the same agrument has been made about the printing press and the radio at various points in history. mass communications technologies have huge potential to enhance democracy and redefine citizenship-- consider, for example, how the printing press was in many way a technology which enabled the Protestant reformation (or, one could argue, the whole enlightenment).
the hitch that the internet hit, as i see it, is essentially a technological limitation: the need for a gatekeeper. what i mean is that posting a web page is like tacking up your Paine-esge flyer to a lamppost in Times Square. people will see it, sure (whether they will care or not is another debate). but very few will notice it, because it is lost the the clutter of the millions of other flyers. the way we index the internet is through search engines, which saw some of the first corporate influence on the net and suffer from a range of issues, for capitalist bias to simple technical limitations.
the other way to "catalog" the internet is to use sites like slashdot-- but then you have an editor and a moderator and the whole Paine metaphore has vanished.
and besides, can you honestly say that you read news on the indymedia.org wire and believe it before you double-check with corporate outlets? we're trained to see information distribution as very hierarchical and this is difficult to overcome.
coupled with the rapid and unhindered commericialazation of the medium, the choice between clutter and moderation has left internet has become a lot less decentralized in practical terms, a strange irony given its architecture.
i actually used to work as a telemarketer. people had a lot of hysterical responses pre-fabricated for telemarketers (i would rate them on a scale of 1-10 if they stayed on the line, but most would just crack the joke and hang up). the people who had just been dumped were the best though-- i can't tell you how often i would say:
"hello, blah blah blah, is Mr. Smith there?"
and get:
"that motherf#cker left me with that slut! if you find that bastard tell him to f#cking die!..."
thankfully, the organization i worked for didn't tape calls. so, i would get paid by the hour, minus 50% if i didn't make a certain number of calls, plus a dollar for every donation i got. so, when i got someone who seemed cool enough but was pissed at me for calling, i'd explain that if he donated 50 cents, the organization would actually lose money (and i would get a dollar to compliment my minimum wage).
moral of the story: telemarketers are minimum wage employees (or even prison labor in some cases), so it's best to just say "no, put me on the do not call list" and hang up. it's the companies that make people call you that you should find a way to harass back.
Manuel de Landa wrote an expanisve (and fascinating) study of the social and military rammifications of technological war back in 1991. his book, "War in the Age of Intelligent Machines" (Zone books, London, 1991) lays out the idea that because of "smart" weapons and the overwhelming "technologization" of war, we reconceive war as a technological endevour rather than a human one.
it's an interesting idea: if we can discuss how a war will be fought on/., we're discussing war as an application of technology, not as a conflict between people. to put it more simply, if we discuss how a piece of high technology fares against certain other technologies in a certain terrain, climate, etc., we're suddenly talking (and thinking) about technology rather than humans using technology to fight eachother.
the danger is that if we think of war as a conflict of tech in which the best tech wins, we begin to think that war is not a human conflict but an application of technology. of course, you can't dismiss the fact that war is, and always has been, a technologically faciliated endevour. but in discussing the tech, it's easy to lose the politics beneath the tech and, more importantly, the most general point of the tech: to kill as efficiently as possible.
this is one brave and seriously laudable move ob behalf of Brazil, as the WTO could levy massive sanctions against them for this action. for those who don't know what the kids in Seattle were fighting in the streets over, the WTO is a transnational body-- a meta-government, if you will-- that is capable of coercing states (basically by suing them) out of erecting "barriers to free trade." a "barrier to free trade" is essentially any national law which presents any sort of a hindrance to international commerce. disregarding international patent conventions falls under this category (as does elements of Amercia's Endangered Species Act and our ban against importing British beef, as the WTO has taught us in the past).
the political fallout of a WTO action against Brazil on behalf of Roche would probably make Seattle look like a playground skirmish, so maybe the WTO might just back down. not that they've backed down in the name of human life before....
while the arkansas art community might scoff at digital art, they probably also scoff at rock and roll. digital art is pretty firmly cannonized-- digital shows have moved from places like thing.net to places like SF MoMA and now onto places like the Whitney here in New York. while digital art might be associated with the aethetic avant garde, let's be serious: when the Whitney, one of the best funded and best regarded museums in the nation, can do a digital art show, the debate over whether digital art is art or not is about as trite as the debate over whether the car is a good way to get around or not. probably it is, maybe it isn't, but since it has been applied as such the argument is over.
mass reproducable art was embraced as legitimate by aesthetic theorists some sixty years ago. if you have theoretical groundwork and cultural praxis, all you're debating when you debate whether digital art is art or not are the merits of the medium. cultures have always used the mediums which the have at hand and which define them towards the purpose of expressing concepts. while teh means and concepts have gotten more complex, the nature of remains the same.
i think the real issue here has nothing to do with the contracts themselves and more to do with the product. the record companies screw artists, but this is the price artists pay to record on a major label witha ll the perks (distribution, promotion, etc.) thereof. the reason this case is ridiculous is that the record companies have been using their freely-purchaced rights to the artists' product in order to screw the consumers. it is utterly, utterly impossible to justify the fact that a CD costs $18 in Virgin Records. when copyright laws were designed, they were designed to protect artists from those who would expolit them, not corperations from consumers who are sick of being exploited.
