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:
i say that rather than boycotting companies that provide us with cheaper and better services than mortar and bricks companies and thus killing off these companies (no software patents here - that's america's fault, not amazon's), we should boycott rubbish authors like katz and en masse not post in response to this threads, thus killing off this dubious dabble in journalism.
if i make a pro-open source statement, i have you all on my side....
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
How about this; I encrypt every book and newspaper that you own, and I say when and where you can read it? That you cannot read it in a Honda or East of Avenue C? It's part of the End Reader's License that I wrote inside the cover of the book.
It's also not in your best interests to do this.
We should be focusing our attention on getting DVD vendors to recognize their Linux market. Give them a reason to develop hardware and software that runs on Linux to play their DVD's. Convince them that the costs involved in expanding their list of operating systems is less than the revenue they will draw as a result of supporting those operating systems.
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
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.
Wrong. DeCSS doesn't involve your DVD player. DeCSS involves the code used to protect the DVD algorithm. That code is actually belongs to the industry magnates, and even though you may not like that they control it, it is theirs to control. Cracking it is like cracking a computer.
Now that the information is public, there is no security. Can't you see that?
I can perfectly see that, but that's not the issue. Just like a hacked system is thus available to all the world once the method of cracking is released, so the DVDs are effectively security-less. However, that doesn't stop the offended persons from going ahead and prosecuting the suspected offenders. Just because the security doesn't exist anymore does not mean that the perpetrators cannot be tried.
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.
Wrong again. It can be said that no one who ever wrote Napster ever pirated an MP3 song, yet those same people are being attacked, essentially for contributing to the crime, and like you said, the case can be made pretty strongly against them. It's the same issue with DeCSS. If someone did that in their home to copy their DVDs, no one would ever know, but they released a program that would allow others to do the same thing, which, most probably did nothing but contribute to DVD piracy. That's contributory infringement, as you say and can be prosecuted.
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.
Right. No one ever said that the people running megacorps were geniuses, but the fact remains that their technology has been attacked and broken, and the legality of the distribution of that technique is questioned. They have every right to prosecute, and if I were them, I would. If they really had smart minds, they would prosecute, both to send a message about crime and obtain lost revenue, and at the same time, release tools that would allow all their customers to view DVDs. But like I said, no one ever claimed they were smart.
The Internet is also not all under U.S. jurisdiction.
Realized. However, perpetrators can be tried under them when Internet actions affect U.S. interests.
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
In this regard I would give Bruce Perenes a hearty A+ for PR. Not only was a story posted about him that was taking place somewhere else.. but he actually took part in the /. conversation that took place immediatly before his IRC interview.
Rgds.
--
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.
You are of course right about what goes up must come down, the real question is when? I want to live to see it, and if we sit back and relax and let the inevitable force of history do the work, it might take years, decades or centurys and I sure don't want that. I think we now see the seeds of the Gibsonian corporations world. If they manage to rule the world, it'll take eons to overthrow them.
Szo
Red Leader Standing By!
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
I want DVD readability on all systems, and I want the ability to copy my DVDs
--is to--
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
as
When I was a kid, we found tons of ways to do it...
--is to--
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.(*coughI feel no sympathy for the Napster kiddiescough*)
Stop contradicting yourself. I see massive battles being fought now to decide who will "own" media in the future. Personally I'd like to see it be the people who buy it, but it seems more and more that those with big money want it to be the people that make it (i.e. the people with big money). (Ignoring the fact that media is totally worthless without people to consume it). That somehow by putting in the money to produce something guarantees you have ultimate control over who sees it and when and you "deserve" compensation on an order of magnitude based on a finite product, regardless of outside market influences (stuff like, say, the Internet). Stop propping up a dead ideology, power to the people and all that.
+&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.
I beg to differ with your comments, I think that corporations in nature, are no different now to the way they were 10, 15 even 20 years ago. They have always taken advantage of the rules and regulations to breaking point. They use and abuse the environment and the people working for them, it has always been about making money and always will be. I am interested to note why 'you and others' are such experts on the subject, I myself am not but have never claimed to be. Collective suggestion does not make fact.
What I think has changed is the market and the economic/social conditions in which corporations exist. The advent of the internet makes corporatism a much bigger ball game, it's now on a truely global market with new (read almost no) laws, new ways of thinking and new possibilities. The fact however remains that in generally nothing has changed. Corporations and indeed business in general still works in similar ways and have similar goals, albeit attained through different methods.
There are many many issues you need to take into account while arguing points like these. Law, Economics, Athropology, Sociology, Psychology, Business Management, you cannot possibly hope to be able to pull all these together in a single column and expect to be able to come up with any reasonable arguments.
You can also apply similar arguments to that of society, we are in general becoming more corporate, the drive for efficiency, the idea that we feel compelled to justify our existance. Every moment of our lives is touched with at least some sense of corporatism of for most of us has been since the 2nd world war and the onset of the free market.
I fail to see the argument contained within your column, in fact I see a lot more scaremongering and sensationalism and almost what I wall could tabloid irrelevance (I refer to the comments about Steve Case, a bland man indeed but hardly relevant to the argument).
You come so close yet completely fail to hit the mark, you suggest that corporations are the root of all evil, you suggest that it is almost worse than the futures protrayed by the likes of Orwell and others.
I'm so sick of people whining on about how terrible this all is, how it dooms our privacy and our rights. I ask you this... what rights do we actually have, what rights have we ever had? I'm no conspiracy theorist but when it really comes down to it we have little. We have the right to earn money, the right to spend it (all of which contributes to corporatism in some way or another for most of us). We are the problem, corporatism is a symptom. You cannot escape that, it is something that every single one of us has helped create and continue to keep going. We all play a part even if it is only by accepting it and playing along.
You claim that we are safer and having more fun, I beg to differ again, on what pop quiz do you base these suggestions on? Define fun, qualify your statements. In the world of academia if you don't qualify statements then they get thrown out as idle speculation, I'm afraid I do the same. We may be having fun in a more superficial sense, but then that's part of the problem, fun isn't happiness and has no real meaning.
It seems to me that the main problem with society and life in general is that we have removed the personal from everything, we have no real sense of worth, we no longer play a part in something, and the things that we do play a part in is corporatism - do you sense a paradox here?
We take responsibility for our own lives and no-one elses (with the minor exception of those of our children). It is up to us how we act and react (there is a big difference between the two). We are ultimately reponsible for the society we create through our actions, and if we feel we have lost control of it then it is the fault of all of us, not Steve Case, not Bill Gates not any individual, *ALL* of us.
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.
(You can take that either as "Ah, good, there are people with guns who aren't wacko religious fanatics" or as "Oh no, there are left wing armed nutcases too!" Take yer pick.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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
It's entirely appropriate for the state to demand, via regulation, that the corporations it creates and empowers operate in the public interest - that is, after all, the whole rationale for the existence of the state and of corporations. But it often happens that the state creates corporations, corporations gather control of enormous wealth, and then use this to buy government influence.
I don't want a bigger state. I don't want bigger corporations, or richer robber barons, either. Concentrations of power are a threat to freedom.
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.