We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Another Samizdata quote of the day I’m not really all that interested in what Hollywood does with its stuff. I mean, they’re only the size of the porn industry. I think the real revolution is in industrial production. It’s about manipulating factory processes, it’s about mass customization, it’s about a revolution in industry that gets the toxins out of the air and is more efficient by, say, a factor of four than what we had. When that happens we’ll have a genuinely new world. Playing movies off handhelds, that’s not really that big of a deal.
– Bruce Sterling, interviewed in Reason. (Link via slashdot).
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I don’t think Sterling is worth listening to. Read any of his “Wired” rants on the California energy crisis – he just regurgitates the standard leftist drivel. He can’t even get his dates straight. When I pointed out a number of his errors, he replied to me in a very nasty, uneducated, and uninformed manner. I’m surprised to see him mentioned on this website. Whatta boob.
I think Sterling is vastly over rated and many of his views are simply ill-informed risible tosh that only get aired because of his residual ‘cyberpunk cool quotient’… nevertheless, it is indeed an interesting quote and that is reason enough for Michael to post it. It does not mean there is any collective Samizdatista fondness for Sterling.
Sterling is not one of us, and is in my opinion often wrong, but I think I would disagree that he is a “typical leftist”. Sadly, the typical leftists are far far worse..
On this issue though, I think what he says is right. We are in a position where the content industries of Hollywood are very loud, and are very good lobbyists, and because of this what they have to say about the regulation of the internet and other related technological systems has the ear of legislators and (obviously) the media. Because of this, we are seeing things happening such as attempts to build digital rights management systems into every piece of computer hardware. These things affect every use of the computer hardware, not just those uses related to the distribution of Hollywood content. The argument against doing it their way is not so much related to the question of whether they are right or not as it is whether they are important enough to matter. In the cosmic scheme of things the entertainment industry is of trivial importance. Many other applications of computer technology (logistics and manufacturing, for instance) are far, far more important, and will become even more so in future. (The real revolution is that computational power allows us to build and understand much more complicated systems of all kinds. The information management and distribution aspects are actually only a small part of the computer revolition. But they are all that is usually discussed. And this is unfortunate.
This point is seldom made, but is crucially important. Which is why I make it when I can.
I thought there was supposed to be only one Samizdata slogan of the day…
Ah, but one was a quote of the day and the other was a slogan of the day.
In fact, there probably is only supposed to be one per day (Perry?), but this is certainly not the the first time this rule has not been held to. And I will confess to not being hugely bothered myself.