Slashdot Mirror
Citizen Case, DVD-CCA, Napster, and MP3
This weekend, Josh Rosenberg, a Slashdot reader and Drexel University student, sent the following e-mail:
"Dear Jon Katz,
Today [Friday], Slashdot posted a series of related stories. There is the one about Napster being banned in colleges, and even more closely tied together are the articles and threads about DVD reverse engineering. There are well over 1000 comments about these topics, and just by browsing at a level of 3, I can see how many good ideas are mentioned within.
"Many of these ideas, however, need a mass unifying force to have any real effect. (Ad banners containing the deCSS source will be no good if there are only 10 out there and they don't point to anything useful. Writing letters to the copyright office will be no good if they are flames, or perhaps more relevant, if they are not in Word, wordperfect, or pdf format.
"Can you be that unifying force?... Can you make some clear suggestions to the community that can hopefully be followed en masse? As I see it, the Slashdot masses are needed now more than ever."
This e-mail, one of a number like it, had a powerful impact on me. No single person can be a unifying force for so diverse a place as Slashdot, and Josh's plea for constructive suggestions is complicated. But the actions he cited aren't occurring in a vacuum. He's right to perceive a common thread. They aren't unrelated. They are all very much linked by a growing, runaway menace: corporatism. And they are in fundamental conflict with open source notions of technology and culture, on the rise in recent years, from Linux to MP3 to DVD's.
The Net and Web, and the technological creativity, cultural outpouring and individual expression that has accompanied their growth, are incompatible with the greedy and powerful corporations moving to dominate burgeoning new markets and economic opportunities online. Corporatism finds intolerable the outpouring of individualism the growing sense of choice and control that typifies the Internet, and which is closely related to the issues behind the DVD - CCA, Napster and Mp3 cases (Josh might have mentioned Amazon.com's legal steps to patent one-click shopping and AOL's legal efforts to block Microsoft from using instant messaging programs as well).
This conflict pits millions of people newly empowered by technology (to access information for free, and choose their own culture such as music, books, software innovations and movies) against increasingly wealthy, lawsuit-happy, politically influential corporations who will fight to restrict those choices in order to control content (product) make money and retain power.
In many ways, the Net has been an open frontier, generating an astonishing amount of creativity, information-sharing and experimentation. The ideology of corporatism dictates that those kinds of unrestricted boundaries be closed. Corporations have begun deploying lawyers, and seeking a wide range of patents, copyright protections, restraining orders and other actions that are the Net equivalent of fences and borders. As the primary contributors to political campaigns, they will certainly seek the help of government regulators as well.
The geek conceit has been that the Net is too big and diverse for anyone to restrict, but this growing litany of aggressive legal action suggests otherwise. Corporatism has billions of dollars at its disposal, as well as access to platoons of attorneys, politicians and lobbyists.
Any real solution or response of the kind Josh Rosenberg seeks begins with the realization that corporatism is, in fact, a serious challenge that needs to be countered. Distributing source codes for disputed programs is certainly one highly effective option, as it makes legal challenges pointless. Supporting sympathetic political candidates -- these are rare -- is another option. So is contributing money for legal challenges.
Punishing censorious and proprietary corporations by refusing to buy their products may be the readiest, and the most powerful option. Although antithetical to many of the Libertarian impulses on the Net, boycotts are more feared by corporations than any other single threat. It might well be time to send some economic messages. People have to make their own choices. In my own case, I stopped buying books from Amazon.com after their one-click patent infringement suit against Barnes & Noble.com. If ten or twenty thousand people did the same, they might very well re-consider the suit.
(If you have other ideas, please post them below)
But are these responses premature? Are Netizens really less apathetic and comfortable than their non-virtual counterparts?
The first step seems a realization that we are suddenly up to our necks in a political, economic and technological struggle -- the most important political conflict of the 21st century, perhaps -- the outcome of which will say much about our personal freedom, technological choices and cultural expression. So far, there is no such consensus or consciousness.
Most of the people reading this probably don't share Josh's prescient concern. They believe we are in good and prosperous times, and have little reason to fear encroaching corporatism. In this regard, we are still an unconscious civilization. People like Josh could change that quickly.
To see our new future, and to better grasp the context in which the DVD, Napster and RIAA vs. MP3 cases are occurring, get hold of last week's "Newsweek" and see the cheerful face on the cover of "Citizen Case," who, at 41, has miraculously become our new national corporatist leader, momentarily crowding aside the distracted Bill Gates.
In the enthusiastically approving magazine article, one of a torrent of excited journalistic accounts of his life, Case spouts the corporatist ideology for the umpteenth time in recent days: the inevitabilities of globalization, the ethos of the marketplace and the growing power of technology as a force in modern life. These are the rationales for Napster, DVD and the ongoing war on MP3's.
Citizen Case is a bland tycoon indeed, the media baron as vanilla ice cream, too dull to hate or fear. The hapless magazine writer, breathlessly spreading the news that Citizen Case is such a regular guy that he doesn't even have a pool or tennis court, is nearly desperate to wring a single quote out of the new Monarch of the Information Age. What, he pleads, is Citizen Case's overarching philosophy?
"To change people's lives."
Citizen Case, says Newsweek, sent away for anything he could get for free when he was a tot, getting himself on mailing lists for records, consumer-product samples and other geegaws. "His family," reports the magazine, "recalled that he was eager to be first to the mailbox every day. (Steve, you've got mail!)"
Gads. Come back, Bill. All is forgiven.
For more than a century, sci-fi writers, futurists and filmmakers - H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Mary Shelley, George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke, Ridley Scott ("Blade Runner"), the Wachowski brothers ("The Matrix") - have been painting bleak portraits of life in the 2lst Century, our time.
Some have pictured a world engulfed by war and high-tech weaponry; others foresee humanity overrun by runaway technologies from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering. The sci-fi writers were deceptively political. Most of them lived in a time when governments were especially brutal and predatory, and they inevitably jumped to the conclusion that evil political systems would conquer the human spirit.
How could they have imagined that we are, instead, being stalked by invasive and predatory corporations, who don't want to torture or kill us, because each of us is somebody's target demographic. As long as we don't hack into their computer systems, give up some privacy and cash, accept mediocre culture, gadgetry and software, we seem relatively safe, at least for now.
Still, a lot of the issues the futurists raised are relevant to the year 2000.
They evoke a nameless sort of bigness, an overwhelming intrusion by forces so wealthy and powerful, all-knowing and corrupting, that they crush the individual, place profit above human, moral and social concerns, corrupt the police and political system, and quell opposition and resistance. They smother us in gadgetry and entertain us nearly to death. Orwell and Huxley would have absolutely feasted on the image of the lonely citizen, up for hours trying to reach Tech Support or Customer Service, shunted from one automated menu to the other until he quits in disgust or perseveres heroically. This is, in fact, a uniquely American social equivalent of the Olympic trial, a hellish kind of cultural decathlon - only the bravest and most determined can get through to another human being and get the help they are entitled to receive.
So far, the future seems to be going its own way, and the futurists have been partly right, partly wrong. Life for many people is immeasurably better. Work is safer, cleaner. Lifespans are longer, food more plentiful. Leisure time and entertainment technology spawn vast new amusement industries.
The Luddites who violently rebelled against the advent of the Industrial Revolution in England in the 19th century rioted against what they believed would be impossible working conditions. In fact, labor conditions were often so brutal then that the Industrial Revolution is credited as having helped produce both communism and fascism in response, along with countless eruptions, rebellions and civil wars. Both movements promised, and then failed to deliver, better and more human working conditions.
Even though the modern workplaces has serious problems - unequal access to technology, crummy jobs, lack of benefits, security, and individual creativity - employed workers are not nearly as bad off as the Luddites were, or as many feared workers would be at the beginning of the 21st century.
We are healthier, safer, and having more fun than any previous American generation. Life before the Multiplex was bleaker.
But in some ways life is worse - more polluted, crowded, ugly, and complicated and less spiritual, and certainly less private. In parts of this county and world, job markets are quixotic or collapsing, standards of living slipping, social programs weakening. Divisiveness seems inevitable in a world in which access to new technologies spells the difference between education and ignorance, poverty and wealth, opportunity and despair. And increasingly, we can see, as Josh Rosenberg has, growing challenges to freedom and creative growth.
Our time is defined by symbols. One newsmagazine selects the founder of an online book and retailing service as the Man of the Millennial Year, and the other celebrates the unpretentious "Citizen Case," (he drives a VW, wrote the stunned reporter) creator of one the blandest, most consumer-abusive Internet Service Providers.
In a sense "Citizen Case" is pathetic compared to Orwell's Big Brother, who also took pains to present himself as cheerful, ordinary and bland while amassing fearsome power and information. He also, he told his cowed citizens, wanted to change their lives for the better, and had only their best interests at heart.
We would, Orwell warned, become inured to warnings from the handful of people who saw this coming. We'd deem them mad, then make them mad.
Just because you're right, his helpless Winston repeated to himself over and over again after being jailed by Big Brother, doesn't mean that you're crazy. But in Orwell's world, this mantra comes too late. If you see too much and complain, you are crazy, according to the people who run society. Soon enough, in Orwell's world and ours, the insane are envied by the sane.
It's no accident that in the past few months, three organizations have occupied our energy, imagination and consciousness as we bumble into the next century. There was the continuing government confrontation with Microsoft, which had become a new kind of company, bigger and more powerful than any that preceded it.
Then there were the startling eruptions in Seattle over the gathering of the World Trade Organization, attracting a polyglot coalition of protesters, many enraged at what they perceived as the greedy behavior of increasingly powerful multinational corporations.
But the most significant organization was born last week, dominating our cultural and economic news - a proposed corporation that would instantly dwarf Microsoft and every other corporation in history. Of the many amazing qualities of the gargantuan AOL/Time-Warner, perhaps the most remarkable is that even though the list of things it owns is two feet long, they are almost all intangible - ISP's, messaging systems, movies, music labels, cable operating systems. In a few years, you'll probably be able to fit the the whole company's holding on a couple of CD's or micro-chips. That says a lot about how valuable information has become in the Digital Age.
As increasingly happens in our boom-benumbed economy, where a record-breaking NASDAQ and an Everest-like Dow have become our only common national political goals, news of the merger obsessed business writers and journalists for a few days, then receded to the back pages and to thousands of mailing lists, Web logs and e-trading messaging boards. When it comes to the volatile mix of money and technology, Americans no longer have the attention span to get seriously concerned about anything for more than a few news cycles.
AOL and Time-Warner had barely formed their new $350 billion monstrosity before it became clear that other conglomerates would need to soon arrange their own super mega-mergers in order to compete with this mega-merger. In a few weeks, we'll have three or four multi-billion-dollar companies controlling much of our information and cultural lives.
The AOL/Time-Warner marriage is a fine metaphor for many of the futuristic predictions about our time.
Almost everything about the merger seems wrong. The company is too big, too unwieldy. It will know too much about our tastes. America Online is a new media company, growing along the flexible, hi-tech risk-taking that is the hallmark of tech industries. Many investors of both companies are twitchy about the merger. Time-Warner is an old media company, vast, lumbering, conservative, much better at acquiring things than creating them. Case, stubborn and unassuming as he's described as being, has never undertaken anything so remotely as complex as fusing these two worlds.
But there's no doubt that if the merger happens, Case will become one of the most powerful men in the world, the de facto voice of contemporary techno-driven corporatism. Does that make him someone to fear?
Orwell and Huxley were bounded by what they knew, and believed only governments should be feared, that only they could amass this kind of power, promote this degree of mass-marketed conformity, monitor private lives, squelch competition, individual voices and entrepeneurial spirit. And treat their citizenry (customers) with arrogance and contempt.
It turns out that governments aren't nearly as efficient at all of the above as large corporations.
In the 20th century, the governments that aspired to such total domination all failed. The human drive for individuality and freedom, it turns out, is more potent than fearsome weaponry and cadres of secret police. But the offspring of the world's newest global movement - corporatism - are doing much better.
They are less overtly malignant and heavy-handed, and have a simpler, all-inclusive ideology: money and market domination. Political power is less appealing and much less profitable. Everything else - working conditions, job security, the environment, individual creativity - is subordinated to the annual stockholder's profit.
In this new culture, critics don't have to be silenced or imprisoned. They just rail from the fringes until they wear themselves out. Winston wouldn't have been thrown in jail in the year 2000. Steve Case would woo him with some stock options, he'd get a talk show on MSNBC, or, most likely, he'd end up ranting into the ether on some Web log, his enemies and targets never even aware of his existence. Maybe somebody would take out a restraining order against him.
This is perhaps the strangest lesson of Seattle; the futility of the idealistic kids, labor types, environmental warriors and others who saved their money to trek out there. Unlike Winston, they aren't even accorded the dignity of being persecuted. They aren't threatening enough. Their targets could hardly view them as more toothless or ridiculous.
Curiously, the group the corporatists fear aren't the college kids with picket signs, but the handful of kids who can really fiddle with the machinery - the Uber-Hackers. Here, Orwell was right on the beam. The powers that be wasted no time in getting to Kevin Mitnick (now being released) and the handful of other renegades who hack governmental and corporate computers, spread viruses, or penetrate the systems that run the system.
They are not ignored or dismissed; they're treated like major criminals, rounded up by platoons of high-tech federal cops, paraded before reporters, jailed for years. Perhaps they signify the teeth behind the unpretentious corporate smile, the warning to the rest of us to behave, that things aren't quite as benign as they might appear.
The Libertarians appear to have gotten what they wished for, always a dangerous thing. Government now appears to exist primarily to collect taxes, and move paper and money around, and occasionally intervene in ugly foreign hotspots. We no longer even expect it to protect freedom, check power or monitor increasingly wealthy private interests.
Corporatism has also stripped the press of any bite, mostly by acquiring it. Government regulators are flummoxed, uncertain of whether to try and contain this new kind of fluid, evolving global economy, or simple take their best shots (the Microsoft trial) at appearing to be on the case. With corporations now the primary contributors to the political system, Congress is unlikely to take up this role either. That means there's no one around to slow this process, question its impact, or challenge it much.
The only entity smart enough or strong enough to challenge or disrupt the corporatists - the young techno-elite building the very technology they use, increasingly control and profit from - seem anesthetized, sated by the booming, techno-driven global economy, enjoying full employment and soaring salaries, dazzled by the most extraordinary array of toys and interactive entertainment machinery ever assembled. They don't have to be conquered; they've already been co-opted.
The AOL/Time-Warner merger offers us one of those opportunities to define the present and shape the future, depending on whether it's permitted to happen or not, or whether or not we choose to oppose it. If it does happen, the futurists warnings about life in a world dominated by bigness, greed and homogeneity will take another step towards reality.
In the corporatist culture, progress depends on public conformity, the unexamined life, since even a little scrutiny invites regulation, interference and public doubt. Nowhere in Newsweek or in any of Citizen Case's many public appearances recently does he acknowledge a single one of the questions or criticisms being raised about his new company.
Case is a skilled corporate ideologist, even if he isn't so great at getting his customers online quickly. He seems to know that the system he now represents depends on citizen desire for inner comfort, whereas creativity, freedom and individualism depend on self-examination and discomfort. Such unease, a willingness to be discontented, is a hallmark of geek culture, and the beginnings of a conscious civilization.
It may also be the best hope for the 21st century which is, despite all the New Year's pyro-technics, off to a crummy start, as Josh Rosenberg noticed. But his e-mail struck a hopeful chord, especially if it does, in fact, signal the beginning of a broader awakening.
Josh Rosenberg asked good questions, and he deserves good answers. Anybody who has ideas or solutions is welcome to post them here:
A few disagreements, though: "But in some ways life is worse - more polluted, crowded, ugly, and complicated and less spiritual, and certainly less private." More crowded and less private, perhaps, though they seem contradictory. No one notices you in a crowd (3 ppl will read this post). As to polluted and ugly, the world (or at least my little part of it) was dirtier in 1970 before governments (mostly N. American and European) started making the corporates clean up their acts. There is no more lead paint, no more lead and much less sulfer oxides spewing from my tailpipe, no more asbestos, no more DDT. Vegetation around the e. st. louis area is turning green, and there is even a little vegetation in that heavily polluted area. Of course, ugly is in the eye of the beholder.
The plutonium the US and USSR spewed into the atmosphere with their damned nuke bombs in the mid 20th century will never go away. However, they can blame all the cancers on cigarettes, so who cares about all the plutonium?
As to the luddites, they weren't afraid of bad working conditions, they were afraid of no working conditions. John Henry and ten like him could not outdrive the track machines.
"Orwell and Huxley were bounded by what they knew, and believed only governments should be feared..." these companies ARE governments. They make their own laws and are accountable to no one (except the dollar), while the "real" governments are accountable to them. There is little difference between Case, Jobs, Gates, or Charlemaigne.
Unlike that God awful novel 1984, there are more than one "Winston". And like Jon says, all are shouting in the wilderness. And for absolutely nothing.
No force beats money. In 1970 we thought we'd be smoking marijuana in bars by now. Why is it still illegal? Simple- there is too much money to be made from the illegal crop. It will never replace the legal but less safe commercial nausea meds, because it can't be patented. For the same reason, it will never be legal to use for aids or chemo relief.
An entire generation railed against the pot laws, and did not prevail. So what in the HELL can we do about RealAudio? Nothing, I fear.
The same as me and Don Quijote- as much as we can; wage a one man boycott, write web pages few will read, tilt at windmills. As for Mitnik, can you explain to me how his strolling through databases without touching anything helps? How defacing the army's web page for a half hour helps? How hacking and vandalizing MY computer last summer helped? I'm not part of the corporate structure! I'm about as powerless as you can get. When one of you "godlike" innefectuals completely wipe all RealAudio's stolen information I'll be impressed. Until then, just shut up. Mitnik is a loser, not a hero. He did it for fun, not to "get back at the man". When someone goes to jail for wiping the WTO databases I'll cheer. Until then I'll shake my head in wonder and exasperation.
"Corporatism has also stripped the press of any bite, mostly by acquiring it." Well, they may 0wn /. and planet quake, but ,a href "http://www.hulka.com">Hulka's is still online; Flamethrower is still online, and the Springfield Fragfest is still untouched. The Fragfest doesn't even have banners.
As to patents- so what? they expire. RSA, anyone? I'll have fries with mine...
steve mcgrew (password at home)
300 hits a day and all but 70 looking for cheats. It doesn't bode well for our society.
Damn, this guy makes a moronic first-grader spelling error in the first line and it gets moderated up to five?
Moderators are on crank tonight....
Give me a break. DeCSS isn't harming anyone. The Zoran SoftDVD program was hacked to allow copying shortly after it came out in 1997. Yes, people have been copying DVDs since they came out 3 years ago. Also the factories in China making DVD copies. DeCSS changes nothing - except that Linux users can watch DVDs now.
Dear Citizens:
We are facing a CRISIS in America. A crisis in the workplace. A crisis of GENDER INEQUALITY. A crisis that affects us all.
Now, in the last year of the 20th century, you wouldn't expect to still find sexism and gender discrimination in the workspace, would you? Well, think again.
Employment figures recently RELEASED BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT have something STUNNING and DISGRACEFUL to say!
FACT: For every dollar a man makes, A WOMAN GETS SIXTY CENTS!
What they DON'T tell you: Do the math! Once the woman gets her sixty cents, ONLY FOURTY CENTS ARE LEFT FOR THE MAN!
For every dollar the man makes:
a woman - sixty cents
the man - fourty cents
THE WOMAN GETS PAID FIFTY PERCENT MORE FOR THE SAME WORK! WE MUST NOT STAND FOR THIS GENDER GAP IN THE WORKPLACE!
What can YOU do?
Write to your Congresspersun and tell her or him "MEN DEMAND EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK! WE WANT OUR FAIR SHARE! END THE PAY GAP."
Only when the femeinine stranglehold on the workplace is broken, and men no longer get 50% less pay than women, will this country be TRULY FREE.
Thank you for reading, brothers and sisters!!!
The size of the company is actually much easier to define than many would like to admit. The number of employees defines the size of a company. The easiest way to prevent monopolies is to diallow corporations with over 10,000 (this is an arbitrary number) employees world-wide from operating in the US. This would ensure that welfare of a large population of people cannot be tied to the survival of any one large corporation. At the same time, it would be large enough to ensure proper specialization of labor within the corporation for it to stay efficient at doing whatever it does. Any corporation larger than that is only using its size to squash competition and to effect to bully governments. It does not add any value to its customers. Many corporations have reach their sizes by having many unrelated or very loosly related companies within them. This often leads to propriatarization of information and monoplistic situations. Limiting the number of employees would force commoditazation of services. Which always leads to better pricings and services through competition.
Stop encouraging Jon Katz.
Another long meandering rant by Katz that could have been distilled down to these two sentences:
"In this new culture, critics don't have to be silenced or imprisoned. They just rail from the fringes until they wear themselves out."
The real fear of corporatism which Jon and most people don't seem to get is the fact you have no say over it. Unlike a government you can't overthrow it by killing a few individuals and removing the legitmacy or sovreignty of the system. Nope the only real option is to drop out or ignore it all together. Stop spending money on this crap and live your life. The system will only change when a critical mass of people ignore the system.
to boycott Jon Katz. He hates jerks. He hates corporations. He hates brevity. He loves freaky children. And he makes it my problem.
So, I won't be buying his book. I'll make sure to let him know who holds his purse strings. Want to solve these problems, Jon-boy? Get off your silly soapbox and compete. Either that, or crawl back in your basement to fetch another bottle of whine.
Don't forget that some corporations buy out and resurrect old names to lend themselves credibility. Think of "Packard Bell" or even the long list of owners of the title of the SF magazine "Amazing" gaining the recognition of an old, familiar name.
Remember that SF isn't about making *accurate* predictions, but rather *entertaining*, even thought-provoking ones.
> Yes, college campuses are banning Napster, but the primary impetus is not the RIAA. The RIAA has
> had some say, but the primary reason is that Napster is taking over bandwidth.
Agree completely. College networks have terms of use and wasting bandwidth for non-educational purposes is not acceptable. Besides, any group that wants to _legally_ distribute digital audio does not have to use Napster.
Also, I think that Napster does have a strong contributory infringement case against it... it's hard to argue that their system was not designed to encourage copyright infringement.
> As for DeCSS, I have no sympathy for them, either. Hacking the proprietary encoding on a DVD
> I equate with cracking the security of a computer
Completely disagree. "Cracking the security" of a computer involves breaking into to someone else's computer, misusing someone else's property. The people who wrote DeCSS did so by taking apart a DVD player that they legally bought. Who are you to say what someone can or cannot do to their own private property? I hope you do not think the government or any other corporation or person has the right to control what you do in your own home.
> DeCSS is then like giving out the method to the entire world.
No, the information has already been given out. At this point, anyone who wants to use DeCSS to break the law can do so, and no judge or court of law will stop them. On the other hand, if DeCSS is banned in the USA, the only result that will possibly have is to make it difficult or impossible for people to use DeCSS _legally_, like to watch DVDs that they bought. In other words, the guilty will go free and the innocent will be punished.
> I don't want to circumvent the security mechanisms in place that allow companies to make
> money so they can make films and make DVDs
Now that the information is public, there is no security. Can't you see that?
> The Internet is not devoid of laws.
The Internet is also not all under U.S. jurisdiction.
> At the same time, those same people pirate music and crack DVDs all in the 'Spirit of the Internet'.
This is a straw man argument. Where are the people who are pirating DVDs? None of the defendents who showed up for trial ever copied a DVD and yet they get sued anyway.
> I see companies who need to be educated in the ways of the Internet, and I also see a bunch of
> crybaby users who, when they don't get their way, take a very adverserial stance that doesn't
> seem to help anyone.
Agree, but I think it's the film studios who are the crybabies. "If you don't do watever we say, we'll never make any DVDs ever again."
The Linux people wanted to buy DVDs and watch them so much that they built a player in their spare time! If the movie industry was sane, they'd recognize that these people would probably buy DVDs as fast as they could sell them! Instead, they hit them with a lawsuit.
In the end, the film studios will probably get what they want-- I can't imagine a Linux user wanting to buy a DVD from a company that treats its customers with such spite and disrespect.
He tends to write stuff for http://www.zmag.org/.
"For more than a century, sci-fi writers, futurists and filmmakers - H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Mary Shelley, George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke, Ridley Scott ("Blade Runner"), the Wachowski brothers ("The Matrix") - have been painting bleak portraits of life in the 2lst Century, our time." John, all of the above names you mentioned EXCEPT Ridley Scott mad ORIGINAL attempts to define the future. Now, Ridley Scott handled film making superb in Blade Runner, but the entire movie was based off of Phillip K. Dick's _Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep_. You should have put his name there NOT Ridley Scott. The bulk of Scott's movie making did not attempt to describe the future, and the one piece you referred to was not his idea originally. John, I do not like you, you ramble and you don't do your research. Spend less time rambling, and more time researching!!!
I didnt buy my house and land, i shot the old owner in the head and buried him under the roses.
Ok, let's do the DVD thing. Here's my situation, I have DVDs. Legal, bought and paid for. Hell, I even still have the reciepts for them.
I have purchased the right to view them. I have the right to use DeCSS to do it.
Beyond that, I have a DVD drive. It has the little trademark logo on it and everything. I have the right, I have paid a license fee through Toshiba, to use it to view my DVDs, which, as per above, I have paid for the right to view.
Now, here's the kicker, I *have a legal software viewer on my machine which I have bought and paid for and thus have a legally licensed version of the decription code!*
Unfortunately for me that decription code will only work with the Windows OS intalled on my box. I don't want Windows. I don't want to pay for Windows. I am perfectly happy with the idea of using an OS other than Windows, which I also have installed on my machine, but am *forced* to use Windows to view my DVDs. Windows has nothing to do with DVDs.
I wish to make this point again, I do not wish to pirate, or frankly even backup, my DVDs, I meerly wish to view them *And have legally purchased all licenses to do so.*
How is it that one branch of the judical system can be declaring that MS is monopoly that requires goverment intervention to remedy while another branch of the same system is upholding that monopoly?
I can, of course, go out and buy a TV and DVD player, but, again, I have already purchased the hardware to view my DVDs, why do I have to duplicate the purchases and further purchase housing space on an ongoing basis to view DVDs which I already have the legal right, by *everyone's* definition, to view?
The judicial system is de facto forcing me purchase and maintain software and equipment that I don't want, and don't legally need.
Now, in the DeCSS thread someone, not myself, kept bringing up a point and was virtually ignored. It *dosn't matter if DeCSS is used primarily for pirating as long as it has legitmate use.*
I am legitimate use. Anyone else in my position is legitimate use. It is therefore legal for me to obtain and use DeCSS, and therefore its distribution is essentially legal.
Pirating is not. There is a legal remedy for pirating. It is used all the time by the movie industry, the print industry, the music recording industry, etc. It applies perfectly well to DVDs in any IP industry.
Charge the lawbreakers with breaking the law and prosocute them.
