Posted 10:47 by Mark Federman permanent link
Making the World Safe for Theocracy

In yesterday's Globe and Mail, columnist Doug Saunders echoes what I noticed a long time ago: The United States of America has become a Christian Theocracy, approaching the degree to which Iran, for instance, is an Islamic theocracy. The lead: "The Iranian cab driver was taking me across one of the largest Persian cities when he confessed that he had become worried about his country's fate. "Everywhere there is religion," he told me. "This is the most religious place anywhere. This should be the most modern country in the world, but the politicians want God to run everything." His country, in his view, was hanging in the balance. The legislature, officially secular, was dominated by a circle of strict religious adherents who controlled the executive branch. In every speech, they invoked God's powers, and they were making determined efforts to bring religious authority into every branch of public life. Half the country's people seemed to support religious authoritarianism, while the other half seemed to hide in frightened silence. The only thing surprising about this conversation was that it took place in Los Angeles, home to hundreds of thousands of expatriate Iranians, and the subject of my taxi driver's complaints was the United States."

This is yet another indication of The Reversal of America, reversal being the effect that occurs when a medium is extended beyond the limit of its potential. The first permanent arrivals from England to the New World at Plymouth Rock sought religious freedom, and established a colony - later a country - founded in the principles of religious freedom and mutual tolerance. But today, those principles have been eroded to the extent that religious fundamentalism takes centre stage in everything from politics to sports to education to the workplace; separation of church and state being invoked as some sort of talisman by whose souls are yet to be saved in a vain attempt to protect themselves.

For a world in which religious intolerance seems to be the root of much of our contemporary evil, the rise of fundamentalism anywhere is of concern. When it takes hold of the largest, and most powerful, empire whose influence is dramatically exercised throughout the world, it is time to worry. God help us!
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Posted 16:32 by Mark Federman permanent link
Petition to Prosecute Organizers of Suicide/Homicide Bombings Against Civilians as War Criminals

A friend alerted me to this Call for UN & World Leaders to Prosecute Organizers of Suicide/Homicide Bombings Against Civilians as War Criminals Petition. It reads, in part, "raising infants and children to become suicidal/homicidal bombers is a violation of fundamental human rights, a breach of the Geneva Convention and a war crime. We ask that those political, governmental, military and religious organizations and their leaders and supporters be prosecuted by the International War Crimes Tribunal to the fullest extent of International Law. It is our firm belief that when these genocidal war crimes cease, populations will not have to conduct defensive actions against terrorism. When that happens, there stands to be improved chances of peace in the world through negotiation and civilized conflict resolution."

We know that our thought processes are culturally programmed by the various technologies and media we employ. These technologies include not only what we conventionally think of as technology and media, but also the language, entertainment, educational curricula, narratives and stories. While in many places in the world - and in particular, the Middle East - the ground is often one of enforced poverty, overbearing military presence and repression, encouraging a culture of anger and violence - "an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth" - has brought us to a world in which everyone's freedom is at risk. The message - effect - is to create chaotic and destabilizing influences throughout the world that provokes draconian responses, even within nominally democratic and "free" states. Peace, acceptance and compromise are anathema to those who encourage cultures of anger, as they undermine the effects that give terror criminals their power and influence. When the world becomes serious about bringing the organizers of mass homicide bombings to justice, and shutting down the ability of their supporting organizations to function, we will finally be on the road to enabling prosperity for those who now live in repression, poverty and constant fear.
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Posted 00:53 by Mark Federman permanent link
Defend the Freedom to Read

Carrie Russell, the American Library Association's copyright expert, weighs in with an articulate piece on DRM and Fair Use. She highlights the problems with the current implementations of Digital Rights Management that seem to exclusively favour corporate and commercial interests, while ignoring the (copyright) law of the (American) land. Russell also points out the threat to our freedom to read, and to have private thoughts without fear of repercussion (although this, too, is under attack on multiple fronts). She concludes her article with several modifications and proposals that would disarm a DRM regimen, and find the appropriate balance that has always been the intention of the copyright provisions.
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Posted 19:24 by Mark Federman permanent link
Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

On September 9, 2003 Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is! Toronto's hospitality industry has been devastated this summer and it's up to all of us to help a vital part of our economy get back on its feet. "On September 9th, join Torontonians across the city and show your support by eating all of your meals at local restaurants. It doesn't matter if you got to a local diner for their breakfast special or a gourmet restaurant for their tasting menu - you can make a difference just by eating."

