Digital technology has lowered the cost of production to the point where giving things away for free has become a legitimate business model. “Once a marketing gimmick,” writes Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, “free has emerged as a full-fledged economy.”

The problem with this “freeconomy,” Andrew Orlowski writes for the New Statesman, is that eventually, someone is going to have to pick up the bill. Anderson and Wired are both pushing a techno-utopianism, according to Orlowski, that mixes “manifest destiny and opportunistic hucksterism.” For many years, and two economic busts, the message worked. Now, Anderson’s new book Free isn’t meeting with rave reviews, and Wired (like many magazines) is struggling to survive. Orlowski writes:

“So, perhaps the Wired era is over, departing like a snake-oil salesman at a medicine show who—having poisoned the town—can’t leave quickly enough”

Sources: Wired, New Statesman

Team Obama looks a lot like the Bush Administration, at least in its position on fines imposed under the federal Copyright Act. David Kravets reports for Wired that the Justice Department has weighed in on the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) file sharing lawsuits, and the news isn’t good for music-downloading college students and other defendants. The government supports damages of up to $150,000 per music track, echoing the former administration’s views. 

The Justice Department’s intervention responds to a counterclaim by former Boston University student and RIAA target Joel Tenenbaum, who challenged the Copyright Act’s constitutionality, claiming that the excessive nature of the RIAA’s fines amounts to an abuse of civil and criminal legal processes.

According to Kravets, the government’s position should surprise no one, since former RIAA lawyers litter the top jobs in Obama’s Justice Department, including Associate Attorney General Tom Perelli.

Since 2003 the RIAA has sued over 30,000 citizens under the Copyright Act, including students, grandparents, mothers, children, and even the dead.

As soldiers continue to face violent threats in the form of car or truck bombs, engineers are designing weapons to stop oncoming vehicles in ways that more closely resemble the Justice League than the U.S. military.  David Hambling reports for Wired that the latest offerings include a “pre-emplaced net” powerful enough to stop trucks and cars; a portable trap which sits on the road and releases squid-like tentacles onto overhead axles; high-speed foam; and, a microwave ray gun which would literally fry potential threats. 

Source: Wired

“The problem with Super Bowl snacks,” Brandon Keim writes for Wired, “is that they're boring.” So instead of popping open a bag of Chex Mix and calling it a party this Sunday, take a culinary cue from a few molecular gastronomists Keim consulted. His suggested list of adventurous treats for the big game includes recipes for pizza pebbles, puffed sauerkraut, bratwurst puree, and beer ice cream in a pretzel crust.

Technology is currently crying out for your attention. Twitter wants to know, “What are you doing?” Facebook is asking, “What are you doing right now?” There’s a good chance that your personal, work, and spam email accounts all have new messages waiting for you, friends or acquaintances may be inviting you to LinkedIn or Friendfeed, or maybe your cell phone is ringing. “Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely,” William Deresiewicz writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “now it’s impossible to be alone.”

The technology demands constant attention, because that’s what people want. The “contemporary self,” according to Deresiewicz, “wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible.” The websites offer visibility at no monetary cost, but users end up sacrificing their solitude, privacy, and, in some ways, the ability to be alone.

The technology has a spiritual cost, too. “Religious solitude is a kind of self-correcting social mechanism,” Deresiewicz writes, “a way of burning out the underbrush of moral habit and spiritual custom.” This kind of self-reflection is nearly impossible if people don’t quit tweeting, texting, and calling every once in a while.

The costs of constant contact become more extreme as technology improves. New applications for the iPhone and Google’s new G1 (which I bought 3 weeks ago), allow people to connect with Twitter, Facebook, and a host of location-aware applications at all times. Programs like WhosHere, Whrrl, and the dubiously named LifeAware give near-constant GPS-based updates to friends or strangers of where people are and how to connect.

Some of these location-aware applications go too far, even for tech enthusiasts. Mathew Honan, the man behind BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle, explored the labyrinthine world of the GPS-based applications for Wired and found paradoxically, “I had gained better location awareness but was losing my sense of place.”

The flood of tweets, updates, and friend request can quickly become indistinguishable from real life (aka RL). The din can easily stand in the way of deeper thoughts and self-reflection. “In effect,” according to the Winter 2007 issue of n+1, “this mode of constant self-report can be summed up in a single phrase: “I am on the phone. I am on the phone. I am on the phone.’”

Image by Juhan Sonin, licensed under Creative Commons.

Last week, the U.S. Air Force released a “counter-blogging” flow chart, which encourages members to “fix the facts” and “share success” in the comments section of blog posts critical of the U.S. government and the armed forces. The chart also includes “response considerations,” such as disclosing the Air Force connection, citing sources, and “respond(ing) in a tone that reflects highly on the rich heritage of the Air Force.”

In many respects, this move reflects a broader shift in government to embracing new media and the blogging culture that has sprung from it. According to Wired, the Air Force has been the slowest of the military branches to embrace bloggers as a force to contend with; the Army holds “bloggers’ roundtables” with military leaders and civilians and the Navy invited bloggers to accompany personnel on a humanitarian mission.

Ironically, airmen will have little chance to follow these guidelines if on base, because almost every web address including the word “blog” is banned from Air Force networks.

(Thanks, Newshoggers.)

Barack Obama may have a leg up on John McCain when it comes to TV advertising and video games embeds, but McCain has the advantage when it comes to robocalling, reports Wired. Shaun Dakin, who Wired describes as an “anti-robocall activist,” collected data showing that the McCain campaign ran 12 automated political telemarketing efforts in the past month and a half, compared to Obama’s four.