Shoes aid me in jaywalking. I have not broken the law for purchasing shoes. Pencils help me copy and distribute copyright protected material, as do copy machines. Cassette decks allow me to copy protected audio, VCRs not only allow me to copy protected video but I'll bet *it's the primary use to which they are put.* HBO even promotes this use of VCRs. VCRs are not illegal.
*Pirating* is illegal, and already prosocutable.
If I purchase a gun I am not guilty of murder. Ok, you don't like guns, substitute a knife then, ( there is actually one case on record where an enraged husband *put down a gun to pick a knife and stab his wife to death.*) How about a pointy stick, or a banana.
The crime of murder is prosocutable. Prosocute the murderer, not the banana.
Because I *have* legally purchased the deencryption to decode DVDs for viewing I have the right to use DeCSS to view them on Linux.
I have bought the banana/pointy stick/gun. I may now make whatever legal use I wish. I am already banned from making illegal use of the protected IP. Leave me alone until I do.
pin-headed? nah more like pin-head "We'll tear your post APART!"
Here too, TV time is very, very low.
Gotta keep the kids sane, you know...
> Hi; I own a DAT recorder, and it has a "feature" called SCMS (Serial Copycode Management System)
:)
> pronounced SCuMS. What this means is that if I record my self blowing bubbles in my tea, I can
> make 1 digital copy of the tape
No, this is false. Only commercial music DAT tapes have this restriction. Of course, there isn't any music available on DAT anyway... so who cares?
Your own recordings from an analog source do not have any restrictions on digital copying.
> But it cripples my home recording studio.
So buy a professional DAT or a digital interface card for your computer. These have no such restrictions, even the restrictions you claim apply to you that really don't.
What REALLY killed DAT was not the copy protection (it allowed one copy anyway which was all people wanted to make their own mix tapes), but the fact that the music companies demanded a royalty from every blank tape sold. So not only did they restrict copying, but they punished everyone who bought a blank tape as if they were copying illegally anyway.
Obviously, we said FUCK THIS and had nothing to do with such an immoral scheme. So I buy data DAT tapes without the subsidy to do my home recording
well they might not be so bad, but all their users are indeed arseholes.
the thing of it is, when i said exercising our free will, i wasn't referring to everybody's...
So now we get to the root of the issue. The free market doesn't work to control corporations because it doesn't always force them to do what a minority desires... specifically, yourself. The ultimate minority, the individual. This bothers you because you see yourself as enlightened, more intelligent than the general populace. You think that your ideas and values are therefore worth more than that of your mother or your boss.
You want to harnass the power of the government to accomplish your will when you can't achieve it through peaceful negotiation and/or appeals to a popular cause. This means you are lazy- not enlightened. Don't blame the system, don't blame the corporations or human nature. Blame yourself, and lazy people like you. The fact that different kinds of laziness affect the sheep and the wolves gives neither any sanction.
do libyans and lesbians boycott too?
> He obviously has no idea what he is talking about if he thinks that our government is a
> Libertarian ideal.
He's definately inaccurate, although he wasn't talking about the government, he was talking about people who he labeled "Libertarians" and their ideals.
> *Nothing* could be further from the truth. The number one issue facing us is not corporatism. It
> is this new "third way" that is infesting western liberal countries such as ours...
No shit. I agree fully.
> The root of all this is government. Corporations can not use violence because gov't already has a
> monopoly on its use.
I agree completely.
> If we separate gov't and economy, as we should, the the whole thing comes crashing down
Unfortunately, I can't envision how this would happen in one giant crash. I can see gradual change through concerted effort, I suppose.
> Gov't fears its own demise and supports these corporations as a result.
It doesn't fear its demise, it isn't a person. Some members of government just like the payola, that's all.
> Jon Katz is a socialist.
Let's not go ahead labeling people, this is an ineffective means of argument. If you want to get your point across, explain it but inflammatory words turn readers off and cause them to ignore the rest of what you are talking about.
Those of you who play RPG games, do you remember a game entitled Shadowrun? For those of you who don't play roleplaying games or who haven't heard of Shadowrun, I've pilfered a description straight from their web page:
"The year is 2060. Magic is as real as the mean streets of the mega-sprawls.
Corporations call the shots while nailing each other through covert operatives in cutthroat competition. Flesh and machines have merged - the street samurai with his smartguns and impossibly fast reflexes, the deck who can plug his own brain into the worldwide computer network, the rigger who links his mind to his vehicle and takes hairpin turns at fantastic speeds. Any you'rea part of this wired world, where corporate skyscrapers glitter over the dark shadows they cast. you live in those shadows.
You're a shadowrunner - a street operative."
OK, so magic doesn't exist, and we can't plug computers into our brains...... yet. But how long will it be before the corporations do call the shots? And how long after that, do the corporations start using crackers to steal each others secrets?
Those of you wanting to read more about Shadowrun, see: http://www.fasa.com/shadowRun/
One man calls for revolution, and most of you reply that you're happy with your chains.
To Jon Katz, I bet your lips move when you are reading this.
'FADE OUT'
...
...
..
'FADE IN'
(Bill Gates in Underwear and T-shirt flunge over his head)
BillG (Yelling) : "I NEED TP ! I NEED TP FOR BUNGHOLIO" YOU GOT SOME TP?
Katz (Yawning) "Meow!"
Moderated Lame.
Rule one of the world is that if it is digital it is ours.
They have no business and right moral right to come play in a world where they are late-comers and change it rules.
And that applies to everyone else who has tried to make money in this business by claiming they can come into a world where software IS free and try to create rules to their benefit which are contrary to the fundamental rule of the digital world.
If they do not like the rules, go play some place else. Do not come mucking around here trying to bully us into abiding by their rules.
No one invited them here. We can do quite well without them, thank you.
There's nothing to prevent us from creating a standard that nominally uses encryption and using something similiar to GPL to restrict it to open source software, thereby locking out commercial software vendors from using it at all. It's a broad new form if intellectual property out there and there's nothing to prevent us from abusing it ourselves to make our case.
Somewhere along the way, people got the idea that this land was their "private property," and started fencing it in and building housing developments, etc.
I belive that was a little thing which was called the 'homstead act' which gave it to any person who wanted to live on it long enough. At least, that's what my high school history teacher told me.
The number of people in a corporation is not a good indication of the size, especially in the case of multinationals. Why? Often when a segment of a business gets very large, it'll get made into its own little corporate entity, but will still have heavy ties to its parent corporation, which will in all major respects still call all the shots.
Here's two examples to consider:
1) AT&T Canada Corporation/AT&T (U.S.) Corp. Actually, AT&T Canada has at this point gotten a fair bit of autonomy from AT&T US, but this is because AT&T Canada is the amalgamation of several other companies that it took over^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmerged with (ACC, Netcom, Unitel, Metronet, and others) and absolutely *had* to make changes to the way it implemented things in order to be profitable. However, where it is at all feasable, it tries to mimic the procedures used by AT&T US, and will always obey any orders given to them. Why? AT&T US licensed the AT&T brand to the Canadian company, and retains the right to yank it back.
2) Sympatico/Bell Canada. I don't have any 'insider' info on this one, but it's pretty clear that Sympatico operates under the direct control of Bell Canada, with the bonus that Sympatico gets special pricing on services such as switched ADSL circuits (otherwise it could not remain competitive).
Please note that this is just based on my observations and are solely my anonymous opinions. I'm sure someone's going to tell me that I'm totally wrong, and hey! Maybe I am. Make your own observations, draw your own conclusions.
Sigh. After rereading your message, I realized you already said what I posted above. Anyway, here's the problem: How do you define which subsidiaries make up the "whole" in order to do a head count?
"Corporatism" is a nice buzz-word, since it potentially unites a lot of people who fear large corporations. But it is, ultimately, a diversion.
There is a better word than corporatism, one that has existed for a while, and which actually has some intellectual significance to it: consumerism. The problem is not with the existence of corporations, it is with the mentality of consumerism. Which is not limited to consumers (except insofar as everyone in a consumerist's world is a consumer, even those who manufacture consumer goods). Consumerism consumes; consumerism does not know how to take care of the world. Everything is subsumed to the short-term consumption, to the abating of short-term appetites, so of course longer-term needs will be ignored and abused. Consumerism explains the problems that Jonkatz rails about, and much more, while also providing a philosophical underpinning that the term "corporatism" lacks. "Corporatism" has, at best, a psychological underpinning, which is evident in his posts: he more often sites the fear of certain groups of people, than he appeals to any deeper philosophical understanding of the situation. Which is sad, really, because Jonkatz not only has a lot of people listening to him, but he also has a grip on rhetoric that many lack.
There is another dichotomy that also explains this phenomenon much better than "corporatism." That is the dichotomy between dynamism and stasism. Virginia Postrel (a libertarian writer, BTW) discusses this very well in her book The Future and Its Enemies. Stasists, she says, are one of two types of people: reactionaries, "whose central value is stability"; and technocrats, "whose central value is control". What JonKatz rails about most are the technocrats, those who want control. Control comes in many forms, and not all of them are manifest (directly) in government. A corporation or individual who seeks to have everybody using its product, to dominate the market and everybody in it, to subsume long-term interests for a need to control how the future looks...is every bit as much a stasist technocrat as a government planner whose ultimate job it is to require everybody to conform to the government's idea of the future. But don't confuse this with some vague, ill-defined, ill-researched notion of "corporatism." Technocrats are attracted to power. In our society, with the government as it is today, corporatism are given power: so of course stasist technocrats will be attracted to corporations.
Which brings up another point: how could any corporation have the power so many have today, without a government that gives them power? Without a government that has the power to tax, to redistribute money, to sign contracts, to enforce absurd patents, etc.
It is not even entirely clear whether JonKatz even understands what a libertarian is. I take that back: it is very clear he doesn't understand. No, Jon, a libertarian is not someone who wants the government to collect taxes, push money around, and occasionally intervene in foreign hotbeds. Where did that bit of absurdity come from? I suggest that you do a little reading up on libertarians before making emotion-driven claims about what libertarians want/wanted.
So we have two terms to describe the phenomenon that Jonkatz has (rightly) identified: consumerism and stasism. I don't have an antonym for consumerism handy, but the opposite of stasism is dynamism. If you seek to control how the future looks, you are most likely a technocratic stasist; if you seek to 'uphold tradition' at all costs, and abhor changes to the marketplace, you are most likely a reactionary stasist. Not that those are mutually exclusive categories.
Both consumerism and stasism explain, in a much more thorough and much more philosophically deep way, the problems we're facing with a lack of respect for and recognition of human rights, and the accumulation, not of wealth but of power in the hands of people who seek to tell us how the future is to be lived.
And in this way, the problem cannot be foisted on "those evil corporate bastards" (who else, after all, is to be considered part of corporatism?), or "those sheep [which is everybody but me]". The problem runs much deeper than that, and even JonKatz has a part to play in that. Because, by not understand the deeper philosophical issues, by not examining the issues closely enough, by being content with self-righeous indignation when surface appearances make it seem as though some undefined "other" is responsible for our mess, we are all contributing to the mess.
And here, of course, is where I part ways with much of the free software movement (or so it seems). You don't put a temporary fix on permanent problems. Boycotting one company for obtaining an absurd patent is not the way to provide for a future where absurd patents have no hold. You change the system--you offer a philosophically sound argument, and implement a philosophically sound policy, that does not allow injustices to occur in the first place. And when media companies marge? The way to fix those is not to increase government power (a government, keep in mind, that is increasingly consumerist/stasist in nature), nor is it to be content with boycotting the new company...it is to work on your own vision of the future. Don't be content with merely choosing from among alternatives proposed by others, but create your own alternatives. Some people do this. Others, it seem, just go on ranting about the evils of the current alternatives and call for increased government regulation.
Such is life...
Posting anonymously because I don't care to log on twice.
Doesn't the Lord Our Saviour teach patience? Tisk, tisk...
Ship mail order and tell the bureaucrats to go fuck themselves
Punishing censorious and proprietary corporations by refusing to buy their products may be the readiest, and the most powerful option. Although antithetical to many of the Libertarian impulses on the Net...
I think that's exactly opposite. Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but don't Libertarians want to deal with bad corporations themselves, using tools like the boycott, instead of having the government do it?
How about using a system similar to SETI@Home with password-protected accounts and groups? It might not prevent complete abuses, but at least you'd be able to trace back "57 million dollars spent at B&N!!!" to one email address... Not perfect, obviously, but certainly better than, say, online polls...
I'm not an AOL (l)user, but I have to acknowledge
that AOL has shown itself (IMO) to be one of the
good guys -- i.e. on _our_ side.
AOL:
is a *nix shop
releases GPL software (aolserver.com)
now owns Netscape -- which graphical browser
are _you_ looking at right now?
If anything, I'll rally to support AOL, if for
nothing more than to have a decent/modern
browser for _my_ system of choice -- GNU/Linux.
It just hit me that Linux(R) might not be the
agent of Microsoft's destruction, instead AOL
might fire the silver bullet.
..not Chompsky... that was a typo, I swear.
(The Same Anonymous Coward)
I'm not sure I understand the vehemence here against Jon Katz. Yes, it's a bit general, but then so is life. You can't always be specific. Besides, though these are fears we've had before, weren't the justified then as well? Shouldn't we still be on guard and pay attention to the things that happen around us? Maybe we don't need a savior, but we SHOULD be watching and listening and caring. The minute you tune out, you don't count anymore.
Sounds somewhat similar to the concept of anon.penet.fi ... sadly, even Finland's strong privacy laws were not immune to lawyers hired by a certain religious cult... However, even lawyers couldn't stop people from getting the word out...
I read a while ago about someone developing a method which used USENET to constantly mirror and re-mirror websites...I wonder if this might be a useful tactic to remember...
Dammit, this guy's right on the money. Using services like resellerratings or pricewatch works for pecuniary transactions (while trusting the BBB doesn't). Making the money walk away from a business *will* get its attention. Hell, look at the RBL. No force, just agreement, and it gets results.
So who's going to take the business model of selling ads on a boycott status page, and get rich doing it?
open source man: jon katz! only you could be so bold! the slashdot readership won't sit still for this! when they hear you've posted another feature...
jon katz: don't act so surprised, you vile troll! you weren't on any anti-katz mission this time. several of your trolls were moderated up recently... i want to know what happened to the moderation points they gave you!
open source man: i don't know what you're talking about! i'm a concerned slashdotter on a mission to save slashdot from endless windbagging!
jon katz: you are part of the troll alliance and a pest! take him away!
katz stooge #1: holding him is dangerous! if word of this gets out it could generate sympathy for the trolls in the readership!
jon katz: i have traced the lost moderation points to him! now he is my only link to finding the troll-sympathizer moderators!
katz stooge #1: he'll die before he tells you anything!
jon katz: leave that to me and my natalie portman truth-bot!
thank you.
The bland leading the bland once more. I'm sure this will get moderated down, or the ip banned. That's what happens on slashdot- they like to scream about censorship (in that addle-pated, I-haven't-thought-this-through manner of theirs), but what's sauce for the goose doesn't appear to be sauce for the gander...
Oh, and if you're reading this, naz, moderate me up, it will annoy Katz :-)
---------------------------------
Do something right, join Amnesty, Greenpeace, or do something to help your local homelessness charity. Leave that gas guzzler at home. Don't drop that litter. Every little counts.
If you want to idolize a cracker, I'd suggest starting with Robert Morris (the infamous Cornell grad student), since at least he had the technical savvy to screw things up by accident while testing what was basically a clever hack.
But a social conscience? Yeah, if corporatism gets really bad, there will need to be a bit of civil disobedience. Seriously: an anyone really name a warez puppie, cracker, phreak who gives a shit about society anymore?
One thing that's got to go is the hacker's (not cracker's, I'm on a different rant now) libertarian mentality. It's really incredible to me that intelligent people who are aware enough of their computing environment to hack on open source software will play with guns in their spare time and practically exhibit (and you should know who I'm talking about here, and with an ivy league degree, he should know better :-) a militia mentality. If the religious right wing militia nutcases ever get any control, the free speech and cultural quality that hackers prize will be gone. Dead.
But more important than that is this: freedom is freedom for all, not for a few. Yes, it's nice to have a civil society in this country, but if half of the people are too poor to use it, or the educational system sucks [so much that new proto-hackers are being stunted], what's the use? Lots of people seem to have disdain for socialist-ish policies because naturally it's like being talked down to by government; it is an insult and it tends to get corrupt. Please: don't let this block your view of the actual situations. There's a lot that sucks in this country that won't be fixed by libertarianism, and a lot that's almost been ruined by the business libertarianism (like the SF Bay area - there's a good Salon article on this).
OK, I'm done ranting on Katz. Now I'll give a compliment: the Citizen Kane analogy is apt, given that Steve Case penchant for collecting freebies (AOL coasters^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hinstall disks?) - for those who've seen the movie (I'll guess a reasonably large proportion of readers), recall Kane's sculpture collection that he barely even looked at. He could get it so he did. Case could get Time Warner so he did.
Incidentally, Kane is an example of a movie that almost wasn't released (Hearst tried to bribe RKO into burning all filmed copies and the manuscripts as well). It's also about the failure of a pop 'hero' (all those farmboys idolizing Gates in the where-do-we-want-to-drag-you-today ads?)
your post is irrelevant to this issue.
Corporatism, corporatism, corporatism. Evil, evil, evil. Damn media conglomerates. Down with them. Damn Amazon.com. Down with it. Mr. Katz, here's your check from the big media conglomerates you work for, the advance check from the big media congolmerate that you sold the move rights to your book, and your royalty check from your book sales on Amazon.com. Bill Gates has more credibility than you.
What a crock of socialist twaddle.
i have one word to say to jon now ...
* P L O N K *
The US gov't is not ideal for Libertarians. It still does too much it shouldn't. For starters, there is Social Security, a huge rip-off.
Question is, where did the land the farmer is using come from? He claimed it, of course.
Quantum Link came before AppleLink
Actually, one of MS's corporate policies from the beginning has been that they would always have enough money set aside to run for 1-2 years with absolutely no revenue coming in (or so I've read in Time magazine, but I'm too lazy to look the article up. I think it was in the issue on BillG.) That's cash. Something like $2 billion (USD) worth. Kinda scary, considering how we've seen how MS can turn itself around on a dime, if the need arises.
Hi; I own a DAT recorder, and it has a "feature" called SCMS (Serial Copycode Management System) pronounced SCuMS. What this means is that if I record my self blowing bubbles in my tea, I can make 1 digital copy of the tape. If I try to make a digital copy of my copy, I cant. This feature was implemented to stop people copying DAT tapes digitally. But it cripples my home recording studio. Now the people who implemented this, are probably the same people, (fat Hollywood lawyers on $1000+ per hour), that spent was it 2 years? arguing over DVD encryption. So, you could have had DVD years ago if the licencing had been sorted out. Now that they have some encryption, all be it poor, who is benefiting from it? Not Hollywood, but their lawyers, going around sueing everyone, because the encryption they promoted was v.poor. So who is to blame? The very people, going around sueing people. Who also happen to be making large ammounts of money from their poor decisions. I'm in the wrong job I think :-) have fun dis 'n dat
i'm with you there, matey. i keep getting letters from the uk tv license people telling me that in case i didn't remember from 2 months ago, if i get a tv, i have to pay a license. duh. its as if they can't accept that there are some people out there with better things to do with their lives than being spoonfed mindless drivel evening after evening. tv means you don't have to think for yourself. people start believing it after a while. since when has there been anything worthwhile on??? (the odd one or two programs excepted -- not enough for £100+ license fee and forking out for a TV).
here, here. I must admit I'm getting very tired of these poly-sci discussions of the under informed. If I were interested in changing the world I wouldn't start at /. - Stick to the tech news. -Greg
I would tend to think that your money is knowingly used to lift share prices here and there and make profit for someone else. Do you realy think that the fund managers do not know the issues and are waiting for us to tell them? The game is much, much deeper. Their decisions are influenced by places that have nothing to do with you and that you know nothing about. The game is one of GAINING CONTROL FOR SOMEONE (and you will never know who). You may get your miserable meal at the end but that is not the driving force.
I have a few ideas on possible ways to send these companies a message on what consumers do and do not find acceptable.
For starters, I propose the creation of a webpage, in conjunction with a massive email campaign, wherein anyone can go to do the following:
1. Find out current and past information on lawsuits/abuses that the RIAA and MPAA have started.
2. Easily send off emails to each of the component companies that comprise these groups informing them of their decision to no longer purchase their products (not just cds/movies but also anything else. . . This means that since Sony Music is a member of the RIAA that you wouldn't buy a Sony Vaio) until they either drop membership with their respective organization or the organization stops their lawsuit.
3. Link to alternatives such as sites like mp3.com, riffage.com and sites that promote the independant movie scene.
4. Get banners to allow them to link to the site in order to help get the word out.
This would be a relatively easy way to send a strong economic message that we will no longer accept abuses of our legal system. If such a page were to be a created, and gained momentum, it might help put an end to large companies using their massive amounts of money to squelch smaller ones with lawsuits they do not have the money to defend.
On a side note, if a judge rules that mp3.com has not broken any piracy laws, then they should be eligible for membership in the RIAA as per their own membership guidelines which state the following:
"Any person, firm or corporation which has its main office in the United States and is engaged in the production and sale, under its own brand label, of recordings of performances for home use, shall be eligible for membership in this ociation. Such eligibility shall not extend to any person or to any firm or corporation which is engaged in, or during five years prior to its application has engaged in, or which is controlled by any person, firm or corporation which is engaged in, or during five years prior to said application has been engaged in, the unauthorized creation, duplication, sale, importation or other use of sound recordings in violation of state or federal law."
I think it would be relatively funny to see mp3.com try to join the RIAA although the only thing we as consumers can do to see that happen is to suggest it to mp3.com.
Just some thoughts.
I see... you are happy with your greesy cheesburger and willfully release all control over your future to the Big Corp (tm)?
Oh yeah, you are happy because you can imagine how it could be worse...
Ha, ha, I guess that you can't imagine that there are people who can imagine how it could be better!
On the other hand without those, who you have no respect for, you would never have your greesy cheeseburger on the first place...
No, he teaches intolerance to homosexuals, intolerance to minorities, and intolerance to anything not christian.
Oh wait, that's the churches that follow him.
Ah, now we get down to it - Couldn't YOU be our saviour, Mr. Katz?
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Yeah, there should be a category "Jon Katz proving he's an idiot" sorting by author seems dumb, i mean what if katz actually posted something relevant(sure, its a stretch), then it would go into the news section.
is Jesus your personal savior? click here
Amen.
I went TV-free for the first time more or less by accident - I moved into an apartment with a new roommate who was rather antisocial and kept her television in her bedroom. I didn't want to spend money to buy one of my own. So the year I lived with here, I watched essentially no television, except when I visited my parents.
After that I moved in with some people who kept their TV in the living room, and I started watching again. Then I moved into a place of my own, and resolved to go free again. This resolve lasted until Sunday night, a couple of hours before the Simpsons came on. I drove to Best Buy and bought a set. That was a bit over a year ago.
Then, in early November, I went on vacation, visiting a friend who is TV-less. I spent a lot of that trip introspecting, and realizing that I was letting TV (and to be fair, the web as well) distract me from accomplishing goals that were important to me. Pretty much the first thing I did when I got back home was unplug my little 13" set, carry it out to the dumpster, and heave it in like a 20-lb basketball.
I wish there were more of a call-to-action here, which was said at the outset was the point of the article..
Anyway, it just seems to me that the Wild West of the Internet is being tamed and normalized. You know, during the Gold Rush two centuries ago (well, technically I guess one) there were a lot of wild times, a lot of get-rich folk, a lot of lawlessness, but sooner or later the Law came into town and the coorporations and everything went to hell.
As I see it, this decade is going to determine the course of development for the Internet for the next century. All the major legal precedents will be set, sweeping laws are being passed and whether or not they are upheld will affect countless cases in the future. That's why it's so important to fight these lame-o lawsuits now, because this is the root by which future legal judgements will be made. That's why it's important to fight these mergers (if possible) because giant companies so often choke off innovation and enforce the status quo, because single-source media is a bad thing (where's Noam Chompsky when you need him? He should be writing for slashdot!). That's why we should fight and publicise the totally illegal Eschelon monitoring system, and deter attempts to come up with a censoring protocol standard for the Internet. That's why we should fight to Free Kevin (uh, ok, he's out now but..) and anyone else who's scapegoated or demonized or made an example of by authority figures. That's why we should resist serial numbers on Pentium chips and in our Word Processor files. That's why we NOW should fight for our right to reverse engineer, to export strong encryption... That's why we should fight their attempts to hand them a key to whatever we lock up, to give them the right to march in and take our files... They're fucking with us, folks! We must stay vigilant. That's why we should actively pursue open standards and--
Oh wait. Full House is on. Gotta go.
Amen,
I have probably watched TV for about 24 hours total over the last year, usually when visiting someone.
I've started reading books again, getting some more coding done, and I generally feel more "awake".
I sort of missed TV the first couple of months after I stopped, but now I mostly feel disgusted when I visit my parents and see what comes out of the pacification box.
What I meant to say is that Libertarians oppose any sort of government-provided safety net for the poor. They generally (I think, so correct me if I'm wrong, please) oppose things like affirmative action, which I believe to be one of the most important methods of closing the gap between the haves and have nots.
If the government were to do as the Libertarians want, then I fear that gap will only widen.
And yes, you're right. I do need to do more work in the area of charity. I try to give as much as possible, but I fall short. A lot. But I'm trying to improve. Thanks for giving me a good kick in the butt. I needed it. :)
But I do question your statement that donations to the Salvation Army, etc. "don't count." Those organizations do a much better job of serving the needs of the poor precisely because they've been organized to do it. They know what the needs are and I trust they'll put my money to good use.
The above is precisely the attitude I find so distasteful in Libertarianism. In the statement above is the implied belief that if someone is needy, it is his or her fault for not working hard enough. It pains me to know that people actually think this way.
I understand your sentiment about forced morality, but I still believe some sort of safety net is needed. I don't think the current system is necessarily the right way to do it, but without government-mandated taxes, I don't think things like subsidized housing would happen. It's simply too big a job for any one charity organization to conquer. And frankly, I'm more than glad to fork over 5% of my income so that others not as lucky as myself have a chance at a decent life.
Again, I apologize if I've offended anyone. I certainly did not mean to imply that all Libertarians are not compassionate people. That is clearly false. It's the belief system as a whole (exemplified by the quoted passage above) that I disagree with.
--
If freedom-destroying legislation is passed, then we have several options:
--
My point was that Katz generalizes these incidents to corporations as a group, and that's just not valid.
If you don't like what the DVD CCA is doing, don't buy DVD's. I, for one, refuse to give them any money until they wake up and realize that what they are doing is idiotic and probably illegal WRT fair use. Consumers were wise enough to kill DIVX before it got off the ground. We can improve DVD access by educating consumers.
Why don't we sue the DVD CCA for restricting our fair use rights (and they are rights that have been granted us by the courts)?