Boosting our city never tasted so good!
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Posted 08:20 by Mark Federman permanent link
War on Terror (tm)

I don't often agree with Naomi Klein, noting ironically that her NoLogo gig is itself a corporate brand, but in today's Globe and Mail column, she is spot on. Klein quotes Susilo Bambang, Indonesia's Co-ordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs as saying, "Those who criticize about human rights being breached must understand that all the bombing victims are more important than any human-rights issue." Klein then continues: "In a sentence, we got the best summary yet of the philosophy underlying President George W. Bush's so-called war on terrorism. Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism, real and exaggerated, has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human-rights abuses."

Under the guise of extending national security, governments - from developing and emerging nations to the United States iitself - creates a climate of insecurity and mistrust among its own citizens, sacrificing the foundations of democracy in the name of preserving often fragile attempts at managing a democracy. As Klein astutely, if cynically, notes, the "War on Terror (tm)" has never been a war; rather, it is "a kind of brand, an idea that can be easily franchised by any government in the market for an all-purpose opposition cleanser." I would go one step further, noting that it has, like many good brands, become a hot, narcosis-inducing cliché, meant to hypnotize an unsuspecting public into accepting that which, under other circumstances, would be entirely unacceptable.

In one of my favourite Kevin Spacey movies, the Spacey character says, "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." The reversal of this applies today: "The greatest trick a(n arguably) democratically-elected Administration every pulled was convincing the world that terrorists exist everywhere."
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Posted 22:51 by Mark Federman permanent link
Grounding Right and Wrong

Here's one that I missed. Julian Dibbell relates a story about being a virtual fence in a virtual world. Among the many interesting aspects of this tale is the moral dilemma in which Dibbell finds himself. "So there I was, stuck between a dirty deal and a quick 5 million gp profit. I'd been stolen from in the game before, and I knew how much it hurt. Players can use hiding and thieving skills to slip into your house right under your nose and walk away with everything they can carry. It's not just impoverishing, it's humiliating, and I wasn't eager to be part of any such business. That Jammaster had lined me up as a fence a full day before committing the crime didn't help -- anybody that calculatingly predatory was plainly nobody to get mixed up with." An interesting tale, to be sure, and most certainly a reminder of the McLuhan maxim that a figure has meaning only with respect to a particular ground; change the ground and the meaning changes, even for a constant figure.
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Posted 22:27 by Mark Federman permanent link
Open Minded on Intellectual "Property"

Lawrence Lessig directs us to a remarkable story about how American business interests - Microsoft among others - have been lobbying the U.S. government to cancel a meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization on "open collaborative models to develop public goods." This, in and of itself is not remarkable, as many large corporations are all for competition as long as they have a dominant market share and a way to maintain it without having to really compete (unless you believe that lobbying for favourable government intervention is a part of market competition, but I digress.) What is remarkable is the justification apparently offered by the director of international relations for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, one Lois Boland. She is apparently quoted in a letter saying that, "that open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to promote intellectual-property rights."

As you can imagine, Lessig, one of the leading proponents of a healthy intellectual commons AND the appropriate balance between the common good and the creator rights, is near apoplexy with this one. And so too are his readers: more than 70 comments have been posted to this particular blog entry at the time I'm writing this. Lessig points out that open-source software, for example, cannot properly exist without intellectual property rights, and that is very much the mission of the WIPO. He goes on to say that, "someone who doesn’t understand [these points] ... at a high level of this government just shows how extreme IP policy in America has become."

