Russian translation by Ruguevara, Naething, Ssneg, Kgro, Ouizeeble, Freeformfactor, Alfsoft and Gmarketer, using Translated.by
My latest Locus column is up: “Artist Rights” describes the terrible risk to artists that arises from expecting online services to police everything their users do for copyright infringement. If YouTube, Scribd, Blogger, LiveJournal and all the other sites where we’re allowed to put our work have to hire lawyers or erect technical filters that attempt to prevent infringement before it happens, it will dramatically raise the cost of expression. That’s not good for art, period. (Even worse — the automated filters won’t work, so you’ll pay the cost of reduced opportunities for expression and you won’t even get the benefit of control over distribution of your work)
But even worse for artists: when the cost of distributing art goes up, the number of companies involved in it goes down. We all know what that looks like: the record industry, cable TV, the studio system. All systems where there’s a buyer’s market for art, where the big companies have artists over a barrel.
We live in an age in which more people can express themselves in more ways to more audiences than ever before. The majority of this expression is intimate, personal maunderings — the half-spelled, quarter-grammatical newspeak adorning MySpace and Facebook pages. These are often intensely personal, with none of the self-conscious artifice that we’ve traditionally associated with “published work.” By turning the personal into the public, an entirely new aesthetic is coming into being — and a huge proportion of the invisible social interaction of a generation is being recorded forever. As Charles Stross notes, we are living at the end of “pre-history” — the last days of a patchwork human history. Tomorrow’s lives will be remembered by the historians of the day-after-tomorrow with astounding clarity and thoroughness, reconstructed through the midden of personal blips, twits, and chirps emitted by our social tools. By comparison, our own lives will be as opaque and unimaginable as the lives of the poor schmucks who inhabited the same cave for 200,000 years, generation after generation leaving no mark more permanent than a mouldering knucklebone lost in the soil.
Paradoxically, it is this very feature that leads many artists to view these sites with suspicion and derision. A common refrain goes like this: “These sites are filled with pirated material and they know it. They’re making money off our work, and the only ‘redeeming’ quality they have is that a bunch of idiots get to talk about their cats around the clock and around the world.”
Could these sites be remade to prevent infringement, and if they could, what would that mean for free expression?
Here’s part twenty-seven of my reading of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
The Hodgepodge blog has created a widget to track the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds until the launch of Little Brother — color me flattered!
Luke Kowalski’s just published a Polish translation of my story Printcrime — what a great way to start the new year!
Here’s part twenty-six of my reading of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
Neil Gaiman gave me an unexpected Christmas present this year — a stellar review of my forthcoming novel Little Brother (a YA novel that pits hacker kids in San Francisco against the DHS in a bid to restore the Bill of Rights to America) on his blog. He has a few quibbles with some of the plot elements, but closes with this:
I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can.Because I think it’ll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won’t be the same after they’ve read it. Maybe they’ll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it’ll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they’ll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they’ll want to open their computer and see what’s in there. I don’t know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It’s a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.
See also:
Cory’s Little Brother reading
Holy crap, I love the cover of my next book!
Happy xmas! I’ve just posted a 2:23 reading I did of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland — the first book I ever read to myself, and one of my all time favorites. The reading’s under a Creative Commons Attribution-only license, so do anything you’d like with it!
Last month, I popped in on Taugshow, the madcap “talkshow” put on by the Monochrom net-arts collective in Vienna. I was interviewed along with Sean Bonner, Evelyn Fuerlinger, GameJew, Tim Pritlove and Jeff Moss. Monochrom just posted the video — there’s some damned funny stuff here and lots of good stuff to think about.
Here’s part twenty-five of my reading of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