--
If corporations truly have too much control over our lives, then I submit it is we, as a society, who have let this happen. I can't speak for others, but I certainly don't feel oppressed or limited in any way. If I want MP3's, I'll make them from the CD's I own. I have no desire whatsoever to acquire bootleg music (regardless of the fact that MP3's of '30's jazz are difficult to find).
Don't corporations have the right to protect their property? They produced the music and movies. They paid for all the expensive recording equipment. Why do we have a right to copy and distribute it freely?
The artists don't make enough money, you say? Well, they should have signed a better contract. There are lots of independent recording houses. Or why not cut their own CD?
I guess my point is that we each have the control over our lives to either buy in to what the "greedy corporations" are selling us or just ignore it. It's not that hard, really. I own a total of about 15 CD's and 4 movies. I buy something when it looks interesting to me. If the recording house is not selling quality stuff, I won't buy it. I'll go make my own music instead.
As far as destroying culture is concerned, we each make our own culture. Culture is an inherently human thing. I don't understand how a corporate entity can have any control over that. It may take that culture and make it more visible, but the culture was there to begin with.
Now, I'm not saying that corporations should not be held accountable. Clearly there are some serious issues that need to be addressed (the environment comes to mind). But Katz's article sounds more like a child complaining that he can't get what he wants than a rational argument against corporate excesses.
And don't get me started about Kevin Mitnick. Anyone who holds him or any other criminal up as a hero is a fool. Mitnick stole property. He's a common thief using uncommon methods.
Finally, I resent the fact that as a user of the internet I am immediately pigeonholed as a Libertarian. As human beings we have a responsibility to each other that Libertarianism seems to ignore. They talk a lot about personal responsibility but completely ignore the issue of our responsibility to the poor and underpriviledged. I kindly ask Mr. Katz not to make such sweeping generalizations in the future.
--
I'm assuming you're referring to the act of corporations filing lawsuits, etc. to protect their investments (in their eyes) and the general drive of corporations to dominate a market and make money.
I guess it's quotes like this that led me to my conclusions.
--
Amen, and halaleuiah!
.plans with uuencoded bzipped files, then so be it. If that means placing all code on several platforms in friendly countries and sowing links throughout the 'net, then let's do it.
But, what actions? I think that is what Mr. Katz hopes to generate, discussion about possible effective action.
Personally, I think the only effective action is civil disobedience. I think we should use every platform available to publish banned code, and every channel to spread the code.
If that means using
In any case, the actions must be frank, open, and advertised. We must prove that censorship is not only politically and socially destructive, but impossible as well. Since we can't fight with lawyers, we must fight with the tools we have-- the 'net, our brains, and our knowledge.
One thousand people is all it will take. I will be one. Are there others?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
You just hit the nail on the head!
This is exactly why the Libertarian types are so wrong about this and other similar issues.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Flamebait my ass! Read the bloody thing - that's exactly what he's floating here, via an ego-stroking email. What I wrote is called a "relevant comment". If you don't agree with it then post a reply, don't smack me down with your moderator stick. Guess I should just start writing Natalie Portman poems.
Go ahead now, moderate this as off-topic. We all know we must not DARE challenge a pin-headed moderator.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
I read the teaser. I read the first three paragraphs of Katz's article. Then I found myself being stupefied and read not further, both because it was babbling and it was sensationalist.
Yes, college campuses are banning Napster, but the primary impetus is not the RIAA. The RIAA has had some say, but the primary reason is that Napster is taking over bandwidth. College networks are set up for the transfer of educational information. Most colleges (at least the ones I've been to), also have lengthy AUPs that ban such things as game playing, porn sites, and even general servers. I don't see people getting up in arms about this. We had a kid shut off completely from our network for running a porn site. The reason: it was taking too much bandwidth (and it was, I saw the figures). No one said, "Hey, he has a right to serve his porn!" because really, he doesn't. Campus networks are managed by the campus, and they maintain that explicit right to regulate the type of data that runs over it. I feel no sympathy for the Napster kiddies out there who want to trade their MP3s. When I was a kid, we found tons of ways to do it that didn't involve Napster and I'm sure they will, too.
As for DeCSS, I have no sympathy for them, either. Hacking the proprietary encoding on a DVD I equate with cracking the security of a computer. DeCSS is then like giving out the method to the entire world. I support reverse engineering, but I don't support the maliciousness. I want DVD readability on all systems, and I want the ability to copy my DVDs, but I don't want to circumvent the security mechanisms in place that allow companies to make money so they can make films and make DVDs. I don't see DVDs as an expensive medium right now and the efforts by a few software vigilantes who want access to everything and anything has set back the industry. Companies don't want to get involved in a technology that is targeted by computer hackers. DeCSS hurt the computer community more than it helped it. I liken it to the EFNet smurfers who managed to bring down entire networks of servers. Those servers eventually just left EFNet, and now that network is just crap to be on. Did the kiddies win? Maybe, but there are far less servers to IRC on now. The same thing can happen to DVD.
The Internet is not devoid of laws. People cry when their systems get hacked or smurfed and call in law enforcement agencies to track down the villains. At the same time, those same people pirate music and crack DVDs all in the 'Spirit of the Internet'. To me, the Spirit of the Internet has always been about a global community respecting each other and sharing information for its benefit. I don't see that at all nowadays. I see companies who need to be educated in the ways of the Internet, and I also see a bunch of crybaby users who, when they don't get their way, take a very adverserial stance that doesn't seem to help anyone.
The 'heroes' of Slashdot are just as much a part of the problem as the 'villains'. I don't support either of them. In the end, it's the common person who doesn't belong to either group that gets screwed.
A simple search on Google reveals that there are some engineering unions in the world, and following a link shows that they even do things.
reveals that there are some engineering unions in the world, and following a link shows that they even do things. If you're interested in unionizing, don't go for those beauracratic, "we don't want to strike because then us union leaders can't take bribes" unions. I say, become a wobblie, one of the few unions out there that won't comprimise until the whole system is in the hands of the workers...
That's http://www.iww.org again, if you missed it.
Michael Chisari
Capitalism, with all of it's terrible warts, exists simply because (for example) a person who is better at growing food than I am (aka, a farmer) trades with what he does best for what another entity does best -- perhaps building things like tractors, etc.
Actually, that would be incorrect. You are confusing the idea of a market economy with the idea of capitalism. Just because you have a market economy, identified mostly by the concept of value-add, does not mean that you have a capitalist market. There are such things as market socialists, and I'll tell you why that's not nearly as much of a contradiction as you'd think.
Forget everything you've ever been told about capitalism and socialism and the differences between them. Both are very easily defined, it is only their variations that take on such complexities.
Capitalism: Ownership is in the hands of the capitalists, who pay, via a wage, laborers for their labor. Laborers sell their labor, since it is the only ownership they have. Capitalists, despite not producing any actual product, recieve most of the profits indefinitely due to their initial investment.
Socialism: Ownership is in the hands of the workers. Workers split the profits based on who did the most work, who has most seniority, whatever. The idea is that if you don't actually *work* (as in, produce the product yourself), you don't recieve any money.
Of course, there are many variations on these basic ideas. Petty Bourgois systems are basically capitalistic, but private ownership is severely limited (small farms, family-owned operations, etc). This, initially, was the basic idea behind the USA, with corporate charters being damn near illegal. Then there's communism, which abolishes markets completely (which is why the USSR was not communism, since they used a monetary system which promises inequalities) and instead bases subsistance on need and ability.
The basic idea, however, is that Capitalism is based on private property (leveraging ownership of more than the owner can use theirself and employing workers) and socialism is based on communal or collectivised property (public ownership where no single person claims rights to use or destroy a resource) and possessions (such as your toothbrush, which, in a socialist society, will *not* be collectivised
Something to think about: Given these two basic concepts, which category does Linux fall under?
Also, just as their are State and Libertarian versions of Capitalism (Fascism being State Capitalism, Objectivism/Libertarianism being Libertarian Capitalism), there are State and Libertarian versions of Socialism (Marxist-Leninism being State Socialism, and Anarchism being Libertarian Socialism).
Just remember that there's a lot more to society than we've been led to believe, and just because conventional "wisdom" tells us that a certain system just won't "work", don't reject it outright. Just keep in mind: There is no spoon.
Michael Chisari
Which means you should prepare to face a barrage of court orders, attacks on individual freedom, attempts to bottleneck the Internet, and arrests of prominent Open Source gurus.
It's quite possible. I'm not saying it's definite, but the possibility exists. Keep in mind that Food Not Bombs gives away free vegetarian food to anybody who's hungry. Their reason? Because "food grows on trees."
Despite this wonderful example of altruism, they've had numerous encounters with the police, and are a constant target of brutality and harrassment. Strange, no?
Maybe not. Food Not Bombs are very progressive and radical (as opposed to being liberal, and just whining about poverty), and have decided to take matters into their own hands. Becuase of this, they also use the opportunity to hand out flyers, organize protests, meet other social activists, etc. Most probably, this is what scares the government and corporations into repressing them.
Probably open source's saving grace is the fact that most of it's members are not equating the sharing of code with political ideologies. Regardless, it will be targetted by the corporations it threatens, but in the first wave of repression, you'll see very IP-oriented attacks (such as the actions by RIAA), lobbying to forbid the use of open source software in government institutions, along with future attempts to use the antiquated patent and intellectual property laws against the open source community. As this begins happening, you will start seeing open source advocates becoming increasingly more radical in order to challenge the powers that be.
More protests, more electronic civil disobedience, etc. Once people start using the freedom of open source as a point of advocacy towards a more free and equitable society is when you will see the real repression by the elites. Not because giving away code (or food) is inherently dangerous to them, but because it represents a flaw in their dominance that they will go to great lengths to conceal. What is that flaw? That we don't need them!
One of the popular Linux slogans has been "Welcome to the Revolution." So welcome - and welcome to the front lines. Prepare to duck!
Make no mistake, Open Source is a revolution, but what most "Linux zealots" don't realize is that the people in control never welcome a revolution of any kind.
--
gcc -o -Wall society.cc
society.cc: Classes 'government' and 'capitalism' not found!
society.cc: Derived classes, 'greed', 'oppression',
society.cc: 'hierarchy', and 'violence' will no longer
society.cc: function.
Proceed with compilation? Y/n
Michael Chisari
That's why we all need to put up web servers and be our own ISPs. Big corporations will have harder time bullying citizens excersizing their free speech. It doesn't look good on "60 Minutes".
Moreover, we have to make it easy for people who would otherwise use AOL, to set up their own web servers so that they can be in control of the "content" they want to create.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
True, however if you connect via the phone company (i.e. DSL not Cable modem) you probably will have less trouble, as phone companies are less likely to try and police contents of your Web server.
Of course if you use AOL/TW then you probably will not be allowed to put up a web server.
If we become desperate we can always run dial-up UUCP or do radio-waves based networking, especially now that FCC allowed mini-radio stations...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
In addition to integrity, he'd have to have complete control of his publishing/distribution rights. The part that can't be confirmed by any search is Jon Katz' contract. The assignment of copyright is usually done before the book is published. After that point, until the contract expires, Katz has no control over where they sell the book unless the contract allows that(which is beyond highly unlikely. It doesn't matter if he screams till he's blue in the face, he can't choose where they distribute his books. Add that to the fact that much of what Amazon.com sells is from the Ingram catalog and you'd have to pretty much quit selling your book altogether to pull it from Amazon. This isn't like having an online text on a web site that you can just move around to another site if you get pissed at the host. Book contracts are just that: contracts. Once you sign them, you're stuck. Music contracts are the same way. Look at the artists who have tried to distribute MP3's and had their record labels pull the files because of the contract wording. Katz can most likely no more stop Amazon from distributing his book than a Playboy model who has a religious experience can stop Playboy from continuing to publish her photos once she signs the contract.
LetterJ
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
check out www.fair.org for some frightening facts about the press, and who owns them, and how that affects the news you read/see daily.
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
A friend of mine put it this way: "There exists a force called Gravity." This just says that what goes up must come down. I've read some of the novels Katz is talking about. Some that hit me the most however are Asimov's Foundation series and a more obscure book called 'The rise and fall of practially everybody'. If you can't grasp my opinion for the direction of the situation in the us, I'll put it the way it's been put a million times before. What goes up must come down. The Romans sure did, and nobody ever thought they would.
--Me
You've got more question marks than I do in my columns. The mistake you're making (why should you be moderated down, BTW?) is you're confusing corporations with corporatism. As I and others have written, they are two very different things. Corporatism is much-driven by de-regulation, venture capital markets and the explosion of the Net and the Web.
The old corporations..AT and T, IBM, Ford, were very different. Not as global, or as synergistic, not nearly as big, not seeking to be as dominant. Companies like Microsoft and AOL/Time-Warner thing are very new to the world. There's been nothing like them before. The fact that peple don't see this is disturbing, and very much part of the problem. There' s nothing wrong with c orporations or capitalism, but on this site, after all the stuff with Microsoft, can you really believe that this kind of company and legal stress isn't new?
jonkatz@slashdot.org
You're mistaking corporations with corporatism. The latter is very new, very different. Theres' nothing wrong with making money, and these issues of responsibility you're raising have nothing to do with my piece that I can see.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
It also strikes me as unbelievably short-sighted to claim that this may be the biggest problem of the next century. I assure you people in 1900 didn't have the faintest clue about what the 20th century's problems would be. Maybe a big asteroid will fall on our heads, or that 3rd world war will break out anyway because some government was stupid enough to install win2k on a tactical missile control system, or we get invaded by aliens, or the environment gets out of control after screwed up weather-control experiments. Maybe the gene technology revolution will start new fierce political battles, polarising societies world-wide. Maybe we just won't care and happily jack in to the Matrix to enjoy a pseudo-world.
And in 2101, we'll laugh at how self-involved people were in the 20th century were. Even if the blue pill is a suppository, most people will still take it.
What part of Media Figurehead don't you understand?
The figurehead part.
The problem is that the people who control the media, especially very large media companies, often end up having considerable political clout. The government is often afraid to oppose these men (at least directly), because the media control and power they wield can be more than the politicians'.
For example, most politicians wouldn't want to get on Rupert Murdoch or Kerry Packer's bad side, if they could help it. The bad press that could result is a threat to re-election, among other things. (Yes, I'm a political cynicist.)
I'm not saying Case is one of these men, just that they do exist. The threat they pose is indirect, sure, but it's there all the same.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Where to begin.
First off, Jon Katz once again is saying what he thinks will sell, and now that he has a book to seel (on amazon and thru other CORPORATE venues) he needs to hook us with his wisdom.
So are you hooked yet?
Are you hooked with the idea that JOn Katz has set himself up as THE GEEK SPOKESMAN, that hsi will be the Nouns And verbs of the community?
Are you hooked with a person who in one posting decrys the hostile language of net posters, and in the next flings flames and troll bait at "corporate" people?
(I gather in Jons world view Corporations are not people, they are this mystical entity much like Rage Against My Cherios "The Man". Jon forgets that People make the evil he looks to objectify, and thus Jon fails to see he attacks people with is verbal missles.)
Are you hooked with the actions of a man who for the last many months has been writting shallow meaning tracts of buzz word laiden text all in the name of YOU?
Remeber, this is the Jon Katz who proclaimed Blair Witch Project as the SINGLE BEST INDI FILM EVER ( passing over "the last broadcast" and a slew of others simply because he was ignorant of their being). This is the Jon Katz who creid over the poor abused "geeks" for being thier own persons but who then riddicules others for being differnt than his image of them.
This is the same Jon Katz who has used the community to pen a book and bolster a carrer that is built up soley on the works of others.
This is the Jon Katz who honors Riddley Scott for creating Blade Runner?
Yes Jon "Im all surface" Katz is the man that has been apointed as the voice of the geeks, is being support by Slashdoters, and with his book now seeks to solidify his rightfull places as mouthpiece and moral navgator for all things "cyber".
Remeber what happened when Billy Idol tried to become the front man for Cybersapce? Remeber Al Gores claim to inventing the internet? Remeber evey clueless technophobe who 5 years ago would have laughed at you for your actions and now seeks to not only imitate your actions but lay claim to thier source?
Remeber these things, and you will remeber what it is Jon Katz is doing here.
And hes geting a cahs payoff for his action....:)-
Sweet deal, cash for making the word safe for the pinks.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
I fought the building of Microsoft every legal way I knew how. It was built anyway. The vast majority of people I talk to have no idea why its existence is a bad idea. Even after I explain it, they usually sort of think of me as some likeable crackpot.
I find this lack of opinion strange since Microsoft controls so many aspects of their day to day life. What they do at work is largely controlled by Microsoft applications. The assumptions Microsoft makes about how people work become reality because people use their applications. But, that fact just doesn't seem to impact on people.
Similarily with the DVD/CSS battle. I don't know how to explain the deadly serious implications of this battle to people who don't understand. What's at stake is the ability to build technology the way we want it. If it were some corporation deciding what aspects of genetic research were moral to pursue, people would be screaming. This is only slightly less important, but people haven't a clue.
If Jon Katz wish to talk about this, let him. We need as many voices screaming as loudly as possible about this as possible. The DVD thing alone gives me the heebie jeebie's.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Oh my, Jon Katz. Isn't this unnecessarialy alarmist?
I gather that people aren't quiet so afraid of the "government" these days - as Pogo said, "We have seen the enemy and they is us." Which is as it should be in a democracy.
But why be more afraid of Business (with a capital B)? We have even more votes in "capitalistic" economies. After all, every dollar you spend is your vote writ large. If you don't like the company, don't buy the product. Do the wealthy have more votes? Well, how many operating systems is Steve Forbes going to buy for his PC anyway? More than J. Average Geek?
It's a simplification, to be sure. But success != bad either in people or in business, and it's still true that inefficient, wrongheaded and corrupt business practices tend to destroy the very very businesses that practice them.
J.
I suppose it depends on what you call capitalism. I tend to exclude the features that are common throughout history. Now there are indeed many disagreements between different cultures as to which group "owns" what, and as to what "own" means. Being of a particular turn of mind, I tend to group the concepts [own, owe, ought, owner, owned] into a relationship mapping, and consider that they are all dealing with the same concept from differing points of view.
Historically owning something meant that one stood in the midst of a net of rights and obligations that were connected to that object. Being powerful meant that effectively one had more rights and/or fewer obligations.
In English history, being a landowner meant that one was a close supporter of William the very unpleasant. He took all of England as his personal property, and then parcelled much of it out again to his supporters (so that they would continue to support him). These were, then, the lords of the land. Today we say landlords. Capitalism in this context was the route by which skilled craftsmen, merchants, etc. purchased back their own liberty. To blame the oppresions of the autocratic regiem on it seems a bit unreasonable. On the other hand, it was certainly self-serving, but the choices were to save yourself, or be a serf.
This may be seen as a root of capitalism, in the Brittish descended cultures. I am less aware of how other cultures developed their capitalist tradition, but I assume them to be similar.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sure, all the colleges are saying "it's the bandwidth" but I'd bet money each of those colleges received nastygrams from RIAA, which prompted the actions. It saves more face for the colleges to cut off Napster access for "technical" reasons over "legal" ones, regardless of the fact that both reasons are in play here (and both valid reasons, regardless of many people's opinions).
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
I am also only interested in watching legitimately produced DVD's. On my Linux machine, of course. And with the idea if I move to a different area, I should still be able to watch the movie, since I already paid for it.
For me, the bottom line is that because the DVD-CCA is trying to re-centralize the distribution process, it should be fought. Also, my personal opinion is that because the way that the companies chose to employ their encryption (region locking) is wrong, I'm willing to sacrifice the ability to buy/watch a new movie on DVD by waiting until there is an open version. By waiting I deprive the companies in question of revenue until they play nice.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Never said it was bad. I said that the excesses of the capitalistic system are bad.
Perhaps so. But if you look at most of the excesses of capitalism, you usually find someone at the top willing to say "f--k everyone else", whether that be in the form of enviromnmental abuse, anti-union and/or anti-strike violence, illegal monopolistic prices, company towns, etc.
When only money matters, everyone else suffers. When worker's rights, the environment, etc. are included in the company's bottom line equations along with money, we find that some very good companies count both. Unfortunately, and this is my own very jaded opinion -- in terms of large companies, most don't.
It's not quite as menacing when you think about what's really going on.
Hmmm. Environmental destruction, influence peddling, legalistic means of trying to control the Internet -- did I miss anything? If these aren't menacing to us as individuals, then what is?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I never quite could understand how Libertarianism gives a person a "cop-out" from responsibility. I always kind of figured it was something that required that a person accept responsibility for one's own actions. You can't blame all your problems on the big power structure like Microsoft or IBM or AT&T. I suppose it can excuse a company from having to make, say, a TV capable of HDTV, but consumer demand would drive the demand anyway.
As for Libertarian rhetoric pandering to corporate interests: if the government should not be involved in business, that includes business subsidies and lawmaking. Subsidies for tobacco companies, for example, would be out in a Libertarian system. The DMCA is an infringement upon personal rights, so I don't think it would really be quite kosher in a Libertarian system-- it makes a civil matter into a criminal one, and it involves the government in matters of commerce (matters which would probably be handled best by contracts). If the government can't get take away rights of companies or give individuals special rights, then it can't give the companies special rights or take away the rights of individuals.
And I guess most Libertarians are more likely to complain about something like the Microsoft case than they are likely to complain about the DMCA-- which is probably because the DMCA hasn't really even entered into the public consciousness. OTOH, even my mom knows about the Microsoft case. If trying to draw attention to (what you believe to be) injustice, which one is going to easier to point out? Microsoft, naturally. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be speaking out against something like the DMCA, but it's understandable why they don't.
I guess maybe I see Libertarian viewpoints a little more objectively (insert Ayn Rand joke here) than people who just want to rant about Microsoft (which I've done before, but I've ranted to my friens about DMCA and the whole DeCSS thing, too). Or maybe I totally misunderstand the entire concept, but I'm somehow arriving at strikingly similary viewpoints from a totally different set of axioms... who knows?
I don't like the tone of Mr. Katz when he suggests that these authors didn't anticipate the Ueber Corporation. In a lot of SF, even in something like Clans of the Alphane Moon (Phillip K. Dick) the insane asylum is the result of an ueber corporation. I don't think there is anything anyone missed.... on the contrary, I think it is a running theme that results in the weaponry and technology that is present in these novels. The end of government....
Does anybody still remember Fredrik Pohl's excellent The Merchant War (or something like that... I've only read the translation and that was a long time ago) with the whole society based on advertisements.
Karma: Good! Napster: Baad!
what a great idea! i've spent about $15 at B&N and $30 at fatbrain since I made the decision to boycott amazon -- i almost certainly would have spent that money at amazon otherwise.
-- Adam
while we can criticize capitalism - we can criticize how it allows death and hunger... how can we blindly forget the means to justifying the other end of the political and economic system?
20 million dead Russians
10+ million dead in SE Asia after the US pullout
of course, Big Brother was quite good at hiding such unnecessary data in the media in the MinTruth - today's equvalent would be CNN and the LA Times.
The funny part about this whole never-ending debate is that the concepts of capitalism are synonymous with what Charles Darwin called "survival of the fittest" - which SHOULD be more properly called "death of the weaker". If you don't want to suck down the bitter pill that Darwin's point was "lots of people live shitty lives then die and a small random few do not. They thrive over the others by eating them and adapting ways to not be eaten by them" Well hell's bells! Is that not what our buddy Case is doing? He's eating the others and preventing others from being able to eat him.
Or are we going to all become crationists here and start subscribing to an all powerful, all caring force controlling how people should live and how they should act and what is good and what is bad?
What bothers me about those in such a hurry to return to Marxism - the White House, Supreme Court, and nearly half of the Legislative branch, and the "new" forum to create class envy - the minority leaders like Farakan and Jackson and other Anti-semite racists - which, without exception, has resulted in the need to squash the desire for freedom - though it could cause death, or lesser standards of living, less gadgets, etc - thru the use of mass murder of those who do not want to follow the communist leaders.
Of course, in the future, with technology, maybe we could forgo the need to mass murder those who are "politically incorrect" and simply brainwash them, modify them, educate them - to think the right way.
There was no real reason to kill Winston at the end of 1984 other than for Big Brother to prove a point. Winston could have returned to te real world, loving BB, being reeducated by the government.
So, we are left with two choices - either "this piece of land is mine" or "this piece of land is everyone's, and everyone gets to look into what i do on that piece of land." Again, the funny part is that the left would say on one hand "what goes on in my bedroom is my private life" and in the next breath, they want to impose OSHA standards on "home offices" - effectively saying "Yeah, we're not going into your bedroom, unless that's where your computer is."
Those who will not choose to give up their right to do what they wish with their portion of land in any way they chose will fight to the death to keep that right - the other side will simply kill them without thought in order to make behavior, thoughts, and deeds acceptable and correct.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
The Preable to the Constitution has been wrong since it was written. It reads : We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide
for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and
establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
But lets face reality. People have never had power in the United States. Corporations have always run this country.
Write your congressman and request that they pass legislature changing the opening sentence from We the People... to We the Corporations...
Maybe if this went before Congress, people would wake up and see whats been going on for 200 years.
and age seems to get merged into this quagmire. I find myself
increasingly interested and aware of all the gobs of gadgetry, often
through places like
increasingly aware and disturbed by the ongoing trends of
corportization, such events as kids being suspended from school for
wearing a 'coke-shirt' on 'pepsi-day' and other equally crazy
corporate culture.
There is no easy solution to this very difficult problem. I do
see that we all have a part in it. I recently quit my job at the new
AOL mega-corp. I've had enough, but now my choice is to work at some other
mega-corp with equally bad tactics and practices. The problem is
systemic, and endemic. I boycott Amazon because I believe the fact
that they have a trademark on "One-Click(tm)" and a patent on the
underlying technology is absolutely ludicrous, however, I see the
increasing number of technologies which are patented out from under me
and feel like I had better file for a few patents if I want to be able
to continue writing software, i.e., in order to have the technology to
work with to produce software.
Moreover, I feel like dropping out doesn't work. Most of
'the sixties' drop-outs are the drooling sheep that we complain about here.
Maybe we should begin to embrace, extend, and destroy just like the
MicroSoft tactic. Jump in grab the technology and take it where they
never thought it would or could go.
Angry about the DeCSS lawsuits? Download the source-code and compile
it yourself. Convert all your DVDs to MPEGs on your HD and screw
them. Angry about amazon.com, support your local bookstore, or start
your own non-fascist one. We embrace, some of these ideas are good
and well healed, we extend, make it the way WE want it, destroy,
screw them, these businesses would take you to task over nothing...
do the same to them.
John
Sometimes I have something that I believe worthwhile to say but I am too busy to spend time posting it the day the Slashdot article appears. When I finally have the time, maybe a few hours later, the forum is already dead and it is not worth wasting time posting something that nobody is going to read. I am sure many other readers have had similary experiences and many good ideas have been lost due to the short lifespan of Slashdot forums.
I think one solution could be to have Slashdot to break into two services: a fast-paced one mainly for posting and commenting news and a slower-paced one with the same structure but with weekly postings instead of daily postings so that people can discuss more about issues not so attached to a specific date but more important in the long term.
