'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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Lessig's The Future of Ideas
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September 20, 2008
Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas. In the Preface Lessig argues that we are far enough along to see:
the future we have chosen with respect to the Internet. In that future, the counterrevolution prevails. The forces that the original Internet threatened to transform are well on their way to transforming the Internet. Through changes in the architecture that defined the original network, as well as changes in the legal environment within which that network lives, the future that promised great freedom and innovation will not be ours. The future that threatened the reemergence of almost perfect control will.
He adds that he doesn't mean the control of George Orwell’s 1984 --the struggle is not between free speech and censorship, or between democracy and totalitarianism.
The freedom that is my focus here is the creativity and innovation that marked the early Internet. This is the freedom that fueled the greatest technological revolution that our culture has seen since the Industrial Revolution. This is the freedom that promised a world of creativity different from the past.This freedom has been lost. With scarcely anyone even noticing, the network that gave birth to the innovation of the 1990s has been remade from under us; the legal environment surrounding that network has been importantlychanged, too. And the result of these two changes together will be an environment of innovation fundamentally different from what it was, or promised to be.
The story he tells is about how an environment designed to enable the new is being transformed to protect the old The new is the way that Digital technology enables an extraordinary range of ordinary people to become part of a creative process. The new is moving from the life of a “consumer” (passive, couch potato, fed) of music film, and art, and commerce to a life where one can individually and collectively participate in making something new. It's a world of rip, mix, burn.
The old is the future we are currently taking .
Take the Net, mixit with the fanciest TV, add a simple way to buy things, and that’s pretty much it. It is a future much like the present... the forging of an estate of large-scale networks with power over users to an estate dedicated to almost perfect control over content. That content will not be “broadcast” to millions at the same time; it will be fed to users as users demand it, packaged in advertising precisely tailored to the user. But the freedom to feed back, to feed creativity to others, will be just about as constrained as it is today. These constraints are not the constraints of economics as it exists today—not the high costs of production or the extraordinarily high costs of distribution. These constraints instead will be burdens created by law—by intellectual property as well as other government-granted exclusive rights.
The promise of many-to-many communication that defined the early Internet will be replaced by a reality of many, many ways to buy things and many, many ways to select among what is offered. What gets offered
will be just what fits within the current model of the concentrated systems of distribution: cable television on speed, addicting a much more manageable,malleable, and sellable public.
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:51 PM | Permalink |
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