Indeed. Copyright, patent rights and trademark rights were originally limited licences granted by the sovereign to creators and inventors, so that they could benefit from their work for a limited time, after which the rights reverted to the crown for the benefit of the entire society. (Prior to such grants, all innovations belonged to the crown, period.) With continual extensions to the duration of exclusive copyrights and patent rights, the reversion for the benefit of society part is, for all intents and purposes, lost entirely. Not only does this result in an ultimate loss of innovation and creativity - a classic reversal - but it also retrieves the time when all new creations belonged to the ruling class. In our case, the modern monarchy are, of course, corporations with monopolistic, anti-competitive tendancies.

Before you rule me a communist or a starry-eyed idealist, remember that almost all work published by the McLuhan Program is not without intellectual property protection, but rather, it is licensed under an appropriate Creative Commons licence. Remember too that if you are reading this weblog from most places in the world in, say, the first decade of the 21st century, it is exceedingly unlikely that a single work will enter the common domain under the copyright regime in most developed countries during your lifetime.
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Posted 17:09 by Mark Federman permanent link
Plato and the Language of Cyberspace

Catching up on last week's DECONversation now that the lights are back on. Pierre Lévy described his great quest, for which he has received a very prestigious Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence at the University of Ottawa. Pierre described how, through history, the evolving technologies of language enabled Collective Intelligence according to the scope and scale of civilization. For instance, spoken language allowed people within a tribe to collaborate and develop a collective intelligence that permitted the tribe to survive and thrive. However, the spoken word does not travel very far (that is without electric technologies like radio), and its scope of influence is therefore limited. The written word, that enables language to travel without a person, permitted collective intelligence in a city - a larger scope of influence than the limited tribe. Although Pierre did not mention print, this, too, created conditions for collective intelligence in the next larger unit of human organization, the nation-state.

So far, we haven't strayed too far from canon McLuhan, as is well described in Understanding Media. However, Pierre's goal over the next three to four years of research, is to create the abstraction, and definition, of the language of cyberspace that enables collective intelligence therein, regardless of geographical distance. This presumes, of course, syntactic structure, a grammar and culturally-grounded (one would presume grounded in the culture of the Internet) semantics.

So what might be the nature of a "language of cyberspace?" As McLuhan tells us, "Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outered senses. They are a technology of explicitness. By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant." (Understanding Media, p. 57) Words originate with sensory experiences, and abstractions thereof, from our natural world. But there is no "nature" in cyberspace. Cyberspace is designed, architected and constructed as a human artefact entirely through code. So whatever the language of cyberspace might be, its "words" are unlikely to be related to sensory experiences of nature, as are our natural world words. Rather than being expressive, cyberspace words might be impressive, capturing metaphors of the constructed code environment.

While it's tough to get your head around such an idea, remember that spoken to written to typographic language each involved reversals of one sort or another. A language of cyberspace should involve an analogous reversal. McLuhan Fellow Twyla Gibson observed that a language based on impressive words would be one of form, not content, much in the same way that jazz, haiku poetry, fashion styles, or art periods concern themselves with form and impression, not the specific content of the music, poetry, clothing or painting. She pointed out that Plato's Code is such an impressive language. This, of course, fits perfectly with McLuhan's laws of medium retrieval prediction: The language of cyberspace would indeed be a retrieval of Plato's Code.
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Posted 17:50 by Mark Federman permanent link
TV on the Street - In the Middle of a Blackout??!