Another solution would be to have a good site outside Slashdot where interested people could continue discussions once the Slashdot forum has been superceded by more recent news. I am unaware of such a site, if it exists.
I find Mr. Katz article very interesting and I feel distressed by the fact that the discussion it could spark will be dead tomorrow and so will be mostly fruitless. The most distressing part is that this will happen due to the nature of this Web site, and not because the issue is not worth more comment.
Wrong. Capitalism and Free Enterprise (which is what you are describing) are NOT the same thing.
Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production.
Free Enterprise is the allocation of goods and labour by a market mechanism.
Capitalism depends on possession of goods and services. That is, if I can charge a price in the marketplace for something I have and you don't because it costs resources to produce and I have the resources and you don't, then I can gain more resources and gain more economic power.
Information poses a problem to the capitalist because the reproduction costs are close to 0. There is no value in owning the means of production if there is no cost in production. In a true free market, the cost of software would approach 0 and that can be seen in the open source effect.
Therefore a capitalist must somehow restrict the access to the means of production to drive up the price. They do this by artificial controls on productions such as copyrights, licenses, patents andtrade secrets. That is why the DVD patents are so important to corporate America. Without them, the emperor would have no clothes and the free market would replace corporate enterprise by individual enterprise.
I am heartened to see that some people out there are actually willing consider action against corporations as a possibility. I would say that cynicism is the disease of a part of my generation, seen so often here in the knee-jerk reaction to anything suggesting hinting of influence from such countercultural groups as feminists, environmentalists, labor, civil rights, etc. Or there may be a retreat into the cry of insignificance. (ironic, as I wonder if more than two people will read this) However, as was the battle cry of feminists in the 60's "The Personal is the political!" YOu can do exactly what Hnice says, tell everyone you know, when doors are accidentally unlocked, peek inside, take notes.
:)
Overall, however, there was a key point I think that Katz missed: the tendency of consumerism/coporatism (as they are sides of the same coin) to accentuate the individual while destroying the sense of membership to a larger group. The power of the corporation over the individual is great, bring an immense amount of pressure to bear on a single person and (almost) inevitably, they will crack. A single person has no one to share experiences with, to be supported by, they are alone in their experience and we all know how loneliness feels especially the powerlessness of it. However, as a member of a group there is much greater power, sharing of information, support, humor, understanding. It is this isolation that allows a corporation to operate in a democracy while all the while maintaining power over the individual.
Now, I realize that I haven't clarified why capitalism/consumerism breeds individualism. That structure requires the concept of ownership. "This is mine!" is the implicit statement when you buy any thing, from a postcard to a house. At a personal level this works out alright, there are some people who post "Private Property" signs and shoot any unknown person they see (remember the Japenese foreign exchange student who was shot??) but more likely we have all learned to share and the neighbor kids play on our lawn and we take the shortcut across Farmer Johns field without problem. However, few corporations feel the same way and, possibly because they are removed from the personal by shareholders and direct ownership, little breakins and "curiosity" becomes a much different thing.
Arggh.. I have to go now, check back for more
joey
+-------+ between the wish and the thing lies the world - All the Pretty Horses
Seems to me the best way to avoid getting sued by legions of corporate lawyers is to avoid being a target. Wasn't it Sun Tzu who made the comment about water, being soft, overcoming the hard? We need to be more like water.
For the uninitiated, have you ever tried hitting water? It just sort of moves out of your way, then engulfs your hand. We need to be the same way.
Don't give the corporate fatcats a target to aim their lawyers at. That's what anonymizers, stego, MixMasters, and all those other crypto tools are out there for. Why not do a MixMaster for web servers?
Tim May and the other folks on Cypherpunks were wrong about the target, but right about the reasons - the target isn't the government but corporations. I don't fear the government, who at least nominally has the Constitution and the criminal justice system to provide at least a bare minimum of restraint, I fear the corporations, who have nothing but civil sanctions holding them back, and who cares about a fine of a million dollars a day when your corporate illegalities are making you 20, 30 or even 50 times more than that per day? And you can put an individual in jail, but when's the last time you've seen a corporation behind bars?
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
No, that's allodialism. Land is not Capital; Capital is not Land.
"This thing that I made is mine!" is Capitalism. So is, "this thing that I paid someone to make for me," and "this thing that my machine made for me."
Allodialism is claiming resources that are simply "out there" and not created by anyone. It's a perversion of Capitalism in which Land (which belongs to nobody) is conflated with Capital (which belongs to whoever paid for it). In your example, the mineral vein is a kind of Land; but the "idea" is a form of Labor, of which Capital is merely the accumulation.
Here are a couple of links to documents that describe the difference between allodialism and capitalism:
For Crying in the beer, would ya chill with the AOL/Time-Warner hoohaa? Its really about as sinister as Lego merging with Duplo. The only two "respected media organizations" to be affected are CNN and TIME, and they've been working together for some time now anyway. There's no threat of a Journalistic monopoly. The only sinister result was some shoddy fact-checking on the bogus story about nerve gas in Southeast Asia.
Standing up to the establishment is good, when the establishment is being naughty, but this smacks of a plea for attention. The one thing we should have learned from the boomers is to eschew catch-phrase driven media types who shout out "corporatism" at every flickering shadow.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
While the not-quite top layer players like Zeos vanished, Compaq is struggling, there is still a vast market for flexible, knowledgable computer upgrade, assembly, etc.
My roommate and his father operate one such business, make a nice pile themselves ($56 an hour), and people like their work enough to spread it through word of mouth.
Maybe what we need is to define a "micro" category. Are they going IPO? Not bloody likely. But their margins are pretty good on hardware. On the other hand, they are happy working on-site vs. owning a brick and mortar. Aside from mileage, they really cut their expenses.
So, it's not that profit margins are drying up. It's that the margins of old no longer readily support the old method of doing business for anyone who's not a niche or top-level player.
I think the PC (hardware) industry is a rather poor one to make the analogy as I've demonstrated above, since barrier to entry is comparitively low. On the other hand, owning a television or radio station or daily newspaper is not cheap. That's where the consolidation has taken place and what I think we need to worry about most.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
Funny thing about that. Pretty much everyone at my paper (newswriters, copyeditors, production folks, machinists, delivery drivers), I believe, is unionized. But then, some folks complain that we're stridently liberal about everything. We can't win for losing.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
Looking at the topics raised I noticed everything but star trek - now this may just be me but surely it's more important to discuss all these topics on their own merits before bundling them into one - especially when the AOL/TimeWarner (EMI?) merger has only just raised its head.
Just my twopeneth worth.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
Oh, wow. Perhaps the only thing more scary than some monolithic "corporatism" that Katz worries about is the implication of statements like this. OK, Jon. How big is big enough? Who decides? You? The DOJ? We see statements with similar implications these days like "He makes too much money" as if we have any place in that discussion.
Folks, as big as TimeAOLWarnerEverything gets, no one can force you to use their products and services. If it really gets "unwieldy", more efficient competitiors will undercut it. Only one entity has a monopoly on the legal use of force, and it sounds as if a lot of people are willing to give that entity more power to in order to prevent these "evil" companies from getting "too big" - whatever THAT means.
I'm beside myself...we bemoan ATM fees and cast Case as this week's incarnation of Big Brother while acquiescing every day to what really affects our lives.
Here's another book you've no doubt thrown into the kook pile...see what happens when Atlas Shrugs.
Ok well maybe not, though given the current batch of candidates I'd personally cast my vote towards Katz if he decided to run.
/. (assuming I can get the story posted) Anyone else interested in the concept of a Slashdot party please email me directly in addition to posting replies.
But that is not the point of my post. From the comments I've read so far, most of us seem to think that the small steps we can personally take to combat the growing corporate threat are too slow and too ineffective to matter. Sadly those sentiments are probably correct. We are not likely to receive salvation at the hands of a clueful politician either. Therefore we can do one of two things; We can either sit around on slashdot complaining about the lack of options in our political system or we can stand up for ourselves by forming the Slashdot party and start fielding candidates. The sad truth of the matter is that no one is going to care if a bunch of linux geeks post revolutionary ideas on Slashdot. We have to bring our ideas to the "real" world, we need to take the ideas and ideals expressed here and do something with them.
Plato (excuse my paraphrasing but I can't seem to find my copy of "The Republic")said that the just man becomes a leader not because he seeks power or money, but because to be ruled by the unjust is intolerable. He also goes on to say that the just leader doesn't rule the people but serves them, and watches out for their well being. Those words ring just as true today as they did 2000 years ago. Now is the time for just men and women to stand up against tyranny and seize the power that is rightfully theirs. For too long we have veiwed politics as something beyond the grasp of the average citizen, and because of that corporations now govern the government.
Enough with the concept of passive resistance it's not working, boycotts and letter writing campaigns are all well and good but we really want to make waves, and get our issues in the public view the best way to do it is as an elected official, or even as a serious candidate. I can rant against censorship, corpratism and the eroding foundations of American democracy all I want as a common citizen and probably never be noticed or taken seriously. However if I make those issues my platform as a legitiment candidate (even if I don't win) I will get noticed, my ideas will get ink and airtime and issues will be brought out into daylight. Even a minor official, like a school board member, can make major waves by taking a strong idealogical stand. Small waves today could turn into a political tsunami in the next ten years, if we just stand up and flex our political muscles.
So I'm putting the call out to all Slashdotters to try and get one ours on your local ballot this year. Those of you that so eloquently post your freedom loving prose get up and prove that you really mean what you say here. This week I'll be investigating what it takes to get on the ballot for the school board here in Anchorage. If I'm able to run for a seat I'll announce my candiacy here on
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
It seems to me that at least public corporations aren't governed by free-thinking "people" in every sense of the word that that conveys, because of the concept of Fiduciary Duty.
The way I've heard that defined (corrections welcome) is that the people who actually make decisions on behalf of a corporation must, in doing so, end up at a sole motive: profit. In shorter terms, the fiduciary duty of a corporation to its shareholders is to make a profit.
Not: preserve the environment, do well by the employees, take care of poor people, or any other such altruistic or otherwise lofty goal. Even if the shareholders voted overwhelmingly for some other such "corporate" goal, it wouldn't matter. So one of the basic axioms we deal with when we confront the intrusion of corporations into our civil freedoms is that corporations must attempt to profit above all other goals, or die. In other words, they couldn't not try to profit even if they, the shareholders, wanted to.
And to me, that draws the distinction both in the argument between "people" in the "can't we all just get along" sense perpetrated by tomwhore and some other posters to this board, and the "People" with the fiduciary duty to consume all tangible aspects to our world, including our ideas, thoughts, feeling, and actions. The People don't have the freedom to use their shared entity as an agent for positive social change.
Then, what if that concept changed? What if government released public, for-profit companies from fiduciary duty? It'd be as easy as changing the definition of fiduciary duty to "any tangible, justifiable end." Dare I say it: an OPEN SOURCE legal/value system!
Profit would still be an acceptable one of those, but then the "people" who happen to own shares of a company, in sufficient numbers, wouldn't be limited to it as an option. People would actually have a choice, making them more like "people."
I guess coupled with that would be the elimination of the designation, "non-profit." There'd be one code of conduct for ALL companies, and even if we had to decide what that was, it'd be uniform. Currently, certain non-profits, in order to get tax breaks, are not allowed to espouse a particular political issue or candidate; yet, for-profit companies can and do insert themselves into the political process, almost to the exclusion of regular citizens. Whether you decide if that stays or it goes, it would be one set of rules for everybody.
I welcome replies to this, but until it happens, THERE IS a realistic distinction between us (those who decry corporate intrusion) and those who benefit excessively from ownership and corporations.
We're NOT all just 'people' anymore.
_____
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
..True, however if you connect via the phone company (i.e. DSL not Cable modem) you probably will have less trouble, as phone companies are less likely to try and police contents of your Web server....
Here in England, I am on the British Telecom DSL trial, and the routers are programmed to stop us from hosting sites (i.e. no incoming connections), some have modified code on the routers to get around this, however they have been warned that if they do, they will face having their service withdrawn and that is it illegal hacking i.e. to get the service that you are contracted to get, you have to perform an illegal activity and go to jail, now thats corporate abuse of a monopoly, backed by the government at its worst, if we start being thrown in jail, it will make the Kevin Mitnik saga look like swift justice.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Ok, well here is how I have fun with TV, I desect the program, look for the media hooks, and second guess what is going to happen next, now that can be great fun, especially with freinds, when I pronounce on "what happens next" and get to be right, normal people look at me and start asking if I am psychic or if its a repeat and I had seen it before, Oh what fun! The only other thing is some good documentaries, like for example the recent series on the Japanese economic bubble and a good history of the LTCM (Long Term Capital Management) debacle, so I do manage to get something for the licence fee, although not that much, also I have now started watching some of the documentaries on PBS via ICraveTV over the Net, which fill in blanks in my head, TV can make you think, but we need more and better programs to do so. Just my 2p worth.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
On the subject of Robber Barons, you might want to check out
The Invisible Barbecue by Eben Moglen.
It draws parallels between the present and the RailRoad Land Grab era after reconstruction. (the greatest flourishing of Robber Barony before the internet came along)
By the way, this guy serves as counsel for the FSF and has argued on the EFF side in the California DVD-CCA case.
What is even more disturbing is the lack of understanding of the "value added" people put into products their company sells. For instance, I'm a new engineer, working for a gov't contractor, making ~$40K, which is pretty good for the area I inhabit. However, the projects I'm working on represent a "final product" that will be sold to the government (or something -- tells you how much I know/care) for multiple millions of dollars.
The thing is that there are very few people working on this project, and most of them are around my wage level. Sure, there's stuff like "overhead" and "connected costs," but the bottom line is that, at some point, the stockholders are going to be walking away with a hell of a lot of money, most (if not all) of which will have been generated by me and my colleagues.
Now, soon I will have the opportunity to become a stockholder (employee stock purchase thing), and I will. In one way I will think of it as capturing more of the value I add to our "product."
The real solution, though, is unpalatable to my mostly conservative colleagues, though: unionize. "An engineer union!?!?"
A simple search on Google reveals that there are some engineering unions in the world, and following a link shows that they even do things.
I hate it when I lose my train of thought.
Ah yes. You see, the people that contribute their time, sweat, etc. to making automobiles, aircraft, hauling goods, teaching our children, etc. have all figured out that, in the end, corporations don't give a damn about the stakeholders . So, they've figured out that they can get their voices heard if they get together. Technology-savvy individuals, wooed by the "big bucks" they're offered, think that being in a union will only be a bad thing.
The funny thing is that this very opinion is propogated by the corporations. They own (almost) every media outlet, so is it a surprise that they can get the media to show pictures of the union exploiters sitting on their ass earning workman's comp for a papercut? Is it surprising that this is portrayed as some sort of a majority of union workers?
This is too long, it's gonna get auto-demoted.
You get the idea, though. It's more wicked than just controlling the media or the medium, it's controlling our lives and our livelihood. Particularly here, with the large numbers of techno-savvy people. Pay attention!
-Ristoril
Yes and no --
the thing of it is, when i said exercising our free will, i wasn't referring to everybody's, but to everybody who would like to see amazon own less than 100 % of their market. that makes me, katz, a reasonably-sized majority of this board, and a couple hundred thousand others, maybe.
but you've got everybody voting in the general election -- my mom, my boss, jeff bezos -- basically, tons of people who either don't notice or don't care that our options aren't as broad as we might like them to be, if there were a bunch of major players.
so, i agree, any successful but intellectually oppressive company can be dethroned, but only if its down-side is widely accepted, and people know what to do about it. which is where the letting people know part comes in.
god is just pretend.
You're right, and I can only say that I fell victim to my desire to sound unequivocal, passionate, etc.
A world in which we only had fatbrain wouldn't be much better, for the vary same reasons that lead one to mistrust amazon or ms.
god is just pretend.
I'm not sure that i'd call what i'm talking about anarchism, but i would certainly say that the more that the individual is able to be a self-sufficient entity, in terms of his access to information, the more power he'll have over corporate attempts to subvert his freedoms.
That is, by maintaining an understanding of what's involved in protecting privacy and freedom, you actually help to protect it -- the understanding of the act is the act itself, in a way. Hand in hand with this goes the ability to do things which would qualify as anarchistic, of course, but I don't know that you neccessarily have to do them.
god is just pretend.
Sufi wrote:
/. postings.) We noticed, and we're pissed.
... it might just help you extract your cranium from your rectum.
> The western capitalist world *IS* corporate
Yes. That's precicely the problem.
Just look at USWest (or, as it's colloquially known, USWorst), and their unresponsiveness to thousands of customers wanting DSL. Though they have the monetary and manpower resources needed to make it happen in short order, they prefer to line the personal pocketbooks of their board members and high level executives (while paying pitifully low wages to the linemen who do all the work that makes them that money). Why? Because there's nowhere else that their customers can get service.
> Shouldn't we be focusing on the slightly more important but less relevant to you issues here?
Like what?
You think the rain forest is any more important a natural resource than the 'net?
You think the rain forest is any less important to us than the 'net?
> Jeez, get off your moral high horse and start talking about something the majority of people actually give a shit about.
Less than 20% of eligible voters showed up to the last presidential election.
What makes you think the majority of people give a shit about anything?
> but fail to notice companies are patenting human DNA
Look again. (It's all over last week's
> stick to the geek aspect
What? Geeks aren't interested in environmental issues? Geeks don't care about people's rights and liberties being trampled by governmental incompetence and corporate greed?
Let me get you a crowbar
Funny, yes, but then, not all that silly when you think about it. Pretty impressive to predict in 1983 that a then small computer company would be a world-ruling monolith by 2019.
Their only mistake was in picking a hardware company instead of a software company. But then, who'd have thought that a little, podunk company called "Micro-soft" would be heading for world rule?
The cake is a pie
Is it even possible to refuse to allow your books to be sold on Amazon? Authors don't typically have that sort of power, and Amazon lists literally everything in print (and more). For exmple, Richard Stallman has about twenty or so things listed. (Most "Special Order".) Obviously if anyone would refuse to sell through Amazon, he would. But how could he? He'd have to demand that his publisher not sell to Amazon. His publisher would likely laugh at him.
People tend to think authors have all this power over their work. They don't (unless their last name is Chrichton or King).
The cake is a pie
I do tend to agree with Jon in so much as there is an obvious effect of corporations on the freedoms available to that third sacred right, "pursuit of happiness".
And I do agree that the injunctions presented regarding DeCSS are extreme, but on the other hand I see reason behind the banning of Napster where others seem to see little. The colleges that are moving to ban Napster are not doing so to infringe upon the rights of the students. Nor are they doing so to support the music industries. They are doing so to keep their own costs down. Quite honestly, they cannot be infringing upon the rights of these students, as the students' access to a college's bandwidth is not a right, at least, not at the college I currently attend. It is a privilege. There should, in fact, be little argument over this, as most universities have "Responsible Computing" policies that specifically state that the use of the university's bandwith is a privilege that can be revoked by the university for any reason.
I myself am a big fan of the concept of private property, i.e. when I buy something, it is mine; I have the right to do whatever I want with it such that in doing so I don't infringe upon the rights of others. Thus, I analogize decrypting a DVD to cutting all the pages out of a book and making origami with it. But I'm also the type of person who analogizes hacking (Whoops, misnomer, I must mean cracking. (Whoops, misnomer, I mean criminal entry)) into a computer system with breaking into my house. Thus, Kevin Mitnick is really nothing more than an overglorified cat burglar, albeit a clever one. This is also where a great deal of problems arise. As Jon has pointed out, the results of these situations (the DeCSS injunction, etc.) most affect abstract ideas which sometimes can be analogized, and sometimes can't. And, often, the analogies that can be found are contradictory. I see Mitnick as a cat burglar; the government sees him as the most dangerous computer user to be let free. Perhaps we're both right, perhaps neither is correct. It's always been a perspective issue; only recently has the political situation strayed to the degree that we concentrate on our economy as there are no real threats to us politically. The Cold War is over. There are less than half a dozen (I think) Communist nations left, and those that are still here pose no threat to the security of the United States (China's a toss-up, I'll admit that). The Internet has arisen and become an incredible source of information, and has undoubtedly enhanced the lives of everyone using it. Life is quite different than it was 30 years ago, and I would venture to say it's better.
Jon himself has pointed out that we are being limited by corporations. I would like to emphasize that the corporations that his focus is on are entertainment industries. The threat is not to our lives, but to our enjoyment of them. The fact that this is the case has me particularly pleased. We are at a point where we can complain about how few choices we have to spend leisurely. A hundred and fifty years ago, this wouldn't have been the case.
As many people have pointed out, the key to this realization of the American Dream not becoming the American Nightmare is the dissemination of information. The American public are not a techno-cognoscenti. The information discussed on Slashdot would necessarily need to be spread out to the rest of the people, through whatever means necessary, if this course of action were to be taken. And that won't happen until a serious analysis of the situation happens, and until enough people are willing to do so. Anyone can post their opinion anonymously or pseudo-anonymously on the Internet, myself obviously included. But how many people are willing to publically support the ideas they profess on the Internet? Obviously not everyone. Anonymity is an important part of our lives. Unfortunately, as long as our anonymity remains a high priority, these problems will not just go away.
I don't ask that anyone agrees with me; to do so would be your choice. However, I do ask that whomever reads this message has the courtesy to think about what I've said before responding. Courtesies are not necessary, but they are pleasant.
I hear a lot of whining here, but whining does not achieve things in the American political process.
This community IS A POWERFUL FORCE. Our support created billion dollar corporations that take marketshare from the biggest monopolistic corporate force there is. If we can compete in that arena, we can compete anywhere.
I think the Electronic Frontier Foundations is our political voice. We need to focus our political frustrations into constructive action that builds the EFF into the powerful lobby that it needs to be. It is worth noting that many of the most powerful lobbies in Washington are grassroots organizations. You need only consider the AARP and the NRA to imagine what the EFF could become.
In addition to grassroots support, the major companies that this community has created (Red Hat, VA, Andover, etc...) have an obligation back to us to visibly support for the EFF. Slashdot, you at least ought to put a banner up for them pro bono - they ARE advocates against your accusers in the CA DVD case after all.
2. Stop using the products/services of the offending companies.Like Jon Katz and others (me too) have taken a stand against Amazon by refusing to buy books until the patent is dropped. And let those companies know why -- the easiest way to end a war is to show your adversary the benefit of co-operation over competition.
Really, open source DVD playback technology would open up new markets for DVD sales. Maybe a few would be pirated, but come on, most of use just want to watch legitimate ones.
That was my best guess, since Monsanto is sort of a agrichemical and pharmaceutical company.
Of course, I'll keep trying if you'd be kind enough to drop a good hint...
Ungh
So, tell me, how's life at Searle/Monsanto?
I suppose the merger with Pharmacia/Upjohn doesn't help any with the stock price, eh?
Ungh
Well, I'd give "credit," if that's really the right word, to Ridley Scott (or whoever it was that wrote the screenplay) for "Blade Runner." Philip Dick never wrote any story entitled "Blade Runner." He did write the novel called "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" upon which, allegedly, the "Blade Runner" script was based, but the two are so different that one can scarcely see even a bit of resemblance, much less a direct lineage.
In fact, right before the movie came out the producers offered Dick $250,000 to suppress the original and vastly superior "Androids" and in its place to write a novelization of their script. Dick needed the money, but on his agent's good advice he turned them down.
There's a very interesting overview of Dick's life and works in this article at Hermenaut.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> We, the people, are the "corporations". We build them. People run
> them. People who, at the end of the day, are no worse than we are.
This is laughable. You complain about Katz's unjustified generalizations and then you come forth with a howler like this. Yeah, sure, you and I are the same as Bill Gates and Steve Case. Except of course that they are multibillionaires and we aren't, and between them they control corporations with a total value of around a trillion dollars and we don't, and in the real world that does amount to something of a difference.
You go on to compare the massive social destruction routinely wrought worldwide by giant corporations equally with your sense of offense at seeing Katz post an article on slashdot with the equivalent of a higher moderation score than yours. Right, and first-degree murder is about the same thing as jaywalking too. Have you no sense of proportion at all?
> Show me *WHY* it is inevitably the case that any corporation must
> be nothing but soul-sucking evil. Show me *WHY* I should believe
> that the mere existance of a megacorp is a violation of all I hold dear.
Well, I would suggest that you start by reading Capital by Marx and Engels, but I don't suppose you will ever do so. It is an awful lot of pages, and it is an infamously heretical book, and you wouldn't want to be caught out violating the heresy laws now, would you? Anyway, despite your Show me *WHY*s, my guess is you don't really want to be shown anything which conflicts with your fact-free, a priori Randite preconceptions.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
And here we are, burning books in the street for all to see....
And that is literature, according to DIJ.
Dijital
Diji
"I came, I saw, I WTF'd!"
Tell you what, posting here on Slashdot is like preaching to the choir. The best way to get these concerns out would be to stage a protest. I'm talking a REAL protest, like people in front of a building holding signs. What we need to do, is PRINT OUT these threads, and send them to our local politicians, so that they, in their analog world, can see what is happening here.
I'd be at least willing to draft a petition and print out some signs about how our freedoms are in jeopardy. It's only if we organize OFFLINE that we can make a difference ONLINE..and that's what the corporations are doing right now.
A Slashdot CONVENTION is what is needed.
Let me know your thoughts.
CJF
Whose political candidate, the Naked Dancing Llama, gets 1000s of hits a day...what does that tell you about the political system..
But I will.
If you and I have priorities that lead us to hurt others for our own personal gain, or spill huge amounts of toxic chemicals in rich wildlife areas and not bother to clean up, you and I will be put in jail. That's called accountability.
If a Corporation chooses to do these things to meet its own priorities (i.e. increase shareholder value), the Corporation does NOT go to jail. Ever. There is no accountability. At worst the corporation will be sued and lose some money. DId you see how much Exxon suffered after Valdez? How much did the CEO of Exxon suffer? Even less. In the early 40's Bayer took loads of Jews from concentration camps and used them for rather sadistic drug experiments. Humans who did this are still hunted as war criminals. The Bayer corporation still has no responsibility for this. When challenged, they blandly reply that the people who made that decision are no longer with the company. Who is accountable? Fear Corporate Rule until stockholders can be personally sent to jail for a corporations decisions which are aimed to please them. Steve
Opinion's in PDF and WordPerfect format are hard for some of us to come up with. Could someone code a quick way for us to (Slashdot Readers) to make our opinion known via a simple web form?
I can help with the coding, if we can get a server going. Mine would die under the load, it's a P100.
-- Smile
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
I think I can see where you're coming from but I don't necessarily agree with your perspective.
True, there are still problems with this world. There probably always will be. People will still die unnecessarily, natural resources will still be squandered, and so on. But I think that Jon Katz has brought up several very relevant points in his post. Points that shouldn't be overlooked.
Should we wait until this whole corporate problem grows to the point that it's every bit as big as our natural resource problem? Or should we do something about it now when at least we still have several options in front of us. I would much rather tackle this issue now and then move on to other, perhaps larger, issues than to wait until corporations have removed many of the freedoms that I enjoy now and have become even more entrenched behind laws, lawyers, and politicians and try to fight them then.
