Good lord there are some fucked up people out there. I never knew Jon Katz had such a vocal group of critics who immediately pan everything he says. Just because he introduces new views to you morons, you pillory him? Why do you even read his articles if you don't think he has anything to say? I'm no hick and am pretty damn well-educated and I'd say that Katz is one of the most important writers out there, in that he is writing about topics nobody else will touch, topics which are very interesting and central to our future--and he does it well, without exaggeration, and very insightfully. I'd take a Katz article any day over any other writer in America.
Yeah, yeah, this whole technology-as-salvation thing is wearing quite thin these days. Technology is a tool. Nobody worshiped looms or mills or iron horses, did they?
The merit to this article, though, is Katz' discussion of Americans' profound sense of dislocation. We Americans are a very lost group of people. We are divided, fragmented, powerless, very deeply scared of everything, and yearning to find a meaning to it all.
Some posters here have wondered "Why does America need a 'national mission'? The Brits don't have one, the Canadians don't have one." The reason is that if we do not have a national mission for ourselves, we just might see our country for what it really is--a vast money-making conspiracy that has absolutely no regard for human life or human rights or human dignity. And that's a pretty shocking thing to realize. No wonder we're burying our heads in the sand.
Technology can NEVER be a religion, or a salvation, or the answer to our problems. It can be a useful tool to help revive the American people and save ourselves from doom, but only in the context of a broader socio-political movement that aims to truly fix the American system.
Remember that this is in Berkeley, in the Bay Area, a place filled with people who are into providing services like this. In fact, I doubt that even outside of Berkeley there are many services like it in the Bay Area. I live in Berkeley and had never heard of it.
My point is that if such a service is rare here in the Bay Area, how widespread is it going to be in the rest of the nation, where available computers and net connections, as well as the community ethic that drives such a service, are not often found? If I lived in East St. Louis, could I get a free computer and net connection from a local group?
This is just one reason, among many, as to why there can be no digital equivalent of our offline communities. When so many people have access barriers, utopia is far off. And besides, how the hell are you supposed to have a community without personal, face-to-face interaction?!?!
Now that's not true at all. Much has been accomplished through obstinacy, stubbornness, and temper tantrums, not to mention all the variations on the theme of brute force. Additionally, history is filled with people who tried to be 'diplomatic' but wound up getting taken advantage of. Now knowing the RIAA, do you think that we users and simple folk would get a fair deal from them or get taken advantage of? What about the artists? Nobody wins but the RIAA when you play by their rules. I say fuck their rules...where we're going, we don't need rules.
There ain't no goddamned way I'll ever pay for music again. Certainly not until the RIAA cartel is broken up. Now, if my money actually went to the artists themselves instead of Sunset Boulevard, then I'd consider opening up my wallet. But I feel that music, like other forms of art and all forms of information, should be free. The RIAA may crush Napster or, if they were smart, cut a deal with them based upon the "if you can't beat em, join em" principle, but they'll never wipe out P2P MP3's. The revolution has begun, and it's not televised, it's on your computer.
But so does the opposite extreme: corporate solutions.
We can go ultra-left and have socialism. That's a bad idea.
Or, we can go ultra-right and have feudalism, where corporations are the lords and we are the vassals.
Or, we can take the middle path, the path that gives the most individual freedom AS WELL AS the most economic growth.
That middle path was laid down by the founding fathers in 1787 with the Constitution and its surrounding documents (i.e. Bill of Rights). That middle path, both anti-statist and anti-fedual, was the one the US should have followed.
Instead, we allowed corporations to rule the country, all in a perversion of individual rights. People like "profiteer" are examples of the foolishness that allowed this to happen: they saw, correctly, government as a menace, but misjudged the size of the threat of corporate domination.
So what we have is NOT China, thank god...but not America, sadly. No, we live in the Middle Ages. CEO's are barons and control the president-king. All you and I can do is serve our lords and thus ensure our survival...or rise up in a 21st century Jacquerie and overthrow Corporate Feudalism.
So, in the future, instead of making idiotic claims about those of us who would truly like to make America true to its original ideals, either read your Federalist Papers, your Jefferson, even your Lincoln. Get a clue. And if you're too stupid to do anything but echo what your corporate lords tell you, please fuck off. History doesn't need you.
There are some things that are totally ridiculous to worry yourselves about. And then there are things where worry, even paranoia, are justified. It seems obvious then that matters of privacy are something that we have every right to worry about, and even be paranoid about.
Even before the internet we had enough to contend with in terms of privacy; Echelon and the widespread (ab)use of our social security numbers had been going on for a while. Now with the internet and all of its hidden code, which few of its millions of users understand or know how it works, it is far easier to invade individuals' privacy.