You've got to hand it to those cyborgs. They'll find a way to power their extensions, one way or another. Yesterday evening was the DECONversation in the Tub among Pierre Lévy, Maurice Benayoun and Steve Mann, moderated by Derrick de Kerckhove. So would you think that a little thing like the biggest power failure in North American history would stop an event such as that? Not if it's a DECONism Gallery! Steve did a little cyborg magic and had 120V AC running to a small television that he set up outside the Gallery on Dundas Street, right across from the Art Gallery of Ontario. With the TV tuned to CBC's coverage of the blackout, crowds of people gathered around the unlikely outpost of electric connectivity to hear the expected pearls: "No, we have no idea what caused it... It may be two days before power is fully restored... We don't have a firm timetable..." and so forth.

When television was new, it was a relatively cool medium. It encouraged people to come together and become actively engaged with the medium. But now, television demonstrates hot effects: It is often used as "background noise," people sit down in front of the tube and "zone out;" a type of hypnosis - couch potato syndrom - kicks in. But media temperature is always considered relative to the ground. Yesterday, the change in the ground, and the appearance of this new medium - a television in the street in the middle of a blackout - engendered a very cool medium. As people congregated, fully engaged with this little TV and each other, I could not help noticing the retrieval: that iconic 1950s image of people gathered in front of the window of the television store.
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Posted 17:28 by Mark Federman permanent link
The Message of Electricity

If anyone ever doubted the re-tribalizing effects of electrcity, and what it enables, of which Marshall McLuhan spoke, its effects - or messsage - became very clear with the anti-environment created when 50,000,000 were plunged into (eventual) darkness by the massive power failure. (takes a breath... that was a long sentence!) We have become conditioned for social communication, and specifically oral modes of communication, even though emails, chats and even weblog entries are written as text. When the power went out, people took to the streets, and sans electronic forms of conversation, became collectively social, engaging and openly conversational. Even here in the often anti-social "Big Smoke" (Toronto, Canada for those reading from elsewhere) - where speaking to a stranger is rarely done outside of a nightclub - everybody was everyone else's friend on Bloor Street, Yonge Street, University Avenue, King, Queen, Dundas and all. The new social nature - the need to connect continually - that underlies what we call the Global Village is, by and large, a ground effect most of the time. We don't often notice the urgency of the need, with the exception perhaps of compulsive email checkers. However, presented with the anti-environment in which there was not electronic connection of any sort available, we did the next best thing: We said hello to the person next to us on the street. Nothing like a crisis to bring out the best in most of us.
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Posted 11:28 by Mark Federman permanent link
Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Does anyone own a CD-R, CD-RW or DVD-/+R? If so, you may eventually be subject to stiff financial penalties imposed not by the criminal justice system, but by the capricious civil (although the actions are anything but) system. Slashdot draws our attention to thousands of lawsuits, and hundreds of thousands of threatening cease and desist letters, that have been initiated by direct-to-home satellite broadcaster DirecTV against anyone who has purchased smart card programmers, readers, and related equipment.

Smart cards are becoming ubiquitous throughout the world for security access, "money cards," identification cards and many other applications. Universities throughout North America and Europe use smart cards for everything from opening the door in the residence, to signing in for exams, to purchasing food in the cafeteria. Smart cards are also employed by the DTH satellite companies to enable access to their set-top boxes for home satellite television reception. There are those who illegally counterfeit these smart cards and sell them to consumers that subsequently use them to illegally decode the television transmissions without paying for the service. This is out and out theft of a service, period and is wrong.

However, what is also wrong is the illogical and draconian conclusion to which DirecTV has lept: That everyone who has purchased smart card-related equipment -- including legitimate researchers, developers, innovators and inventors -- are simply enabling piracy. By seeking, and indiscriminately receiving, injunctive "relief" by way of these lawsuits, DirecTV, their lawyers and complicit judges are imposing thousands of dollars of legal expense to defend what are frivolous accusations. The innocent researcher faces severe financial hardship in non-recoverable legal fees, even to defend himself against these baseless charges. The necessity to assume such a financial penalty is a punishment; hence the accused is guilty, not only until proven innocent, but even when he is proven innocent! Given that possession of equipment that might be used for piracy is enough to attract the attention - and large guns - of litigious entertainment companies, it won't be long before those who possess computer-attached recording devices of any sort may well be targeted by zealous legal vultures... err... eagles.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has established a website that will assist all those hundreds of thousands of people who are wrongly accused. However, the greater, long term fear is that the mentality of Western commercial and political interests have moved away from encouraging innovation and enterprise, and towards a new form of protectionism that will reward entrenched, already-established companies for stifling those who may eventually unseat their predominance through disruptive technologies. Many of these companies seeking such monopolistic-style protection were themselves founded on precisely the innovative types of research and development that they are seeking to prevent in the name of eliminating piracy.
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Posted 10:35 by Mark Federman permanent link
Bloglines News Aggregator