I see it like the frog that is sitting in luke warm water but is boiled to death after the water is gradually warmed to the boiling point. All the while the frog is able to jump to safety but never realizes there is a danger because of how gradually the water temperature changes. The water is luke warm, and I say we jump now! These types of issues aren't going to go away. It's only going to get worse as time goes on.
Slashdot is exactly the place for things like this to get started. Who else is going to do it? We have a lot of resources represented here and a great sense of community, so why not?
Just my $.02
-Travis
Excellent post!
Welcome my son, welcome to the machine Where have you been? It's alright we know where you've been You've been in the pipeline, filling in time, provided with toys and 'Scouting for Boys' You bought a guitar to punish your ma, And you didn't like school, and you know you're nobody's fool So welcome to the machine Welcome my son, welcome to the machine What did you dream? It's alright we told you what to dream You dreamed of a big star, he played a mean guitar He always ate in the Steak Bar He loved to drive his Jaguar So welcome to the machine "Welcome To The Machine" - Pink Floyd (Roger Waters)
#DEFINE QUESTION (2b)||(!2b) -- William Shakespeare
Welcome my son, welcome to the machine
Where have you been?
It's alright we know where you've been
You've been in the pipeline, filling in time,
provided with toys and 'Scouting for Boys'
You bought a guitar to punish your ma,
And you didn't like school,
and you know you're nobody's fool
So welcome to the machine
Welcome my son, welcome to the machine
What did you dream?
It's alright we told you what to dream
You dreamed of a big star, he played a mean guitar
He always ate in the Steak Bar
He loved to drive his Jaguar
So welcome to the machine
"Welcome To The Machine" - Pink Floyd (Roger Waters)
#DEFINE QUESTION (2b)||(!2b) -- William Shakespeare
There is a huge difference between business and corporatism. Business is making a quality product, marketing it to the group that would use it, selling it, making money, etc. Corporatism is a large company acting only on its interest in the bottom line and ignoring privacy, free-speech, and creating bland media for a good buying environment (look at the 3 big networks in the U.S. and tell me that is not bland crap stuck around commercials).
I disagree. "With freedom comes responsibility," right? Libertarianism is about trusting the individual to use their freedom responsibly. Of course, a minimal level of law is required, but no more than that.
I'd argue that the far right is more about shirking responsibility. Just look at all the finger pointing when it comes to Columbine, for example. Nobody says "my bad. I screwed up." No blame placed on Harris/Klebold - it's the black trenchcoats and Doom that made 'em that way! The solution is - obviously - to ban those products or acts that are deemed "immoral".
Of course, the far left isn't much better (and I'm left-leaning myself). Let's rescue people from fiscal irresponsibility and give them Social Security so they can (in theory) retire. It's basically gov't required charity. Compassion == good, forced donation == bad.
Somebody must check corporatism. If not, our very freedoms are in jeopardy. But those checks should come from the consumers (ahhh, there's that responsibility coming in) - not gov't. The problem is that too many people are willing to trade some freedom for a modicum of safety - and that's a slippery slope.
The key is, IMO, better education. Too many of today's youth (and I'm 23, so I don't think I fall in that category anymore...) lack the critical reasoning skills necessary for Libertarianism to work. They gobble up the corporate advertising like it's required to live. I need my IKEA furniture, my Nike's, my Abercrombie shirts... etc. I wanna be like Mike!
Cheers,
Brian
The AOL/Time-Warner "Incubus"? A quick perusal of Wordsmyth gives us the classic and Katzian definitions:
;-), so I'd expect that you'd aim for clarity of point, not cleverness of phrase. . . remember, if you say something and get misinterpreted because of ambiguity, the blame is shared equally.
1. an evil spirit in male form that is said to have sexual intercourse with women as they sleep. (Cf. succubus.)
2. a frightening dream.
3. anything that oppresses one.
Just to make a niggling point, almost no one uses senses 2 or 3. "Incubus" and "incubi" are almost exclusively used to depict male vampiric entities. (Anyone remember that clever Reebok rep who used the clever CLM of calling a running shoe the "Incubus" a couple years back *G*?)
Jon, I know you write for a living (despite what many other posters here consider what it is you do for a paycheck
Rafe
V^^^^V
Rafe
Opinions expressed by the author may not actually exist in the wild.
I love these self-appointed leaders of the techno-elite telling us how it is. As a Libertarian, I completely resent his definition of Libertarianism. He obviously has no idea what he is talking about if he thinks that our government is a Libertarian ideal. *Nothing* could be further from the truth. The number one issue facing us is not corporatism. It is this new "third way" that is infesting western liberal countries such as ours... The problem is the melding of government power with corporate insterest, which is, by definition fascism. The root of all this is government. Corporations can not use violence because gov't already has a monopoly on its use. But corporations, being backed by gov't, is what threatens us. If we separate gov't and economy, as we should, the the whole thing comes crashing down. The reason that gov't supports these institutions is that these instituions are supported by the same money that supports gov't power and influence. Gov't fears its own demise and supports these corporations as a result. This rant by Katz is nothing more that his Menshevik political thoughts being disguised as commentary. Jon Katz is a socialist.
Profits? What profits? This is Amazon we're talking about. They can lose millions of dollars at a record pace, and still get Bezos named Time's Man of the Year...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I think you miss or exagerate the point. Corps. dont care how free we are or what we think. They arent against individuality, or any particular culture. They want to make money. How they make it is irrelevent. They will use any tool at their disposle if they belive it will increase their profits. The problems we face stem from the fact that the thinking is way too short term. They want profit NOW. The fact that they actions maybe result in a bad public impression which in turn can lead to lower sales doesnt seem to occur to them.
Corporations used to thrive on innovations. One upping their competitors to offer a better product. Now you go into a store, you find stacks and stacks of products that differe little save for the packaging. The focus has shifted from innovation, to preventing others from making innovations, by using legal means to block their attempts whenever possible.
Whats intresting is that you miss something very importat about these mega-corporations: WE OWN THEM!
I use "we" in a very broad sense. What i mean is, most if not all compinies are owned mostly by nameless share holders, who have no say in how the company behaves. (How much of microsoft does bill gates own?) They recive a check everynow and then, and that is the extent of their interaction. The companies policies and decisions are mostly carried out and created by hired employees(boards of directors?) paid company salaries (and hence in the employ of the shareholders). So in effect we have entities with inredable amounts of money power and influcence, being run by people whos jobs are to maximize the amount every share hodler recives, and who can get up and walk away from any mess they made with no obligations or responsibilites.
Take a look at microsoft. Every one seems to think that microsoft is bad, evil what ever. But what exactly is it thats "bad"? "Microsoft" is just a group of people working under a common name. Is it those people that are bad? a few of those people? one of them? Who is responsible for a corporations actions? The boards of directors are just employees. The shareholders have no real say in what the company does (unless they own ALOT of stock). Where then do we put this blame?
As has been pointed out, these mega-corps have their fingers in too many pies to be able to boycott them. Maybe we can boycott their stock. If you disagree with what a company does, sell their stock. if the market was flooded with stock no one wants, the value goes down, and the company will find it hard to do what it wants: make money. (of course that alos opens the door to even bigger mergers as the companies become devalued)
Just as unworkable: buy stock in the company, hopefully enough that oyu have influence with the board of directors. maybe we cand band together and creat ficitional corportions just to own shares for us in the large corporations, so that a collective voice could be heard.
Ok i'm done. start critizing.
On a side note, for a book that effectively throws every argument Katz has ever made into the dirt, read The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel. It's the book that gave my views a name ;)
~=Keelor
So much wonderfully intelligent discussion results from posting in response to his rubbish.
Agreed. Who cares if what he writes is complete nonsense, it serves to get decent debate going on the subject. I think he deliberately overdoes his articles anyway, just to provoke so much opinion :)
What goes up must come down. The Romans sure did, and nobody ever thought they would.
And just how long did the Roman Empire last? Several centuries IIRC. While things tend to move faster today than they did then, once we are in the situation of having a group of meta-national corporations (read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series for a great take on the future development of Earth's corporations) controlling almost all services and goods the situation can be stable for a long, long time. Just look at the MS monopoly. Once a company has got itself into that position it can stay there practically indefinitely given some reasonably intellegent and ruthless people running it. And the larger the corporation, the longer it can stay in that position, through sheer inertia if for no other reason.
Today, I am responsible for the content of my web site, and the buck stops here. If my ISP becomes co-responsible, what is going to happen to the personal website? What about controversial websites, that some find offensive? What about Free (speech) Software websites that some deep-pocketed lawyer-laden business finds offensive.
Even if the US sets this kind of precedent it still won't affect the web as a whole - many sites would move to servers and ISPs abroad, in countries where this kind of thing is allowed. This sort of thing would require every country in the world to agree, and then any country opting out could make a fortune hosting these sites. I believe that a lot of the online casino sites are hosted in the Cayman Islands where laws are a lot less strict than in the US.
Unfortunately this leaves little mom n' pop web sites out of business.
True, but at the moment there isn't a need for such a thing. A lot of the mom n' pop web sites (good term BTW :)) probably won't carry any offensive material - I doubt the majority of web sites do. However again we come to the laws of supply and demand - if there are a lot of people wanting to host a web site and they cannot in their home country then someone will find a way to provide that service. The technology is there, but it's just not necessary at the moment. I'm sure a battalion of web site-less geeks could sort it all out if they were frustrated enough :)
Hot Damn!
... really.. isnt telling you what to buy a very mild form of mind control?)
Preach the word! (seriously)
If only there were more people in the world like this. And perhaps there will be-- If, that is, our founding Fathers were correct in their assumption (a pretty sound one, i might add) that an educated populace is a good, productive and happy populace, able to get what it needs (at least) and hopefully what it wants.
I don't recall the name of the Philosopher who first conceived this.. (Socrates?) but i think the idea here is Eudaimonia. Which, in so many words says that happiness is achieved through excellence (in mind, body and spirit) and thus, a happy life is one conducted in excellence.
Excellence, i have come to believe, refers to living to your fullest, doing what you do best, and helping others as you would have them help you.
So, i would guess and say that if we continue towards a morally sound, intellectually open and productive future we would eventually achieve Eudaimonia, the Real Utopia. Wild Fantasies? Eh, who knows. Its not like we are that guy from foundations or anything. This future, of course, is bereft of the corporate blandness and mind control. (exaggeration, nonetheless, but
And blah, blah, blah et cetera. To make a long story short, the solution is goes like this.
1. Find the best facts you can get.
2. Act on this information in the best way (most excellent?) you can.
3. And perhaps, through simple iteration, generations in the future may have better lives than we have ever imagined.
-Chompster, in the depths of his ignorance: 200ft and falling!
Heh, its kind of funny, but i really wonder if my suggestions will be marked as over-idealistic, bombastic and hackneyed? Well.. only way to tell is... [post]
This isn't a redundant post; I just set my threshold to 6.
Sorry if this is off-topic - just seemed like a glaring omission (especially considering that The Matrix has a lot of influence from Gibson). You want a scary view of corporatism? In Neuromancer (and the rest of the Sprawl trilogy, I assume - can't wait to read the other two) the corporations are almost nations in themselves, with their own military, their own anthems, and coportate-logo-tattooed empoloyees/slaves-for-life for citizens.
bp
woxy.com - Bam! The Future of Rock and Roll
Sorry if this is off-topic - just seemed like a glaring omission (especially considering that The Matrix has a lot of influence from Gibson). You want a scary view of corporatism? In Neuromancer (and the rest of the Sprawl trilogy, I assume - can't wait to read the other two) the corporations are almost nations in themselves, with their own military, their own anthems, and coportate-logo-tattooed employees/slaves-for-life for citizens.
bp
woxy.com - Bam! The Future of Rock and Roll
Just a small issue with the point that corporatism is bad. The only thing to stop the representation of many of the interest groups within the "good" side of this fight as corporatist is a lack of formal external recognition. This may indeed be changing, but even if it is not, the interest groups which fight the "forces of darknes (MPAA et al)" have more in common with a formal corporatist analysis than not.
Further I would suggest that an increase in corporatist activity in the modern "democratic" state is (IMHO) a greater force to oppose those large organisations that would ride roughshot (sp?) over the interests of a large number of "voiceless" persons than virtualy any other political mechanism. So let's not go hacking at the coporatist ideology without due care.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
That's exactly what I'm doing. I had been planning the purchase of a DVD player and new Dolby Digital receiver hardware, but what with these cases, I've decided to put that purchase off indefinitely. I'm a movie buff, but I cannot (and will not) condone what the DVD-CCA and MPAA are doing here - this is ridiculous!
It's always unwise to claim that SF authors have never thought of something. If you go back and read Ray Bradbury you'll find people chatting inanely in public on mobile phones; annoyingly intelligent devices; and a whole town taken over by advertisers.
I always used to say we would go to hell with Bradbury. Sadly, it seems to get closer every day.
I was pondering a similar line of thought the other day and I placed it in context of the progress of mankind as a whole. I think that the coalescing of freedom-minded people caused by our information revolution is germinating the seeds of our growth into the next stage of 'evolution'.
I think you see the hint of this in books like Asimov's classic foundation series(Gaia), or in the way the Alien's are portrayed in Contact. Not that I am so impressed by "stupid butthead astronomer" anyway, after all it only has a one button mouse :)
So, yeah, yeah, what I'm talking about is the age old 'love one another'. Put other people or the good of mankind above yourself. I think more educated or at least intellectually intersted people understand this naturally. They are searching for answers to questions, mainly technical, but this forces them to see the reality of their own context. Where do they fit in [or not fit in :( ] to society.
My own personal epiphany in this regard is rather recent and so I don't have a thorough analysis, but I believe I have a few key points:
1) Society will NOT make any significant advancement until the/a majority of the people understand their own context. We are too big and complex to allow 'one man to make a difference'...I dunno, maybe Michael 'Valentine' Smith2) I had previously been disillusioned with the good of society, but having witnessed how this is manifested often(albeit in a fragmented way) so often throughout the 'net and mainly the open source community, I have changed my mind.
3) Even though from an abstract point of view, this battle is us against them (i.e. the roots of a newer advanced culture vs. corporatism or egotism), the point is not to destroy them, but to destroy that which is against "truth". (okay that's sounds a little cheesy
i.e. the Santa Clara DVD prelim injunction, and someone may have made this point already...The judges actual decision was very logical with the information he had, albiet wrong. And I felt that he understood most of the truth, was taking a safe step, and would probably make the right decision if convinced of the parts he was missing. So we don't want to destroy the 'truth' that he already holds by villefying him, which I don't think any of the important people are doing :)
4)That we as a community must stick together. The tendency of intelligence, especially in youth, can be sometimes to concede to a "stronger" force. I think this is because the more you understand, the more you see yourself in context with society and how little each one of us really matters. But placidly defending ideals will sometimes force individuals to take one for the team to make a point(thanks, Kevin!)
5)That this concept(not mine, it's GPL'd!) is not antithetical to individualism. Each can aspire to whatever heights of achievment, but must not delude him/herself out of context. I think a stark exapmle of this would be to contrast people like Linus, Alan, etc. against the Gates', the Bezos', and the Case's of the corporate world.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong(GPL'd by DM 1997)
Here's a link.
Sorry about the spelling and grammer. I went to public school. On a side note. I didn't want a seperate post. Mitnick may have been a criminal but the way he was treated shows a blatent disregard for cival liberties. Go get the full story at 2600 The companies involved gave false claims about the damage that mitnick did to their companies and then didn't report those losses to stockholders as they are required to do.
It's a matter of money. Look what OJ simpson got away with. If Mitnick had the kind of money that OJ did he would have been out of jail in months instead of years.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
at least in the PC industry, anyway. Profit margins are suddenly drying up, and the Supply chain that has existed for many years appears to have gone off and shot itself. All the distributors are either covertly direct selling to end users or being eaten up since they now hold no market cap. This makes the margins razor thin on hardware, and lessens the ability for new low-cap startups.
Is this happening in any other industries? Is the future one in which you have no choice of whom to buy a product from?
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
Make sure you read the feedback section, the "your web page sucks" comments really show how far the needle goes.
Kill your TV
--------
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Situations like this further strengthen my idea of going back to school to get a law degree, and specialize in computer and technology law.
It seems that Multimegacorps and our political leaders are too old to fully grasp the true potential and existing state of technology in the world. There is potential to forever change the world for the better, opening lines of communication and sharing of ideas, bridging cultural gaps and the like. But the laws that are proposed and sometimes passed, and the methods used by Multimegacorps to position themselves for Multimegaprofits are all OLD IDEAS. They are based on physical restrictions, where location matters and distance matters.
In the world of digital information, there are no locations, and there are no distances, and there are no limitations (in many ways). Instead of changing their practices and embracing new modes of operation, they are trying to stuff the square of the Internet into their triangle of operations, and it's raising hell.
I've felt for so long that we need to have lawyers that are schooled specifically in technology law. Geeks, people who truly *understand* what this is all about at a fundamental level. Law schools should create course tracks for computer law study, and should promote it heavily. There is an obvious need and demand, so finding employment with this kind of degree shouldn't be a problem.
With lawmakers and lawyers that are well versed in computer issues, eventually the old-school political thinking will change (perhaps without needing to wait for the computer-savvy generation to get into office). Multimegacorp would have some serious competition in the courtrooms.
Are there any shcools that offer this kind of training? Is it being promoted? We need it, we need more soldiers on OUR side of the battlefield. We're outnumbered, and unless something major comes along, within ten years or so the net will be molded into a tool for feeding corporate greed, and will loose its potential to change and evolve the world for the better.
oy vey.
Learn how a CPU works before you learn to program. Seriously.
For those of you who don't want to wade through that entire post, here it is with the noise filtered out to reveal the clean signal.
"The sky is falling...how valuable information has become in the Digital Age...the sky is falling"
Yes, there is a kind of war going on, but the enemy is anybody who would suppress the free exchange of information, and most of these oppressors are NOT coporations.
Of course, I could be totally wrong.
j
"It's not whether or not you're paranoid. It's whether or not you're paranoid enough."
j
"It's not whether or not you're paranoid. It's whether or not you're paranoid enough."
- anonymous
In the UK where I am writing from (and I have no reason to think that the law may be differnt in the USA), the managers of pension funds are legally obliged (yep, and there are cases where they have been taken to court) to make as much money as possible for the holders of that pension fund.
The managers of yopur pension fund, which your hard earned cash goes into every month, are the people responsible for driving many of these deals forwards. Why - because they are legally obliged to.
I think that there are two underlying reasons for this (I seem to recall a story in the financial section of the Guardian I can't find the article I was looking for in the archive - but these ones may be relevent/of interest:
Investors wield their power
Whisper it ... takeovers don't pay )
First, this legal obligation on pension fund managers - pressure for a legal change would help here, although the recent performance of ethical trusts and investment portfolios has been encouraging, and can be used for pointed questioning for pension fund meetings. Second, the investment model in the US/USA is much more dependent on raising money from shareholders than from the bank (which, while they may be b*stards from time to time, at least only demand a set interest rate, and don't ask why you havn't been able to pay them more interest).
So where does this leave us. If you want to check the power of the multinationals it is unfortunately the case that the offering of economic incentives is, as Jon Katz points out, the most effective. The adverse publicity that Shell received over the Brent Spar decommisioning caused a major change in mindest. The publicity over 'fat cat' utility managers in the UK has also been very high profile.
If you want to get involved, then talk to your representatives of your pension fund. Apply pressure to them directly to invest ethically, and to take a long term view. After all - it's your money. If you own shares in a corporation, get along to the AGM if you can. Ask them about their policies, these people *really* hate it when they take flak from shareholders - as any number of news stories show.
Remember, it's your money. You may have earned it, but the way you invest it (be it in goods, services or stock) is, amongst other things, an ethical decision.
However, are people going to really care where all this stuff is coming from? Maybe I'm making some really broad generalizations here, but I think people, in general, don't care too much where they get what they need. As long as the have a good job, a roof over their heads, plenty to eat, and are otherwise relatively happy, they're not going to care that half the stuff they use or read or watch comes from one broad source. As long as they stay happy in their own secure (ha!) world, they're not going to worry about it.
Reminds me a little of something I read in a Heinlein novel. There's the people who can think, the people who can't think, and the people who don't want to think. If you try to make those people who don't want to to start thinking, more than likely you're going to get clobbered so they can go back to their quiet, unthinking lives.
So, maybe things are going down the tubes. Maybe you want to point out to everyone that things are going that way. You're probably going to find that people don't really care, and just want to let the others do the thinking.
However. what irks me are those who rant against the corporate system in general, but who harbour secret desires not to cease the inequalities, but to merely be at the head of the pile themselves.
Jon, is is my fear, and opinion at the moment, that you are one of these people. You post stories, usually quite lengthy, about how bad the system is, but when people respond, you do not partake in the discussion itself. I believe your e-mail sources are genuine, don't get me wrong. But when someone posts an alternative theory, or an addition to yours, I have never seen a response. An awful lot of Slashdot readers see you as someone who writes stories on high, secure in the knowledge that you have an army of readers who will disseminate your material, and who will heed your opinion.
I will always hold you in high esteem for providing an alternative outlet for the Colorado fallout, but until I see you start to post in response to criticism, that is all I will continue to respect you for.
I realise that Slashdot may not be your primary concern. I also appreciate that you are probably a busy man. However, by not responding to criticism, aren't you merely propagating the attitudes of the bosses who don't listen to their staff? Are you not, when it really gets down to it, one of those who you claim to despise?
Apologies to plunge for invading his thread, I just needed to air this.....
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
Perhaps this just seems obvious to me, but it seems to me that all the raw materials needed to effect change are here. You have the people who want the change. These people are usually in some sort of technical field and statistically make more money that the average. You have up to date information. And you have a community that generates huge volumes of feedback.
;) .) You can joke about them all you want but the fact is they are very effective. Everyone knows that the best voter turn out is the older generation.
This is the base for a political organization. A lobby if you will.
WHY: I've seen a pattern over the past few months of slashdot articles. Whenever we are critical of those who enforce gov't regulations we find that the responce is: "I'm just enforcing the law, if you don't like it, get the law changed." This is something that corporations understand. The DMCA didn't just appear out of the blue.
The fact is there is no one out there looking after the geek interests. There are great organizations like the ACLU, however, I don't think they understand the issues like we do. And organizations like the EFF, while do a very good job, are not really chartered to loby congress.
WHO: Everyone who's a nerd. I don't care if you use Linux, Windows, or even Mac OS. You're a geek and it's about time we organize. It's proven that a well organized loby does in fact effect change. Look at the AARP (The old people loby
MISSION: I'm not suggesting a silly "Rock the Vote" type campain. I'm talking about a real loby with a technology edge. I'd like to see on-line voting records on key laws. I'd like it clear that we are watching the law makers and we will be presenting the facts to members on how you voted on issues. Big companies can swing a lot of money, but I think we could swing a lot of votes.
SLASHDOT: Slashdot it self should not be the loby. It has far more value as members of the press. But I think slashdot could be the starting place for action.
Quote: "In the 20th century, the governments that aspired to such total domination all failed. The human drive for individuality and freedom, it turns out, is more potent than fearsome weaponry and cadres of secret police. But the offspring of the world's newest global movement - corporatism - are doing much better. " . Well If thats the case then we are fine. Because if that happens you can be rest assured the US and all these other evil capitalist governments will fall. Natural Selection does wonderful things ;)
However, I wish he would take part in the community as a whole, and post with us and take part in the real /. community. I think that would stop a lot of flames against him. He could've then addressed this with the community as a whole, and all would be well.
I take back my harsh words...
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
It was reported here and in Daily Variety that New Line Features bought the rights to Katz's book "Geeks" to be made into a feature film. New Line are a Time Warner company. The fact that Katz can rant so readily about TW / AOL's evil and yet profit from that corporation himself - even the behavior of most of our politicians isn't so disgustingly hypocritical. At least they don't sell us the notion of themselves as Anti Corporate.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
Perhaps boycotting Amazon or AOL or whomever else won't hurt their bottom line. Perhaps the corporations won't even notice if every single Slashdot reader stops buying their product, listening to their music, or whatever. But in Ben's comments and others I see a far greater danger -- apathy.
If we think we can do nothing, then we've already allowed the other side to win. I agree with Ben -- DeCSS seems quite trivial compared with overpopulation, environmental threats, or even adequate healthcare and education. But shall we give up on those causes, too? The problems that we face in the coming years are going to be subtle, and take many forms. In the face of a surging Dow, low unemployment, and a boon of goods and services that make life easier, longer, and more enjoyable, who's going to believe someone who says that we're all doomed? The corporations have the power they do because we gave it to them. And we're the only ones who can take it back.
How we can accomplish that goal, I've no good idea. But what I do know is that a dedicated group of individuals can change the world. Look at the civil rights movement, women's rights, the French Revolution, even the Blue Ribbon Campaign. On large and small levels, all of them changed society and the world. We can't let ourselves feel helpless and small. We can't be apathetic. If we do, then we've allowed the other side to win. The Internet is a means of sharing knowledge, and I believe that knowledge is power. Let's do our best to share that power with everyone, not let it (and in turn, us) be controlled by a few wealthy megacorps -- to follow Ben's suggestion about educating those in power. And, let's go one step further -- for knowledge is useless without action. Let's get out of this apathetic GenX mentality and fight for what we believe.
No, I am not kidding.
I think folks are getting bogged down in the nitty gritty. Has anyone ever thought what would have happened in Linus did not create Linux? Do we assume that another pioneer would have stepped his place? People say that the web is great at bringing people together, but more often than not it only brings out the worst in people. Instead of compromise and a discussion of ideas what we see is people banging away their agenda on their keyboards. The consumers will be consistently stomped on until we act as a people. And this isn't new, it happened back when AT&T owned the phones, Rockefeller owned the oil, and Adam owned the fig leaves. It is human nature and each new generation is disgusted by it, the only difference being in degree. And it takes someone or some group for people to rally around. It takes someone to stick their neck out at get it going. But what we have is a generation of keyboard commando's, used to spewing out online justice through flames. No stomach for any real confrontation. But what can I say, I am in the same boat. Banging away on these keys everyday making a living, waiting for stock options to come through. Looking out for number one.
Another important thing to remember is that some of these "lesser" issues are tied to our ability to do anything about "what really matters". Did you know that there was a pretty good commercial made durring the first clinton term argument over health care that supported a national health care system? Many TV stations wouldn't air it because they had much bigger contracts with businesses which were threatened by the plan.
You can't seperate freedom of expresion and independant media from the causes that "matter" because when Nike ownes the media, they just aren't gonna run a PSA against buying things made with underpaid overworked labor.
(Random side note, I was watching a really old video tape (of the star wars holiday special actually) and there was an ad for the united garmet workers of america. Its weird to think - are the unions too stupid today to put together good touching ads about supporting American workers, or is there just "no market" for them?)
