The Internet's a Commie!

'Communism would totally work,' people say.
'...If only...'

I agree. It's obviously brilliant, but there are tons of IFs.

Maybe, however, the Internet has come to fix it all.

This week's reading talks about the need for a new model of power.

Now that individuals can create and add to what used to be controlled solely by large corporations (think Linux vs. Microsoft/Macintosh), it's a lot harder for the big bad guys to come and squash the little people (definitely check out the link via the picture to the right). Additionally, there's the shocking revelation that people are actually willing to do things for free!

-shocked face-

WHY? Why would anyone not want to be paid?

Well, maybe it's because we're all commies at heart....and because Micro$oft is for Capitalists.

But of course that's not the case for everything. There are plenty of people out there who are still trying their darndest to make money off of the Internet. A few of them will even be enormously successful at it. But that's okay. The Internet isn't just a commie, or even just a community. It's got so many communities that there's room enough for all. Even clashing oppositions! Oh boy!

The media of the Internet can be run by lots of little guys because they don't have to appeal to everybody (or dictate what everybody gets). Instead, they appeal to whomever finds them appealing, and that's good enough, because there are lots and lots of people on the planet who have Internet access. There are even more who don't, who someday might. Ooh the potential...

Tripping over Culture

I don't know if there's really anything more articulate that I can add to the piracy story, but if nobody else minds, I'm going to use this required blogging moment to rant a little about something I've not really said much about yet.

I used P2P software when it was hot stuff, and then rumors started going around that it was illegal and I started being sneakier about it. Then the rumors turned into giant lawsuits and I got scared. I eventually completely stopped.

Now, however, we can all enjoy the luxury of paying big businesses lots of money for them to control what used to be free.

$.99 a pop! And remember, of course, that $.99 is just a tricky way of messing with people's minds to make them think it isn't actually a dollar, which it is. We all know the penny is useless.

So, for one dolla' we can buy us some music. Digital music. But wait, what did we learn about digital things? Oh...yeah....the whole concept of reproduction doesn't really apply to them. Hm. Nice that they still charge us though.

Personally, I am way too cheap and way too opposed to anybody who I think is monopolizing on this overreaction/crackdown to ever pay money for a song online, but as long as I'm a college student, I can use Ruckus to hunt down artists I've heard about to find out if I actually like their music enough to buy their CD.Via th is method, I recently discovered that I absolutely love Hoobastank's new CD, Every Man For Himself (here's a snippet from their song, Born To Lead), so I bought it. Then I discovered that the new Lostprophets CD sucks (no audio for them, because I didn't buy their CD).

It's brilliant!

I not only just supported one of my favorite artists as a reward for their good work, but I saved money by not falling for the previously good reputation that Lostprophets had built up with me. All thanks to free, online, digital music.

How does that (free music) not benefit the system? Now, instead of artists making a profit off of songs that nobody likes (woe to them), people can decide beforehand which songs are actually worth listening to, and even worth paying some money for. Additionally, people can be exposed to even MORE music they might like. Artists get recognition, and if they're good, they can profit from CD sales, concert tickets, or merchandise.

But surely that's not enough... after all, those songs that people listened to that influenced their purchasing decision should have cost money, too. I mean, the artist deserves at least that much, right?

Poor...starving...rock star. Evil digital media - so damn efficient.

It seems to me that the more we squash "free culture," the more we'll find ourselves tripping to find any culture at all.

Personally, I think we ought to form a team of real pirates. We all know that the internet is the people's domain. How many anti-free culture lawyers do you know who are also hackers? Let's keep it free and use our numbers and skills to our advantage. These arrests and lawsuits are scary, but they won't win out in the online world.

Not that I know anything about how that works...

Back to Reality

Last Friday I went to the Films Across Borders event put on by Visions and Voices.

The featured filmmaker, Alex Rivera, had made some rather interesting short films (a lot of them dealing with immigration) and he showed some of them to us, as well as giving us a little preview of his upcoming feature film, The Sleep Dealer, which deals with the fact that while we're tightening our physical borders, we're also making use of technologies such as the Internet that allow for completely open/non-existent borders. What was interesting, though, was that he touched upon one of the ideas of this chapter: a virtual "home" for diasporic people, provided by broadcasting and media forms.

In 1995, when CGI was nothing like what it is today, Alex Rivera made a short film about his Peruvian father. He recounted how at home his dad tried to completely separate himself from his Peruvian background, but every night he would sit in front of the t.v. and watch Spanish-language programming for hours at a time. He was miles and miles away from his home country, and even seemingly trying to forget about it, but each night he would, as Rivera put it, transport himself back to Peru through a virtual world... Because television can do that.

To try to make visual what Rivera imagined happened to his father each night, he made the film Papapapá (potato father), using now-ancient technology that was way cool at the time (and took three weeks to render, he told me later) to put his father in an actually virtual space (skip to the end of the 28-minute film to see that part).

It was a little hard for me to watch, because the graphics were so horrible, but it gets the point across. His dad his shot out of a Pringles can and lands in this virtual reality that's somehow Peru through his television. He finally finds a way out to get back into the real world, but we're left to wonder, what about all the people now?

We have much more addictive things than the television that can create virtual worlds even more realistic than the one created by Rivera for his father. What happens if we don't leave?

We talked a little bit in class about the question of why we prefer Second Life to the so-called 'First Life,' and of course the most obvious answer was that in Second Life, you can fly! But what about places like the ones described in Sturken and Cartwright, where poor communities purchase a television set rather than a refrigerator or a bicycle? The analogy can be carried over to us - we use the Internet to build relationships with people who live just down the hall from us, rather than bothering to get up and walk over there to actually physically hang out.

Part of what makes it so appealing is that we're able to come into contact with so many different people online that it makes it easy to have a huge number of shallow relationships, while at the same time choosing which people we get closer to. That sounds pretty good. In fact, it sounds a lot like life, but with even more of the slightly-shallower contacts. Plus, it's super convenient...and of course, there's the flying, but who knows, maybe we'll all find ourselves trapped in a world of bad CGI, begging to get out and get back to that mythical "MeetSpace" or "First Life" and live IRL for a while.