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Saturday, March 9, 2002
Except that they've turned Congress and the Copyright office into a wholly cowed ssubsidiary 
| | Confession: i have *never* downloaded an mp3 file, or burned a cd copy. Never. I don't know why -- call it habit, but i was perfectly happy buying my cds through Amazon. Not anymore. I'm boycotting buying music. I know i'm too late for napster, but i'm certainly not too late to ask my friends for copys and files. |
| | To my mind, the best way to hurt these media fucks is to ignore them.....its just damn hard when britney is so damn cute. |
| | I'm sitting here reading this CARP thing, and it only looks more awful with every sentence. |
Duuuuuh!
| | I missed the plane. Right after I wrote finished the post below I looked at my watch and realized that I hadn't reset it. It was now 1:40 and not 12:40, and the plane was sure to be pulling out. |
| | Sure enough. The ticket agent looked at me. "Searls?" |
| | So I'll catch the 5:something. Got a real window seat this time. On an exit row. |
Mile wide
| | If I hadn't known my flight number, I would have missed it. My ticket said San Jose/Austin. It said nothing about Denver. So when I heard "final boarding call for Denver," paid no attention. Then the voice added "Flight 1440." I was the last one on, and was so rushed that I forgot my ticket wallet at the ticket-eating machine. I realized the problem just before we took off, got the attention of the the attendant with the walkie-talkie and she was able to get the thing retrieved from the trash and brought on board just before they shut the door. This was a Whew because I'm pretty sure my bag didn't get on in Santa Barbara — because I didn't see it come off, and I was watching. I'll need the tag to find the bag if it doesn't arrive in Austin. |
| | Then my window seat was one of those that isn't. Row 7 on Airbus 300s has no window. Kinda sucked because I'm still a kid about sitting at windows. Never tire of it. I'm a geology freak, so if there's ground outside, I'm interested in it, especially here in The West, where the earth puts on a first-class geology show for the front row seats in the sky. |
| | One of my favorite flights of all time was from Geneva to New York on SwissAir. One of the crew saw me looking out the window with an aeronautical map on my lap and asked me if I'd prefer the view from the cockpit. So I spent about an hour up there while we flew over the Canadian tundra. I had been looking for Manicouagan Lake in Quebec, which looks like a circular river that flows into itself, but is in fact the remnant of an impact crater. And there it was. |
| | The Swiss pilots were both young guys, one English and one German. Not the chiseled grey guys we tend to get here in the States. There was a yellow rag plugging a hole in the windshield, and it made a noise. "Yeah, that showed up after we took off," they said. "If it happened on the ground we would have had to scrub the flight." Turns out it was only the inner window. The outer window was fine. But still. |
| | Anyway, I'm in the United Red Carpet Club in Denver. The mountains are snowcapped in the distance and the ground here is covered with slush. I see it's 73 degrees in Austin. And we leave in 30 minutes. I think this time I'll be a little better prepared. |
| | Still stuck with the windowless window seat, though. Since I was "checked through," they said, "the system won't let us reassign you." Getting a new seat was the whole idea behind getting off the plane. |
Do you know the way from San Jose?
| | I'm not in Austin. Nor in Denver, which was my one stop between Santa Barbara and Austin. The first flight was cancelled. Good thing I was there way early because I barely made it on a flight that was leaving for San Jose. Otherwise the best option would have been driving two hours to LAX and flying out of there. On three hours sleep, I didn't relish the thought. |
| | So here I am in the San Jose Airport, with my Airport on the net through Wayport. Nice and clean: 1 day for $6.95, which is about what I just paid for a cup of coffee and an Egg mit Bagel at Noah's. |
| | Unfortunately the plane to Austin doesn't leave until 9:15 and won't get in until about 5pm, so I'll miss Larry Lessig's speech. |
| | Sunday looks cool, though. I see Ev will be on a 3:00 panel that looks interesting in spit of its reallyh ugly title: "Creating Awareness and Building a Buzz with Independent Content." |
| | This expresses SXSW's New Media focus. The problem, which I plan to harp on during the Tuesday Panel I'm on, is that it turns everything into "content," rhetorically containerized for compliance with the shipping model by which Big Media and its Big Government sock puppets plan to bulldoze and trench the Net's creative commons and replace it with a broadband-enhanced expansion of the same old Media System they've controlled since they took over the ad hoc experiment we call radio, back in the Twenties. |
| | That's why I got a bit testy when I answered my interview questions. (Here are Ev's answers to the same ones. Understated and classy, as usual.) |
| | I'm influenced, I think, by reading the CARP report (it's a .pdf you download there). If you have a chance, please take a look at it. The sucker is 135 pages long, but let me direct you to page 35: "The Nature of "The Marketplace." Amazingly, it glazes your eyes and makes your jaw hit the floor at the same time. I don't have time to go into it here, but please read it. The thing lays out the deeply compromised logic by which there is no recognition of the possible existence of a real marketplace — one where all parties are free to interact directly. It only recognizes the mediated plumbing system the RIAA understands so well, and dismisses webcasting as an alien threat. |
| | Oops. Final boarding. See ya. |
Traction
| | Next post will be from elsewhere. Probably Texas. |
| | Meanwhile, a little grist. |
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