Anyway, thats why I worked on the Ckean Election Campaign in my state. Sure you could say "with all the problems in the world today, couldn't you have given your time and energy to something more worthwile?" but 1) People who say that sort of thing often don't give their time to anything and have to attack what I choose to make themselves feel superior, and more importantly 2) the real problems are going to be a lot easier to solve if we can decrease the influence of large corporate and special interest donations to legislaters. You can start running to your goal right now because its too important to waste time on anything else, or you can stop to pump up your bike tires and get there a lot faster in the end. (environmentally friendly analogy ;-> )
...will work for Chick tracts...
Whoever it was that suggested Jon should lead us all must have been appealing to the /. sense of irony.
It becomes increasingly apparent that Mr. Katz is interested only in formulating ever-longer rants against the corporate beast, rather than taking any kind of positive action in the real world. This is still a world where everything significant must be done on paper- I've been applying for a license to resell products in the state of california, and it's like registering my car all over again. You have to get the paperwork, you have to fill the paperwork out _BY_HAND_ in pen, because there is no format for editing the PDF file they considerately you with, and then you have to go to the office and stand in line to make sure they get the damn thing. If Steve Case can bring any kind of efficiency processes like this, I'm all for him running the world.
Steve Case for President!
But seriously, for the last 2 weeks Jon has been railing against all the young angry white nerds who need some kind of benificent guidance to appreciate what they have. Then someone comes out (presumably one of these hot-headed geeks, taking time out from a flame-war) and asks Jon to be that organizing force, and Mr. Katz can do is blather about Orwell.
For pete's sake man, put your money where your mouth is. Unplug for a minute and take a stand for what you believe to be right, in the *gasp* real world. THAT's what the online community really respects, and the only way you'll get 3/4ths of the people in this country to even know you exist. Otherwise, you are as guilty as anyone else is of treating the real world as an abstraction, something you don't have to worry about as long as the modem (or ISDN, or DSL- have you subscribed to that corporate incubus yet?) is working.
Mr. Case has realized that it is necessary for any real business that has plans for long term success to be anchored in brick and mortar, because that's what this world is made of- not bytes and photons. It sounds like maybe you're a little jealous you didn't think of it first.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
1. Strangely enough, slashdot is the only place I know of that reports news AND questions corporate greed. Are there any others?
2. What will happen after andover.net goes public? (I'm behind the times, did it already go public?) How long then before it's bought up and the slashdot forums are silenced forever?
Seriously, I'm trying to say, are we the only ones capable of speaking out against rampant, unchecked capitalism? And what can be done? We can continue to use Napster, we can continue to use MP3 players and not those lame-ass other digital music formats, we can continue to distribute the deCSS source (is anyone still distributing it? or have they all been silenced?), and we can insult Steve and Bill from the comfort of our forums, but what good is it doing?
Does anyone have a list of geek-friendly politicians?
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
[o]_O
Microsoft does not actually rule the world. If not for the DOJ it would have ventured out of the computer industry toward almost every other medium: telephone, television, newspaper, etc. The rules of our government put strict limitations on what corporations can do. Microsoft did dominate the computer industry, but as of right now computers are not the center of everyone's lives.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
Let's have a contest: everyone gets to try to guess Jon Katz's age. I don't know for sure, myself, but I can make some educated guesses based upon his use of the English language and writing style.
My guess: Katz is 27. Definitely not over 30.
I'll pony up a prize for the first person who hits the mark: a spankin' new copy of Rogets Thesaurus. It'll help you find big words and stuff.
(Lest anyone think I'm slamming the kids, I'm 28.)
Any takers?
Oh yeah... here in new zealand... only the very rich can affored internet access. One hour costs about US$16.95. And theres only one ISP that can a max of 10 at a time.
Serously... it isn't that expensive (no free ISPs though). I pay about $US 20 for 250 hours for my ISP, but u can get unlimited access for cheaper as well.
And. NZ is one of the most connected coutries in the world. US was quite low down if i remember right.
But if your talking about T1's etc.. then u might be right.
- - -
And you know why noone cares? Becasue ppl like you say thats it's impossable, that it can't happen, it never will, why bother even trying?
If everyone f****en woke up and thought about it, they would realize that it is possable to stop it.
Gezz... it's not as if they are super humans or anything, i fact most of them are dumb. I fail to see how someone intelligent can think that money will bring them happieness.
If you want to bring down these coperations, simply abuse them like they abuse everyone else.
Yes i run win98, but i didn't pay for it, and i never will pay or any software untill they change there way... and if they changed their ways then the would need money anyway.
Link
- - -
Yip.. and it's called anarchism.
A FAQ is here...
- - -
I personally feel that we as a country have gotten to point where apathy is the general feeling of the mainstream. I have seen this in everything that I read, see, and basicly, the whole media system out there. Most people don't care about what is going on in the world around us. What is it going to take for us to get over this fucking problem. We are a "suit happy" country. Everyone is suing someone else just so they can get easy money and not have to work. I hear on ZDnet that the Chinese are working on Linux viruses, so they can tear us apart. Here is a link to that article. http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2000/3/ns-12862.html What is with the music industry trying to stop the napster, and the other mp3 players? Are they trying to eliminate the compitition so they can get there "monopoly" going. The only way I will go back to buying CD's is if they start to lower prices from $18 a CD, maybe down to 10. I would love to see Janet Reno go after AOL, Time-Warner, and the RIAA, just like she ripped apart MS. That is just my opinion, and I'm only 17, so I don't know everything.
Your website doesn't have to contain offensive material to be banned. Angelfire, Geocities, and Tripod erased my site cause they deemed it offensive. I'm a drummer, and I had a lot of personal infos about my musical career there, as well as some transcriptions one could consider open source music, like the 26 Standard Rudiments, and so on. And, no porn, no call for terrorism, no bomb-making instructions anywhere, not even the slightest hint. To this day I still wonder what's offensive about a page dedicated to playing drums...
~remove my opinion on spam to mail me~
A few ideas, and things to remember. 1. When writing to the corporations, government offices, etc remember to keep your letters and complaints relative, impersonal, and constructive. If you don't like something, offer an alternative. If you think a policy is foolish, a lawsuit frivolous, point out why. 2. Support your statements. IF the truth of a statement isn't obvious to the AVERAGE person, then support it, take them through the proof of it. 3. Understand the other guys point of view. Corporations exist for the sole purpose of generating profit. To suggest that they should be otherwise is pure idioicy. It's a fact of human nature that everybody's out for themselves, and only partially for the good of others. Don't complain about them trying to make a profit, complain about the unethical means they're using to achieve it. Everybody always wants free everything, but it's a fact of life that nothing's free. Everythign is paid for by somebody. Companies will give out samples and demos, and cheap garbage hoping to get you interested intheir more expensive items. It's ALL about $$$$$$. Don't complain about corporations choosing profit over responsibility. How many times have you forgone income, or paid more for an item in the name of global/social/personal responsibility.
Sending spam is legal, ethical, and basically a good thing
...in several responses to my post, I'll tuck this here, instead of under one of them.
:-) we might be able to court the NRA. (After all, when encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will have encryption.)
The deCSS case could well go to the Supreme Court. It has several interesting features that need to be legally tested.
1: Jurisdiction and the international nature of the Internet.
2: Are ISPs common carriers, content providers, or both, and how is the line of responsibility drawn?
3: How should the rights of Reverse Engineering be defined, especially with respect to the new copyright law?
Perhaps this is a poor case for the Supreme Court, because there are so many factors. It might make for a very muddy decision. Personally, I hope so.
This is NOT a good test case. At the moment, we have NO friends, and are quite likely to lose, no matter what the merits. The reporting I saw on the New York case indicated that the judge was VERY friendly toward the MPAA side. It's easy to believe we could line up the ACLU and Nader's Raiders as friends in fairly short order, but I don't know about their clout. Since encryption is involved, and after all encryption IS a weapon,
We haven't truly come into our own as an organization with CLOUT, largely because we aren't really an organization. But I fear that the time for CLOUT has arrived, perhaps prematurely.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
First of all, as a Canadian I am vividly aware of the lack of corporate press in America. For example, how many of you American readers are aware of or have ever heard of the MAI (now dead) which would have destroyed investment barriers between nations. Canadians (and others) shot it down but *activists* I know in the states hadn't even heard of it.
My point is that awareness of corporate control is at a stunningly low ebb, no matter whether you support or hate it, in the US.
Jon Katz's predictions of a dire future remind me of Wired's future scenarios a few years back. They gave three possibilities, dominated to various degrees by dictator-like corporations.
Here's a bit of media education for those who didn't get it in school (and I bet that's most of us): The larger the corporation the more profitable it can be. But there's a severe downside when media companies join with others. It's a fact that they can't cover their own dealings with impartiality. Do expect MSNBC to cover the Microsoft trial impartially? They will either cover their own news with a biased slant or not cover it at all (almost as bad). And the more one company owns the less you're going to hear about.
Here's a page with information on which media companies own what as well as some good analysis.
What Wired didn't see at the time was the power of open-source. I think it's a powerful weapon against corporate control because we can use big business' best weapon, the law, against their domination of our culture. Let's face it, that's how open-source got started, against Microsoft and other software corporation monopolies that were putting out crappy software.
Well, now we've pissed off the big boys and we have to learn to play as dirty as they do.
That means learning how to use lawyers and money and learning how the media game works.
home page
So, tell me, how's life at Searle/Monsanto?
Sorry, I wouldn't know, as I don't work there!
Keep guessing! :)
Although I myself am a libertarian, I can understand where you're coming from. However, one thing I would ask that you attempt to understand is that even within the very broad philosophical position termed "libertarianism", there are many conflicting factions. As a self-described "libertarian", I can honestly say that there are many other self-described "libertarians" who I would never want to associate with. I'm referring to the former Republicans who refuse to recognize that corporations are every bit as tyrannical as the government they oppose. They'll usually say that they oppose corporate welfare if asked, but they never place any emphasis on the evils of corporations. By and large, these "libertarians" seem to view corporations as a positive thing. I consider myself a libertarian who favors a free market economy, but it my opinion, corporate capitalism and free markets are mutually exclusive. Corporations profit off of countless state privelages, including but not limited to massive subsidies, favorable regulatory status (including monopoly privelges), land grants, patents, special tax cuts, limited legal liability, and privelaged access to state resources. Furthermore, they're almost never held accountable for ecological damage. As a libertarian, I hold that individuals have the right to freely exchange their products and services with other individuals, and to collaborate with each other in groups to work on productive projects. Corporations prosper by infringing upon this right, and hence I oppose them just as much as I oppose the government. I don't see any relevant difference between the two. My political philosophy doesn't even come close to pandering to corporate interests, and yet I favor a free market. It would be extremely inaccurate to describe me as a socialist. To the same extent, it's extremely inaccurate for well-intentioned leftists to consider corporate capitalism as an embodiment of the free market, and to despise the idea of a free market accordingly.
Why shouldn't the government check corporatism when corporatism is the government's own monster? As a libertarian, I think that other libertarians need to realize that corporations are not free-market arrangements. They are fictional persons created by the state who benefit from countless infractions upon individual liberty, including but limited to state subsidy, favorable regulatory status, land grants, patents, special tax breaks, free access to state resources, limited legal liability, etc. Individuals deserve legal protection from these entities, and I think it's naive to say that the success of these companies should be solely left up to the consumers of their products. It is completely consonant with libertarianism to say that when an entity infringes upon individual rights, the entity should be forcibly stopped.
I'm a libertarian, and I agreed with him. I favor a free market economy, but I agree with him that corporations are antithetical to a free market economy. I support free markets, and hence I oppose corporate capitalism. As a libertarian, I don't see that I'm wrong.
The "libertarians" who deny or fail to realize that corporate capitalism and free markets are mutually exclusive are the ones who are wrong.
1. You form a union - increase wages, etc.
2. Bosses realise that the amount they have to give to stockholders is less. They react in two ways - blame the unions and charge more for their product.
3. Since you are selling to the government taxes go up so you need even larger wages (plus general averice). Prices for the product keep going up. Eventually the company you work for goes bust (the government finds a cheaper supplier) - the stockholders still walk away with most of the money generated over the years.
4. You try to get a new job - the new company hears how your old one went bust due to unions therefore they are banned (or at least resisted).
Unions don't help - the company that closed is instantly replaced by another equally or less ethical. The only representive of the people that has the power to do anything is the government but that is a whole seperate problems.
Question is, where did the land the farmer is using come from? He claimed it, of course.
He claimed it almost certainly by force or the threat of force. He'll say, "it was my father's". And if asked where his father got it from he'll say "it was his father's"
And if pushed hard enough (this is true in regard of at least one welsh landowner I challenged) as to where their great^n-grandfather got it, they'll finally get on their high horse and say 'He fought for it'.
Well I'll fight you for it now, my friend
TomV
as previously stated, this is dead brilliant
and here's why :
traditional media is a one way medium; the people are the passive recipients.
the lack of any kind of feedback mechanism for different or dissenting opinions causes any individuals holding such opinions to feel marginalized.
consequently individuals beleive they are alone and in the dark.
which is not the case.
the current feeling of disillusionment towards consumer culture/corporate media control is not a new or unknown concept (american beauty, fight club, coercion: why we listen to what "they" say, culture jam : the uncooling of america, faster : the acceleration of just about everything, amusing ourselves to death : public discourse in the age of show business)
we need to take back our culture from corporate media interests; culture is not theirs to create and sell to us.
the first step is to break the individuals feeling of marginilization; which obviously cannot be accomplished through traditional media channels.
this is why the idea of a web site with mobilization statistics for a given goal is a fantastic idea.
anyone with an interest in media, technology, ethics, etc; check out the books mentioned above; i HIGHLY recomend culture jam, written by the founder of adbusters. their website, www.adbusters.org, has some fanstatic do it yourself kits for media subversion.
For more than a century, sci-fi writers, futurists and filmmakers - H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Mary Shelley, George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke, Ridley Scott ("Blade Runner"), the Wachowski brothers ("The Matrix") - have been painting bleak portraits of life in the 2lst Century, our time
Come on, Jon.. you're really going to give Ridley Scott credit for Blad Runner, and leave out Philip K Dick?
I generally agree with the article, however.
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
Removing personal web sites would effectively kill what people are wanting the internet to become. Why bother to have things like a T-1 or a DSL line if you can't publish something. Controversial web sites are a little bit of a problem. Ok for example I have some content I thought I would like to put on a web site. The only problem is that the content is slightly pornographic is there a place that offers maybe free webhosting for pages that has almost anything on it? (well except kiddie porn). You really can't find too many (as far as I have seen) because it is controversial in nature.
Well, the way Congress would like things to work (fortunately, this is still tied up in the courts) it would be illegal to post anything considered "offensive" on the internet without somehow verifying that the person on the other end isn't a minor. So, because it's unclear as to what the laws/liabilities will turn out to be, pretty much nobody in the US will host even a slightly pornographic page that is freely viewable.
Anyway, though, it isn't the ability to publish independent pages that is really in danger of dissapearing, though (provided, as above, it isn't "offensive" to the sexually-dysfunctional white male policy-makers). But consider: what good does it do anybody if you publish your insightful, revolutionary views on your home page, if nobody in the world is going to find it on their own? Chances are, it'll never be linked to by cnn.com, warnerbrothers.com, etc-owned-by-mega-corp-X.com, and thusly, the vast majority of net users will never know you exist.
The concept of businesses killing things that are free would be a little silly. I am sure that Americans the world over probably don't like communism. However there are several over 1 billion of them in the world in China. Does this mean that communism is in trouble? Probably not for at least 50+ years at the rate we are going.
Communism in China is already dead. China is an essentially capitalist nation with a few state-owned industries struggling to compete and a more zealous than average government, when it comes to maintaining the power of it's leaders. It's been on it's way out for decades, but the capitalist forces in SE Asia did it in (as anything more than a buzzword, anyway) about ten years ago.
If what I say is not verbally offensive then I have little reason to worry. Publishing code on the internet is not an offensive action. Just because a rich business man decides he dosn't like it dosn't mean that I will not have some means to publish my code.
See above. Certainly, you can distribute your code one way or another; the internet is too large and interconnected for anybody to actually squelch some piece of information completely. It's been tried before, witness the Religions Technology Center (Scientology) and it's attempts to abolish criticism from the 'net. However, if a company has the power that AOL-Time-Warner is going to have, they can certainly make sure that most people will have to already know exactly what they're looking for before they'll ever run across it. Again, the vast majority of the 'net users will never know you or your code exists.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
>to Kevin Mitnick (now being released) and the handful of other renegades who hack
>governmental and corporate computers, spread viruses, or penetrate the systems that run the
>system.
>They are not ignored or dismissed; they're treated like major criminals, rounded up by
>platoons of high-tech federal cops, paraded before reporters, jailed for years. Perhaps
>they signify the teeth behind the unpretentious corporate smile, the warning to the rest of us to behave,
>that things aren't quite as benign as they might appear.
Though I don't know anything about how to crack, an idea just hit my head(ow! :-)). Remember how Etoys(a really big company) sued Etoy(a really small company) and the they were attacked by cr/hackers which sent their stock plummeting...
Well, I realize this is very brute force and unproductive, but maybe this is a way for users to make examples of coporations.
Ok, I realize this seems very stupid and I am going to get flamed like nobodies business, but I hope you don't think I am trying to be a troll, this idea just occured to me.
---
What exactly are the commercial possiblilities of Ovine Aviation?
Such a model does exist: the one I'm thinking of, however, is focussed to fighting the War on (some) Drugs.
For example, when TV's Judge Judy Sheindlin made some really idiotic comments in Australia about addiction, activists mobilized and, through their letters, got several advertisers to withdraw their sponsorship as well as generated some news coverage.
I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to /. to implement a similar advocacy information center...
-Duketor (tim.meehan@utoronto.ca)
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.
I expect an intensifying and concerted attack on the open source movement and the hacker population using all the resources at the disposal of the courts. In fact, I would consider such an attack to be a validation of the reason I have been actively promoting Linux for the last year.
Now, before you jump on my "persecution complex," let me explain. Capitalism, as a socio-economic system, is just one stage in the evolution of human society. Marx thought the next stage was Communism, but history has proven him wrong. Thus, if a new system is on its way, one expects the existing leadership to vehemently oppose the change - and fail in the long run.
Now, consider Open Source. Thousands of geeks - the indispensable "priests" of the "information age" - voluntarily giving away their work for free. Just because the work needed doing. It is a revolutionary idea, and one that the existing powers cannot effectively counter. Thus it is unsurprising that the leaders of Corporate Multinationalism should focus their energies on crushing this movement. I'd be shocked if they didn't.
My apologies if I've offended any of the Libretarians on Slashdot, but taking the broad historical view, that's what I see.
Which means you should prepare to face a barrage of court orders, attacks on individual freedom, attempts to bottleneck the Internet, and arrests of prominent Open Source gurus. As well as the more insidious attempts to recruit those gurus into high-paying mega-corporation jobs that use all of their available time.
One of the popular Linux slogans has been "Welcome to the Revolution." So welcome - and welcome to the front lines. Prepare to duck!
-Josh
Believe it or not, but the ramblings of a deranged and mistaken man are still just that, even if they are long-winded and filled with big words that try and make him look good. I am really sick of Katz and he is now going off of my "Reading list". What aragonce he has (and how confused is the person who emailed him) to think that he could be the one thing that unifies /. against the horable and opressive corperate america?!
Sometimes mergers are good, and I for one am very happy with the AOL/Time merger, at my house we use RoadRunner (A great service) but it is kinda difficult to use at times and my mom has a hard time with it when I am at school. So I think that if you add a few parts RoadRunner, with a sprinkle of AOL's simplicity there is a very good chance that my mom will be able to deal with it well and even more people can get on the net and get informed. Mabye then, once they have learned more about computers, they can get off there AOL splint and get a better broadband service, perhaps RoadRunner without the AOL addon, because I have a very hard time believing that they will become completely synomonus at every level (just as you can still get on to AOL via a T1).
It is sad when the creations of one's own mind begin to trap them in a twisted web of dreams that cannot be easily escaped! More to the point, when I read the artical it at first looked intresting, but the more I read I realized it was just someone bitching about things they don't like while not doing anything about changing it and such. Well I am bitching right now, and I am going to do somthing about it! Setting, here I come!
www.slashdot.com/delete.cgi?Katz
Talk about dreams...
bye bye!
Home, home and deranged...
Am I the only one who remembers RollerBall? Johnathan E. becomes a hero in a world owned by corporations where the 'powers that be' do not want a hero, just mundane life. It looked like the world sucked at that particular time and it looks like that was one of the more prophetic movies. Well, time to break out the skates.
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Anyone remember the group Consolidated? One of their earlier albums was called "Friendly Fascism", which took its name from the 1980 book by Bertram Gross. One of the songs on that album started out with an appropriate phrase: "Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the end of the 20th century and the rise of friendly fascism. Regrettably, millions will die as before, but just think of the savings!" Katz's article made me think of both the book and the group. It looks as if the Onion satire about one global company, Global Tetrahedon, is looking less like a joke and more like a reality, and I hate it when satire gets accurate.
In case you haven't noticed, all of these companies embrace copyrights as their bread and butter, while Linux/the internet/ and all the innovators who are doing somthing now days pratically repell copyrights by their very nature. Until we come to a consensus on this point, I don't think slashdot will ever have a concensus that it can move forward with.
Capitalism and evolutionary biology are indeed not the same things. But I fail to see why evolutionary principles haven't influenced capitalism. To illustrate: Back when we hunted meat, even the best hunter couldn't be assured of a catch each time he hunted, but someone else in the group was likely to have been luckier and caught more meat than he could eat. He would then share it with others, who would in turn help him out when he fell on bad days. Those who didn't share are probably no longer with us, so odds are that this is an evolved characteristic. This is related to trade; there's just a time lapse involved. With the advent of agriculture, one man was more or less assured of food and wealth all the time if he had a field of grain, or bunch of cattle. There was little need to share with his neighboors. Capitalism kicks in because he might need a rug. The point is, trade is inseperable from our nature as social critters. We have evolved to be social, and it's not a stretch to say we've evolved to trade.
Katz is right on in highlighting the expanding corporate domination of the Net. One key question is how to convey this to non-geeks, those to whom the Net is just another home appliance.
I work for a public interest group and tried to convince my fairly paranoid coworkers this weekend that we should be fighting to protect Internet privacy. Even those who think we shouldn't let the government take away our guns asked why we should care if corporations control all our info--what are they going to do, just show me better-targeted ads?
To bring this problem home to the masses, unfortunately, it takes horror stories. I'm newbie enough not to know many. Can anyone help by posting either concrete examples of corporate control of our information harming people (e.g. people being denied health insurance because they buy alcohol, etc.), or similar concrete examples of plausible threats? My campaign awaits.
People used to aspire to nationalism, and those who followed humanism thought they were the progressive and enlightened ones. Then the world got smaller. Now people aspire to globalism, or in bizspeak "corporatism". What happens next, say, when humanity is spread over many worlds? "Multiglobalism"?? It's just another 'ism! It's an arbitrary human word with only as much meaning as you think it has. Jon Katz basically asks (repeatedly ; ) the same question - "what is wrong with society?" As some people have pointed out the question encompasses more than patent law, copyright law, etc. Since the phenomenon is happening all over the world, isn't a better question - "what is wrong (and right) with humanity?" Forgive my arrogance for saying that I think the answer to what is right and wrong in the world, is the same as what is right and wrong inside each of us. (If you know your ancient philosophy, I guess you could call this the Delphic mystery). There are a million technical answers to our dilemna, but only one answer that will work without creating another technical problem in its wake. Why your next door neighbour is a fucked up landlord who threw an unemployed family out on the street is probably because he/she is an unhappy person, and has a lot less to do with the SDR ratio of the US government, Micro$soft's defense of its anti-trust suit, or whatever amount SUN charges in liscencing fees. As the bard once said, "all the world's a stage..." And when it comes down it it, that's all it is, which is something we tend to forget once "zeal" sets in. I'm not saying you should ignore the show (it's there for your enjoyment, believe it or not), but if you have trouble thinking that you can do anything to improve it, try thinking about your own part, and the things close to you. That's the best place to start. Can you look yourself in the eye and say, "faced with the same temptations as Gates, or Case, or Alan Greenspan, would I really do anything differently? Could I actually make a bad business decision for good reasons, risk losing it all, and every good thing I could use it for in the future, forever?" If you can't say yes, then you're not part of the solution, your part of a system. There isn't a "Citizen Case" in the world who would say to themselves "shit if I don't crush Disney's latest promo, my family won't be able to eat this week." People in that position have stepped belond the normal laws of competition, which was what held back corporate greed before the internet took off, and the only thing left to stop them spreading misery is their own internal compass. The fact that people like that don't seem to notice the negative effects of their actions isn't because they are sociopathic monsters (the same things wrong in them are the same things wrong in you) but more likely because they cannot understand/have never seen those effects - they don't seem real and they cannot relate to them. If we don't tell them, I doubt they ever will know. Since few people here have made any suggests about what can be done, I don't feel too stupid to say that I have an idea : "get close and personal with these people. Don't act like a criminal, or act in ways that enforce their negative concepts of what you do - or at least don't be seen acting that way (all the worlds a stage, right ; ) Who is "these people"? Well at the moment that's pretty simple - that's everyone else in the world. There are exceptions all over the world as well, some of them are on /. and if you see them you have an obligation to encourage them. Like you they are only human, they only have the power you give them, and what's right in them is right in you as well. I don't want to get touchy-feely with either Mr Gates or Mr Case, and the good news is that I don't have to in order to reach them. The bad news is, most of us will first have to improve our ability to communicate with people, rather than machines. Ciao Leo (Feel free to spam my hotmail account - leontribe@hotmail.com)
Then the world got smaller. Now people aspire to globalism, or in bizspeak "corporatism".
What happens next, say, when humanity is spread over many worlds? "Multiglobalism"??
It's just another 'ism! It's an arbitrary human word with only as much meaning as you think it has.
Jon Katz basically asks (repeatedly ; ) the same question - "what is wrong with society?" As some people have pointed out the question encompasses more than patent law, copyright law, etc. Since the phenomenon is happening all over the world, isn't a better question - "what is wrong (and right) with humanity?"
Forgive my arrogance for saying that I think the answer to what is right and wrong in the world, is the same as what is right and wrong inside each of us. (If you know your ancient philosophy, I guess you could call this the Delphic mystery).
There are a million technical answers to our dilemna, but only one answer that will work without creating another technical problem in its wake.
Why your next door neighbour is a fucked up landlord who threw an unemployed family out on the street is probably because he/she is an unhappy person, and has a lot less to do with the SDR ratio of the US government, Micro$soft's defense of its anti-trust suit, or whatever amount SUN charges in liscencing fees.
As the bard once said, "all the world's a stage..." And when it comes down it it, that's all it is, which is something we tend to forget once "zeal" sets in. I'm not saying you should ignore the show (it's there for your enjoyment, believe it or not), but if you have trouble thinking that you can do anything to improve it, try thinking about your own part, and the things close to you. That's the best place to start.
