Oliver Hartwich, pornography and if good comes from evil, where does stupidity come from?

(Above: more xkcd here).

It wasn't so long ago that a war was raging between blu-ray and HD DVD and to Toshiba's chagrin, and to my eternal hatred of Sony, blu-ray won.

But if you head back to the actual days of the war, the sages consulted the runes, and came up with the idea that the pornography business would determine the outcome of the war. Way back when, it seemed like HD DVD was going to be all the go:

As Ramos puts it, Wicked chose HD DVD primarily because of Blu-ray's prohibitive expense and lack of market share, as well as the fact that it is generally cheaper and easier to produce using the format.

"Right now, [HD DVD and Blu-ray] are so new that people are confused. They don't know which format they want. Our primary goal was to bring some sort of high-definition product to the consumer. There's something to be said about planting a flag and being first, and we wanted to stay ahead of the curve as much as we can in terms of technology."

In addition to being first, the plan for now, according to Ramos, is for Wicked to continue presenting its most popular titles on HD DVD and eventually move to a day-and-date DVD and HD DVD release scheme. (Porn Industry May Decide DVD Format War, Porn industry may decide battle between Blu-Ray, HD-DVD).

Oops, they called that wrong.

But actually as the story makes clear, the porn industry is inclined to bottom feeding, and to going with whatever technology is to hand, provided it's cheap and dirty and get down, and can be delivered with a handy in-built pricing structure.

In reality, the battle between the two formats was decided for other reasons than the availability of pornography in HD, not least the incompetence of Toshiba and its allies in prosecuting the war.

And back when the influence of pornography achieved its mythical status - in the battle between Betamax and VHS - the reality was that VHS achieved more immediate prominence in the marketplace because of price and availability and consumer friendly features, while Sony peddled its upmarket quality at a price the quality didn't justify.

If you want some of the reasons for the death of beta, you can head here to videotape format war. It makes it all the more poignant that I've just picked up my first betamax player for five bucks to rip a couple of old tapes.

In just the same way, not porn, nor even god could save the laser disc, or give it a wide market, and it never got going as a mass format before it fell to DVD. Not that porn was interested in laser because it was such an expensive and useless format. Instead they stayed close to their original love of VHS for many years, until replication costs dropped to a reasonable level on DVD. Nor did porn get interested in a half dozen other interim technologies, because as leeches they just want quick, cheap ways to connect to their customer base (remember the good old days of interactive multimedia on disc?)

Back in the very beginning, Betamax was long on short, useless tapes, short on regard for consumers, and because Sony showed its arrogance and indifference to consumer interests, it got whipped in the market place. But as a result of its quality, Betamax stayed - in the shape of Betacam - as the professional tape format, and it makes it all the more poignant that I'm about to throw out into the street my last piece of Sony gear. (Don't worry, it'll be gone overnight, no litter here).

Anyhoo, the important thing is that Betamax failed as a result of a Sony cock-up of the first order, not because you could see more cocks up and in action 0n VHS. (How Sony killed Betamax).

But where's this heading?

Well poor old Oliver Hartwich jumps the shark and swallows the porn kool aid in Every vice is really a blessing in disguise.

His thesis? Technological change is driven by the porn industry:

Thank God for the porn industry. The seemingly questionable industry does not care about morality, but is nevertheless a constant source of innovation and social improvement.

Um, well actually in the recent past it's been Japanese electronics giants that have been a constant source of innovation and social improvement, and while Japan is charmingly riddled with pornography, trust me that a love of money is equal to a love of sex even in that capital of SM and love hotels and schoolgirl love and manga and hentai.

But Hartwich is determined to get hot and bothered:

On Monday the Herald reported from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where 3D porn was the hot issue for technology geeks this year. A porn actress, who had just starred in one of the industry's first 3D films, was quoted as being ''very excited'' to pioneer this new field. She should be. Once again, the porn industry turns out to be a force for good - unintentionally.

Um, apparently Hartwich has failed to note that in the recent flurry of mainstream 3D film-making, Hollywood has produced a film which has already crossed the US$1 billion threshold, and is being talked about as the biggest box office show of all time. ('Avatar' blasts past $1 billion worldwide). And about the only porn in it is the pornography of violence, and a bit of grappling which implies consensual coitus between tall blue creatures, replete with dissolves and discreet framings - who knows what goes where - not to mention a little mind fucking between the blue things and other creatures.

Of course Hollywood is wildly excited, because 3D is currently immune from piracy, a new fort after vhs failed, dvd failed dismally, and the supposed impenetrable fort of blu-ray and HD-DVD failed like the Maginot line.

Poor Hartwich can barely repress a yawn about useful purposes for the renewed and improved kind of 3D:

Schools will use new 3D television techniques to teach. Imagine how geography lessons will come alive if classes can virtually wander in faraway places using 3D glasses. Physics and chemistry experiments too dangerous or complicated for classrooms could also be shown on a 3D screen.

Should the parents of the future wish to thank the brains behind these teaching improvements, they would be surprised. Far from being the result of some philanthropic engagement, the new technologies will have been conceived not in an ivory tower but as a byproduct of the sex industry.

3D as a by-product of the sex industry? New technologies in the AV arena all from porn?

Oh come on, jerk my chain, or if that's too hot, stroke my tush. 3D has been around since the 1950s - perhaps the bearded aged and run down might even have seen Dial M for Murder in a hoary format called Natural Vision, at a time when pornography was under the counter and the puritanical standards of Senator Conroy reigned supreme.