Slashdot Mirror
the same agrument has been made about the printing press and the radio at various points in history. mass communications technologies have huge potential to enhance democracy and redefine citizenship-- consider, for example, how the printing press was in many way a technology which enabled the Protestant reformation (or, one could argue, the whole enlightenment).
the hitch that the internet hit, as i see it, is essentially a technological limitation: the need for a gatekeeper. what i mean is that posting a web page is like tacking up your Paine-esge flyer to a lamppost in Times Square. people will see it, sure (whether they will care or not is another debate). but very few will notice it, because it is lost the the clutter of the millions of other flyers. the way we index the internet is through search engines, which saw some of the first corporate influence on the net and suffer from a range of issues, for capitalist bias to simple technical limitations.
the other way to "catalog" the internet is to use sites like slashdot-- but then you have an editor and a moderator and the whole Paine metaphore has vanished.
and besides, can you honestly say that you read news on the indymedia.org wire and believe it before you double-check with corporate outlets? we're trained to see information distribution as very hierarchical and this is difficult to overcome.
coupled with the rapid and unhindered commericialazation of the medium, the choice between clutter and moderation has left internet has become a lot less decentralized in practical terms, a strange irony given its architecture.
i actually used to work as a telemarketer. people had a lot of hysterical responses pre-fabricated for telemarketers (i would rate them on a scale of 1-10 if they stayed on the line, but most would just crack the joke and hang up). the people who had just been dumped were the best though-- i can't tell you how often i would say:
"hello, blah blah blah, is Mr. Smith there?"
and get:
"that motherf#cker left me with that slut! if you find that bastard tell him to f#cking die!..."
thankfully, the organization i worked for didn't tape calls. so, i would get paid by the hour, minus 50% if i didn't make a certain number of calls, plus a dollar for every donation i got. so, when i got someone who seemed cool enough but was pissed at me for calling, i'd explain that if he donated 50 cents, the organization would actually lose money (and i would get a dollar to compliment my minimum wage).
moral of the story: telemarketers are minimum wage employees (or even prison labor in some cases), so it's best to just say "no, put me on the do not call list" and hang up. it's the companies that make people call you that you should find a way to harass back.
it's an interesting idea: if we can discuss how a war will be fought on /., we're discussing war as an application of technology, not as a conflict between people. to put it more simply, if we discuss how a piece of high technology fares against certain other technologies in a certain terrain, climate, etc., we're suddenly talking (and thinking) about technology rather than humans using technology to fight eachother.
the danger is that if we think of war as a conflict of tech in which the best tech wins, we begin to think that war is not a human conflict but an application of technology. of course, you can't dismiss the fact that war is, and always has been, a technologically faciliated endevour. but in discussing the tech, it's easy to lose the politics beneath the tech and, more importantly, the most general point of the tech: to kill as efficiently as possible.
this is one brave and seriously laudable move ob behalf of Brazil, as the WTO could levy massive sanctions against them for this action. for those who don't know what the kids in Seattle were fighting in the streets over, the WTO is a transnational body-- a meta-government, if you will-- that is capable of coercing states (basically by suing them) out of erecting "barriers to free trade." a "barrier to free trade" is essentially any national law which presents any sort of a hindrance to international commerce. disregarding international patent conventions falls under this category (as does elements of Amercia's Endangered Species Act and our ban against importing British beef, as the WTO has taught us in the past).
see (R)TMark's http://www.gatt.org, a very honest parody of wto.org, for a more on the WTO.
the political fallout of a WTO action against Brazil on behalf of Roche would probably make Seattle look like a playground skirmish, so maybe the WTO might just back down. not that they've backed down in the name of human life before....
we'll just have to see to that.
while the arkansas art community might scoff at digital art, they probably also scoff at rock and roll. digital art is pretty firmly cannonized-- digital shows have moved from places like thing.net to places like SF MoMA and now onto places like the Whitney here in New York. while digital art might be associated with the aethetic avant garde, let's be serious: when the Whitney, one of the best funded and best regarded museums in the nation, can do a digital art show, the debate over whether digital art is art or not is about as trite as the debate over whether the car is a good way to get around or not. probably it is, maybe it isn't, but since it has been applied as such the argument is over. mass reproducable art was embraced as legitimate by aesthetic theorists some sixty years ago. if you have theoretical groundwork and cultural praxis, all you're debating when you debate whether digital art is art or not are the merits of the medium. cultures have always used the mediums which the have at hand and which define them towards the purpose of expressing concepts. while teh means and concepts have gotten more complex, the nature of remains the same.
i think the real issue here has nothing to do with the contracts themselves and more to do with the product. the record companies screw artists, but this is the price artists pay to record on a major label witha ll the perks (distribution, promotion, etc.) thereof. the reason this case is ridiculous is that the record companies have been using their freely-purchaced rights to the artists' product in order to screw the consumers. it is utterly, utterly impossible to justify the fact that a CD costs $18 in Virgin Records. when copyright laws were designed, they were designed to protect artists from those who would expolit them, not corperations from consumers who are sick of being exploited.