Can you look yourself in the eye and say, "faced with the same temptations as Gates, or Case, or Alan Greenspan, would I really do anything differently? Could I actually make a bad business decision for good reasons, risk losing it all, and every good and worthy thing I could use it for in the future, forever?" If you can't say yes, then you're not part of the solution, your part of a system.
There isn't a "Citizen Case" in the world who would say to themselves "shit if I don't crush Disney's latest promo, my family won't be able to eat this week." People in that position have stepped belond the normal laws of competition, which was what held back corporate greed before the internet took off, and the only thing left to stop them spreading misery is their own internal compass.
The fact that people like that don't seem to notice the negative effects of their actions isn't because they are sociopathic monsters (the same things wrong in them are the same things wrong in you) but more likely because they cannot understand/have never seen those effects - they don't seem real and they cannot relate to them. If we don't tell them, I doubt they ever will know.
Since few people here have made any suggests about what can be done, I don't feel too stupid to say that I have an idea : "get close and personal with these people. Don't act like a criminal, or act in ways that enforce their negative concepts of what you do - or at least don't be seen acting that way (all the worlds a stage, right ; )
Who is "these people"? Well at the moment that's pretty simple - that's everyone else in the world. There are exceptions all over the world as well, some of them are on /. and if you see them you have an obligation to encourage them. Like you they are only human, they only have the power you give them, and what's right in them is right in you as well.
I don't want to get touchy-feely with either Mr Gates or Mr Case, and the good news is that I don't have to in order to reach them. The bad news is, most of us will first have to improve our ability to communicate with people, rather than with machines.
Ciao
Leo
(Feel free to spam my hotmail account - leontribe@hotmail.com)
A primary ( and entertaining ) defense against this is KILL YOUR TELEVISION. This is already happening among the technically savvy people I know.
Several of my colleagues and neighbors, some of whom run websites on the side, no longer subscribe to cable at all. It's hilarious to watch the linemen sniff around my utility pole every other month, convinced that I must be pirating service, since I don't have a cable subscription --- and I couldn't be NOT WATCHING, could I?...
This pales to the fun I had when we were a Nielsen family!<chuckle> We would zap commercials by switching to a blank channel, sometimes forgetting and leaving it on snow for awhile. They kept coming out trying to repair the box because "nothing" kept getting big ratings! (It was a big percentage of the tiny amt of time we had the set on. )
Learn about the mindfscks used in creating ads which implant misery in the first second and use it to promise deliverance via the product. Recapture your TV time to do some tutoring in your town, or coding on your pet open project.
The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. - W. Gibson
Besides, I think you're just jelous I've a karma of almost 450. :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Throughout history the world has been variously run by royals, nobles, thugs, politicians, and CEOs (yes, there is a lot of overlap between those groups).
If you want to make a difference, become a member of one of those groups (yes, your particular choices are limited) and then act. Otherwise, get used to the fact that your life will be largely irrelevant in the context of History.
If you choose to make a difference, resign yourself to the fact that you will have to completely change your mode of living. You will have to become obsessed with gaining power and control. You will probably become that which you despise.
The counter argument I am certain someone will make about revolutionaries is wrong because while revolutions shake things up for a while (perhaps even a couple of hundred years) human nature remains unchanged and so we return to the same situation again and again.
As an aside, I have to say the reference to "Libertarians having gotten what they asked for" indicates an incomplete understanding of Libertarianism (no offense intended).
-- OpenSourcerers
I'm increasingly troubled by all this. Eventually, I'll explode.
**>>BELCH
For more on this subject, see:
http://geolib.pair.com/welcome.html
Peace and love, y'all
You're missing the point. In order for resources to be developed or traded they must be owned, and in order for them to be owned they must at some point have gone from being unowned or communally owned to being privately owned. While several philosophical justifications for private acquisition exist (that individuals own property because their "husbandry" of it is in everyone's interest (Hume) or that they do so by "mixing their labour with it" (Locke)), none is adequate for all cases, and certainly none justifies the current set of property rights.
This point is overlooked because to be honest how land was acquired doesn't matter much. In recent times the issue has been much more about capital than land, and capital can be produced or bought in any amount you need as long as you have the money, so there's no need to steal it.
These issue about acquisition are coming to the fore again in the slightly different form of arguments about intellectual property. Precisely when copyrights and patents should be granted and how far they extend is a serious issue for our times. A civil liberties issue, in fact.
Well, as someone who as occasionally said bad things about the Libertarian position on these things, I suppose I should respond. There are two aspects to your post.
Firstly, many libertarians, and people who agree with you on many matters, do not feel, as you do, that corporate interests need to be controlled. Indeed, for some, libertarianism is an excuse to refrain from accepting responsibility. I appreciate that does not apply to you. Quite a large number of libs are not only relentlessly self-righteous and bigoted concerning the opinions of others, but also seem to feel that their philosophy gives them the right to be as offensive as they please. This is not good PR.
Secondly, and more substantively, if you consider the kind of corporate capitalism that we're seeing get worse and worse at the moment to be a threat (as I do and I guess you do) Libertarianism looks ineffective and indeed in some places seems to pander to corporate interests. For instance, most libertarian rhetoric emphaises not the abolition of corporate subsidies and the kind of pandering involved in the DMCA and its ilk, but the scrapping of the regulations that try to control corporate greed.
It's interesting to compare the weapons that govenrment and corporations have to exert their control over us.
Government power is ultimately underwritten by violence. If you don't pay your taxes they can use violent power to to put you in jail.
Corporate power is derived from the exact opposite- they control people by making them comfortable, by giving them exactly what they want. This is the reason why it is far more dangerous - it is much harder for most people to understand how much they are being controlled.
Large corporations have a life of their own - their officers are quite powerless to change them. Imagine a big corporation where someone tries to do what he believes to be the right thing but which also means less profits for the corporation. In a privately owned company it might be possible, but in large corporations you could get sued for not serving the interests of the stockholders. All decisions are made in the name of "the stockholders". So do the stockholders wield the ultimate power? Of course not. The big corporations have unblievably complex ownership compositions - they keep merging and buying each other with stocks rather than cash. In many cases no single stockholder has complete control. In the cases where a company is mostly owned by a single entity that entity is not a person - it is another corporation which cannot make the decision because of its obligations to its own stockholders.
As a result of this the corporations act almost as independent sentient beings. An individual within the organization is as powerless to change them as a single cell in your brain is powerless to change your decisions. Note that Microsoft is not quite at that stage - significant influence is still in the hands of Bill and Steve. But look at the big telecom companies - the mergers and acquisitions in this sector in the last years are proceeding at a frightening pace and soon there will be nobody left to merge with. These companies will soon have control over your combo PDA/cellphone/digital wallet. Do you really want them to have so much power?
I believe the battle between individualism and corporatism will be play a major part in the history of the 21st century. The weapon which gives individuals some chance in this struggle has appeared on the radar screens of corporations in the last few milliseconds of the 20th century: the Internet. Ironically, it is also the source of a lot of the cash infusion which makes these M&As possible. A mere ten years ago, who would have believed that one of the world's largest media companies would be bought by... an overgrown bulletin board?
It's going to be an interesting century. Pick your side. Choose your weapon. Decide how you will live this life .
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Heehee - I was just reading some m-oldie mags in the way-back machines and one article was about "Blade Runner" and the city of the future, around 2019, where corporations ruled everything - and one of those corps., haha, was, heehee, get this - the Mighty ATARI Corp. Bwaaahahahaha :))
The Scarlet Pimpernel
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You can't now. If this will happen you will be able to do that for sure within less then a year. Nature and Business both hate empty space ;-)
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
From the Jargon File: /fuhd/ n.
FUD
Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.
Katz (or whatever Perl script they've got running today):
They are all very much linked by a growing, runaway menace: corporatism.
I started reading the teaser text of the article before I read who posted it. The fact that 'incubus' appears in the first sentence clued me in to the fact that it must be a Katz article - yep.
It is amazing to me the amount of overgeneralization modern day techno journalist can pack into a single sentence.
-josh
-josh
Besides, maybe some ACs like to read JonKatz stories. Personally, I find the comments much more amusing than I find the story interesting!
Eric
Wrong!!
Capitalism, with all of it's terrible warts, exists simply because (for example) a person who is better at growing food than I am (aka, a farmer) trades with what he does best for what another entity does best -- perhaps building things like tractors, etc. As long as the "balance of trade" is equitable, capitalism works extremely well because it's sort of like an escalator that anybody (that is willing to work) can get on. It's when the balance gets upset that things turn bad, which is what Katz is talking about here.
The problem is that rampant capitalism (money as the sole medium of value) has no innate morality with which to do things like protecting the environment, people's rights, etc. All has been subjugated to the almighty bottom line.
C.S. Lewis, a Christian writer admired by alot of folks said it best, and I hope someone can find the exact quote and post it here. Paraphrasing, he said something like "more evil is done by men behind closed doors than in all the wars ever fought." The thing I find interesting is that this statement was made many years ago in a context of how corporations usually turn against the "common man" by seeking to exploit.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
- Darkness is always driven back by light. That is, exposure of corruption usually manages to destroy it. IF you know of influence peddling that goes counter to the freedom of the 'Net, bring them to the attention of as many people as possible say, by posting it to the Internet?
- Stop using the products/services of the offending companies.Like Jon Katz and others (me too) have taken a stand against Amazon by refusing to buy books until the patent is dropped. And let those companies know why -- the easiest way to end a war is to show your adversary the benefit of co-operation over competition.
- Similarly, move any investments you may have away from companies which are heavily involved in governmental lobbying towards controlling the 'Net. These companies lose power profoundly as the lifeblood of their investment goes elsewhere. AOL would not remain in a position to buy Time/Warner if their stock value suddenly got gutted by a mass movement away from both companies. Sony, Paramount, etc. wouldn't be in much of a position to fight DeCSS if suddenly no-one was buying their products.
- Practice civil disobedience as a group. In the DeCSS case, this means making sure that the source code remains published on the web outside the court's reach.
- Talk to your elected officials. Who like it nice and quiet so that they can go on (excuse the language here) sucking at the corporate tit. Who know if they get tossed out, the power and bucks dry up. Let them know that if they don't take a stand, they won't have a job.
Ooh, brain flash. Let me add one more item to this list: remove all links to sites controlled by companies involved in the fight, and don't browse those sites at all. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think a total "link boycott" would have quite a dramatic and traumatic effect on those company's Internet related advertising rates?...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Jesus Christ, I'm sick and tired of this. Libertarians are portrayed as ignorant people who just want to let big corporations roll over consumers, not letting the consumers or the government get involved. It seems that people think that Libertarians just want people to sit back and do nothing.
NOT TRUE.
One belief that a number of Libertarians (not all) have is that the government shouldn't be involved in commerce; that the Free Market will regulate itself, based on certain principles.
Boycotting is a method of self-regulation for the market, and most Libertarians support boycotts. I have previously participated in boycotts of companies that didn't take proper environmental meausures, choosing instead to pay the EPA's fines; I've also participated in boycotts of companies that used inhumane animal testing. Boycotts demonstrate how the market can be kept in check without the government getting involved (a boycott of Microsoft products, based on Microsoft's practices, would surely have been supported by a number of Libertarians-- just, please, no government involvement).
But that doesn't mean that Libertarians support the *reasons* behind every boycott. I, for one, don't support the current boycott of Disney that religious conservatives are calling for-- I don't agree with what the protestors are trying to achieve through the boycott.
But I would support a DVD boycott. While I certainly believe that one should be able to profit from one's own intellectual property (i.e., the CSS algorithm), I think that you have to take the proper measures to gain that protection (i.e., patenting the damn thing). The CSS algorithm was obtained through legal means, and I sincerely believe that the MPAA's actions are completely wrong. A boycott, in this case, would certainly be a *large* boost to the "Libertarian pulse" of the Internet, Jon. It would really give consumers an idea of just how much power they have-- that companies *can't* get away with anything they want, because they have consumers to answer to.
So let's boycott the DVD Forum companies. Then maybe they'll remember who ultimately controls their purse strings.
...corporations ruled everything - and one of those corps., haha, was, heehee, get this - the Mighty ATARI Corp. Bwaaahahahaha :))
The names have changed (Atari isn't a big player anymore) but everything else is still the same. Corporations do rule damn near everything.
They may not be able to buy your vote, or my vote (yet), but convincing us not to vote is about as effective. And you can bet they buy our representatives' votes.
I agree, it might be difficult. But at least a *very public* anti amazon comment would be nice. And how about just asking them not to? Nice for publicity anyhows.
Where we may see the correlations between 1984 and the coming and present society, I see more corelation between Farenheit 451. Knowledge and books are dangerous things that can't be controled so they are outlawed. A dumb society is a subserviant society. Many of the points brought out by Katz are not new but its good to bring them to a collective summarization. We live in a dangerous time. Our rights are cowtowed more often now then they have been in previous decades.
The reason: People have not come to understand the rights they enjoy on the Internet. What a boom to man-kind the Internet and the open ideas it was formed around. Now people that twiddle around AOL are the ones making decisions. Indeed as in real life, an uninformed, ignorant and generally apathetic citizenery leads to encroached upon rights. Finally, live by the words of Ben Franklin
"Those who would give up an Essential Liberty, to purchase Temporary Security, deserve Liberty nor Security."
Hangtime
The main issues which concern slashdotters seem to have a common thread:
corporations use courts to restrict freedoms of individuals and other (often smaller) companies.
DVD thing, copyrights, reverse engineering, hacking, etc.
In all these cases freedoms which previously existed have been fought by corporations protecting their turf. And whom do they fight against? They target individuals, or small corporations. Well, the EFF steps in on occation but does not have the resources to fight all battles.
Civil disobedience is not always flexible enough if one wants to target specific court case rulings. One can mirror code, and get the a 'secret' out, but beyond this its power is limited. It does not hold anyone's feet to the fire.
It is also better to shape the law to our purposes than to simply flaunt it.. It is too easy to portray us as a bunch of crimminals, even when a law or a ruling is clearly idiotic.
The geeks among us are individualistic, yet there is a need for a defense fund. In order to defend the rights which those who are technologically proficient hold dear -- the rights which are important to the next 100 years, not simply the last 100.
In running such a fund, there ought to be a choice of what peticular causes to support. If A donator is concerned about say, the Mitnik case, then one should be able to donate (via easy credit card payment) to *that* case. This way indiviudals who are concerned can target their donations to the causes which they are concerned about. Also, this may increase the likelyhood of a donation.
e-activism anyone? ; )
-B
One active response that I'm surprised isn't mentioned more often is the idea of data haven. The basic concept is straight out of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, although the idea has been around longer then that.
Someone, in a free country with good laws and a good legal system (i.e. not the US), supported by hackers and privacy supporters all over the world, should set up some really big servers. These could host reverse engineered open-source programs, cryptography software, text documents, and other free speech related stuff.
Programs like deCSS could be hosted there, immune to the machinations of lawyers here. We need something like this now. It will be essential if reverse-engineering does become illegal in the US, affecting software like Samba and hundreds of other useful programs.
Questions I would really like answered:
- Does something like this exist already?
- If so, can I support it?
- What would be a good country to do this in?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Maybe you didn't read what I wrote- seeing "capitalism" and "problem" and then seeing red. I'm not saying anything about the virtues of free markets- I'm a great advocate of them. The point is that free market theory has no legitimate way to describe how people ever came to acquire the resources these use to produce things in the first place. Everyone from John Locke to Howard Nesbit have tried to deal with this problem, and none satisfactorily. Most of the ways people acquired reasources were horridly illegitimate, and that has a big effect on the efficient use of resources later on. It has nothing to do with how hard you work- you can't make a tractor with your bare hands. Ultimately resources have to come form somewhere, and for the market to work, they have to be owned. Allow me to play devil's advocate here though with your capitalism = bad equation. Capitalism happens because people want things, and others try to supply them- and everyone tries to find the fastest most efficient way to do so. What you call the threating "bottom line" is really just the sum of people's desires. Frankly, I think the bottom line is a generally good thing. Maybe you don't like what other people desire, but its a little pretentious to blame it all on a system that prizes efficiency instead of the actual demands of people. Money isn't the sole medium of value- money simply represents preferences and estimations of value. It's not quite as menacing when you think about what's really going on.
You're thinking of the division of labor. Free trade is the condition under which the division of labor isn't regulated.
Capitalism isn't the same as evolutionary biology, and it's one of the biggest fallacies out there to assume that it is. There are much different machanisms at work in either system. Like it or not, thanks to capitalism, virtually every measure of human welfare has increased over the past 300 years.
Does anyone else find it hypocritical to be pretending to take some 'moral high ground' by
posturing about refusing to use Amazon.com, while Jon Katz still sells his books through Amazon ?
So in public he pretends to be making a stance against this 'evil corporation' while still profiting from its sales of his books.
If there was anything other than rhetoric coming from Katz he might actually get some more respect around here.
So I guess there is the challenge. Boycott Amazon if you want, but actually do it, don't just pretend to be doing it. Forbid them from selling your book and lining your pockets, if you have any integrity.
Anyone can easily confirm this by a quick search at Amazon...
If i sound frustrated, it's cause I am. From the point of view of responding to a capitalist threat by exercising our capitalistic free-will, you know, I don't see much promise.
Um, that's like saying that even though some jerk was elected by a voting process, that same process can't remove him. That's not true. But the process takes time, lot's of it. Especially as the targets get larger and larger. Keep preaching, keep practicing, don't falter, and you will win, it just takes time and an iron will.
+&x
Technological progress is increasing at an exponential pace, and that pace has now outstripped the average man's ability to adapt. That's Future Shock as Alvin Toffler described it, and that's the underlying problem that is causing so many symptoms we only barely understand -- Corporatism being among them.
Corporations are in turmoil these days. The stodgy old businesses are struggling to adapt or die, while new businesses are leaping ahead, able to evolve more quickly and survive. If corporations were species, this would be a time of grand extinction, where most fail and disappear while a few well-adapted types are able to assert their new dominance. Future shock kills corporations who cannot handle it.
Except corporations have a survival mechanism that organic species do not -- the merger. Gargantuan megacorporations can survive in a changing climate by having some pieces that are adaptable and strong to support other pieces that are failing. Right now many corporations are choosing the merger as their defense against the increasing pace of change.
And so we have Citizen Case. A man who has proved himself adaptable in today's world, and who built a healthy company in the midst of change. It is no surprise that he -- or the media -- would choose highlight his mundane and normal side. Because that's what the people who give him power want to see. The average man cannot comprehend the pace of change today, cannot handle this future shock. He wants someone he can trust and understand to steer him through this confusing world. Everyman depends upon Steve Case, and the corporations.
To paraphrase what Morpheus said in the Matrix, all those people out there are your enemy, because they support the system. Normal people cannot handle Future Shock, and so in defense they willingly give ever-increasing amounts of power to corporations, who they see as able to handle increasing change. Even more disturbing, the corporations are beginning to see this as their due; they are beginning to believe that people should trust their decisions implicitly, and they are baffled and threatened by anyone who does not share their worldview of globalism and profit. They've lost the concept of ethics and honesty; in such turblent times, they have come to believe in the adage that might makes right.
But there are people besides the corporations who can adapt...some of whom can adapt better than the corporations themselves. Kevin Mitnick is a prime example. I don't like the guy (my credit card was one of the ones he stole from Netcom), but I have to admire his ability to assimilate and understand technology so thoroughly and so quickly. Mitnick and those like him are the individuals who will survive Future Shock the longest. And because they understand the world better than the corporations, the Uber-Hackers have the ability to disrupt corporate plans. DeCSS has caused a lot of heartburn in several corporations, and it has the potential to destroy an industry unless that industry adapts to it. The corporations know that the only thing that can harm them is even faster change, and the Uber-Hackers have the ability to speed the rate of technological progress.
Perhaps the Megacorporations know subconsciously that they will eventually not be able to adapt. When technological progress escalates to a rate their organization cannot handle, the megacorps will have to divest into smaller more adaptable portions or die. Right now mergers are a valid response to change, but eventually they will be counterproductive. The organizations will not be able to adapt when the climate shifts, and the public -- the average man -- will latch onto a different company as more adaptable, more trustable and safe. Until the next climate shift occurs.
So what can be done to stop corporatism? One answer is to be patient. Coporate greed ignites technological progress which eventually leads to their own doom. Although today's corporations are larger and more powerful than any in the past, they are also more short lived. We're not seeing any more 200 year old Lloyd's of London being created; the lifespan of Microsoft will be measured in decades, not centuries.
Another response is to hasten tech progress. The Open Source Movement, as the largest collection of donated ingenuity ever assembled, may be the most adaptable organization humankind has ever known. It may be the most adaptable organization that humans are capable of creating. Contributing to OSS is a denial of corporatism in one sense...and an evolution of it in another, as future corporations will have to assimilate aspects of Open Source organization in order to become adaptable enough to survive. That's already begun. The next Time-Warner will rely on intellectual property that is donated, and as limitless as humanity.
That's a danger, though, for when Uber-Geeks support a corporation they begin to turn into the normal man that powers globalism. So be careful what you support, and always think about the consequences. You Are A Power Source. The Matrix really hit on some subconscious principles of today's society.
If you're lucky, the projects you support will grow into new corporations; ones able to handle rapid change, and ones who know how to survive while remaining ethical. The Uber-Geek -- the Adaptable Man -- must guide the world through an evolution that most of humanity cannot grasp. Corporations will seek to provide that guidance with the principles of greed and implied trust. We need to show the world how to adapt while retaining our souls. And hey, we can do it.
Until the next wave of Future Shock hits. But no sense worrying about that before we can even imagine what it will bring.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Say hello to the BeatAOLes.
---
Preaching is just that, preaching - only a small few listen and even fewer care. It is not effective, it winds people up (as the response to Katz's recent articles demonstrates), and eventually it becomes ineffective.
Mostly we know the arguments, we are a semi intelligent bunch. As you rightly suggested preaching to the converted is a waste of time and in my mind an abuse of the platform, there are much more worthwhile issues at stake.
My suggestion was merely that we have to take personal responsibility and lead by example. Talk is just that, and as the maxim goes talk is cheap. We can only ever take responsibility for ourselves yet few of us actually bother doing that, instead we prefer to talk about it which gets us approximately nowhere.
I meant nothing more and nothing less. We can go round in circles criticising each other for our comments to Katzs' threads and I'm sure we will... but it is unlikely to go any further unless we each as individuals take the action we talk about so much.
It is the government, not the corporations that cause the problem.
Corporations are powerless without government support.
For some reason the USA tends to pass laws that have no effect but increasing the power of single corporations by decreasing the possiblility of competition.
What do copyright and patent laws do? They prevent competition and technological advancements. For example, the RSA encryption patent did allow the relevent company to make some money on licencing it, but it's primary effect was to delay the adoption of the new technology by 17 years.
Think about it.
If you do something that a major Corp doesn't like, do corporate security guards come and bust down your door? Nope - It's the FBI. Last time I checked the FBI was an arm of the government. But all they seem to do is use our money to enforce corporate policy.
The even existance of corporations is because of the government. When you form a new corporation, who do you register it with? Your local government.
If, for example, AOL/Time Warner want to prevent the spread of others' opinions they can't do it themselves, they'll try to get laws passed preventing speach that they don't approve of - probably under the guise of "Immorality" or some such. We need to make a preemptive strike, prevent the government from having the power to legislate morality - or anything else that it doesn't need to legislate.
So, as I said before, the single entity that is the primary cause of the problem is the government. So if we reduce the power of government (which in the USA the citizens have the power to do), the power of corporations to harm consumers is reduced proportionally.
Note: This post is primarily written from a USA-centric perspective, but it is equally valid in most other countries.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Free trade boils down to "Since we have different skills and interests, I'll swap some of my labor for some of yours". If we meet in the marketplace with equal power, full knowledge, and all costs accounted for, that trade leaves us both better off.
Capitalism boils down to "This resource (bit of land, mineral vein, idea) is MINE, and government guns will back up that claim". It's very good for those whose claims the state decides to back but, depending on what's being claimed, can tend to suck for everyone else.
Trade is an ancient activity, predating historical record; capitalism, especially industrial corporate capitalism, is relatively new.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I understand your pain. But that's what your post is - an outcry of pain. Nothing more.
It's the *ONLY* real way of harming these companies, and if other people chose not to follow you, then educate them to the issues...
Ok, so really, there are two real ways of harming these companies. I know you don't really think the best and only way to affect change is by what you do with your money - you say as much in your post. What you're raging about is essentially that the choir is being preached to and it doesn't need to hear it anymore. How does Slashdot get some REAL power to change the world beyond our own limited community? How do start educating people beyond ourselves? Being lectured to forever, even after you've agreed is _painful_.
But, that's exactly what Katz article was about, wasn't it? How do we go beyond our individual understanding and get the alarm sounded to others? Effectively.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
So, no one on slashdot ever buys from amazon again. Fantastic, their profits drop off by 0.5 % because we all shop at fatbrain anyway (it's not like most of us were real big fans prior to the one-click suit). Jeff Bezos, I'm sure, is shaking in his boots.
I liked your post, but I just wanted to point out another possibility. Boycotting Amazon and shopping at Fatbrain may not break Amazon. Linux may not break MS. But, the other part of the picture is that Linux and Fatbrain _exist_. The numbers of slashdot may not break Amazon, but they might be enough to sustain Fatbrain.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
for(x=0;x100;x++)
print("This is BRILLIANT");
So, now I'm thinking about it, and, the first problem that pops into my head was, how do you verify the data received from boycotters?
I have no doubt the boycotters will invent data, or at least exaggerate. What's to prevent me from going to the boycott site and ratcheting up some gaudy numbers?
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
Sounds good, but often it's the evil we don't respect and don't watch over that ends up biting us in ass in the end.
What AOL has done is not trivial either. The fact that it was a scrappy startup just a few years ago should be a clue to it's power, not a clue to it's non-power.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
the fact that at some point in history, some person found a natural resource, declared "this is mine," and proceeded, along with his descendants, to profit off of it.
Capitialism is successful because it is designed to reward people who GET OFF THEIR ASS. The proper response when you are concerned that the resources are being "found" by others is to mobilize and start competing to claim the rest. That is in some sense why "homesteading in the noosphere" is the notion that the open source movement embraces.
The problem, of course, is not that the free market exists, but rather that it doesn't exist: When governments allow it, corporations corrupt them. Suddenly, gevernement blocks others from legitimate "homesteading" in order to PREVENT compitition, free trade, and the exchange of ideas that will expose the "resources" the corporation has garned to not be so valuable after all.
The DVD companies, for example, seek to use the government to prevent people from exchanging the knowledge of how to demonstrate the worthlessness of their encryption scheme. A governement committed to capitalism and freedom would refuse to use its force to bolster such false valuations.
Even if the US sets this kind of precedent it still won't affect the web as a whole - many sites would move to servers and ISPs abroad, in countries where this kind of thing is allowed. This sort of thing would require every country in
the world to agree, and then any country opting out could make a fortune hosting these sites. I believe that a lot of the online casino sites are hosted in the Cayman Islands where laws are a lot less strict than in the US.
