Controlling Culture and Social Behaviour by Digital Locks
Cory Doctorow has this new Pluralistic post about "The age of disinvention," published yesterday to recall the Supreme Court's 1984 Betamax decision.
"They disinvented the VCR," he argues. "You might think that the reason we don't have VCRs anymore is because VCRs were supplanted by DVDs, PVRs and streaming, but that's not the case. They had it in for the VCR from the very start, and they never stopped trying to kill it. Eventually, they succeeded."
An associate has called this "a superb analysis," and "there wasn't space about the DVD Jon case, however, which was a fight by the cartel to prevent /playback/ on GNU/Linux. That case was never about copying because dd can copy just fine without decrypting the content. Decryption is needed for playback."
This topic was recently covered in my personal blog. I still use plain old CDs (right now Lisa Stansfield, who is still excellent), no "DVD" or any of that 'modern' stuff with encryption where none is necessary (unless the veiled goal is DRM). A lack of compression lessens the load and energy consumption as well.
We now have a sea of DRM, of encrypted (to protect against the user) junk, and of slop that basically contributes brute force (energy-wasting) plagiarism which produces mediocrity (or worse, junk). It has also doomed the Net. As the first comment, published yesterday by gnuman, puts it: "The more you fill your time, with [slop] or with anti-social networks, or just regular socializing, the less stuff are you going to write on your blog. Heck, these days people probably write less in general and upload video of themselves talking instead. It's not [slop] as much as people's lack of time to write or even read."
Also revisit: re:publica 2019 - Eben Moglen: Why Freedom of Thought Requires Attention
Well, currently the Internet lessens the incentive to publish, as it's being drowned by plagiarism (ro)bots and few large companies that hoard and police speech. The policing of speech is designed to control behavior en masse.
Remember: if you don't fully control the technology in your possession, then you're not using that technology, this technology covertly uses you (while giving you false signals about who's truly in charge or whose desires are fulfilled). █
Image source: Jon Lech in 2005