Recipients of the calls are greeted with automated messages like this one, sent to Talking Points Memo by a voter in North Carolina:

I'm calling on behalf of John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama and his Democrat allies in the Illinois Senate opposed a bill requiring doctors to care for babies born alive after surviving attempted abortions—a position at odds even with John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama and his liberal Democrats are too extreme for America. Please vote—vote for the candidates who share our values. This call was paid for by McCain-Palin 2008 and the Republican National Committee at 202 863 8500.

Will McCain’s army of tele-bots march him into the White House? Probably not. Wired cites a Pew Research Center survey that found that almost half of the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire who received robocalls hung up on the calls. According to Ben Smith of Politico, “Robocalls are a relatively inexpensive way to deliver a negative message, and used to be seen as an under-the-radar way to do it, though that's no longer really true.” Indeed, scripts and audio of McCain’s robocalls are popping up all over the Internet, though there's scant mention of what the Obama campaign's calls contain. And unfortunately for McCain, coverage of robocalling isn't translating into positive press.

Image by Joe Wu, licensed under Creative Commons.

Biology may have a say in who gets your vote this November. A new study published in Science found a correlation between physiological responses to threats and people’s partisan leanings. Test subjects with firm conservative political views displayed stronger physical reactions to unexpected loud noises and threatening images than those with liberal persuasions. While researchers didn't want the study to be interpreted too broadly, Wired reports, "the results suggest that fear leads to political conservatism."

This isn't the first time researchers have tried to crack the political biological code. A 2005 study by Berkeley psychologist Jack Block looked at the personality traits of a group of toddlers and checked back in with them as politically opinionated adults. Block's conclusions were certainly colorful:

…the relatively Liberal young men, when in nursery school two decades earlier, impressed nursery school teachers as boys who were: resourceful and initializing, autonomous, proud of their blossoming accomplishments, confident and self-involving. The relatively Conservative young men, when young boys, were viewed in nursery school as: visibly deviant, feeling unworthy and therefore ready to feel guilty, easily offended, anxious when confronted by uncertainties, distrustful of others, ruminative, and rigidifying when under stress.

A 2003 study by New York University psychologist John Jost reached similar conclusions. According to Seed, “Jost said his study found that an adult displaying heightened needs to manage uncertainty and threat was associated with an attraction to conservative ideas, while openness to new experiences and cognitive complexity correlated with liberal ideas.”

Not surprisingly, the findings of these studies have invited ample criticism. Selwyn Duke, writing for the conservative American Thinker magazine, called the Block study “psycho-babble,” and came to the conclusion that “the social sciences today mainly serve to provide a specious scientific basis for liberalism.”

The first proton beam whizzed around the Large Hadron Collider track today, far underground, beneath the Swiss-Franco border. “Like first light in a telescope, the first beam in the particle accelerator is a landmark moment for a program that has spanned more than 20 years and involved tens of thousands of scientists,” reports Wired News.

The track is the world’s largest, spanning 17 miles, built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Scientists won’t get busy with the good stuff—smashing atoms!—for several weeks, but when they do, many predict discoveries that will revolutionize physics, even our basic understanding of the world. Wired does a heck of a breakdown.

Other predictions for the outcome of the high-energy collisions haven’t been nearly as rosy. Doomsday scenarios include the creation of mini black holes and “dark matter” particles called strangelets. Even though independent reviews have deemed the planned experiments safe, my friend still thinks we should probably be throwing an end-of-the-world party come mid-October. I’m inclined to agree. No RSVP necessary, just check HasTheLargeHadronColliderDestroyedTheWorldYet.com before heading over.

Local foodists have gone too far. I’m all for stalking the wild asparagus, but hunting the urban pigeon? Perhaps we should also dine on Washington, D.C.’s plentiful rats? 

Wired’s Alexis Madrigal is “65 percent not-kidding” about eating pigeons. “A food source that lives on our trash that is so reproductively prolific that we can't kill it off? That's green tech at its finest!” writes Madrigal. “Pigeons are direct waste-to-food converters, like edible protein weeds, that leave droppings that could be used as fertilizer as a bonus.” All it would take, suggests Madrigal, is a quick rebranding. “Pigeons can merely reclaim their previous sufficiently arugula-sounding name: squab.” 

The squabble over squab continues at Earth First. “Would you be open to eating things not commonly considered appropriate as food? Pigeons? Squirrels?” it asks. The question might be better worded as “things not currently considered appropriate as food.” Pigeon used to be widely consumed in the United States, Madrigal points out, and the same is also true of squirrels. Modern-day squirrel hunter Hank Shaw laments the decline of squirrel consumption in the summer issue of Meatpaper (article not available online).

Twentieth-century cookbooks as common as The Joy of Cooking and Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking included squirrel dishes, writes Shaw, as well they should have—the critters were plentiful, and the flavor is fine, he assures. “Its sweet darkish meat vaguely resembles the dark meat on turkey,” Shaw writes. “When squirrels have been eating acorns or other nuts, their meat is deliciously nutty—not unlike the Spanish bellota hams that gourmands shell out princely sums for.” 

Shaw makes a tempting case for the tastiness of squirrels. So why not squab? Well, if we use Shaw’s logic—squirrels taste “deliciously nutty” because they eat nuts—wouldn’t city pigeons taste, um, “deliciously trashy” from feasting on our trash? 

Image by Ernesto Andrade, licensed under Creative Commons.