I should hope that the need for privacy is obvious to all of you. Without privacy, the right and ability to keep your personal information and your personal life to yourself, individual rights have no meaning. We might as well live in 1984's Oceania.
Of course, the most direct threat to our privacy has long been corporations, NOT the government. This does not mean that I have forgotten about the FBI or CIA or the NSC, they do have their abusive tendencies. But they keep their files sealed and don't sell them to the highest bidder. And most governmental agencies, even the FBI and CIA, do have some respect for the rights of privacy of Americans, even if they forget those rights too often.
The corporate sector, though, has no incentive to respect privacy. They are driven by profit alone, not any sense of public service (however warped it might be in some gov. agencies). The government can be easily regulated, yet we seem to have trouble regulating corporations.
People on the right will argue that corporations should be free of regulations in order to do better business and keep the economy afloat. These are the same politicians, of course, who rail against the government for not respecting individual rights enough (i.e. the Elian case). Their contradictions are amazing, and it has long been clear that most politicians will do what their pimps in big business want them to do.
Still, government regulation is the only way to rein in corporate abuse of privacy. The FTC has realized this and many on/. have also realized this. Corporations will never regulate themselves, they're only interest is in profit, and so it is up to us to show the government just how important our privacy is.
JonKatz has just written everything I've been thinking about individualism, corporations, and society for the last five years. It is quite a boost to see these issues being discussed and debated on a high-profile site like/. and I hope that JonKatz will keep these matters in the eye of this community.
Some people seem to take issue with the way JonKatz has defined individualism. I think he is right on. Individualism is a tricky thing and doesn't make for a great rallying ideology the way Marxism or religion does. You can't get a group of people together who will agree completely on what individualism means or what it should mean.
But contrary to some opinions I've seen here, an "individualism movement" can be put together and be extremely effective. The best example of this was the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley (yeah I'm a Berkeley student, forgive the self-promotion). There, a very diverse group of people, some with antithetical opinions (campus Republicans and campus Communists) united forces to oppose the university's ban on political activism on campus. Mass rallies were held in the fall of 1964 to protest the abridgement of our constitutional rights, police cars were blocked. It took three months but the policy was overturned and free expression was allowed.
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" (Mario Savio, Berkeley, Dec 3, 1964)
The words of the ground-breaking Free Speech Movement still ring true today, except the enemy is not the University of California, but corporations. It is true that fighting corporations is vastly more difficult than a single institution--where are you to direct your energies at? Who do you complain to?
The answer must be our government. The most odious thing the corporations have done is to get their lackeys on the right to convince people that there is something wrong with government having a role in corporate activity. The very reason we have a government at all was to protect its citizens' rights, a purpose that is made clear if any of you were to read your Thomas Jefferson or James Madison.
The only way we can get our government to do the right thing is to make our voices heard. The only thing that has more power in Washington than a corporate lobbyist is the vote. We have at our disposal the power to overcome corporate dominance of our government, and that is to demand that meaningful reform of campaign finance, to rein in monopolistic corporations, and to pass a new amendment to the Bill of Rights, protecting our civil liberties from the government AND corporations.
Once this is done, we individuals will be free to behave as we like with regards to corporations. And of course, the true opposition to corporations must come from the people, but let us not forget that in the American Constitution and the government it intended us to have (but which we do not have today), individual rights and the American citizen have a strong and powerful ally.
Nice though that you guys at/. finally came around and saw that your initial plan was fucked up. The proverb "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" wasn't coined just because it sounded neat, and I would hope that you in the future aren't as naive to do something that is very wrong simply because you think it is well-intentioned. But let's give credit where credit is due, and/. is to be applauded for recognizing the error of their ways. It is sad though that such recognitions are rare.
Sorry buddy but that just isn't true. The First Amendment guarantees my right to say a wide range of things. If you go around starting to limit that due to copyright issues, then you're going to put a significant restriction on the freedom of speech.
Remember too that the Supreme Court has struck down repeatedly any attempts at prior restraint, which is evidently exactly what DMCA is seeking to accomplish.
I have the right to claim, anywhere, that "The US Government should be overthrown". I can publish the schematics for a nuclear bomb. I can explain to you how to kill a man in any number of ways, and all of this is legal. I can't make threats against our leaders and that's a reasonable restriction. So, if I can do all that subversive stuff, why the fuck shouldn't I be able to post something that is copyrighted?
Have we already reached the point where corporations have more power than nations and governments? Buddha help me if we have.
...and take note that your First Amendment freedoms are being violated, all in the name of corporate profit.
