Ars Electronica is a festival with a conference embedded in it as one of dozens of tracks. It’s held in Linz, Austria, a beautiful city on Danube. Artists, geeks, academics and others gather, this year to discuss “A New Cultural Economy.” [Note: I am live-blogging, writing badly, making mistakes, missing stuff, and just generally going wrong. The conference is streamed, I believe]

This morning, Joi Ito, the conference “curator,” welcomes us. He talks about AE’s valuing of artists as those who (especially in Europe, he says) push technology forward by imagining uses. He shows a stack: Ethernet (computers), Internet (network), Web (content), and knowledge (Creative Commons). It took ten years to generate enough user-created content to be worth searching for, he says. But now we’re there. But we need to unlock the knowledge we’ve created via tech, open licensing, and the Semantic Web. We need to get past the copyright holders vs. the pirates bifurcation. We need to look at nuance and at the hybrid projects. And that’s what we’re going to do at AE, he says.

He argues against the idea that amateur vs. professional means good vs. excellent. Amateurs have access to high-quality tools and do what they do out of love. How do we adapt our culture, economy and government to adapt to a generation that would rather produce and remix than consume?

[This is a very rough overview of Joi’s remarks.]

[Tags: ars_electronica joi_ito copyright collaboration ]

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You can read it here. There are many things in it with which I agree. Even so, it is arguably the most right-wing platform in our history.

[Tags: politics mccain obama republicans ]

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I missed John McCain’s speech entirely, since he was rude enough to give it at 4AM in Austrian time (I’m at the Ars Electronica festival), but I had a good laugh when I woke up and checked the coverage: The headline in the NY Times is:

John McCain Vows to End ‘Partisan Rancor’

Of all the themes to pick after the intensely partisan ads and speeches, and the night after nominating a self-described “pitbull in lipstick”! I do appreciate McCain’s gracious ad congratulating Obama on his nomination, but even that ad noted that it was a momentary lull (“We’ll be at it again tomorrow”) in a firestorm of partisan negativity.

Maybe the headline was just due to the Times’ impish sense of humor.

[Tags: politics mccain obama ]

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(From my Blackberry. Pls forgive the typos and abbrevs.)

I watched the Rep conv from my hotel room in Norway. It was 4:30 am when Polin came on. I saw ten mins, enough to see that she’d become a cultural stand-in. She is now not what she is but a symbol in our ugly, perpetual cultural war. (As Jay Rosen has said.)

Then I had to get into a cab, so I watched the rest via twitter on my phone. Fascinating. A play that consisted solely of reactions. The O fans were reacting to her content, as if this weren’t about the Reps hatred of the media and distrust of intellectuals. (And, yes, I believe there’s some racial stuff going on as well, at the archetpal level. What do I mean? Even if I knew, I couldn’t type it on a bberry.)

I experienced the conv in another alienated way: Among Europeans, to whom SP looks like the ultimate US joke on itself. We make a B movie star into a prez, and now we tell ourselves that absolutely anyone can be president. You’re a model citizen? Great, go bring peace to the Mideast. Oh, and here are the launch keys.

But I hope the O campaign continues to steer clear of attacks on SP. That’s the cultural war game the Reps are playing. Instead point out that the Rep ticket is now more conservative than Bush or Goldwater. Stick to the issues. Let the bloggers surface the cracks in SP’s pose…

Well, I guess I’ll press the Send button, athough a jetlagged, frightened person typing on a bberry should never be allowed to post…

I haven’t been able to view the video, but the write-up of this Jon Stewart segment on the hypocrisy of Rove, O’Reilly, and Dick Morris makes it sound quite satisfying to those of a certain ilk.

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I’m sorry to say that I think Jay Rosen’s analysis of how the Sarah Palin candidacy will be played by the media, and how the media will be played by the Republicans, is right on the money. [Tags: politics sarah_palin mccain obama ]

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RealClear Politics has an electoral map that shows you who’s leading where. You can also use it to create your own map.

[Tags: politics ]

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I really enjoyed BioShock, and think that it took computer games an evolutionary step forward (well, if evolution had a direction). I thus was prepped to like this postmortem on the design of the game. Very interesting, and quite frank. No mention, though, of the disappointing ending of the game.

The Slashdot discussion of the article is almost entirely about BioShock’s famously onerous DRM, which the postmortem article doesn’t mention.

(The postmortem points to a fabulous downloadable collection of art from the game.)

[Tags: bioshock games ]

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Beginning by disagreeing with me — always a good way to start! — Lev at Certain Musings has a useful post about the difficulty of preserving the texts we care about, including some of the interesting efforts underway.

[Tags: archives ]

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Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics posts a long post comparing the science policies of Obama and McCain, including Obama’s answers to the excellent 14 science questions posed to both of the candidates; McCain has not answered yet, but he has said that he will. She does not find herself torn. (Neither do I.)

[Tags: politics obama mccain science jennifer_ouellette ]

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