Here’s part six of my podcast of my novella-in-progress called “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life.”
Here’s the audio of my talk at UC Irvine this week on copyright and trade policy — a variation on the video I posted of me speaking at Google a couple weeks back.
Amnesty asked me to write an editorial about the threats to Internet freedom for the Guardian in honor of its conference, “Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing: The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace,” held today in London. I wrote a piece on Internet filtering that the Guardian called “See no evil?”
People say bad things online. They write vile lies about blameless worthies. They pen disgusting racist jeremiads, post gut-churning photos of sex acts committed against children, and more sexist and homophobic tripe than you could read – or stomach – in a lifetime. They post fraudulent offers, alarmist conspiracy theories, and dangerous web pages containing malicious, computer-hijacking code.
It’s not hard to understand why companies, government, schools and parents would want to filter this kind of thing. Most of us don’t want to see this stuff. Most of us don’t want our kids to see this stuff – indeed, most of us don’t want anyone to see this stuff.
But every filtering enterprise to date is a failure and a disaster, and it’s my belief that every filtering effort we will ever field will be no less a failure and a disaster. These systems are failures because they continue to allow the bad stuff through. They’re disasters because they block mountains of good stuff. Their proponents acknowledge both these facts, but treat them as secondary to the importance of trying to do something, or being seen to be trying to do something. Secondary to the theatrical and PR value of pretending to be solving the problem.
Here’s part five of my podcast of my novella-in-progress called “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life.”
Midnight.Haulkerton, the band that recorded a song based on my collection Overclocked, have just released the song elements themselves under a CC license for your remixing pleasure. Joel Falconer from Midnight.Haulkerton sez,
Today, we released the remix pack for the Overclocked song. Now listeners can remix, re-sing or do whatever they want with it. All the individual tracks that make up the song have had all their effects stripped and are now stuffed in a zip.
Midnight.Haulkerton, the band that recorded a song based on my collection Overclocked, have just released the song elements themselves under a CC license for your remixing pleasure. Joel Falconer from Midnight.Haulkerton sez,
Today, we released the remix pack for the Overclocked song. Now listeners can remix, re-sing or do whatever they want with it. All the individual tracks that make up the song have had all their effects stripped and are now stuffed in a zip.
I’m speaking at UC Irvine next Wednesday, giving a variant on my copyright and trade-policy talk, called “Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America Chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart–and why it’s doomed us, and how we might survive anyway.” It’s free and open to the public, though space is limited, so they want you to RSVP. See you there!
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
3:00-4:20 PM
100 Humanities Instructional Building
A couple weeks back, I went to Google and spoke there as part of their Authors@ Google series. I talked about how US trade policy had driven the US to abandon the tech sector and all the enterprises it supports in favor of a doomed plan to replace American industry with Police Academy sequels and Happy Meal toys. They’ve posted the video to YouTube.
Here’s part four of my podcast of my novella-in-progress called “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life.”