I've started using Bloglines as my blog and news aggregator. I tried newsmonster, but found that on my old workstation, it was just too cycle consumptive and, frankly, made my Netscape unstable. But I liked the idea of having the news reader as part of the browser. Bloglines fills that requirement with a free, hosted service that maintains and helps me organize the blogs I like to read, and gives me the new headlines - or bloglines, get it? - of those blogs whenever I ask.

For those who are not familiar with RSS syndication, many weblogs generate a file of XML code that contains a summary of the weblog using the RSS standard. Applications, loosely called news aggregators, can read this XML code and present what is essentially an aggregated summary of all the blogs whose RSS files I've fed to the aggregator. "Subscribing" to a weblog is as simple as telling the aggregator to check the blog's RSS file, either automatically, or whenever I specifically ask it to. So if you enjoy reading this blog, here is its RSS feed and, while you're at it, why don't you simply subscribe through Bloglines?
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Posted 19:42 by Mark Federman permanent link
The Toronto School of Communications Redux

Senior McLuhan Fellow Twyla Gibson begins her multi-part series on the Toronto School of Communications today. Several segments have been posted, with more to come each week. This research is taken from her Ph.D. dissertation that straightens out a few kinks in the traditional Toronto School theory. In doing so, she brilliantly reveals an esoteric over-arching structure to the early writings of otherwise oral civilizations. She discovered the structure in Plato's writings, and has successfully identified it in ancient Chinese writings, and in the first book of the Bible, demonstrating that the previously unknown framework was, in fact, an early technology of orality.

So why should we be interested? It is no secret - especially to regular readers of this weblog - that we are living through a period of transition from literacy-dominance to orality-dominance in our world of instant communications and mass connectivity. It is not that we are becoming less literate, or the fact that we read web pages proves that literacy still exists. Rather, instantaneous, multi-way, communications retrieves ancient orality in a new form that we see expressed in instant messaging, weblogs, SMS and other similar modern technologies. By identifying and understanding the ancient technologies of orality, we should be better able to create new mechanisms of connecting and conversing, as well as being able to anticipate the long-lasting, structural effects on our society and culture. And that, my friends, is what the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology is all about.
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Posted 01:04 by Mark Federman permanent link
Techno(an)archy?

Abe Burmeister is getting his shorts in a legitimate knot with his concerns over The Technoarchy: "a form of oligarchy where society is controlled by those who use technology the best." The comments on that particular post are more linguistic in nature (and to see the comments, you need to hit refresh when the "Impeach Bush" graphic comes up - cute, Abe.) However, some of his thoughts on the specific issues involved are articulated in this conversation we're having. Come join the fun!
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Posted 02:04 by Mark Federman permanent link
legal@mp3.com vs. Creative Commons

From Lawrence Lessig's blog comes this tale that leaves one's head shaking. You have to read it to believe it. Well, perhaps not... there are a lot of clueless "legals" out there.

