their major record label success they are able to do what everyone else has to do by default, and they're going to make alot of money at it, most good artist out there doing this very same thing are struggling even to make it. Why? it's basically because promoting the music is the hardest part of making a living at it. Getting in front of people, getting people to listen, and getting people interested. This is true for any good idea or product, not just music, anyway, radiohead got this service rendered to them with tremendous success by Capital Records etc... and now their being toted as some kind of "everyman's band" by the fact that their sticking it to the people that enabled their success in the first place.

Now I'm not sticking up for the record companies. I think that most of them are simply using copyright laws in order not to have to innovate and deal in a new digital marketplace. I mean the fact that we can still buy music on Compact Discs, which came out in like 1982 ... and there really has been no major progress in this technology since then...well that's just pathetic. By using copyright laws the record companies are able to artificially leverage the well returned investment they have in the compact disc technology way beyond it's market relevance, that's a good deal for them, but a bad deal for consumers who want instant access to the music they want through the medium we all share (the internet). No wonder the MP3 piracy revolution was so huge, and it scared the record company to death because they see that their ability to make money is threatened by losing the direct tie they have the CD product.

Maybe what the record companies should focus on instead is developing an industry standard file format for digital music, and then use their marketing might to promote the bands they want and digitally sell their content for them. Bandwidth and promotion are expensive, but it's easier to streamline and automate, and overall I can almost guarantee that the margins are alot higher than on manufacturing and distributing CD's. However it is different than what they have been doing for the past 25 years in marketing CD's, and besides, as long as they stick with CD's they can keep suing single moms for $220,000 a pop for using the technology of the day to get the music they want. Let's not even talk about the fact that the new digital economy makes it alot harder to sell really sucky songs by forcing people to buy an entire album just to get the one good song on the CD. Yes it's would be alot different for the record company to actually have to sell quality content in the format and method that the customer demands.

The whole copyright problem is a joke in itself. The problem is not a copyright problem is a problem with the ignorant lack of keeping up with technology. When the CD came out there was no broadband internet, file compression, or anything like that. Really there wasn't a whole lot of broadband internet until almost 20 years after the CD came out. Now that there are these technologies where a file of the same or better quality than a CD can easily and cheaply be transmitted over the internet, people naturally and rightfully want to use that technology to their benefit. Seems to me this is a problem with the record companies not innovating. People didn't have the equipment to reproduce records or 8-track tapes in their homes, cassette tapes were just bad quality, and when the CD came out the record companies had 15-20 years where people still didn't have or couldn't afford the technology to reproduce the music. Now we do have this technology, it's just the reality of reality, record companies have to deal with it or they'll go by the wayside as the bands with whom they DON'T Have contracts start to outnumber that bands with whom they do. It's like they're driving a horse drawn carriage down the interstate and screaming at all the people in cars for going way faster than they are.

What radiohead is doing may have this kind of "rob from the rich and give to the poor" ring to it, but I'd really rather see a band succeed at this from a ground roots level before I'll really believe that "by donation" content is really a good way for an artist or developer to make a living. But hey, it works for the church ok, maybe it will work here too. But wait even the church lets you partake of the content before asking for a donation, maybe radiohead should do the same. How can I decide how much an album is worth if I haven't heard it?

As for the record companies I hope they crash and burn, the destruction of the current system is the only way to make room for the new system (and that should have happened 10 years ago...)