Wow
excellent points fake. the internet sometimes seems to serve as a pacifier and rant outlet. I can tell you, I used to do it. And I'm glad I stopped because it was useless and harmful to me. When I went to a cafe in SF recently I was astonished by the amount of laptop users there were. 98 percent of the people were on laptops and not saying a word to each other.It was kind of surreal. What was that Dylan line-"There was music in cafes at night, revolution was in the air." I remember going into cafes and there was a whole lot of talking going on. Now it seems kind of a zombiezone.
...As for creative workers losing royalties, we can work on that. Musicans
can perform live. Artists can pass the hat.
Most useful work is unaffected by the internet anyway. The internet won't
fix your bike, plant your crops or cut your firewood. Maybe the cube farm
jobs that get outsourced aren't worth doing anyway
Fellow travelers, in *You Are Not a Gadget* (Knopf), excerpted in the current Harper's Magazine, Mr. Lanier writes, "If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of to musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than with truth and beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and content-less. The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. ... Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising."
I don't disagree with this dystopian view. But I prefer to see myself as being in that rank of people who represent human potential expanding, not the one that represents human potential contracting. (Where I am in Flannery O'Connor's two groups, "the irksome, and the less irksome," I'll let others decide.) I ascribe to Joyce's view of art: to re-create life out of life. I also ascribe to James Brown's sartorial view: "I want people to say there he is, not where he is."
It's all part of the artist's job.
PeaceLoveTruthBeauty!
Jack Chase
... I've become increasingly doubtful of the "benefits" of the internet.
When I think of all the trouble it's causing friends and family in terms of broken relationships, decreased (real-life) interpersonal communication, engineering careers shipped overseas and above all the sense that this medium pacifies the public as much as it informs (social activism gets channeled into useless web rants and blogs).
Can you imagine the Dumbya Bush administration without the internet? People would have stormed Washington, but because of the net we all sat around for 8 years bitching instead.