Remember that we here at the McLuhan Program strongly endorse the work of Creative Commons and encourage people to check their licenses, find the one that suits your work, and support their tremendous vision.
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Posted 01:41 by Mark Federman permanent link
Six Degrees of Separation Confirmed

Does everyone remember the Stanley Milgram experiment that engendered the "Six Degrees" urban myth? Even the the original methodology was flawed, a new email experiment confirms six degrees of separation. "Duncan Watts and colleagues at Cornell University in New York conducted a massive email experiment to test the theory of "six degrees of separation", i.e. that everyone in the world can be linked through just six social ties. More than 60,000 people from 166 different countries took part in the experiment. Participants were assigned one of 18 target people. They were asked to contact that person by sending email to people they already knew and considered potentially "closer" to the target. The targets were chosen at random and included a professor from America, an Australian policeman and a veterinarian from Norway. The researchers found that it in most cases it took between five and seven emails to contact the target."

Update - 11 August 2003 - Clay Shirky points out that only 3% of the connection attempts succeeded. Abe Burmeister takes this 97% failure rate and expresses it thusly: "Like it or not we still live in a world of disconnect and discrepancy. And my tollerance for those who sell us myths of connection to make us feel better about our concentration of power is getting dangerously thin."
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Posted 20:08 by Mark Federman permanent link
Flash Mobs for Howard Dean

So the whole idea is to engage a normally disengaged (read: non-voting) demographic via tribal tools, and by their numbers, topple first the other Democratic contenders, and then His Shrubness himself. We saw the preliminaries of this in the Philippines with the ouster of Joseph Estrada, and subsequently in South Korea, with the election of President Roh Moo-hyun. Trent Lott was brought down using these technologies, and Howard Dean has captured the imagination of a disaffected nation, if CNN, Time Magazine and Newsweek are any indication. So how do we ensure the intended effect?

Flash mobs are the latest craze that are sweeping the world. Channelled via cell-phone SMS, emails and weblog postings, crowds of people magically show up at a predetermined location at a set time and do something "outrageous, but legal." So on election day in November, 2004, create multiple flash mob events at polling places throughout the country. Engage the hip crowd via SMS, IM and email. Tell them to show up, and do something outrageous, like vote...

And those of us who (sort of) make our living by observing the non-obvious effects of the things we conceive and create will thank you for demonstrating what e-democracy is truly all about.
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Posted 08:32 by Mark Federman permanent link
The Empty Inanity of American Culture

In today's Globe and Mail, television columnist John Doyle's commentary is spot on. What do flash mobs have to do with Jay Leno, Arnold Schwarznegger, and Roseanne (Barr)? According to Doyle, they all celebrate inanity and provide a welcome obsolescence to obsessive celebrity worship. Remember, one sign of obsolescence is ubiquity and being completely and utterly obvious.
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Posted 22:18 by Mark Federman permanent link
Shhhhhh! - Keep This Quiet, But Pass It On

If you are in Toronto on Sunday, August 10, and want to be part of a flash mob, show up at the corner of Yonge and Bloor at 1:00 p.m. Bring a pad of paper, a pencil, and some tape with you. Sketch the face of someone else who has a pad of paper, pencil, and some tape who is also sketching the face of someone who... Then at 1:15 precisely, tape your sketch to any telephone pole and disperse. I am not the organizer. I merely found out about it!
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Posted 17:15 by Mark Federman permanent link
About Marshall McLuhan

For those among our readers who may be interested in Marshall McLuhan's life and biography, our researchers have just posted the first half of a new essay About Marshall McLuhan. Tucked way at the bottom of that page is a link to an essay "On Reading McLuhan" that offers some advice for the McLuhanista newbie. By the way, the essays, as well as most of the work at the Program, are published under a Creative Commons license, so you're invited to non-commercially share, improve, and increase the collective wisdom. If you find our research and publications useful, please let us know.
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Posted 18:53 by Mark Federman permanent link
Rub-a-dub-dub, Four Men in a Tub

But it's up to you to decide who is the butcher, who the baker and who the candlestick maker... Mangled metaphors and too-hip-for-Plato's-Caves irony abound as DECONism Gallery hosts yet another of its literally immersive experiences. On Thursday, August 14, 2003 at 8 p.m. Steve Mann, Maurice Benayoun and Pierre Levy engage in a DECONversation, moderated by McLuhan Program Director Derrick de Kerckhove, whilst submerged in a hot tub. Yes, you read that right - these four philosopher/artists will strip to their skivvies and hope that those in attendance won't think their ideas and insights are all wet. But is it art? McLuhan says, "Art is anything you can get away with. Art ... like media of communication, has the power to impose its own assumptions..." Go and decide for yourself.

