Piracy and Community on the Internet

[Forsaken_One]

I thought this article (http://www.locusmag.com/2006/Issues/07DoctorowCommentary.html) by Cory Doctorow on Locus Online (as found via Neil Gaiman's Journal (http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/)) was very interesting. It discusses the changes technology (specifically the Internet) is having on publishing, be it music, science fiction, or (in one brief mention) comics, both with Piracy and with the personal communication of artists with readers via blogs and forums very much like this one.

Hope you enjoy and please don't yell at me if you don't.

[PatrickG]

I've said much the same thing and gone farther with it in a series of interesting conversations with my father.

He's informally studied trends and formally studied politics. He used to predict the Top 40 songs with regularity in the 70s and though he's a frequently exhausted small business owner today, he once campaign managed a congressional election and was told he was on the right track to wind up in the electoral college as a delegate.

We talk a lot about (NY Times writer) Thomas Friedman, political parties, candidates, society and his generation (The Baby Boom).

My feeling is that the lawmakers and large companies in this country are out of touch with the direction that information is changing, that society is changing. Much of what is "mainstream" today in terms of immigration policy and copyright law and homeland security and gay marriage and countless other issues (on BOTH sides) will make the leaders of today reviled as McCarthy or Wallace are today.

Our leaders' grandchildren will hold them accountable for their inflexibilities and a leader that cares more about the voting public than the progeny of that voting public is short-sighted in my opinion. Here's where my father disagrees and thinks that my ideas are twenty years ahead or more.

I think that information -- in the form of memes -- is viral and alive.

I'm not some hacker telling you information wants to be free. I don't have a hundred MP3s on my computer much less the thousands that some people do -- and I buy mine.

I'm not saying we should open our borders or abandon our defenses or throw away our traditions where institutions like marriage are concerned.

But we need to abandon binary "up-down" thinking. We need our ideas to be ahead of the problems that face us today, not behind. We need quantum thinking.

In short, 21st century thinking is not enough. We need to rewire our philosophies and science and policy to a way of thinking that is alien to where we come from. We need to win the loyalty of our grandchildren before their parents are conceived.

Information is alive. Manipulating it makes you an artist or a con artist. Witholding it makes you a liar or a tyrant even if you "invented" it.

We need transparency in government, glass walls in the Pentagon. Whenever national security is more important than democracy, we take steps to better a secure a country that is a little less worth defending to begin with.

We need to redefine how we view law, how we view government, how we view borders, how we view art. If we can't adapt to the future before it comes, we will be regarded as monstrous dinosaurs that have no place in civilized times.