We all know and agree that Microsoft's request is ridiculous and blatantly anti-First Amendment. Indeed, if any lower court were to uphold Microsoft were this ever taken so far as to trial, I have faith in the Supreme Court and that they'd strike down DMCA.
If you agree with Microsoft here, then you are a fool, and should move to China. And I don't say that facetiously. Posting a comment on/. is much like, say, passing out a leaflet on a street corner, stapling something to a telephone pole, or simply, engaging in conversation with another person in a bar, on the train, in the classroom.
Nations like America do not censor what its citizens say. Nations like China take down comments posted, say, on the Democracy Wall in 1979 ("what about the Fifth Freedom, Democracy?").
Thus should also serve as a wake-up call to all those who defend Microsoft. Not only have they shown total disregard and disrespect for the laws of this nation (I guess the Sherman Antitrust Act means nothing to them), but they have also shown total disregard for perhaps the most fundamental of our freedoms, the freedom of speech.
Granted, Microsoft is not leading the way here, rather they are following a larger trend of corporate censorship. The main threat to our liberties today, contrary to what the idiotic conservatives think, is not the government or the UN or liberals, but corporations, for whom the Constitution and other laws are impediments to profit. It is time for America to wake up and realize that we don't have to take this bullshit lying down.
I think you're the one who needs the history lesson, jale. The Founding Fathers lived a good 80 years before the emergence of the earliest corporatism in America and long before our current, 1984-esque version of it. Neither Jefferson nor Madison nor Hamilton nor Washington had anything to say about corporations because they simply did not exist. Their discussions about the structure of the American economy and its effects on politics were done in the context of the 18th century, with small farms and small factories.
This does not mean that they have nothing to tell us about corporations. Indeed, all of the Founders would agree on the undesirability of the sort of corporate dominance we see today.
The Jeffersonians (Katz is nearest to these) would object on egalitarian grounds. The reason they wanted a nation of small farmers was so that everyone would have a stake in the economy and in the government above the level of a simple laborer.
The Federalists (Hamilton and Washington and John Adams) would object not because they dislike elite power in politics, but because corporations do not serve the public. The Bank of the US had nothing to do with corporations (again, they had yet to exist) and was chartered more to secure America's currency and foreign trade, which was always vital to our national economy. The reason these guys were able to accept the rule of an elite is because they assumed the elite would work in the best interests of the nation as a whole, not for their own self-interest (i.e. profit). (Read your Federalist Papers, especially nos. 9 and 10).
Corporations, of course, dominate our economy, and treat nearly all Americans as cogs in their machine, as means rather than ends. They have no reason or interest to work for the sake of public service. They are beginning to stifle the free expression of ideas, which ALL the founders saw as being crucially important to our republic. I don't think then that anyone can make the argument that the geniuses who founded this country would have anything but contempt for the Corporate Republic.
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Good lord there are some fucked up people out there. I never knew Jon Katz had such a vocal group of critics who immediately pan everything he says. Just because he introduces new views to you morons, you pillory him? Why do you even read his articles if you don't think he has anything to say? I'm no hick and am pretty damn well-educated and I'd say that Katz is one of the most important writers out there, in that he is writing about topics nobody else will touch, topics which are very interesting and central to our future--and he does it well, without exaggeration, and very insightfully. I'd take a Katz article any day over any other writer in America.
The merit to this article, though, is Katz' discussion of Americans' profound sense of dislocation. We Americans are a very lost group of people. We are divided, fragmented, powerless, very deeply scared of everything, and yearning to find a meaning to it all.
Some posters here have wondered "Why does America need a 'national mission'? The Brits don't have one, the Canadians don't have one." The reason is that if we do not have a national mission for ourselves, we just might see our country for what it really is--a vast money-making conspiracy that has absolutely no regard for human life or human rights or human dignity. And that's a pretty shocking thing to realize. No wonder we're burying our heads in the sand.
Technology can NEVER be a religion, or a salvation, or the answer to our problems. It can be a useful tool to help revive the American people and save ourselves from doom, but only in the context of a broader socio-political movement that aims to truly fix the American system.
Remember that this is in Berkeley, in the Bay Area, a place filled with people who are into providing services like this. In fact, I doubt that even outside of Berkeley there are many services like it in the Bay Area. I live in Berkeley and had never heard of it.
My point is that if such a service is rare here in the Bay Area, how widespread is it going to be in the rest of the nation, where available computers and net connections, as well as the community ethic that drives such a service, are not often found? If I lived in East St. Louis, could I get a free computer and net connection from a local group?
