Results tagged “remix”

Imagine if half a million people marched on Washington, collectively broke federal law, did it in plain sight of the world's leaders and traditional media, and yet we all barely noticed? What if political leaders didn't even see it as a political act, but instead as some sort of funny stunt?

Over the last half-decade, it's become obvious that hundreds of thousands of people around the world have chosen to ignore copyright law and to upload copyrighted material to sites like YouTube without getting permission to do so. Technically, it's illegal. Practically, it doesn't matter. Politically, it's fascinating.

In the past, when an enormous number of people chose to willfully and blatantly disobey laws that they considered unjust, we called it an act of civil disobedience. We understood the social significant of their collective demonstration, and as a society started to reckon with the implications of their actions.Today, we instead see it as an odd quirk of online culture, and outside of some eggheaded discussions about the future of intellectual property law, we largely see it as unremarkable. And that's true despite the fact that traditional political demonstrations in the context of political activism are increasingly ineffective and anachronistic.

Putting the "Party" Back in Political Party

The open culture movement that's expressed through uploading content and remixes crosses conventional political lines and eludes identification with any traditional political affiliation. The sheer number of participants dwarfs movements (or perceived movements) that have attracted much more attention, such as the tea party efforts. Any given march on Washington these days ends not in policy reform or change in any enacted laws, but in pointless and contentious debate over how many people showed up and whether they represent an actual movement. But part of the reason this new online form of political demonstration is so effective in recruiting active participants is because it's made participation as easy as taking part in the existing social networks that so many of us contribute to every day.

For generations, political activists have said that the prerequisite to getting significant participation in a movement is to make the political personal. And nothing is more personal than the entertainment and media we consume and create on our social networks every day. Remixing is an increasingly political act.

So what happens when vast numbers of social networking citizens find another law that they consider irrelevant? What if it's something more contentious or fundamental than intellectual property law? What are the implications of the increasing disconnect between the letter of the law and its practice? Sure, we've had people disregarding marijuana usage laws for decades, but that kind of disobedience was practiced behind closed doors, not in an environment that's inherently public and social.

More importantly, what are the political efforts we can catalyze if we specifically design them to be as easy to participate in as social networking is today, and if we make sure they're not aligned to the traditional structure of political parties but instead are defined by communities of interest?

I don't know the answer, but it seems increasingly likely that even the most technophobic, regressive policy makers are going to start to understand the implications of large numbers of people in loosely-defined online communities choosing to remix and reform laws on the fly without any granted authority to do so. I can't pretend to know what this development implies. What I do know is that we've seen it as a sort of odd aberration for half a decade now, but soon we'll be obligated to see it as a new political tactic to be reckoned with.

Related: The Power of the Audience, about the sense of common experience on the realtime web.

The exact thing you are looking for is out there on the Internet, if you just know where to look. So here are some hints.

• Making the connection between Girl Talk and DJ Drama, Congressman Mike Doyle (Pittsburgh represent!) breaks down remix culture and the obsolescence of a lot of current IP law for the Congress. Check out the video, or refer back to hodling a gun to Dick Clark's head.

• Diversity in Open Source Communities: Lynne breaks it down. I don't need to explain this one to you folks, right?

• The Wall Street Journal alludes to Google's biggest weakness -- the lack of transparency around the AdWords/AdSense/PageRank market. It works like this: Sites can't predict how they'll rank in search results, but some sites depend on that traffic for their business to grow. To scale up a business requires managing risk and volatility, and having a key factor to growth be largely opaque increases risk greatly, limiting investment and confidence and making it impossible to plan. So sites that aren't can't reach scale without relying on search traffic have a limit on the maximum growth they can achieve in a PageRank-based economy.

• That WSJ story also reminded me that Rich Skrenta's blog is as consistently compelling as Dick Costolo's "Ask The Wizard", which I raved about the other day.

• Of course Wikipedia has a list of fictional bears. What's even better is the discussion about the list of fictional bears.

• Fuck Garrison Keillor. Yes, really.

• Nelson Minar looks at distributed computing startups that used to be competitors for his startup. The writeup is honest, smart, and geeky -- all the things that make Nelson so charming. And whatever happened to Google Compute? I used to be somewhat less critical in my analysis of new technologies.

• Todd Levin acerbically points out what's wrong with SXSW. He alludes to many of the reasons I didn't go this year, but I am pretty conflicted about getting easy laughs by tearing down something that other people enjoy. Would be a lot more impressive to get laughs by praising the conference for what it does well.

• Susan Rogers was getting her PhD to understand "whether the human mind is specialized for music [and] how musical training shapes your auditory memory and cognitive abilities". But I just love her for being Prince's long-suffering engineer during the best and most productive years of his career. I kind of have an affinity for her because her story stuck with me during a much more emo period in my life.

• And if you were still thinking about blogging technology evangelists, you might want to note an interesting trend. Recent Microsoft hires in evangelism lasted nine and a half weeks and three weeks. Quitting Microsoft evangelism is the new evangelism! Your mileage may vary.