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Foreword for Content by Cory Doctorow
John Perry Barlow
San Francisco — Seattle — Vancouver — San Francisco
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
“Content,” huh? Ha! Where’s the container?
Perhaps these words appear to you on the pages of a book,
a physical object that might be said to have “contained” the
thoughts of my friend and co-conspirator Cory Doctorow as they
were transported in boxes and trucks all the way from his marvel-
ous mind into yours. If that is so, I will concede that you
might
be
encountering “content.” (Actually, if that’s the case, I’m delighted
on Cory’s behalf, since that means that you have also paid him for
these thoughts. We still know how to pay creators directly for the
works they embed in stuff.)
But the chances are excellent that you’re reading these liquid
words as bit-states of light on a computer screen, having taken
advantage of his willingness to let you have them in that form
for free. In such an instance, what “contains” them? Your hard
disk? His? The Internet and all the servers and routers in whose
caches the ghosts of their passage might still remain? Your mind?
Cory’s?
To me, it doesn’t matter. Even if you’re reading this from a
book, I’m still not convinced that what you have in your hands
is its container, or that, even if we agreed on that point, that a
little ink in the shape of, say, the visual pattern you’re trained to
interpret as meaning “a little ink” in whatever font the publisher
chooses, is not, as Magritte would remind us, the same thing as a
little ink, even though it is.
xv
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