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Summary: Alexandre Oliva, the right-hand man of Dr. Richard Stallman, is reading Dr. Andy Farnell and Dr. Glyn Moody; we'll soon have a mini-series here from Farnell, but here's what Oliva thinks of his thesis (which he first found out about in Techrights)

I seldom blog about books I read, but this month I was lucky to pick up two absolutely awesome books I'd like to tell you about.

Andy Farnell published Digital Vegan¹ last year, I had read a number of the chapters at TechRights, and I've long been looking forward to reading the whole thing. I had very high expectations, and I was not disappointed.

I've long been a supporter of the vegan ethical movement, though I've so far failed to adopt most of its practices, due to will power budget limitations. Part of the reasoning behind that is that I spend a lot of my will power in the struggle for software freedom, for autonomy in using computers, in resisting abuses of tech power and attempts to subjugate us through software. I found digital veganism to be a clever and fitting analogy to refer to these efforts. Thanks, Andy!

The book was a pleasure to read. Besides raising tons of essential issues that threaten our autonomy in an increasingly digital life, and actions we can take to preserve them, he argues the points in insightful and persuasive ways, denouncing time and again that the tyrant has no clothes.

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The other book was Glyn Moody's Walled Culture². He makes a very compelling case of how incredibly harmful copyright has become, and how artists and society at large would benefit from other disintermediated (unwalled?) approaches to funding art, with several hundred references to back it up.

Though the book is available for sale, it's under CC0 (public domain, or close enough where copyrights cannot be given up), and available for gratis download in various ebook formats. It's a great contribution to free culture. Thanks, Glyn!

So blong, ⬆

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) 3.0 Unported. To see a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

______ ¹ "Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor." Glyn Moody. (2022) BTF Press. ISBN 9789464594959 ² "Digital Vegan" Andy Farnell. (2021) Applied Scientific Press, London, England. ISBN 9780956088611