"We are custodians of a miracle. For billions of miles in all directions there is nothing, nowhere like this."

On my tenth day in the jungle, the morning after the Shivaratri party (Shiva's birthday - a bit like Christmas), I finally met my first native monkey. Almost human size, like Hanuman , with a white body and black face, and arms long enough to give me a good clobber, he thundered in with graceful side swings over my tent to the tree above - thousands of leaves heralding his arrival like confetti. The sound at first was so great, I thought perhaps I was under attack. We looked each other in the eye and he reclined on a branch before turning to me suddenly, scowling and angry. He indicated beneath him - a pile of pink toilet paper someone had left under the tree and gave me a universal gesture with his outstretched palm: 'clean this shit up', before leaving fast with his entourage through the trees. The conversation couldn't have been clearer.

Imagine a society based not on the pound or dollar. Where these names related only to a piece of paper you used sometimes to exchange for goods and services. But instead where the most powerful principle is karma - doing good work. It is not so strange an idea to us, that what goes around comes around - it was Newton, after all, who stated that for every action will be an equal and opposite reaction. But it's a fundamental principle here in India, with society perhaps built on it, while in the West it's mostly incompatible with everyday life.

For if we say that our highest goal is to be happy, and if we know that money will buy us neither love nor hapiness - that in truth the highest levels of depression are in the richest nations, then money takes on a much less significant role. Good work is key. And this includes the work you do to earn money, and the energy you manifest with those around you. If you keep creating good vibrations more come back to you. It's as if to become one with the ultimate (god, tao, fate, divine, spirit, pi, maths, whatever), you help anyone who asks, because the ultimate serves everything.

And the more I look at this system, which respects nature - in fact starts with respect for nature, and the feminine as much as the masculine, the more it seems that India is years ahead of us. Not in terms of technology or infrastructure or inequality or so forth. But in wisdom.

Our financial system seems built not on karma, but on debt and consumerism, which in turn is dependent on creating a sense of  individual inadequacy, to facilitate increased consumption. And this constant demand for us to always be consuming is not because the big business bosses want to work overtime or are particularly evil. It's that our financial system is so heavily based on debt, that if the economy does not constantly expand, we will be unable to keep up interest payments on the debt of the money we spend and the economy would crash.

Paul Grignon's 47 minute animated film Money as Debt - is very illuminating on the subject (and more than a little scary).

Which is not to say the market is defunct. Quite the reverse. There's something really strange about letting go of possessions in Goa, living native in the forest with monkeys and snakes and spiders, and returning to the shops to buy cheese, fresh fruit and veg, goods from around the world, beautiful clothes and so on - and for next to nothing, normally. For all my socialist instincts I came back to society loving global trade.

Even credit makes sense when it's issued at source. Sometimes you have lots of money, you pay your bills. Other times you don't and it's a tight few days or week, so the shopkeeper or restaurant or whoever, waits until you have money. But there's no interest, no banks, no beurocracy - just human contact and trust.

It seems that what each of us really wants - hapiness, health and wellbeing - not to mention lots of free time and being close to our friends and family, and a job we believe in and enjoy, is actually not so difficult. The fact we don't have it in the west is not because it is illusive or hard to find., Hundreds of millions of people here - people with nothing, materially, to speak of - have much of that. As a European who has long lived in Goa - told me: the greatest luxuries for him, the things most valuable to help him live his life well, are time and space

So for us in the West to find it perhaps we simply need to stop thinking that finding hapiness is in anyway about aquiring something or getting somewhere, but just a shift in our perception to see that whatever we have right now - even if it is not as good as the Jones's - is perfect. And to train our brain, and our imaginative faculties to view what happens to us in this way so that we don't get mirred by the bleak unfair times, but instead hope. And then do good.

And as well as helping us towards the hapiness that should be our birth-right, such an attitude shift would also start to give the planet and its people the protection and respect she needs.

And this, I think, is the challenge facing filmmakers in the coming years - filmmakers who want their work to reflect or support improvements in people and the world, and the aversion of possible environmental/resource/political catastrophe.

Without this then we really may be in trouble. 

