Re: <nettime> The Return of DRM

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

Excellent points by Zeljko. The easy work of the early
Internet now requires greater effort and determination.
Fighting corruption that inevitably sets in after a
revolution, especially among the leaders of revolt,
is harder and less rewarding.

The tempation is to recall the glory days and bemoan
what has become of the nascent intitiatives. And to
castigate those who have capitalized, literally and
figuratively, on success at moving beyond innovation
to peddling wildly popular rip-offs -- commercial and
academic. Plenitude of products to be critically
studied plenitudiously. Is there no part of the Internet
blob that is not "studies" to death voluminously, no.

Still few studiers write the code or run the systems.
Few are insiders of or knowledgeable about the innards
of the realm. Few sit at the keyboards of control. For those
reasons critical studies are condemned to be tautological.

For the very few technical innovators there are tens of
thousands metacommenters dependent upon the
hard labor of the innovators -- who, may Nietzche harangue
them, do not closely read texts. What they do instead is a
alphanumeric mystery of zero interest to alphabetical
texters.

Arrange a visit to an Amazon data hotel, ponder what
you can't see going on there. Wait, don't admit defeat,
get a job there to get inside the headlessness of the
apparatus. May require crushing your skull.

For the blind-faithers in NYC, beg a social media friend
to get you into one of the six transworld hubs of all Internet
traffic, ask to touch the hummer that sucks your best
and most private thoughts and vile web sites visited.
Then the hummers that suck Goldman Sachs. Ask
for a sample of that beer, sign the NDA to make
a sysadmin nest egg. Enjoy free sex of the Net again.


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