Back from 'Take back America' but first back to the Brangelina baby photo debacle
My views on fair use and the future of the internet struck a major chord at the Take Back America panel on "Blogs : The new insurgency" because I spoke about the realities of blogging politics as a business and as a form of activism and was not going to bow to the pre-packaged sound bites of "we are taking back the Democratic party" or the "we have changed politics for good" that people like Matt Stoller are so ready to spechify on these conferences.
Yes, some changes have come. If you want to count the fact that the blogs published by a Puerto Rican black feminist and their contributors are getting quoted in major media; then, yeah, it's a sign of change. But it's only the beginning.
I am not going to bullshit people about what needs to be done because I am not doing this to run for office of get a job as a political consultant for candidate X. I blog because I want to go beyond effecting politics. I want to help build a network of activists who use effectively the internet for social change. The kind of change that creatively effects the very cultural infrastructure of our democracy through heavy doses of progressive libertarian dissent.
Yeah. I do want to change the world. I'm not interested in sounding good for the next job.
I had people stopping me for questions about the issues I raised there; the most important being that in order for progressives to truly empower a blog insurgency we need to own the pipelines to the internet from IP to hosting to open source companies. That there are decades of digital insurgency before the blogs came on the scene and if we don't learn from past experiences and mistakes progressives will never be able to effectively use this very itsy bitsty bit of new media to truly Take Back America.
By the way, most of the people who came to me were women. Not only did they thank me for keeping it real; but they were impressed with the fact that I was the only who could fluently talk about the technology issues surrounding blogs. That in a panel that had two guys who called themselves the face of "net neutrality" and the "netroots".
Sigh.
I will be putting up the podcast in a minute but I wanted to update you one bit of alarming news that supports my points of contention and another one that that made my whole effing year.
First the good news.
Word has gotten to me that yours truly had the Getty Images lawyers and executives panties in a bunch. I am told by my sources that they haven't had this much fun in all the years they've been working at the company. It's seems my writing about the stupidity of exclusives had the bosses internally debating their strategy and well, getting pissed off at the fact that maybe, just maybe, I made sense.
Heh.
I know from published reports on Yahoo!News that Getty Images lawyers were adamant about muscling bloggers with the DCMA (I'm too lazy to look up the link). Here's the link :
[via Shiloh Not Ready For Close-Up, Gets It Anyway - Yahoo! News]:
As for Getty Images, which Pitt and Jolie announced earlier this week would market the photos, they claim the picture could be seen more as a teaser, enticing the celeb-savvy public into seeing the rest of the shots."Our legal team are looking into it and we will take it from there," spokeswoman Alison Crombie told Reuters. "But I really don't think it will devalue the pictures as everyone is dying to see the full set."
I am going to speculate that they were pushed by TimeWarnerAOL lawyers to follow in on their footsteps or else. And I am going to speculate we will be hearing more about the evil TimeWarnerAOL empire now that the debate over net neutrality vs. DMCA is getting not just heated up here but exported and imposed on other countries.
Which takes me to the bad news.
This appeared today on the Washingotn Post (which, btw, seems to have move all their publishing operations to the open source, free to copy and distribute, WordPress) :
U.S. Joins Industry in Piracy War
Overseas, U.S. government officials say, it is in the national interest to work on behalf of Hollywood and other entertainment and intellectual property industries.
Read the whole damn thing and then come back to me later. What I get from this post is that the United States has successfully found a way to institutionalize censorship by way of exporting their fucked up legislation on intellectual property law. And yes, you read it right. I am equating intellectual property law with censorship.
For centuries artists, scholars and creatives of all kinds have fed from each others ideas to create new ones. Intellectual property law basically is a way for corporations to say we own not just the thoughts and ideas produced by our indentured creatives; but we own all thoughts and ideas derived from them.
Corporations could own goods and then the services related to those goods through patents and trademarks before the digital age because they created tangible and material things. And after slavery, being indentured to the company, to the corporation, whether through blue or white collar sweat shops or the mythical golden cuffs that paved the way to the American dream, was easy to enforce since you could control the bodies of your workers and what they produced through factories and office buildings.
In the digital age its only ideas and their representation in electronic anima that's all to be had. And you don't even need humans to manufacture your goods anymore : the new manufacturing plants can be as sexy as a Photoshop or Audium program and the scrascrapers full of scribes have been transformed by MSOffice.
To claim exclusive ownership on digital images, sounds, texts and services and all their derivatives is to plainly claim ownership of thought and creativity. The lawyers of the RIAA, TimeWarner AOL and all the corporations vowing to clamp down on so called piracy now it and are ready to fight for the right to control what you and me and anybody else has to say or with their products --whether these products are humans in the guise of pop culture stars, books, movies, songs, or anything else they claim to have exclusive ownership on.
Lest I am not being clear : Intellectual property law is one step back and and step closer to a new kind of slavery.
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Blogosphere | Blogs | Politics | Take Back America 2006 | Technology | Angelina Jolie | Brad Pitt | Brangelina
More Cease and Desist Stupidity
Submitted by JJ Ross on 16 June 2006 - 10:32am.
