DRM dreams

Doc Searls has some interesting perspectives on what the real meaning of Digitial Rights Management is. He believes a DRM-governed future is a bleak one -- but one that is exactly what the RIAA, the MPAA, Hollywood, Disney, and the rest of the content cartel want. He feels strongly about this, and he wants us to understand precisely what is really going on:

they want to move the PC into the consumer electronics cartel they know so well. They want to succeed where dot-coms failed, at the biggest fantasy of the era: TV with a buy button. Stereos too. Also MP3 players. All of it.

Money makes the world go 'round. If what you're doing doesn't contribute, then what you're doing must be regulated into oblivion -- in the interest of prosperity, in the interest of profits, in the interest of a return to the boom days when the big-wigs sat on their high-rise thrones and reaped billions for waking up in the morning and brushing their teeth.
12:42:27 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

Playing the Game

Britt Blaser has an interesting post on his weblog, Escapable Logic, about the structure of our society and the rewards it gives to people who realize that nothing is fundamentally important and consequently pursue life as an abstract game, a game whose rewards are richer in direct proportion to the irrelevance of its moves to the general human condition:

So are we ready to say that we have a privileged part of our society dealing with numbingly complex issues that don't matter [...]

That's the conclusion I can no longer avoid. If you are willing and able to manipulate increasingly complex symbols of decreasing real-world significance, then you get promoted to the next rung on the academic/socioeconomic ladder. If you drop out of that silliness at an early age, probably abandoning whatever native symbolic-manipulation skills you might have, then you are destined for a tackier, scrappier, nastier future. [Blaser]

10:57:09 AM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []