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foreword
xix
Of course, as we now know, I was wrong. Really wrong.
As is my almost pathological inclination, I extended them
too much credit. I imputed to institutions the same capacities
for adaptability and recognition of the obvious that I assume for
humans. But institutions, having the legal system a fundamental
part of their genetic code, are not so readily ductile.
This is particularly true in America, where some combination
of certainty and control is the actual “deity” before whose altar we
worship, and where we have a regular practice of spawning large
and inhuman collective organisms that are a kind of meta-para-
site. These critters — let’s call them publicly held corporations
— may be made out of humans, but they are not human. Given
human folly, that characteristic might be semi-OK if they were
actually as cold-bloodedly expedient as I once fancied them —
yielding only to the will of the markets and the raw self-interest
of their shareholders. But no. They are also symbiotically subject
to the “religious beliefs” of those humans who feed in their upper
elevations.
Unfortunately, the guys (and they mostly are guys) who’ve
been running The Content Industry since it started to die share
something like a doctrinal fundamentalism that has led them to
such beliefs as the conviction that there’s no difference between
listening to a song and shop-lifting a toaster.
Moreover, they dwell in such a sublime state of denial that
they think they are stewarding the creative process as it arises in
the creative humans they exploit savagely — knowing, as they do,
that a creative human would rather be heard than paid — and that
they, a bunch of sated old scoundrels nearing retirement, would
be able to find technological means for wrapping “containers”
around “their” “content” that the adolescent electronic Hezbollah
they’ve inspired by suing their own customers will neither be
smart nor motivated enough to shred whatever pathetic digital
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