From Chris O'Donnell's homeschool blog today -
The RIAA Perfects The Art Of Alienating Customers
The RIAA, which just has to be the dumbest collection of white males ever assembled on this planet, is now sending cease & desist letters to kids who dare post videos of themselves on Myspace or YouTube singing and dancing to their favorite songs.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060614/1837225.shtmlI sometimes wonder if they aren't purposely trying to bankrupt the music industry. What a bunch of asshats.
To do my part to piss them off, check back in around midnight for a video of me performing Like A Virgin. That'll teach 'em.
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THIS IS INSANE!
Submitted by liza on 16 June 2006 - 11:03am.
See what I mean!
It is censorship of the vilest kind. This has nothing to do with protecting a copyright and all to do with controlling creativity and free will.
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Suppression is a Science
Submitted by JJ Ross on 16 June 2006 - 2:35pm.
that changes us, limits our very ability to think, not just our ability to express what we think. You know by now my concern isn't economic or even political, but educational and um, "cognitive" freedom, I guess, is the best way to put it. What I care about it is us being free to learn, to think our own thoughts and have our own ideas, and then to EX-press our thoughts as we choose.
And what's in my mind and what I do with it all, is connected to everything else in the world, which in my world is mostly human expression -- what other people believe, think, create, do and express, and then what I think about it all.
This news story is longish and ancient in online terms (18 months) but I want to explicitly add these thoughts about thinking to the mix as part of what Liza and I are arguing against. I want to expose the looming danger that, much like standardized government schooling, the ultimate result of a culture of copyright law and net controls will be to harness, control and exploit more and more of our thought and expression, until finally laws won't need to limit us -- we'll have lost the ability to think originally or to miss it.
Steven Johnson is the author of several cognition books including one I read cover to cover, ''Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life.''
ESSAY
Tool for Thought
. . .Writers don't normally rely on the computer for the more subtle arts of inspiration and association.
We use the computer to process words, but the ideas that animate those words originate somewhere else, away from the screen. The word processor
has changed the way we write, but it hasn't yet changed the way we think.Changing the way we think, of course, was the cardinal objective of many early computer visionaries: Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 essay that envisioned the modern, hypertext-driven information machine was called ''As We May Think''; Howard Rheingold's wonderful account of computing's pioneers was called ''Tools for Thought.''
...For the past three years, I've been using tools comparable to the new ones hitting the market, so I have extensive firsthand experience with the way the software changes the creative process. (I have used a custom-designed application, created by the programmer Maciej Ceglowski at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, and now use an off-the-shelf program called DEVONthink.)
The raw material the software relies on is an archive of my writings and notes, plus a few thousand choice quotes from books I have read over the past decade: an archive, in other words, of all my old ideas, and the ideas that have
influenced me...What does this mean in practice? Consider how I used the tool in writing my last book, which revolved around the latest developments in brain
science. I would write a paragraph that addressed the human brain's remarkable facility for interpreting facial expressions. I'd then plug
that paragraph into the software, and ask it to find other, similar passages in my archive...Before long a larger idea had taken shape in my head, built out of the trail of associations the machine had assembled for me.
Compare that to the traditional way of exploring your files, where the computer is like a dutiful, but dumb, butler: ''Find me that document about the chimpanzees!'' That's searching.
The other feels different, so different that we don't quite have a verb for it: it's riffing, or brainstorming, or exploring. There are false starts and red herrings, to be sure, but there are just as many happy accidents and unexpected discoveries. Indeed, the fuzziness of the results is part of what makes the software so powerful... almost lyrical connections between ideas.
I'm now working on a project that involves
the history of the London sewers. The other day I ran a search that included the word ''sewage'' several times. Because the software knows the word ''waste'' is often used alongside ''sewage'' it directed me to a quote that explained the way bones evolved in vertebrate bodies: by repurposing the calcium waste products created by the metabolism of cells.That might seem like an errant result, but it sent me off on a long and fruitful tangent into the way complex systems -- whether cities or bodies -- find productive uses for the waste they create. It's still early, but I may well get an entire chapter out of that little spark of an idea.
Now, strictly speaking, who is responsible for that initial idea? Was it me or the software? It sounds like a facetious question, but I mean it
seriously.Obviously, the computer wasn't conscious of the idea taking shape, and I supplied the conceptual glue that linked the London sewers to cell metabolism. But I'm not at all confident I would have made the initial connection without the help of the software. The idea was a true collaboration, two very different kinds of intelligence playing off each other, one carbon-based, the other silicon.
IF these tools do get adopted, will they affect the kinds of books and essays people write?
I suspect they might, because they are not as helpful to narratives or linear arguments; they're associative tools ultimately. They don't do cause-and-effect as well as they do ''x reminds me of y.'' So they're ideally suited for books organized around ideas rather than single narrative threads: more ''Lives of a Cell'' and
''The Tipping Point'' than ''Seabiscuit.''... When you're freewheeling through ideas that you yourself have collated -- particularly when you'd long ago forgotten about them -- there's something about the experience that seems uncannily like freewheeling through the corridors of your own memory.
It feels like thinking.
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Glad You're Back - On Your Side!
Just whistle when I can help. . .