I believe the very concept of exclusive intellectual property with respect to recorded music has come to a natural end, or something like an end. Technology has brought to a head a need to embrace the meaning of the word "release", as in bird or fart. It is no longer possible to maintain control over digitised material and I don't believe the public good is served by trying to.
Related: Iggy Pop's incredible John Peel lecture, with good stuff about how art is made for reasons other than money, but if it's too successful, money kills it.
And continuing on Monday's subject, Anne explains why Voldemort and other Hollywood villains are so ridiculous:
]]>How can you make the ministry of magic, which is more or less MI5/GCHQ for wizards, look sympathetic? You need an opponent who, unlike real criminals - who tend to be motivated by rage, addiction, poverty, and mental illness - acts on motives and methods so devious and dense that they make a regulatory apparatus look benign in comparison. Snape is a tragic antihero. Voldemort? Evil (tm). He has to be, otherwise the Death Eaters start to look pathetic, the way neo-nazis or the National Front look in real life, the kind of broken losers whose childhood dreams of being awesome were damaged by bullying and irrelevance, stolen opportunities, bad decisions, and depression.
To put it another way: when Obama said that Americans get bitter and cling to their guns and religion, the Right made him walk it back. He shouldn't have done that; he should have said "What, you don't have an uncle like that? a brother-in-law? a coworker?" Because basically everyone does. Would you go to see seven movies in a row about straight-A students from a top school with connections in government beating the snot out of your Drunken Uncle Howard? That would just be sad. Straight-A students with connections have been beating up on Drunken Uncle Howard his whole life, that's why he's such a dick.
You can not agree with organ sales unless you concede that 1) Slavery in nexum is ethical. 2) There is no fundamental natural right to life or liberty. 3) The members of a society have the right to organise it in such a way that the death of some of them are structurally ensured. 4) That they further have the right to make use of that certainty to exploit those condemned to death for the benefit of some of their preferred members.
Good news: Self-filling water bottle turns humidity into drinking water for cyclists.
And I don't really understand this programming article but I have an intuition that it's important, both technologically and philosophically: Pulling JPEGs out of thin air with several hundred million uses of something called a fuzzer.
By all appearances, Google's bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the "benevolent superpower"... This is the impenetrable banality of "don't be evil." They believe that they are doing good.
If you think about this, it puts a twist on the popular idea that the elite simply rule the world. On a deeper level, the world is ruled by the stories the elite have to tell themselves to feel like they're the good guys. These stories include: that global-scale decisions must be made from the top (or center); that political stability is more valuable than political participation; that "economic development" (the definition is too big to get into here) is a good thing; and the story I find most interesting, that you raise the quality of life of ordinary humans by taking away their pain and giving them stuff, not by giving them interesting choices.
I've been thinking a lot about interesting choices, partly inspired by Sid Meier's famous description of a good game as a series of interesting choices, and partly by an email I got more than a year ago from Owen. Here's some of it:
In game design, they talk about choices that matter. If a choice is presented but people feel obligated to take only one of the branches, that's not really a choice. You must take this option, taking that other option is stupid. Or if taking a branch doesn't result in any perceived consequence. Then take any branch, the choice doesn't matter. They put those kinds of choices in front of you all the time. How do you like your steak cooked? Should I use the gelpacks or the powder for the dishwasher?
This is important so I'll say it again in my own words. If the choice doesn't effect your path, like Coke or Pepsi, then it's not interesting; and if one choice is obviously stupid, like keep your car on the road or run it off, then it's not interesting. But deprive people of interesting choices for too long, and they start making the obviously stupid choice just to feel alive. Another way to say it: we would rather do the wrong thing that we choose ourselves, than the right thing that is chosen for us. I think this explains a lot of behavior that otherwise doesn't make any sense, and it's why even the most benevolent central control can never make a good society, or a good family.
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