Successful music doesn't happen merely because it is appealing. It also helps people form communities. And big-act commercial music gives people yet another thing to talk about during their lunch hour.
The big music companies provide an essential service to society: they bankroll artists and albums and actively promote them as potential catalysts around which our feelings and interests can group together. We, the people, then somehow elect the winners and their reward is big time fame. Our reward is shared experience. Big success in the music business it based as much on music's role as a signifier of group-membership as it is on the music itself.
Any alternative music distribution system will have to provide a way for music to fulfil these social roles, or it will not seriously challenge the status quo.
Any problem-solving system (eg. government or justice system) which has a significant heuristic component (not to mention a poor definition of "successful execution", but I won't go there right now), will not in general produce an optimal answer to whatever problems it is trying to solve.
We accept that the government and the justice system constantly make suboptimal (and sometimes dangerous or vicious) decisions, even with respect to widely-agreed-upon objectives. Given the current state of understanding about the nature of society and cognition, it isn't too much of a stretch to say that the error in the system arises from the fundamental "axioms". You can't have the possibility of a solution without the possibility of error.
In public discourse, I consider libel, incorrect statements, fallacious and incorrect arguments, crackpot-ideas, statements made by vested interests masquerading as altruists, etc, as part of the scope for solution error. An issue to be managed, but one which doesn't bear on the need to better solve the problem (with a more-transparent government, the freedom to inform, to become informed and to engage in public debate), or on the valuable outputs of the problem-solving process.
In conflict, it is a common technique to use the inherent imperfection of a proposal or activity as a straw man to attack the central premise. The value, to the public good, of an informed public debate is central to democratic mythology, even if the debate and the media which support it are not perfect.
This P2P proposal attempts to build a platform for public discourse, one which could provide another counterbalance to the integrated and well-defended machine that is organized government.
Even if there is libellous or clearly offensive material posted on such a system, we can't fall into the trap of confusing the lack of perfect function in the P2P system with a lack of great public value.
If we can accept the massive amount of error and waste in the operation of government and judicial systems, why can we not accept the relatively minor disadvantages of a platform for public communication and debate?
Perhaps (and maybe not) the growth in the size of society and the increasing integration and consolidation of institutions requires, as a counterbalance, the freedom to publish anonymous statements widely, to inform your fellow citizens without the fear of institutional vengeance.
I believe that as our governments and corporations leverage the value of technology to their advantage, and not in ways which are necessarily aligned with the public good, that the public uses of technology needs to match the institutional use stride for stride in order to maintain and improve our quality of life, and further, that we need to recognize this, accept it and encourage it, warts and all.
The aggregated state of human skill, experience, and cognitive tooling will naturally manifest itself as a challenge spectrum containing the entire range of comprehensible challenges, from the easy to the very, very hard. On the easy red end of the spectrum are the problems which can be solved by the relatively unskilled, perhaps because of the assistance of automation; in the middle are those problems that require skill and training and real human ingenuity, and on the blue rocket-science end are those that require investment, passion, intelligence, and creativity.
As our race (country, culture, company, anarcho-syndicalist commune or whatever) evolves, as tools and approaches are created which make it easier to write software or build and maintain complex systems, the spectrum will move. Rocket-science will become "applied technology", applied technology will become button pushing, and buttons will become self-pushing.
But problems which were previously unknowable and unthinkable will become known and thought-about and those that were impossible to solve will become merely difficult.
It doesn't matter what part of the spectrum you operate in, as long as you learn to move with it, or it will leave you behind. (Oh, and as you age, don't forget to convert your youthful vitality into wisdom. I forgot this for awhile, and now I'm trying to catch up, hence this note.)
There will always be a supply of interesting and productive challenges for problem-solvers, systems-thinkers and other Asperger's sufferers.
Which reminds me of the best question to ask when meeting an executive type: "Nice to meet you! So, how do you add value?"
The question is: will the IT masses who toil in middle of the spectrum be able to move with it? Or will they be able to adjust their expectations if the economy decides that they aren't adding value the way they used to?
Slashdot Mirror
Successful music doesn't happen merely because it is appealing. It also helps people form communities. And big-act commercial music gives people yet another thing to talk about during their lunch hour.
The big music companies provide an essential service to society: they bankroll artists and albums and actively promote them as potential catalysts around which our feelings and interests can group together. We, the people, then somehow elect the winners and their reward is big time fame. Our reward is shared experience. Big success in the music business it based as much on music's role as a signifier of group-membership as it is on the music itself.
Any alternative music distribution system will have to provide a way for music to fulfil these social roles, or it will not seriously challenge the status quo.
We accept that the government and the justice system constantly make suboptimal (and sometimes dangerous or vicious) decisions, even with respect to widely-agreed-upon objectives. Given the current state of understanding about the nature of society and cognition, it isn't too much of a stretch to say that the error in the system arises from the fundamental "axioms". You can't have the possibility of a solution without the possibility of error.
In public discourse, I consider libel, incorrect statements, fallacious and incorrect arguments, crackpot-ideas, statements made by vested interests masquerading as altruists, etc, as part of the scope for solution error. An issue to be managed, but one which doesn't bear on the need to better solve the problem (with a more-transparent government, the freedom to inform, to become informed and to engage in public debate), or on the valuable outputs of the problem-solving process.
In conflict, it is a common technique to use the inherent imperfection of a proposal or activity as a straw man to attack the central premise. The value, to the public good, of an informed public debate is central to democratic mythology, even if the debate and the media which support it are not perfect.
This P2P proposal attempts to build a platform for public discourse, one which could provide another counterbalance to the integrated and well-defended machine that is organized government. Even if there is libellous or clearly offensive material posted on such a system, we can't fall into the trap of confusing the lack of perfect function in the P2P system with a lack of great public value.
If we can accept the massive amount of error and waste in the operation of government and judicial systems, why can we not accept the relatively minor disadvantages of a platform for public communication and debate?
Perhaps (and maybe not) the growth in the size of society and the increasing integration and consolidation of institutions requires, as a counterbalance, the freedom to publish anonymous statements widely, to inform your fellow citizens without the fear of institutional vengeance.
I believe that as our governments and corporations leverage the value of technology to their advantage, and not in ways which are necessarily aligned with the public good, that the public uses of technology needs to match the institutional use stride for stride in order to maintain and improve our quality of life, and further, that we need to recognize this, accept it and encourage it, warts and all.
As our race (country, culture, company, anarcho-syndicalist commune or whatever) evolves, as tools and approaches are created which make it easier to write software or build and maintain complex systems, the spectrum will move. Rocket-science will become "applied technology", applied technology will become button pushing, and buttons will become self-pushing.
But problems which were previously unknowable and unthinkable will become known and thought-about and those that were impossible to solve will become merely difficult. It doesn't matter what part of the spectrum you operate in, as long as you learn to move with it, or it will leave you behind. (Oh, and as you age, don't forget to convert your youthful vitality into wisdom. I forgot this for awhile, and now I'm trying to catch up, hence this note.)
There will always be a supply of interesting and productive challenges for problem-solvers, systems-thinkers and other Asperger's sufferers. Which reminds me of the best question to ask when meeting an executive type: "Nice to meet you! So, how do you add value?"
The question is: will the IT masses who toil in middle of the spectrum be able to move with it? Or will they be able to adjust their expectations if the economy decides that they aren't adding value the way they used to?