There is much to see in the hearts and minds of people I meet here to think such a change could be possible - and maybe bloodless, and maybe soon. Even the wasted tourists whose Withnail-style posturing would make Bachus reach for the Alka Seltzer, even they seem to get it eventually.

We're sick of living miserably in office cattle pens, working like dogs so we can afford to pay off the bill for the things we worked like dogs to produce.

God is hope, as a restaurant owner from Manali said to me recently. And we need hope now - for the more I look at it, the more it feels we have the most important task in the solar system - we are custodians of a miracle. For billions of miles in all directions there is nothing, nowhere like this. There is no backup plan or second life. It's this. The planet is beautiful and incredible, and while our society may be like a teenager refusing to listen to the wisdom of his parents and tidy its room and quit smoking, we are evolving.

We may only just be beginning to take our instructions from nature, rather than barking out orders like a dying general clutching onto a vanishing empire, yet there is, I think, hope.

So the UK government is looking at following in French President Sarkozy's footsteps by forcing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to monitor thier customer's web usage and disconnect them (after a warning) if they are found to be downloading illegally. This switch of legal responsibility from the copyright owner to the internet provider is significant - but more alarmingly so is the change of web access into something which can be monitored and controlled by the people providing you with access. I'm supposed to be taking time out in India, but couldn't resist sharing my thoughts when I heard the news.

Internet Protocol is built on the all-data-is-equal model, where anonymous packets of information are sent from servers to users, with no-one in between having the faintest idea what that data is. The switch to a system (supposing it can be securely built) which identifies this traffic and acts as a result is a culture shift in the fundamental nature of the web - potentially allowing, for example, ISPs to block politically sensitive material, or provide faster, more stable web access to big fee-paying webisites over slow ones.

Piracy is of course a terrifying prospect for the film industry if it simply heralds a culture of not paying for content. Unlike the music sector, non-piratable aspects of the film business are rarely profitable (while Radiohead makes over three quarters of its income from touring, most films are lucky to cover their marketing costs for a cinema release). Furthermore, while you can make a film on no budget, it's hardly the same as recording an album in your bedroom or mastering on your laptop; the lack of money will be obvious on screen. Films are the most expensive artform going, and a future where users do not expect to pay for the films they watch at home would lead us into the hands of the Orange Film Finance board from the cinema ads, putting up the budget of a film in return for brand exposure. It's a horrible prospect.

But at the same time, the Recording Industry of America's heavy handed approach with music downloaders (sending huge fines and court summons to young children and dying seniors) has done nothing but cement resentment  and hostility to the music industry . Music sales still fall and downloading still rises. The proposal, currently under discussion, may help the film industry avoid considering new business models and ways of operating in the short term, but it also entrenches an us-vs-them attitude and hardening the resolve of pirates while inevitably forcing ISPs to put up their costs, alienating consumers. And what too of shared networks and free-wifi - will public libraries, bars, cafes and National Express trains (and indeed my own house) have to turn off open access for fear that someone somewhere will be using the bandwidth to download something illegal, forcing the ISP to shut down access for all? Potentially terrible PR for the film industry, at a time when survival seems pinned on building a positive relationship with audiences.

I'd also argue that the jury is still out over the impact of piracy on lower-budget, niche and independent films. Some would say that it acts as a 'try before you buy' on high-risk / high-quality films with unknown actors and directors - ie non-studio films. Researching and writing one of the first major market reports into making money from creative assets in the digital age, for Informa in 2001, and watched the shifts ever since, including the huge DRM backlash, and the massive increase in previously unknown MySpace (etc) acts who rise to prominence through giving their music away for free, not to mention Radiohead's highly successful experiment and Four Eyed Monsters, I'm inclined to agree that at a certain level, peer-to-peer sharing is a useful form of marketing. Little Miss Sunshine was widely available to download and watch online through sites like PeakVid and Alluc, yet people I know who first watched it online went on to buy multiple copies - for themselves and friends as gifts.

The people who stand to lose the most in cash terms are perhaps the studios with major tentpole releases, where losing 30% of DVD sales to piracy on say Lord of The Rings, is a significant sum of money when you consider it has made $6bn... (cont.)