This is just one reason, among many, as to why there can be no digital equivalent of our offline communities. When so many people have access barriers, utopia is far off. And besides, how the hell are you supposed to have a community without personal, face-to-face interaction?!?!
Now that's not true at all. Much has been accomplished through obstinacy, stubbornness, and temper tantrums, not to mention all the variations on the theme of brute force. Additionally, history is filled with people who tried to be 'diplomatic' but wound up getting taken advantage of. Now knowing the RIAA, do you think that we users and simple folk would get a fair deal from them or get taken advantage of? What about the artists? Nobody wins but the RIAA when you play by their rules. I say fuck their rules...where we're going, we don't need rules.
There ain't no goddamned way I'll ever pay for music again. Certainly not until the RIAA cartel is broken up. Now, if my money actually went to the artists themselves instead of Sunset Boulevard, then I'd consider opening up my wallet. But I feel that music, like other forms of art and all forms of information, should be free. The RIAA may crush Napster or, if they were smart, cut a deal with them based upon the "if you can't beat em, join em" principle, but they'll never wipe out P2P MP3's. The revolution has begun, and it's not televised, it's on your computer.
But so does the opposite extreme: corporate solutions.
We can go ultra-left and have socialism. That's a bad idea.
Or, we can go ultra-right and have feudalism, where corporations are the lords and we are the vassals.
Or, we can take the middle path, the path that gives the most individual freedom AS WELL AS the most economic growth.
That middle path was laid down by the founding fathers in 1787 with the Constitution and its surrounding documents (i.e. Bill of Rights). That middle path, both anti-statist and anti-fedual, was the one the US should have followed.
Instead, we allowed corporations to rule the country, all in a perversion of individual rights. People like "profiteer" are examples of the foolishness that allowed this to happen: they saw, correctly, government as a menace, but misjudged the size of the threat of corporate domination.
So what we have is NOT China, thank god...but not America, sadly. No, we live in the Middle Ages. CEO's are barons and control the president-king. All you and I can do is serve our lords and thus ensure our survival...or rise up in a 21st century Jacquerie and overthrow Corporate Feudalism.
So, in the future, instead of making idiotic claims about those of us who would truly like to make America true to its original ideals, either read your Federalist Papers, your Jefferson, even your Lincoln. Get a clue. And if you're too stupid to do anything but echo what your corporate lords tell you, please fuck off. History doesn't need you.
There are some things that are totally ridiculous to worry yourselves about. And then there are things where worry, even paranoia, are justified. It seems obvious then that matters of privacy are something that we have every right to worry about, and even be paranoid about.
Even before the internet we had enough to contend with in terms of privacy; Echelon and the widespread (ab)use of our social security numbers had been going on for a while. Now with the internet and all of its hidden code, which few of its millions of users understand or know how it works, it is far easier to invade individuals' privacy.
I should hope that the need for privacy is obvious to all of you. Without privacy, the right and ability to keep your personal information and your personal life to yourself, individual rights have no meaning. We might as well live in 1984's Oceania.
Of course, the most direct threat to our privacy has long been corporations, NOT the government. This does not mean that I have forgotten about the FBI or CIA or the NSC, they do have their abusive tendencies. But they keep their files sealed and don't sell them to the highest bidder. And most governmental agencies, even the FBI and CIA, do have some respect for the rights of privacy of Americans, even if they forget those rights too often.
The corporate sector, though, has no incentive to respect privacy. They are driven by profit alone, not any sense of public service (however warped it might be in some gov. agencies). The government can be easily regulated, yet we seem to have trouble regulating corporations.
People on the right will argue that corporations should be free of regulations in order to do better business and keep the economy afloat. These are the same politicians, of course, who rail against the government for not respecting individual rights enough (i.e. the Elian case). Their contradictions are amazing, and it has long been clear that most politicians will do what their pimps in big business want them to do.
Still, government regulation is the only way to rein in corporate abuse of privacy. The FTC has realized this and many on /. have also realized this. Corporations will never regulate themselves, they're only interest is in profit, and so it is up to us to show the government just how important our privacy is.
Some people seem to take issue with the way JonKatz has defined individualism. I think he is right on. Individualism is a tricky thing and doesn't make for a great rallying ideology the way Marxism or religion does. You can't get a group of people together who will agree completely on what individualism means or what it should mean.
But contrary to some opinions I've seen here, an "individualism movement" can be put together and be extremely effective. The best example of this was the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley (yeah I'm a Berkeley student, forgive the self-promotion). There, a very diverse group of people, some with antithetical opinions (campus Republicans and campus Communists) united forces to oppose the university's ban on political activism on campus. Mass rallies were held in the fall of 1964 to protest the abridgement of our constitutional rights, police cars were blocked. It took three months but the policy was overturned and free expression was allowed.
