There’s an interesting point-counterpoint on file sharing at Salon between Scott Matthews of Andromeda and Jason Schultz of the EFF.

TechDirt comments on the above…

3 Comments »

Good news! Based on a quick read, it seems that AKMA has offered to tend people‘s sites in perpetuity after they die for the low low price of $30! Sign up now! It’s such a bargain!

How does he do it? Volume!

6 Comments »

From Jay Rosen‘s terrific journalism blog:

First in Philadelphia, then again in Buffalo, Federal agents were ordered to block “print” reporters from questioning Attorney General John Ashcroft during events where he defended the Patriot Act and talked about the urgency of renewing it.

Note: The man using federal agents to prevent the print media from talking with him is the Attorney General of the US.

Be the first to comment »

From North of the Border, Michael O’Conner Clarke writes:

India’s Business Standard newspaper is reporting on the RNC’s ‘smart’ use of campaign funds – using low-paid sweatshop call centre workers in Noida, India to call up Americans and pump them for campaign funds to support the Bush re-election campaign.

The Republicans deny it.

5 Comments »

Project Censored has released its list of the 25 top under-reported media stories of 2002-2003. (Thanks to slashdot for the link.)

2 Comments »

Take a look at the littlest Lessig.

Be the first to comment »

According to a column by Scot Lehigh in the Boston Globe:

Phasing out the estate tax alone, for example, will cost the treasury $138 billion over 10 years, notes Robert McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. Rate reductions for families earning more than $225,000 will equal $81 billion over three years, adds McIntyre, while the new break for dividend income will reduce the federal coffers by $70 billion over the same period.

Those are some big numbers.

1 Comment »

Bruce Springsteen played Fenway Park. I live three doors down from the park, so I set up lawn chairs on our roof, invited some friends over, and listened.

The first sentence is true, the second one false, but that doesn’t matter. The point is that in the real world, when you publish something, you make it public, even while reserving some rights: I can listen on my rooftop but I can’t record the concert and then sell copies.

Why do we care about artists/writers publishing their work? At one level, it’s because we want to be able to buy the Springsteen CD. But, at a macro level it’s because the public is constituted to a large degree by the works that are made public. The published works are less like canned goods on a shelf and more like the landscape of a public land: the public land is unthinkable without its landscape.

And it’s not even as clearly confined as that. The CDs and books and performances don’t make the public. Rather, the effect of the works makes the public. We as a public are constituted by the ideas, moods and rhetoric that ripples out from the works. We want this stuff to transform us so subtly that we forget where the terms came from. Works have their deepest effect when we’ve forgotten which bound sets of paper and small flat disks they first came from. This is how culture advances. This is how culture is.

So, here’s the problem. On the Internet, because its space is purely digital, works are even more definitional of the public than they are in the real world. Yet, because the Internet is digital, we are technically able to more perfectly track the path of works and their effects. If, in the interests of publishers (and to a much smaller extent, the artists) we never let the works affect us implicitly, losing their connection to their original authors, we destroy the new public that is struggling to emerge on the Internet.

For the short-sighted sake of the publishers, we are destroying the public that our works enable.

[Please support the EFF and the Creative Commons.]

Joi blogs his own reflections on this topic. I’m in total agreement.

5 Comments »

Gary Unblinking Stock points to an article in the Madison Capital Times:

When Sally Baron’s family wrote her obituary, they described a northern Wisconsin woman who raised six children and took care of her husband after he was crushed in a mining accident. …

…Almost in unison, what her children decided to include in the obituary was this: “Memorials in her honor can be made to any organization working for the removal of President Bush.”

3 Comments »

An article in “Washington Monthly” by Joshua Micah Mitchell suggests the irony that neoconservatives are Post-Modern in their willingness to choose the truths that suit them. He writes:

In that simple, totalizing assumption [that experts can be ignored even if they are right in the particulars] we find the kernel of almost every problem the administration has faced over recent months — and a foretaste of the troubles the nation may confront in coming years. By disregarding the advice of experts, by shunting aside the cadres of career professionals with on-the-ground experience in these various countries, the administration’s hawks cut themselves off from the practical know-how which would have given them some chance of implementing their plans successfully. In a real sense, they cut themselves off from reality.

The article does a good job cataloging the administration’s lies and mistakes. I just don’t see what it has to do with Post-Modernism. Here’s what Marshall thinks it has to do with PoMo-ism:

For an administration that has been awfully hard on the French, that mindset is…well, rather French. They are like deconstructionists and post-modernists who say that everything is political or that everything is ideology. That mindset makes it easy to ignore the facts or brush them aside because “the facts” aren’t really facts, at least not as most of us understand them.

This is just so wrong under a thin veneer of being right. Pomo doesn’t say there is no truth so you can say and believe whatever you. It is worrying at something much harder: truth isn’t a direct relation between self and world. It is mediated by language and history. That raises issues about the nature of truth … issues confirmed by even the most casual acquaintance with the world’s diversity.

So, no, the Bush administration isn’t PostModern. Any administration that says the world is divided into good people and evil-doers is way out of the PoMo parade. IMO, the Bush administration’s policies are a instead based on a bracing mix of self-assertion, self-delusion, willful ignorance and lies.

Of course, I could be wrong.

(Thanks to John Erickson for the link.)

12 Comments »