Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Seriously, there is stuff bubbling up from under about the whole IP
situation. What Baen Books have been doing with their free library has
been getting attention; I was ranting about this at ConJose, and there
in the audience was a certain editor from Tor, nodding like his head
was about to fall off. (And it wasn't Cory's editor, either.)

Here's a prediction: the big media conglomerates that own the music
and film companies that are members of the RIAA and MPAA *also* own
lots of book and magazine publishers. And the guys who deal in text are
a lot more laid back than Hilary Rosen and friends would like. Sooner
rather than later the whole DRM and open content controversy is going
to stop being [huge corporate goliaths] vs. [the rest of us] and turn
into an internal boardroom fight over what IP policy the media
corporations ought to take. At which point, Cory and friends (I include
myself here, if you don't mind) are going to find allies behind what
were formerly the enemy barricades.

In the long term, of course, the only way to *really* secure
intellectual property is to come up with a means of selective memory
erasure. But that's a whole 'nother can of worms ...

Bruce: if Cory did not exist, would you feel it necessary to invent
him?
  

    
E-mail from J. M. Brenner:

I caught your reading at Stacey's in SF yesterday, and
I'm afraid that while the Q&A period struck me as vintage
Sterling, I'm afraid that the paean to your cell phone
didn't go over that well with me.

The dark side of cell phones is that they appear to be
astoundingly addictive for some people, to the point that
they regularly risk their lives to go driving around
chatting on them, with that distinctive cell-phone user
look: eyes glazed over, grinning to themselves, cruising on
auto-pilot.  I used to try and make "hang it up" gestures at
these people, but it's no use: they can't see you.

What data there is on the subject shows that this behavior
is "as dangerous as drunk driving", but these people either
haven't gotten the word, or are engaging in some serious
denial.

So for you, "cell phones" are symbols of being connected,
but for me they're a sign of being dangerously disconnected.

And further, I think it's pretty demonstrable that
increasing connectivity is not *always* a good idea.
c.f. Kevin Kelley's reporting on "Kauffman's Law" in Chapter
20 of "Out of Control".

This is a point that seems intuitively obvious to me,
because I've worked at jobs that were nearly impossible to
do because of the extreme quantity of internal email you
needed to read.  (It isn't so much "the guy who reads the
most email won't be fired" it's more like "the guy who reads
the most email should really get the hell out of there.")
  

    <scribbled by jonl Thu 16 Jan 03 19:19>
  

    
It's the guy who SENDS the most email that gets fired!
  

    
Tomorrow is the last *official* day for this interview, but of course
everybody's welcome to hang out here until 2012 or the end of history,
whichever comes first. Meanwhile everybody should drop by here and jam
tomorrow, we'll party like it's 1999.
  

    
E-mail from Tom Georgoulias:

Or someone will just paypal their whole family's whuffie to buy it, then
put copies of Cory's soul on a P2P net to try and get their whuffie back
up.

I read that Bruce will be at BookPeople in Austin, TX on Tuesday, Jan
21st, at 7:00PM.  Is that the end of the book tour?
  

    
Now back home.  Whew.

After three days of ceaseless ranting and
charisma hemorrhage, I am pitifully hoarse and
afflicted with a bad cold.  I probably got it off that
cellphone I borrowed.  They SPREAD GERMS
you know.  The microwaves COOK YOUR BRAIN
AND YOUR EYEBALLS, too.

My, am I ever feeling my futurist 21st-century age
today.  I'm gray haired and middle-aged and feeble
and so, so respectable.  I'll just be tottering along now,
tomorrow-now trending rapidly toward yesterday-then.
Somewhere, a nice chrome and matte-black
cyber-walker awaits me.

Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow are here.
You must listen to these younger folk,
ladies and gentlemen.  They've got a lot on
their minds.

Adios.
  

    
It's like Massumi says, "Yearning is a tendency without end; it is
unexpiring, unself-consuming. It is a supplementarity of paradoxical
movements, a kind of excess that is neither being nor surplus-value, an
excess that can neither be identified or calculated, even fleetingly, let
alone purchased or accumulated--that can be only embodied. Becoming is
virtuality detached from the universality of capitalized specification and
returned to the body as local site of global deviation. It is the exemplary
incarnation of singularizing excess. Becoming is the temporality of the
future-past woven into a de-ontology of the unworkable: the pragmatics of
postcapitalist affectivity."

And Burroughs: "Cry of newborn baby gurgles into death rattle and the 
crystal skull. THAT IS WHAT YOU GET FOR FUCKING."

Adios!
  

    
Elvis has left the building. 
  

    
re: 108: ??
  

    
Heh. Pomo detritus.