Speaking of art at DECONism Gallery, James Fung and Cory Manders have developed the art and technology of Regenerative Brainwave Music far beyond the original experimental DECONcert. REGEN3 / Regenerative Brainwave Music: ElectroBrainFunk goes Friday, August 15 at 9 p.m. at DECONism Gallery, and features Fung and Manders joining jazz musicians Bryden Baird, Dave Gouveia and Sandy Mamane.

DECONISM Gallery is located at 330 Dundas St. West, Toronto, right across the street from the Art Gallery of Ontario. Tickets for both nights are available at the door.
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Posted 17:49 by Mark Federman permanent link
McLuhan Marxism, and the Artists' Revolution

In this week’s Understanding Understanding Media seminar, we came across the following McLuhan observation: "Marx based his analysis most untimely on the machine, just as the telegraph and other implosive forms began to reverse the mechanical dynamic." In other words, Marxism was a little late, since the industrial workers were about to reverse in the coming age of electric speed. So it would seem as if Marxism was, and is, obsolete, that because its industrial age, mechanized ground shifted, the workers of the world would be united via telegraph, and later telephone, television and teleworking.

But if Marxism, in its simplest expression, gives control over the means of production to the workers, is there such a thing as "McLuhan Marxism?" Do we have examples of electrically-accelerated, extended and intensified workers of today gaining control over the means of production, and if so, what sorts of economic revolutions can we observe? Some thoughts that emerged from the seminar:

The open source movement returns control over today's "production equipment" - software systems - to the workers who "manufacture" it. In wresting control from proprietary software developers, some major companies are feeling under siege and shifting their economic base. This revolution seems to be weighing in favour of the workers, as open source software runs the majority of Internet infrastructure and supporting mechanisms. In the meantime, companies like Microsoft, while adopting open source processes themselves, are modifying their business focus to become more entrenched in entertainment delivery via their pacts with AOL Time Warner and promotion of entrenched Digital Rights Management mechanisms.

In the case of companies like Enron, Adelphia, MCI-Worldcom, Tyco, among many others, the "workers" who produced the (temporary) wealth were actually called management and executives. In these cases, the commodities they produced was information, that may have represented tangible commodities, but not necessarily. The workers did seize the means of information production (taking control away from their nominal bosses, shareholders and boards of directors) and were successful for a very limited time. A similar case could be made for the Internet bubble, during which the means of information commodity production was completely in the hands of those who did the producing (of bogus business plans, for instance.) Here, the revolution failed, and failed completely, after a very short time.

Finally, the revolution is still underway, and heating up with each passing month, where the information commodity is music and video. The downloaders have been cast as thieving pirates, and industry associations are aggressively pursuing copyright transgressors. But the McLuhan Marxist revolution happening in the recording industry has little to do with those who use KaZaA, Morpheus and the rest to undermine the RIAA and MPAA. The workers who produce the music and video - in other words, the artists - have seized control of the means of production (and distribution), and are increasingly choosing to make their wares available directly via the web, or through smaller (and arguably fairer) independent labels. Downloading music provides inexpensive means of marketing and/or distribution.

This realization casts a new light on the war against the so-called pirates. By eliminating downloaders through intimidation tactics like the current spate of RIAA lawsuits, the industry associations severely restrict the artists' ability to independently reach their market. The real reason for anti-piracy zeal is now clear: Downloaders of the world unite! The artists have nothing to lose but their chains!
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