I’m torn between being gleeful in my typical anti-corporate, anti-culture homogenization, anti-box store way, and feeling bad that we’re losing hundreds of spaces where readers of all ages could find out about books.
Borders Nostalgia | Conversational Reading (via housingworksbookstore)
I’m not torn at all. When big business says there’s no money in books, I think our society is in big trouble. Libraries can barely stay funded and book stores are closing left and right.
This is very scary.
Big (Corporate) Brother: Wireless carriers openly considering charging per service — Engadget
Imagine paying extra to visit Facebook. Imagine not being able to check your tweets with your smartphone while on the go. Imagine wireless carriers charging us to do even more stuff that costs them little extra to do (like they already do with texting). This is horrible and they’re thinking about considering it.
I remember back in the AOL days when AOL used to charge X amount of dollars for X amount of hours online. Ridiculous, right? Of course. Well, it seems like wireless carriers may be thinking about going backwards. In fact, in some ways, they already have with their $60/mo-for-1GB-style plans. Now they want to micromanage what they let us do on their connections.
This is ridiculous. Please clock the link above and read more about this nightmarish scenario.
Posted this on my tech blog and thought that posting it here, too, would be a no-brainer.
What does a corporation do when it discovers it may have developed and marketed a dangerous and potentially devastating product? Here in America, you confuse, you obfuscate, and you buy off scientists.
Tom Laskawy (via chemicalfreeskinny)
Well, what do ya want? They’ve got to make a living, right? Even if it means a few people have to die… I guess… that’s their God-given right as a corporation, right?
[much snipped here]
Like the Ministry of Truth, it appears that Apple is deliberately attempting to usurp the meaning of the word Flash in the computing industry and redefine it. They’re tired of the word standing for an inefficient browser plugin. They’ve begun leaving Flash out of stock Mac OS X installs. They’re dodging its implied meaning in calls and pushing what they want it to refer to. Fast, efficient storage.
Down the memory hole, indeed.
Rafer sez:
Jobs is doing some sketchy stuff, vis-a-vis redefining “open,” et al. However, Flash is the longstanding private trademark of a pretty darn big company. If they can’t defend themselves by learning how to either ship a great version of this product or market decently, they deserve to be redefined and forgotten.I started thinking about a related phenomenon the other night. My main takeaway at this point is that right now Apple understands the power of shaping and controlling language better than any other company out there.
For me the issue then becomes whether we, as consumers, should put up with it. I’m switching to Android with my next phone for myriad reasons, one of which is I do think Apple has really started to exploit customer ignorance by enhancing it.
Link: A Different Threat to Net Neutrality
get ready to rumble !
The whole fight about net neutrality is about to take a turn from the abstract to the concrete but in a somewhat unexpected way. It is not ISPs or telcos that are turning out to be the immediate culprits, but rather content owners, specifically TV networks. They are blocking Google TV from…
I was thinking the exact same thing this morning. Why is accessing their content on Google TV any different from accessing their account in Google Chrome? Or Firefox? Or…? Isn’t the easy way around this just to turn all TVs into PCs?
Regardless, it’s just more dinosauric behavior from the networks. You’re supposed to want to be on more devices, guys! Not less!
EUROPE! HANDS OFF OUR MEDICINE
Reblog this link to support our global campaign to stop Europe’s multiple attempts to restrict access to medicines for patients across the developing world.
Help us send a message to the European Commission to keep their HANDS OFF OUR MEDICINE!
Thanks for your support!
Yeah, I’m pretty much pro-humanity and anti-unregulated-corporate-power, so this hits me a couple different ways. Please reblog or RT or reFB or whatever—spread the word that untold lives are at risk because big pharma wants to control patents and the EU might let them.
Found this via falconieri:
“The essential problem with Google is that it no longer considers itself primarily a search engine. Instead, Google believes it is an advertising company whose search results are mere fodder for commercial messages. This is the crime Google has committed. It is not in violating the principle of neutrality, an ideal that never existed in the history of knowledge organization. Google’s crime is against human culture. Google has stolen our common knowledge and commercialized the library. The long-term cultural consequences of this deplorable criminal act are unclear. But Google’s loathsome introduction of advertising into search results is travesty that must be investigated. Now is the time to begin a substantial inquiry into Google’s practices, not because they violate “search neutrality” but because they violate the human need for commercial-free learning.”
—
Google’s Flaw (via azspot)
I feel like blaming Google isn’t fair. We’ve commercialized WAY more than just knowledge. In fact, we’ve pretty much commercialized everything in our lives.
There’s a great moment in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an astronaut is trapped outside a spaceship by a computer gone psychotic. As the astronaut uses his forearm-mounted computer interface to try to work out a way back inside, we see, right next to the text display, a giant IBM logo. This joke made the audience laugh out loud the last time I saw it in the theater.
When you brush your teeth, there’s likely a logo on your toothbrush. When you drive down the street, not only are their billboards that you drive past, but there are about a half-dozen (or more) logos right inside your car—the car-brand, the brand of radio, your GPS’s brand’s logo, your cell phone, soda can/coffee cup, etc.
I remember in high school (way back in the last century) one of the school clubs ran a candy and soda shop in the cafeteria, where they’d buy candy and soda cheap and then mark it up to sell it to their fellow students. I’ve since heard that some schools accept sponsorships from major corporations in exchange for ads placed around the school. I recall one instance where competitors’ vending machines were banned from the school in favor of the sponsor’s.
