Guerillartivism.net

Benkler's Wealth of Networks summed up something very well in this passage:

"the tension between the industrial model of cultural production and the networked information economy is nowhere more pronounced than in the question of the degree to which the new folk culture of the twenty-first century will be permitted to build upon the outputs of the twentieth-century industrial model.

In this battle, the stakes are high.

One cannot make new culture ex nihilo.

We are as we are today, as cultural beings, occupying a set of common symbols and stories that are heavily based on the outputs of that industrial period.

If we are to make this culture our own, render it legible, and make it into a new platform for our needs and conversations today, we must find a way to cut, paste, and remix present culture.

And it is precisely this freedom that most directly challenges the laws written for the twentieth-century technology, economy, and cultural practice."

As i continue reading "The Wealth of networks" i was thinking that keeping general purpose computer distributed, and i mean a normal completely operational PC in every home, was even more important than i thought in the war for the public good.

If the population can maintain their current ability to out pace, outgrow, outshare and out communicate the big players with distributed solutions, good projects will have more capacity and emerge as industry leaders.I think this will happen as people will tend to pledge their CPU, storage and bandwidth toward project that help them and therefore will eradicate business crooks and the like. (yes, of course, some bad will come of it too...)

I wonder if this could lead to a big lowering in the reliance on intellectual property revenue as a way to make business, art, etc, particularly in the health sector where keeping drugs price artificially high should be a crime against humanity or in the movie industry where a good script would get millions of people to render frames.

I'll have to keep this in mind for the coming guerrilla backpack project. How could we leverage this while avoiding the pitfall of a big companies paying people to work on small parts of big secret puzzles, like in One Point O.