Random notes

Hello Darkness?

A version of this was left as a comment response to a blog post by Mark Pilgrim:

A decent portion of those people on this planet who can understand why control over technology might be important -- i.e., they actually understand that, and why, technology has real power -- want to increase and protect technological autonomy. Not everyone, of course, but enough to make a difference.

However, the idea of technological autonomy remains as fundamentally inscrutable to the vast majority of technology's users as it is fundamental. Until we find some way to address that problem, the Apples of the world will continue to sex up and sell technological servitude while the disempowered line up to thank them for it.

--Benjamin Mako Hill 01:23, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Quotes from Cube

Worth: There is no conspiracy, nobody is in charge, it's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master-plan, big-brother is not watching you. If this ever had a purpose then it got mis-communicated or lost in the shuffle, this is an accident, a forgotten perpetual public works project. You think anybody wants to ask questions? All they want is a clear conscience and a fat pay-cheque."

Quentin: Why put people in it?

Worth: Because it's here, you have to use it or admit it's pointless.

Quentin: But it is, it is pointless.

Worth: Quentin, that's my point.

Quentin: You make me sick, Worth.

Worth: I make me sick too, we're both part of the system. I drew a box, you walk a beat, it's like you said Quentin, keep your head down, keep it simple, just look at what's in front of you. I mean nobody wants to see the big picture, life's too complicated. Let's face it, the reason we're here is because it's out of control.

---

Quentin: What do you think the establishment is? It's just guys like me. Their desks are bigger but their jobs aren't. They don't conspire, they buy boats.

Moglen's Faculty Presentation

Much, much here.

"Careful analysis of the Wikimedia Foundation would take five minutes and explain pretty much absolutely nothing except how the hosting bills for the servers are paid."

"I know, for better and worse, how the GNU Free Document License that makes Wikipedia possible came to be: Richard Stallman and I wrote it in his mother’s apartment on West 89th Street and in a conference room at the MIT AI Lab before the building was taken down and the building named after Bill Gates was put up instead (it leaks, as you know, and MIT is suing Frank Gehry about that; the GFDL still works as designed)."

Ethnographic Work

Susan Silbey told her advisor, "when am I going to be done?" and her advisor would tell her that, "that's not for me to say; it's for you to say."

Marx on Crime and Innovation

"The effects of the criminal on the development of productive power can be shown in detail. Would locks ever have reached their present degree of excellence had there been no thieves? Would the making of bank-notes have reached its present perfection had there been no forgers? Would the microscope have found its way into the sphere of ordinary commerce but for trading frauds? Doesn't practical chemistry owe just as much to adulteration of commodities and the efforts to show it up as to the honest zeal for production? Crime through its constantly new methods of attack on property, constantly calls into being new methods of defence and so is as productive as strikes for the invention of machines.”

Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value I, 387 - 388 (Marx and Engels Collected Works).

Harpers Weekly on Summum

Judges in Pleasant Grove City, Utah, were weighing a free-speech suit filed by adherents to the Summum church. Members of the church claim that the city is discriminating against them by displaying a red granite plaque of the Ten Commandments in a public park but refusing to display a monument inscribed with their own faith's Seven Aphorisms, which were communicated via telepathy from divine beings to a man named Corky Ra. Ron Temu and Su Menu, two Summum worshippers, argued that the Commandments were compatible with the Aphorisms, as both were handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. "If you look at them side by side," said Su Menu of the two monuments while sitting in a metal pyramid and drinking an alcoholic sacramental nectar beside a mummified Doberman pinscher, "they really are saying similar things."