Have you watched children’s TV lately? I haven’t. I stopped years ago because (get ready for it) it was just too commercial for me. The disgustingly unhealthy food they try to sell kids is shocking and the methods they use to do it, equally so. Loud music, “wacky” animation, and effective lies insist that Cocoa Puffs are part of a nutritious breakfast (they only say that because they have to admit that you shouldn’t try to survive on Cocoa Puffs alone).
Google isn’t doing anything we haven’t already done to ourselves. They’re just doing it in a new way. Does that make them evil? Well, only if you consider ourselves evil for accepting so many other examples of commercialism into our lives and drawing benefits from it, as well. You think Google should allow us to search without ads? How are they supposed to survive? You benefit from their service, so they should benefit from you using their service. Seems fair enough to me.
Personally, I think it’s about capitalism more than any one entity practicing it. I mean, you can’t blame a tiger for feeding on prey. The whole structure of capitalism demands exploitation—of workers and of customers.
Right there is where the true evil lies, in my opinion. Well, there and in the banks.
(And yes, the title of this post is my paraphrasing Obi-Wan’s “who’s the bigger fool” dialog from the original Star Wars movie.)
RIAA paid its lawyers more than $16,000,000 in 2008 to recover $391,000
Business is great! If by “business” you mean “being in the RIAA lawyering business.”
Not surprised.
The real question is whether the RIAA succeeded in its mission to establish new behavioral norms surrounding music. I feel like it’s less and less acceptable to pirate music, and legitimate streaming and download services simply keep growing. This outcome was probably worth $16,000,000 in attorney fees.
I’ve got my own anti-RIAA biases to contend with here, but it feels to me like ascribing the change in behavioral norms entirely to the RIAA’s legal campaign is a significant reach.
The (relatively small) possibility of being the target of an RIAA lawsuit is certainly a disincentive to sharing music illegally, but I think the bigger nudge to broad patterns of behavior has come from the concessions that the recording industry is making [on digital pricing and global availability, for example] that are making it simpler for us to get legal downloads than illegal.
When it was hard (or impossible) for people to get the music they wanted directly in digital form, it was possible to cast illegal sharing as a sort of noble, Robin Hood-ish pursuit; with the rise of legal download sources (note especially DRM-free sources) with broad and deep catalogues, it’s much, much harder to tell that story.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to come up with a coherent argument for out-and-out “piracy” that doesn’t amount to “I don’t want to pay for it,” when even DRM is decreasingly common on legitimate downloads: lest we forget, Amazon’s mp3 store has only been around since the end of 2007, and Apple’s iTunes Plus since the start of 2009.
Whether or not the $391k/$16MM figures hold up to further scrutiny, there’s no question that the recording industry has spent a huge amount of money on lawyers over the past decade or so. I just have to wonder whether behavioral norms would have shifted more quickly had the industry put that money towards actually competing online sooner.
UPDATE: when writing this post, I misunderstood the premise of the original piece—no one’s taking credit for anything here. It’s just a musing about whether or not the change was made thanks to the lawsuits. Humble apologies to anyone I may have misled with this post! That said, please read on for my misinformed thoughts on this:
I love it when big business tries to take credit for shit it has no business taking credit for. This is a great example. Compare the availability of legally downloadable tracks to the ability to illegally download them back in the late 90s early 00s. Now compare them in “modern times.” Yeah, it’s obvious, making music reasonably cheap and easy to get was always the way to go. Likewise, with all other media. If only the industry had embraced this back then, they’d have saved themselves a lot of money and a handful of lawsuit victims a lot less stressed.
The landscape for media is shifting and the part of that landscape that was for music got a head start. Now, the big labels are acting as though they are the “winners” and are trying to write the history books. Of course, the real winner is the consumer. We get to pay for our music and get it easily, pretty much on our terms. No more buying entire albums just to get the good songs. No more paying for packaging. No more clunky discs taking up shelf space. So this is just the recording industry trying to feel good about spending all that money on absurd, unfair lawsuits (not to mention saving face).
Of course, the reality is that illegal downloading will never end. The other reality attached to that reality is that big business will survive anyway—as it already has.
Whiners.
“Apple CEO Steve Jobs came up with a two-part solution. Part 1: There is no problem. Part 2: Even though there is no problem, we’re going to give everyone a free case, which should insulate the antenna and prevent the interference that we just told you isn’t actually occurring. But if you’re still not happy, you can give back the phone for a full refund. Jobs’s snotty tone made it clear that he was pretty fed up with all the whining about a problem that he says doesn’t exist. This is classic Apple behavior. No matter what the whole world can see with its own eyes, just keep saying that it isn’t true, and maybe, eventually, everyone will believe you. By refusing to acknowledge the problem, Jobs just reinforced the image of Apple as a company that is in deep denial and unable to admit a mistake—a company that has for so long been able to bend reality to suit its needs that it now has lost touch with reality itself.”
—
Lyons, on the iPhone 4 announcement
This isn’t Steve Jobs. It’s not Apple. It’s business. Seriously. This isn’t news. This isn’t even commentary. Remember how BP reacted when their party in the Gulf started?
So, really, isn’t this kind of “cynical” attitude just ignoring the bigger problem of corporations wholesale lying to us across the board? Why pretend Steve Jobs is doing anything but protect his shareholders’ profits?
This is a systemic problem. Every company lies when they get caught doing something wrong. Lyons’ article should have been two sentence long:
“Bullshit, Steve. Tell us the truth.”
With maybe a third saying:
“Thanks for the free case, though.”
But if his article was that short, I guess Lyons wouldn’t get paid as much.