"For any idea you can imagine — and some you can't — there are thousands of articles and images electronically swirling around the globe. But that's not the real story. That's not the big news. The word that's going around, the word that's finally getting out, is something much larger, far more fundamental. The word that's passing like a spark from keyboard to screen, from heart to mind, is the permission we're giving ourselves and each other: to be human and to speak as humans."
Chris Locke, The Cluetrain Manifesto

Why are we doing this? It's easy to look at the growth of the moving image worldwide in its ceaseless expansion to every corner of our lives, from living rooms to pubs, stations, restaurants, buses, and our pockets; to see this addictive and mesmerising glare against the backdrop of escalating global problems and question it.

"So the guys who started this business all cheated somebody to get there, and now they're being cheated, perhaps, by all these crazy, geeky people all over the internet. I must say, my anguish level is not great."
Richard Dreyfuss

"although iTunes has 70% of the pay to download music market - only 1 in 40 of all tracks downloaded on the web are ever paid for. That's 2.5%"

For many years now people have been telling us how much the media world is changing. And it is. Faster than we ever imagined.

I downloaded my first Torrent this week. It took me about 20 minutes to download and install the software and get an album called Wu Orleans - a mash-up of Old New Orleans Blues and the Wu Tang Clan which will never appear in a shop. There’s the rub - if I wanted to pay to buy the album I wouldn’t be able. Like DJ ‘Gnarls Barkleys’ Dangermouse’s Grey Album, and DJ BC’s Let it Beastles it’s in a strange category of illegal downloads where there’s no legitimate alternative. The choice is between never hearing these songs or breaking copyright law. DJ BC and Dangermouse are so good at what they do that the idea of simply never listening to the tracks wasn’t really an option.

But now, as a result, I have a piece of software which could, if I so chose, allow me to download pretty much any album, TV, piece of software or film. For free. I won’t. But I could.

"As filmmakers we believe that no film can be too personal. The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments. Size is irrelevant. Perfection is not an aim. An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude.”
Lorenza Mazzetti, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reiz, Tony Richardson - The Free Film Movement

"For every entry in the encyclopedia, there is now a Web site. For any idea you can imagine — and some you can't — there are thousands of articles and images electronically swirling around the globe. But that's not the real story. That's not the big news. The word that's going around, the word that's finally getting out, is something much larger, far more fundamental. The word that's passing like a spark from keyboard to screen, from heart to mind, is the permission we're giving ourselves and each other: to be human and to speak as humans."
Chris Locke, The Cluetrain Manifesto (Chapter 1)

Looking again at James MacGregor's guide to the Free Film Movement  this morning, I was struck by how similar its founding statement is to some of the central ideas of Cluetrain. For those who haven't heard of it (which until a few months back included me), The Cluetrain Manifesto is an essay published by Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger in 1999 looking at how business and communication was evolving on the Internet. Unlike the typical corporate sponsored report of that period, Cluetrain recognised a massive sea change in nature of business transactions, shifting from heavy top down systems (we will tell you what to buy) to loose non-heirarchical structures like eBay, and tranposing this shift to communication and the media saw a revolution brewing. At its heart is the idea that only by becoming more personal - as personal as is humanly possible - would an organisation or individual be able to stand out on the web where there are billions of pages and products competing for attention.

"We have killed all our Gods, they offer us nothing that a scientist cannot dismiss or add doubt to. Yet our hunger for a force or parental energy bigger than ourselves or our all-too-human parents has moved to a religion of capitalism, which requires only that you attend regular services at the Church of TV and pay homage through diligent consumption. Spirtualism exists enough to allow us to find a faith that makes us feel better about death, and indeed about ourselves and the way we have chosen to live, and it asks for nothing in return but the occasional burst of self righteousness after an organic vegan lunch or a day of yoga and meditation. And the rest of the time the mighty uber-faith of desire and consumption is something we can all sign up to, even if in our quieter and more humble moments we suspect it isn't really doing many of us much good – occasionally wondering if we will have much to bequeath our descendants beyond partially flooded mass graves and landfill sites."