Unfortunately this leaves little mom n' pop web sites out of business. I can't even get my own server let alone get it hosted abroad in any sence.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
1) Unaccountable institutions;
2) Unaccountable corporations, becoming more of a issue today;
3) The only value of #2 is money, no human or environmental interests are considered unless we make them consider them.
Power structures will always try to slide back the basic rights for the common man, at best they'll let them stagnate. Libertarian ideas of a free market won't solve anything, as long as #3 exists we will have all sorts of unnessary problems. I don't have any obvious solutions to #3, but we can do a lot better than capitalism, or even improve on the current implementation. Without some sort of regulation it's also difficult to fight corporations on your own, I don't exactly have time to study river water to see if nearby companies are polluting, nor do I have the power to fight a company who is paying me too little, which is why we need unions and collective action.
The solution is simple as well, we protest. This is the way it has always been done. This IS a social change issue, a fight between the "man" and the average joe who wants his freedoms, and his ability to express himself to be enhanced by new technology. You cannot rely upon the political system to create new laws, you have to get out there and demand what you want for yourself and your fellow man. They will listen. I rail on our government and corporations a lot for being oppressive, but they WILL do anything you say if you take away your business (corporations) or march a million people up to capitol hill on a regular basis (government).
Protesting the system and unionizing is how we got the labor rights we have today. The US has a very violent labor history, unfortunatly you don't learn this in High school. People formed unions so the owners couldn't ignore them. This is how we got minimum wages, 40 hour work weeks, minimum standards for working conditions, and so on. Schools and the media would have you beleive that all our material wealth and technological gains over the past century or two have led to the "prosperity" we have today. This is a total joke. There is a slashdot poster whose sig file has this quote: "Machines didn't free men, it only allowed men with machines to enslave other men." (this is off the top of my head, I can't remember the exact wording). I couldn't have said it better.
We simply need to keep our institutions accountable. The letter writing campaign due to the DVD situtation is a step in the right direction. Hopefully in the future we'll have some very organized protests in whatever form, now that so many people are becoming disapointed with the status quo.
"number of emails sent to Jeff B." or
"number of press stories about our boycott." or
"dollars spent at B&N by former users of Amazon.com." or
"number of friends told to boycott Amazon"
If I can go to a slashdot page that shows me up-to-the-minute stats on the number of my comrades who have decided to boycott Amazon, I'll keep the faith. Furthermore, whereever those metrics are published becomes an epicenter that attracts press coverage.
How long will you play a game if you never know the score?
19th century Anarchist to a collegue: "This world is corrupt. Empires and governments exploit the worker, the rich get full as the poor starve. This world should burn, and we should build another one in its place."
/.: "But in some ways life is worse - more polluted, crowded, ugly, and complicated and less spiritual, and certainly less private. [...] standards of living slipping, social programs weakening. Divisiveness seems inevitable in a world in which access to new technologies spells the difference between education and ignorance, poverty and wealth, opportunity and despair. [...]growing challenges to freedom and creative growth."
/. crowds, who are always looking for the latest government/corporate conspiracy to discuss in the comfort of their own priviledged lives.
21th century Katz to
This coming from a man who advocates bootlegging mp3s, and justifies it as "choosing our own culture", whereas I would call it theft. Gotta love creative interpretations of reality (i.e. lies).
This coming from our "savior", Jon Katz, the Messiah.
Cry me a fucking river, Mr. Katz. I have no respect for you. It seems like every damn week, you see a new "evil", and attempt to decry it, wrapping yourself in self-rightgeous rhetoric, as you wet the ravenous
I have no respect for you, Mr. Katz. You decry the WTO meetings because they had an impact on the media. I respect the people who braved the law-enforcement officers, for their own ideals and beliefs.
I have no respect for you, Mr. Katz. You cry about the growing infringment of the corporate world in our own lives, yet you profit from it with books, and surely, correct me if I'm wrong, lectures. Are your books freely available? Are your lecture transcripts posted on a website somewhere?
I have no respect for you, Mr. Katz. I have no respect for quixotic polemists, always looking for the next windmill. I have respect for the people who actually do something, and have no need to be validated and worshipped by near-sighted freaks. I have respect for people who change the system by action and words, not words alone. I have respect for everyone in this country who gives his own time to help others. I have respect for every student who takes a year off to go overseas and teach to the disfavored. I have respect to everyone who dedicates their lives to helping others, through action. I have respect for my own aunt, a nun, who teaches to the poor in Peru.
I have no respect for you, Mr. Katz.
at least in the PC industry, anyway. Profit margins are suddenly drying up, and the Supply chain that has existed for many years appears to have gone off and shot itself. All the distributors are either covertly direct selling to end users or being eaten up since they now hold no market cap. This makes the margins razor thin on hardware, and lessens the ability for new low-cap startups.
Is this happening in any other industries? Is the future one in which you have no choice of whom to buy a product from?
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
It wouldn't be that surprising. There are many very complex connections, out there, with these mega-corps. There is simply no way to be sure you ARE boycotting them. Anything you spend can wind up in the pockets of a dozen major corps.
But don't let that be an excuse for not acting. If you give up now then they have already won.
You can break up mega-corps. I work for a multinational Pharmacuticals/Agrochemicals corporation. The Agrochemicals business is being de-merged almost certainly because of the bad publicity it is gaining in Europe from its involvement with genetically modified crops. This has effected the share price, so the corporate machine has moved to solve the problem.
And that is the important point; all corporations react to defend their share price. Anything that hits the share price will force them to act. If you refuse to trade their stock and buy their products (those that you know of) then you are helping (in however small a way) to chip away at their power.
Just because your contribution is small does not make it less valid. Has open source coding taught us nothing? Maybe I'll just stop submitting bug fixes now....
It seems to me that Gates and Case are really very nineteenth-century types - they are the famous "robber barons" like Leland Stanford and Andrew Carnegie.
This is not a new insight. J Bradford DeLong has an excell ent article with some interesting conclusions on the influence of the personal billions.
But the key question is: are there true economies of scale to build the structures that would be abusive. After all, big isn't inherently bad.
Microsoft had such an opportunity - the "network effect" that pulled so many applications onto Windows.
The 19th century robber barons had railroads, and industrial economies of scale - a big steel mill is more efficient that 100 small ones.
But does AOL/Time-Warner have a similar hook? None is obvious to me - there's little advantage to a web application provider in hosting through AOL. A little one, but not a big one. Not like the difference between staking your future on the launch of a Windows app against a MacOS app.
The difference between a rich company and a dangerous monopoly is the "only game in town" factor. Time-Warner has that in some cable utilities - that's the only monopoly I see. And cable has competitors.
Remember when AT&T was "TPC" ("see figure 1"?)(BTW, I can't find a URL for a "see figure 1" joke to include here...)
Henry Troup
hwt@igs.net
These comments are placed in the public domain.
The situation with land today is that large corporations control most of it, and are trying to gobble up the rest, but it's a big country, and there will probably always be niches for those who don't want to toe the corporate line. Of course, "private property" is a fetish. Anyone who questions it is crank, and nevermind that almost no private land in this country was originally gotten *EXCEPT* with public subsidies.
The first thing to realize is that a corporation is a government-subsidized entity. Corporations are chartered by governments, and their officers and shareholders are given extraordinary legal protection. (If a corporation sues you and wins, you can lose your retirement fund, your savings, your everything. If you sue a corporation and win, the corporate officers just pass the bill to the corporation; their personal fortunes aren't at risk.) That's the reason corporations exist. Their enormous wealth, accumulated over lifetimes (unlike people, corporations don't have to die), gives them extraordinary influence on the governments that created them. Uh oh, I sense a positive feedback loop.
And yes, first post, goddamit, and before my morning cofffeee.
Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive are all about how corporations eventually made governments irrelevant, conducting their own private wars and controlling access to all media outlets. [H|Cr]ackers raid corporate networks trying to pilfer data to sell on the black market, while the rest of the world just takes comfort in whatever the corporate media feeds them. Which is exactly your point, I think.
In any case, despite your sub-optimal choice, I agree that the corporations are indeed taking over and the geeks of the world may be the only ones capable of doing anything about it. But, as you say, how do we motivate our own community to action, especially since huge numbers of us are employed (or would love to be employed) by these companies? Should we bite the hands that feed us?
--Mythos
mine was irrelevent, sure i by that, trolls aren't always relevant, i'll give you that. just be thankful i don't get to post to the main page, like some other people who post irrelevantly(heh, that's quite a word, if it exists :)
is Jesus your personal savior? click here
For Christ's sake Josh, try not to get the Katz hyperbole engine fired up next time will ya. And you should probably think harder about who you ask to be your representative. A non-geek, reactionary, gas bag whose biggest claim to techno-fame is writing unedited copy for /. is not my idea of a good "geek issues" represenative. There are actually folks out there who've thought much about the issues that you've raised. Folks that have a coherent philosophy and the talent and skill to help us out. In fact these people are already doing something about the DVD-CCA and the MPAA lawsuits.
So, choose wisely grasshopper. For the ability to ramble and incite 200 flames per article does not a good advocate make.
I find it humorous that in one post Katz rails against individuality and obnoxiousness, and the next against corporatism. One of the biggest things corporatism sells is a warm&fuzzy image- Barney and the Smurfs as corporate spokespeople. The advantage of conformanity and homogenity is that people won't get offended.
Corporatism isn't anything new- does "Whats good for GM is good for the US" sound familiar to anyone? People should read Noam Chomsky more often. Corporatism (as it's known now) took over the national media sometime late in the 19th century (that's the 1800's for those still having problems with their date routines). What is difference is that we're becoming _aware_ of the problem.
I refuse to believe that, in all the corruption and contacts and schmooze and links and interindustry operation and amazing stunts of marketing and demographic analysis and data mining and sheer goddamn chuztpah, anybody really thinks Steve Case is about to take over.
What part of Media Figurehead don't you understand?
Case pulled off AOL. Big deal. He may be about to get his name in the papers, but so what? Suddenly, the entire industry has an excuse to merge--and what's hilarious is, since this is Steve Case and AOL and The Flagship of the Tech Industry, the government's afraid to stop it because nobody wants to be the dipshit the burst the Great Internet Bubble.
Who needs trusts when you can just go ahead and merge?
Who needs real leaders when fake, impotent ones are much less scary to the general public?
Bill Gates embodied power. Power implies those he is able to hold power over. So all the evils of Microsoft had a face, a name, someone for the KMFMS folks to revile.
Steve Case is being portrayed as the ultimate schmuck. Some guy, suddenly the head of Time Warner. Awww, ain't that cute.
Do you really think that Time Warner is actually planning to be ruled by some guy who *gasp* started up some scrappy startup truly built out of *APPLELINK*, which somehow has been erased from the records of every single history I've seen?
Gimme a break. At bare minimum, they want to prevent the non-ignorable force that was AOL from giving all those annoying little guys who give unlimited, uncensored, and unfirewalled net access access to their precious cable network. AOL's calls for free access would have suceeded. Now that just AOL gets access(and maybe a few major ISPs like Earthlink and Mindspring who will just get bought out anyway), give it a few years, and global network service bans will be as simple as a word from...someone.
I promise you, it won't be Case.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Put this together with another context. CBS recently used digital technology to filter out a competitor's logo (NBC) from appearing in a broadcast. What's to stop AO(Hell)/Time Warner from essentially saying, "well, because this court decision essentially made the ISP a content provider, we don't want to be sued, so we will filter out anything we don't want to appear as being part of 'our content' from being transmitted via our wires..."
Poof, instant corporate censorship of free speech, aided and abetted by the court(s). At least in this one area, I think the DeCSS case may end up in the Supreme Court unless it is modified or struck down before it gets there. So once again, thanks for highlighting this for the rest of the /. community to read, understand, and fight against.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
This was hanging around at 1, and since I don't have moderator access, I'll try and get it up with a karma bonus: It is cid 48= =============
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Hypocrisy (Score:1)
by GordonMcGregor (gordon@unfortu(_dot_)net) on Mon January 24, 15:44 WET (#48)
(User Info) http://www.flirble.org/gordon/
Does anyone else find it hypocritical to be pretending to take some 'moral high ground' by
posturing about refusing to use Amazon.com, while Jon Katz still sells his books through Amazon ?
So in public he pretends to be making a stance against this 'evil corporation' while still profiting from its sales of his
books.
If there was anything other than rhetoric coming from Katz he might actually get some more respect around here.
So I guess there is the challenge. Boycott Amazon if you want, but actually do it, don't just pretend to be doing it.
Forbid them from selling your book and lining your pockets, if you have any integrity.
Anyone can easily confirm this by a quick search at Amazon...
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
===============================================
I work at one of the universities that has banned Napster and I know that the major concern here was the bandwidth problem. Gets a little annoying waiting to do something important, like grabbing patches, etc, when you are held up by the fact that Joe Moron, is busy downloading four gig of crappily-encoded MP3s.
Katz seems to go to far talking about Mitnick and others like him too -- even Mitnick admits that what he did was wrong and illegal, and that's not the problem. The problem is that the Justice Department not on threw the Bill of Rights out the window going after him, but told the judge things any reasonable person would understand to be blatantly false (like you can hack into anyone's machine with a computer and no network connection of any type, or that you can't make Russians launch nukes by whistling into a telephone) in order to impede his defense (and now, give him insane terms of parole so that he almost has to break the law to make a living).
When they banned cigarette smoking I responded by not going to restaurants, public events, etc.
When clubs charged me $5.00 to come in and told me I couldnt come in wearing what I was wearing I stopped going to those places. "You mean you are going to charge me five bucks and then tell me what I can wear?"
I have boycotted Amazon as well. I always vote with my feet and my dollars.
With the DVD thing I refuse to buy any DVD device of any kind, or any DVD's.
Boycotts are actually simple, you want me money you have to cater to my needs not tell me what I want or what to do.
There is a difference between want and need.
You need water to live, you only want DVD's.
By upholding the injunction against an ISP for the actions of a subscriber, the court effectively changed ISPs from communication conduits into content providers. I realize that this is a preliminary injunction, but if it stands, the spirit
of the Web is in trouble.
One court case is hardly going to change the face of the internet unless it is directly from the supreme court. Plus the internet is hardly just a US thing. I guess if you really want to you could just leave the US and go somewhere else; however the price for connectivity in other places would most likely be a hell of a lot more expensive and more unavaible.
Today, I am responsible for the content of my web site, and the buck stops here. If my ISP becomes co-responsible, what is going to happen to the personal website? What about controversial websites, that some find offensive? What
about Free (speech) Software websites that some deep-pocketed lawyer-laden business finds offensive.
Removing personal web sites would effectively kill what people are wanting the internet to become. Why bother to have things like a T-1 or a DSL line if you can't publish something. Controversial web sites are a little bit of a problem. Ok for example I have some content I thought I would like to put on a web site. The only problem is that the content is slightly pornographic is there a place that offers maybe free webhosting for pages that has almost anything on it? (well except kiddie porn). You really can't find too many (as far as I have seen) because it is controversial in nature.
The concept of businesses killing things that are free would be a little silly. I am sure that Americans the world over probably don't like communism. However there are several over 1 billion of them in the world in China. Does this mean that communism is in trouble? Probably not for at least 50+ years at the rate we are going. If what I say is not verbally offensive then I have little reason to worry. Publishing code on the internet is not an offensive action. Just because a rich business man decides he dosn't like it dosn't mean that I will not have some means to publish my code.
In the worst case, the Web becomes the realm of the dotcom, and those who brought it into being are banned, or at the very least, tightly leashed and censored by litigation fearing ISPs.
That is nearly impossible like I said in the earlier part of my post. If you kill individual web pages you kill the web. You kill the reason that people even try to have any pride in the web. People want to at least have some crappy web page on the internet and say to mom/dad/friend "Yup that's my little page and everyone can see it" kind of bragging rights. I am sure that people just loved the good old days when publishing was for only about 1% of people but that was taken out of their hands years ago.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I am continually amazed at the combination of willful naiveté and corporate apoligism that always seems to bubble to the fore in these forums. So, many seem to dismiss calls to collective action (especially if they emanate from or through Jon Katz) completely out of hand.
Individual socio-political dogmas aside, it remains a fact that there is a serious problem looming for those of us who want a future based on freedom of thought and expression. There are a lot of major issues bubbling on the stove right now that are going to affect the case law and legislation which will set most of the ground rules going forward in the realms of technology and the Net. The problem is that the political system is fundamentally broken in two ways; 1) the decision process is seriously skewed in the direction of the corporatist interests by the money-dependecies of the major political players and, 2) most of the key political decision-makers, with only a few exceptions, are completely unqualified to understand the issues currently before them - let alone to try to project into the future.
Sure, capatilism is good or at least better than any competing economic systems. But, those who persist in blathering on about libertarianism and unfettered capitalism fail to appreciate the major lesson of history. Unfettered capitalism inevitably leads to anti-social behavior on the part of those companies; either through direct capitalist maliciousness (i.e. Bohpal, Mitsubishi sex-discrimination) or errors of omission, (Exxon Valdez, any number of product liability cases). That's not a slam to corporations per se, its just what they do. They are not directly accountable to anyone besides their shareholders. In a pure capitalist/libertarian society the only power the consumer/citizen has is through lawsuit (laugh) or boycott.
One of the few things the state can do well in modern society is to set the ground rules for corporate behavior and to reign in corporations that threaten the greater good. But, as pointed out above, the playing field is not level.
In order to change this, collective action is needed. Why do so many pooh. pooh the idea of collective political action to retake control of the political process that may threaten our livelihoods and basic freedoms? Is it some sort of subconscious association 60's type hippie direct action? I've got news for you, Microsoft and AOL/TimeWarner/EMI have no such mental blocks.
The crowning achievement of the Open Source movement is a sort of collective direct political action. Linux is the collaborative achievement of thousands of people working on whatever holds their interest in the service of a central, commonly held goal - end the hegemony of shitty corporate OS'es and put control back in the hands of the people. Linux has some basic operating tenets, i.e. the compatibility with the kernel. But, everyone involved has the freedom to work autonomously on very diverse methods of moving the whole thing forward.
That is what we need in the drive to retain freedom and restrain the inevitable corporate tendency to "embrace and extend" their own interests, an Open Source social movement.
"Being Irish, he possessed an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through brief episodes of joy." -W. B.
Jeez...maybe I should file patent for "a pseudo-journalist who lives off the competitive producers of society, while earning a meager living attacking free-enterprise capitalism and spreading socialistic propaganda."
Honestly, Jon...did you ever study business in your whole life? Don't you realize that if it wasn't for free-enterprise business and, oh-my-god, corporations, you might not be sitting in front of your computer, shaving with a razor, living in a warm home, and yes, even using open-source software?
Business is the dynamic interaction of numbers and values to create better products in a competitive marketplace at lower and lower costs. Pseudo-journalism is the manipulation of out-of-context facts to dishonestly attack and undermine values to gain unearned power.
Hmm...
Believe it or not, we've been here before. I think what's going on now is simply a correlation fo the same problem you'll face when thinking about natural resources and how they got allocated in the first place. This has been a huge debate for some time, but basically it boils down to: no matter how good you are at justifying and heralding capitalism as delivering moral outcomes, its birth was illegitimate. That is- there's no way to justify, under the logic of capitalism, the fact that at some point in history, some person found a natural resource, declared "this is mine," and proceeded, along with his descendants, to profit off of it. The same sort of thing is happening here, only it has to do with intellectual property in many cases- we have all these virtual resources and no clear ownership- so companies are simply grabbing what they can, often paying far undervalue, and fencing it off from all the people tat used to enjoy it collectively.
Hello??? Have you been living your life entirely on the net for the past 15 years???
/. JonKatz or anyone else can do a damn thing to stop it?
The western capitalist world *IS* corporate, the internet is just catching up, and what makes you think
Sure you can rebel, sure you can write nice non flaming letters in word95 format, but that aint gonna make a blind bit of difference.
Take a look around, where does it make a difference in the real world, forests still fall, people still die because they don't have decent medical insurance, people still starve. Shouldn't we be focusing on the slightly more important but less relevant to you issues here?
Jeez, get off your moral high horse and start talking about something the majority of people actually give a shit about.
We winge about crappy software patents but fail to notice companies are patenting human DNA, tell me which one is the more fundamental of the 2 there.
/. I say stick to the geek aspect and stop prentending to be useful to society, cos it's all full of shit and way off the mark.
Money talks, email and letters don't. The only way you can stop these things happening is to use your money wisely. Don't like the CSS encryption, then don't buy DVD. Think M$ is a monopoly, then don't buy M$ software.
It's the *ONLY* real way of harming these companies, and if other people chose not to follow you, then educate them to the issues, if they still don't then lump it. But don't just stand there and whine, it aint gonna get you anywhere.
Moderate me down, I don't care about Kama anymore, it's utterly pointless cos it means nothing. The more you whinge the more kama you get, whoopee!
Ben
The Government's faffing over totally unenforcable Acts suddenly becomes insignificant, when the film companies can virtually hold the Federal courts to ransom, and dictate the media's views on events.
I'm not saying you should trust the Whitehouse, but I =do= think we've got a much bigger threat to democracy on our hands. You can worry about the Goldfish, later. It's the Megalodon Shark that's the more immediate threat, right now.
Sure, you can "choose" which company you buy from, but so what? Microsoft's wealth is so vast that they need only put some into a high-investment account and they can run indefinitely with no sales at all. And, no, that wouldn't make them irrelevent. Not with the amount of tech they've bought up, over the years.
Time-Warner, AOL, etc - the same thing applies. Do you think any of them CARE if a handful of people boycott them in protest? Do you think they'd even notice?? AOL -control- so many related markets, now, and such a big slice of each, that they don't need to care -what- we think. They'll keep their existing customer base, because there's really nowhere for them to go. And with control over so many other industries, every person they control is paying them many times over.
Then, there's this detail of HOW do you boycott these mega-corps? They squirm into so many different sectors, and control so much in so many different areas. Is the money for that beefburger going, through some nefarious route, to AOL, Sun, Microsoft, Nescafe, or some other mega-giant?
It wouldn't be that surprising. There are many very complex connections, out there, with these mega-corps. There is simply no way to be sure you ARE boycotting them. Anything you spend can wind up in the pockets of a dozen major corps.
Next time someone brags about the US' "Free Market", remember DVD's, and how free the market was with them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
JonKatz reads like Sokal's parody of postmodern "research". Big words, frequently used correctly, but sometimes a bit off. Some of them are made up. Some of them are used because they have emotional connotations, not because their meanings really apply. And, of course, The Agenda.
This is getting really frustrating. Why the hell does this guy get to post articles on slashdot? He has no argumentation for his thesis. All he has is the belief that corporations are somehow intrinsically incompatible with a free life.
Jon, I have news for you.
They are us. We, the people, are the "corporations". We build them. People run them. People who, at the end of the day, are no worse than we are. Maybe no better, either, but they're not worse. Mr. Case is not evil. He does not hate freedom. He has different priorities than you do. I do too.
It is no more wrong that Steve Case has his position of power than it's wrong that JonKatz can post the equivalent of a gigantic post that will always be permanently moderated as if it were "+5, Insightful".
I think Jon is a waste of slashdot time, and I will continue to think so until he *JUSTIFIES* these psychotic episodes with some actual arguments. Show me *WHY* it is inevitably the case that any corporation must be nothing but soul-sucking evil. Show me *WHY* I should believe that the mere existance of a megacorp is a violation of all I hold dear.
Or shut up.
Or, at the very least, STOP PRETENDING YOU SPEAK FOR ME. You do not have my *permission* to claim you represent the opinions, goals, or beliefs of educated geeks, hackers, or whatever we're calling ourselves this week. Eric Raymond may pontificate, but he's at least *DONE* something.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
So, no one on slashdot ever buys from amazon again. Fantastic, their profits drop off by 0.5 % because we all shop at fatbrain anyway (it's not like most of us were real big fans prior to the one-click suit). Jeff Bezos, I'm sure, is shaking in his boots.
If i sound frustrated, it's cause I am. From the point of view of responding to a capitalist threat by exercising our capitalistic free-will, you know, I don't see much promise. Those people interested in shopping in a morally or philosophically responsible fashion will always be outnumbered by those not willing or not informed enough to do so, especially in the case of technically or socially complicated issues. Other examples are things like electric cars and global warming -- in the case of supposedly conflicting evidence, and problems with the costs of safe alternatives, people just can't seem to care.
That said, i think that there is a tremendous moral imperative for any member of a community that does recognize and understand the problems to a) inform others, b) act passively to prevent the hegemonies and intellectual monopolies we're seeing, and c) act in a positive fashion to secure and develop the tools to make any attempt to unfairly or maliciously gain a stranglehold on our access to information.
So, a) and b) are straightforward -- we stop buyin from Amazon, and we make sure to bore our windows-using friends to death with how fast/efficient/empowering/etc. other OSes/browsers/applications/etc. are. I do these things already, much to the detriment of my social life.
The really important thing, however, is c). It's also the one that sounds dangerous, violent, and fun. It's like the role of the monks in Canticle for Liebowitz or the Foundation in those Asimov books. We're more capable than the average bears of discerning which tools, trends, and uses for information are (on the one hand) most important in terms of their relevance to our information-access-related freedoms, and (on the other) most in danger of encroachment by industry, whether due to lawsuit, or good, old-fashioned suffocation-by-conglomoration.
That is to say, if DVD decryption tools had been squashed by the court prior to their dissemination to the community, well, the industry has won. If we all study and understand the code first, though, they can pass as many laws as they want, but they will fail to encroach upon our right to understand their technology, to understand and adapt any technology. This, I think, is the important thing, in spite of any lawsuit.
Point of story, what the people who break things open are really doing isn't destructive or criminal, it's a natural consequence of human curiousity. And the key way to nullify any attempt to limit this sort of curious inquiry is simply to exercise it at every opportunity. If we know a thing, and understand it, we own it, in a manner that the lawsuits and conglomorates will always lag behind.
I guess I'm trying to reinforce the degree to which I think that this is a great crusade for us, against intellectual limitation, because it's a fight that seems perfectly catered to the things we already enjoy -- learning things, busting them up and reusing the pieces however we'd like. These are subversive acts, I think that most of us discovered this at a very young age, but I think that understanding that this still applies is very important now that there are these potential threats to our ability to own our information and code and processes and stuff.
Those are my thoughts. I'm sure that I've made them sound pretentious and overblown, when I mean to make them sound populist and grass-roots. Fight the power via learning stuff, and knowing stuff. It sounds like fun to me.
god is just pretend.
We sufferred a BAD loss in the second deCSS injunction against us:
By upholding the injunction against an ISP for the actions of a subscriber, the court effectively changed ISPs from communication conduits into content providers. I realize that this is a preliminary injunction, but if it stands, the spirit of the Web is in trouble.
Today, I am responsible for the content of my web site, and the buck stops here. If my ISP becomes co-responsible, what is going to happen to the personal website? What about controversial websites, that some find offensive? What about Free (speech) Software websites that some deep-pocketed lawyer-laden business finds offensive.
In the worst case, the Web becomes the realm of the dotcom, and those who brought it into being are banned, or at the very least, tightly leashed and censored by litigation fearing ISPs.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.