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Monday, March 4, 2002
Yes, but that's no news 
Extremities
| | I had trouble sleeping last night after I read about how Danny Pearl died. Warning: no photos, but not for the squeamish. |
Game Over
They are playing with the nuclear weapon we call The Market, and they will die
| | There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped or turned back, for their private benefit. |
| | The Disney Corp. was once celebrated for its crowd-pleasing recipe: underpromise and overdeliver. But Eisner and his copyright-holding counterparts, drinking deep from the fountain of fear, seem to have adopted a new motto: overcharge and disable. Things won¹t get better for them until they realize that even for copyright holders, the Internet can be a Magic Kingdom. |
| | So now prosperity begins to mellow and drop into the rotten mouth of death. |
The Mystery of Stephen James
| | Apparently lying to your customer is considered smart marketing so there's no real reason why I should have my knickers in a knot over a columnist I believe is imaginary. |
If you can't learn to speak French, at least try to corrupt their fucking culture
Life from below
| | Digging John Perry Barlow's Death From Above. Still one of my favorite essays. It begins... |
| | Over the last 30 years, the American CEO Corps has included an astonishingly large percentage of men who piloted bombers during World War II. For some reason not so difficult to guess, dropping explosives on people from commanding heights served as a great place to develop a world view compatible with the management of a large post-war corporation. |
| | It was an experience particularly suited to the style of broadcast media. Aerial bombardment is clearly a one-to-many, half-duplex medium, offering the bomber a commanding position over his "market" and terrific economies of scale. |
| | Now, most of these jut-jawed former flyboys are out to pasture on various golf courses, but just as they left their legacy in the still thriving Cold War machinery of the National Security State, so their cultural perspective remains deeply, perhaps permanently, embedded in the corporate institutions they led for so long, whether in media or manufacturing. America remains a place where companies produce and consumers consume in an economic relationship which is still as asymmetrical as that of bomber to bombee. |
| | The lop-sided character of this world view has been much on my mind lately with regard to various corporate projects on what they are all too pleased to call the "Information Superhighway" (evoking as it does the familiar comforts of Big Construction by Big Government in cooperation with Big Business). The cable companies and Baby Bells have a model for developing the next phase of telecom infrastructure which, were it applied to the design of physical superhighways, would have us building them with about five thousand lanes in one direction and one lane in the other. |
The Ghost in Turing's Machines
| | Turing's Universal Machine means that you cannot have a software or hardware protection scheme that is secure. Whatever scheme you come up with can be simulated by another computer. The computer industry are not opposing your bill because they want to encourage copying, or because they are bloody-minded, they are not opposing you because of your self serving rhetoric about rewarding artists (remember Peggy Lee, Michael?), they are opposing you because what you want is provably impossible. You can only succeed by making all Turing machines illegal. |
| | Kevin was quite properly set off by Jack's and Michael's aggressively delusional lobbying of congress for lawmaking intended to make the Net and its instruments into a supply-controlled plumbing system for the routing of paid content from a few Big Suppliers to billions of powerless Consumers. |
Flacklash
| | In Pulling a Clue Train, Phil Cubeta, aka The Happy Tutor, shows that we on the Cluetrain list do not all, as an old Australian friend of mine used to put it, "blow up each other's asses with a short straw" or "piss in each other's pockets."( I still don't know what either expression means, exactly, but perhaps those among us who speak Stryne can provide a correct interpretation, in case we're wrong here.) |
BLAMe-O
Priceless
| | As RageBoy points out, Bruce Sterling's Information Wants to Be Worthless is an approximately perfect piece of writing. There's a quotable line in just about every paragraph, and Bruce drives every nail home with a perfect whack. He even works a cluetrain reference (albeit in lower case) in his ultimate paragraph. |
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