Holywood

Corporations and their agents and salesmen are predators, and you are their prey. If you believe yourself to be a customer, you are duped in exactly the way they want you to be. The concept of customer is rapidly going the way of the horse and buggy. There is no better example of this than Holywood, the fictional land that we worship because it tells us what we are supposed to think and, especially, to feel. The Holywood corporations’ customers are turning to piracy in logarithmically expanding numbers because the corporations are unwilling to give them what they want, movies that are not so exorbitantly priced (if even available in certain foreign countries) and immediate access to digital versions of released films. Theaters too, the Holywood churches distributed throughout the world, are dying, but the corporate millionaires just can’t let go of the billions that their price gouging nets them to settle for mere multi-millions in online digital sales. Instead, they choose to continue to disaffect larger and larger numbers of their current and would-be customers through arbitrary lawsuits of helpless citizens, the bribery of politicians, and the manipulation of governments around the world, increasingly alienating public opinion.

Yes, Holywood is going away, even as are (though, admittedly, far, far too slowly) the religions of the world as the intelligence of atheism spreads the truth and science dispels the myths and superstitions we have suffered with for far too long. It’s a dead-end, Sodom and Gomorrah town, but it just doesn’t know it yet. Maybe that’s why they make so many zombie movies. They’re so self-involved. Compare independent vs. Hollywood movies: art vs. lowest common denominator sensationalism; e.g., Winter’s Bone vs. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. We would all be better served if Holywood would just fade away completely, but it will continue to put up a desperate fight trying to take down as many people as it can with it. Maybe if the mindless masses of mental morons who are titillated by tits and asses and violence and gore went to better movies, they might raise their intelligence just a little bit. Any little bit will help the species. But out and out death is probably much better.


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can't steal this

Our moral dictionary says no heisting from each other. To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral. [Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book]

Time to turn to something new. (Everything old is new again.) The issue for me is not the narrow focus of the piracy itself. There are far larger legal and political issues here: The mainstream culture/system we live under is based on oppression. This is the traditional criticism of capitalism by Marxism: The proletariat is incorporated into the system as wage-slaves. But, though capitalism is dying, its death throes are devastating.

The world is about to change, threatening to enable true democracy. Free interchange of data, including (one’s own) ideas is available. The Internet has changed everything and threatens the status quo. Used to be we could loan a friend or neighbor a disk; but what if… Our best friend or next-door neighbor may be half-a-world away.

I buy a product but I do not own it, ownership is retained by the seller. The problem is with the erroneous concept of “intellectual property.” Jefferson did not believe in copyright and compromised at three years. Now, for some products, it is the lifetime of the author plus seventy.

Before 1900, music was performed; now the issue is recordings. The entire essence of music is repetitive performance. A musician creates a song every time s/he performs it. Recordings subvert this process, introducing conformity. The (recorded) musician is no longer a performance artist. S/he is now a business person, locked into a business system.

Writing is similar, the intellect creating via performance. And then the intellectual journey is over for the writer. Time for the writer then to sell his work and start again. And if others copy it, that’s just business, not writing. But artists want to live off their past performance. What if painters retained their ownership of art they sold? Oh, wait, they do, when they put it on the internet. Images, mass produced, have become intellectual property.

This all inhibits further ongoing performance. Artists should create until they die, that’s the whole point. That’s what being an artist means: doing (performing) art.

Ideas and (mental) images are free; people who buy might be stupid. If they buy as a beneficent means of supporting an artist, great. If they buy because they want a mass produced hard copy, fine. If they buy as a matter of convenience, okay; so be it. In the past, it was convenient to buy a book or a painting. Going to a library or an art gallery was less convenient. So, how is getting a book at a library different from copying it? Being in permanent possession is somehow different from a loan?

It’s not the item being owned or loaned that’s important, but content. And content resides in brains, not books or digital files. “Content” is useless unless it is interpreted by a brain. This is what net connections are all about, the connection of brains. Which is why I say that copyright is an erroneous precept. [Caveat: I live in this system, and if it insists I participate, well, then… You better not steal my ideas unless you make all ideas free. And yet…I am seriously considering the Gandhian principle: “Be the change.”]

Anti-piracy and copyright is okay only if you believe in the system. If, as a pirate, you support capitalism, then you are acting illogically. But if you see through the farce into the basic oppression beneath it… Faux-democracy capitalism must prevent piracy at all costs. That’s why it pours so much money into a dying enterprise. They could make nearly as much money by closing down the theaters. They could make nearly as much by releasing products immediately. But they’d pull down the lid of their coffin, by allowing true freedom. We can’t have any of this democracy stuff here, it’s bad for business. So the “authorities” say: Thou shalt not share files, yet they deem some entities worthy of still owning what they have sold, the fact that we have bought it being irrelevant.