Dial M was one of the more respectable efforts, if a lesser Hitchcock, in a format designed to battle television, but which disappeared until a revival involving even worse movies in the early nineteen eighties. If you want a short romp through the history of 3D, head here, but we must return to the hot to trot Hartwich.

Porn producers couldn't care less whether they were doing a service to society as long as they can line their pockets. Yet when you look at porn's track record, it has always been at the forefront of technological change. The development of video tapes and DVDs probably owes as much to the demand for sex movies as it does to less raunchy sorts of entertainment.

Well no, simply put - and as a supporter of pornography and a reviler of Conroy - that's just flat wrong. Drivel. Sure porn gets in on the act, and quickly, and that helps generate user take up, but it does fuck all in the way of driving technology.

Take the internet. It began life as a US Department of Defence Advanced Projects Agency (ARPA) gig, and the guys who devised it were in no way driven by pornography. I've met a couple of them, and what they do in their private bedrooms is their business, but in company they present as the mildest mannered and dullest of geeks. You know getting excited about 1 and 0 isn't the same as getting excited about other kinds of insertions:

But Hartwich is still determined to get excited:

The internet is another case in point. With some justification, sexual needs could be called the mother of the web's invention. Without streaming videos of screaming porn stars, bandwidth would not have been added so fast to the global net. Online learning, iTunes and WebTV later benefited from an infrastructure that had been erected for something completely different.

The mother of the web's invention? I'm guessing Hartwich wasn't online in the early days, and didn't see the original internet attempts at porn, which tended to be driven by amateurs (like alt sex stories text repository) while the professionals stayed in the sex shops, and only slowly began to wake up to the web's potential. It was the customers, with their demands, that drove the take up.

The blather from Hartwitch about bandwidth is the sort you can also hear from pirates, who will assure you up hill and down dale that bandwidth would not have been added so fast, but for the desire of pirates to download music, and now videos, in tasty illegal packages, whether by torrent or other file sharers.

At that point, a shard of reality intercepts Hartwich's brain:

But if porn is the mother, then another P is the father of the internet: the Pentagon. Had some military strategists not looked for a technology to make networking between their departments more efficient, the internet would have never started.

Good intentions pave the way to hell, but that's only half the truth. Even more astonishing is that selfish, dubious and even plainly evil plans often pave the way to a better future.

Well I guess that means Hitler was a jolly good idea for Germany and the world since it led to Mel Brooks' The Producers?

Please no cards and letters, I've fully paid up my Godwin's Law subscription, but it seems Hartwich has decided he'd prefer to sell his soul to the devil:

To students of literary classicism this is nothing new. In Goethe's Faust, the demon Mephistopheles describes himself as ''part of that force which would do evil evermore, and yet creates the good''. Two German journalists, Dirk Maxeiner and Michael Miersch, rightly called this insight ''The Mephisto Principle'' and wrote a book about. It carried the nice line ''Why it is better not to be good.''

Maxeiner and Miersch had a point, and that was before the invention of 3D porn. They noted, for example, there had never been a war between two nations if McDonald's had branches in both. It was trade, they claimed, that made countries co-operate peacefully, not some humanitarian ideals. Or, as the great French economist Frederic Bastiat put it: ''When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.''

Oh please. McDonalds as the blessed cheesemakers? From specious nonsense about 3D to even sillier stuff about the causes of world wars 1 and 11? With a good case to be made for the imperial hi jinks of the European powers - all in a bid to match England's stranglehold on trade with its empire - having had a hand in the start of the first world war? As if we've never had trade which nonetheless failed to stop wars?

It's at this point that you realise Hartwich is just peddling the standard Centre for Independent Studies line, which depends on having a fact free interpretation of history:

The economic crisis has made it popular to denounce all business activity as driven by excessive greed. This misunderstands the role of greed. You may be as greedy as you like, but if you don't produce good products and services you will never find customers to buy them. And if you treat your customers in an unfair way, you will soon enough lose them.

And if you make intellectual property like pornography you'll find pirates ready to download it for free, and bugger the relationship with the entrepreneurs. Still I guess some good will come from the evil of piracy. Free content! Yeaay.

Entrepreneurs who are profit-driven - or greedy - have no other choice but to continuously improve their services, and in doing so inadvertently they do good.

Uh huh, back to the eighties and greed is good. Hmm, wonder what Wall Street will look like when they re-make it in 3D?

There is not a single vice that could not also be a blessing in disguise.

Including nuking the shit out of the CIS?

Laziness is no exception. Harry Truman once quipped that ''whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship''.

That lazy government officials could be preferable was demonstrated nicely in Hong Kong. When it was still a British crown colony, its financial secretary, Sir John Cowperthwaite could not be bothered collecting extensive statistics; he just kept taxes low and regulation to a minimum. Whether this was genius or just plain laziness, it definitely helped to make Hong Kong one of the most prosperous places on the planet.

And has made China an economic powerhouse? Or should we attribute that to communism and the Communist party and one state rule? You know, on the basis that when you have an efficient dictatorship, you have a splendid economy, and when you have the gherkin British in charge, looting the empire can be done with style and taste, even if it might involve the odd Opium war or two.

It's a thought to get used to. Sometimes a porn producer can do more good than a dutiful politician.

Or a scribbler who knows diddly squat about the technological innovations he purports to write about as examples for his ideological ratbaggery.

Well enough of all that and the standard CIS nonsense. I feel a song coming on, with a still as an illustration, rather than the hand held in theatre rips that litter YouTube, and it is of course dedicated to Oliver Hartwich. Long may he get excited - myopia certainly helps in matters of sex and political theory - and long may the CIS oppose Senator Conroy ...