*I sympathize with much of this guy's obvious bewilderment, but he somehow imagines that these phenomena he describes can be resolved by the just and righteous values of a Canadian teachers' union.
*I'm cool about Canadians, teachers and even unions, but thinking they can resolve the difficulties this gentleman denotes here is like imagining that "progressives" could hold their breath and make Haitian earthquakes go away.
http://www.thebaffler.com/viewArticle/121/0/1/
(...)
"Remember what pirates like: Parrots. Eye Patches. And gold, best of all. Mason’s argument was sensible enough: Pirates aren’t anti-capitalists, they’re punk capitalists. “D.I.Y. encourages us to reject authority and hierarchy, advocating that we can and should produce as much as we consume,” Mason writes in the opening chapter of his homage to piracy. “Since punk, this idea has been quietly changing the fabric of our economic system, replacing outdated ideas with twenty-first-century upgrades of Punk Capitalism.” (...)
"As Mason suggested, piracy isn’t just another business model; it is the greatest business model of them all. Its secret, as we shall see, is getting people to work for you, for free. (...)
"Behold the majesty of digital communitarianism: It’s socialism without the state, without ideology, and, best of all, without the working class....
"And so we have our conversation about the enormous cultural restructuring that is going on, but we are having it in a senseless vocabulary where “content” takes the place of “art” and “information” substitutes for “culture,” “knowledge,” “literature,” “music,” “cinema” and “meaning.” All the mysteries of the creative process are flattened: the fickle nature of the muse, the idiosyncrasies of scholarship, and the tenacity required to compose a novel. All are reduced to nothing by analogies derived from the logic of computer code, data processing and high-tech business models.
"But a deeper problem arises when the idiom of technology supplants traditional social criticism. The “freedom” promoted by the software community always turns out to be the libertarian version. It’s about freedom of information: the desire to see how something is made, to tinker, and to pass those insights and innovations along. Copyleft, as the advocates of this all-purpose transparency call it, is not “left” in any traditional sense; it has nothing to say about entrenched systems of economic privilege or limits on profitability. Likewise, the open-source movement does not provide the blueprint for a fairer social order. ..."
(((Nothing wrong with this that progressive values couldn't cure:)))
http://tjcnyc.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/social_mess_big.jpg