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" (Mario Savio, Berkeley, Dec 3, 1964)
The words of the ground-breaking Free Speech Movement still ring true today, except the enemy is not the University of California, but corporations. It is true that fighting corporations is vastly more difficult than a single institution--where are you to direct your energies at? Who do you complain to?
The answer must be our government. The most odious thing the corporations have done is to get their lackeys on the right to convince people that there is something wrong with government having a role in corporate activity. The very reason we have a government at all was to protect its citizens' rights, a purpose that is made clear if any of you were to read your Thomas Jefferson or James Madison.
The only way we can get our government to do the right thing is to make our voices heard. The only thing that has more power in Washington than a corporate lobbyist is the vote. We have at our disposal the power to overcome corporate dominance of our government, and that is to demand that meaningful reform of campaign finance, to rein in monopolistic corporations, and to pass a new amendment to the Bill of Rights, protecting our civil liberties from the government AND corporations.
Once this is done, we individuals will be free to behave as we like with regards to corporations. And of course, the true opposition to corporations must come from the people, but let us not forget that in the American Constitution and the government it intended us to have (but which we do not have today), individual rights and the American citizen have a strong and powerful ally.
Nice though that you guys at /. finally came around and saw that your initial plan was fucked up. The proverb "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" wasn't coined just because it sounded neat, and I would hope that you in the future aren't as naive to do something that is very wrong simply because you think it is well-intentioned. But let's give credit where credit is due, and /. is to be applauded for recognizing the error of their ways. It is sad though that such recognitions are rare.
Remember too that the Supreme Court has struck down repeatedly any attempts at prior restraint, which is evidently exactly what DMCA is seeking to accomplish.
I have the right to claim, anywhere, that "The US Government should be overthrown". I can publish the schematics for a nuclear bomb. I can explain to you how to kill a man in any number of ways, and all of this is legal. I can't make threats against our leaders and that's a reasonable restriction. So, if I can do all that subversive stuff, why the fuck shouldn't I be able to post something that is copyrighted?
Have we already reached the point where corporations have more power than nations and governments? Buddha help me if we have.
We all know and agree that Microsoft's request is ridiculous and blatantly anti-First Amendment. Indeed, if any lower court were to uphold Microsoft were this ever taken so far as to trial, I have faith in the Supreme Court and that they'd strike down DMCA.
If you agree with Microsoft here, then you are a fool, and should move to China. And I don't say that facetiously. Posting a comment on /. is much like, say, passing out a leaflet on a street corner, stapling something to a telephone pole, or simply, engaging in conversation with another person in a bar, on the train, in the classroom.
Nations like America do not censor what its citizens say. Nations like China take down comments posted, say, on the Democracy Wall in 1979 ("what about the Fifth Freedom, Democracy?").
Thus should also serve as a wake-up call to all those who defend Microsoft. Not only have they shown total disregard and disrespect for the laws of this nation (I guess the Sherman Antitrust Act means nothing to them), but they have also shown total disregard for perhaps the most fundamental of our freedoms, the freedom of speech.
Granted, Microsoft is not leading the way here, rather they are following a larger trend of corporate censorship. The main threat to our liberties today, contrary to what the idiotic conservatives think, is not the government or the UN or liberals, but corporations, for whom the Constitution and other laws are impediments to profit. It is time for America to wake up and realize that we don't have to take this bullshit lying down.
This does not mean that they have nothing to tell us about corporations. Indeed, all of the Founders would agree on the undesirability of the sort of corporate dominance we see today.
The Jeffersonians (Katz is nearest to these) would object on egalitarian grounds. The reason they wanted a nation of small farmers was so that everyone would have a stake in the economy and in the government above the level of a simple laborer.
The Federalists (Hamilton and Washington and John Adams) would object not because they dislike elite power in politics, but because corporations do not serve the public. The Bank of the US had nothing to do with corporations (again, they had yet to exist) and was chartered more to secure America's currency and foreign trade, which was always vital to our national economy. The reason these guys were able to accept the rule of an elite is because they assumed the elite would work in the best interests of the nation as a whole, not for their own self-interest (i.e. profit). (Read your Federalist Papers, especially nos. 9 and 10).
Corporations, of course, dominate our economy, and treat nearly all Americans as cogs in their machine, as means rather than ends. They have no reason or interest to work for the sake of public service. They are beginning to stifle the free expression of ideas, which ALL the founders saw as being crucially important to our republic. I don't think then that anyone can make the argument that the geniuses who founded this country would have anything but contempt for the Corporate Republic.