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.

a whole lot more

The effect on me of the raid and shutdown of Pirate Bay has been that I have learned a whole lot more about how to download torrents and, especially, how to find magnets without the aid of a piracy search engine; and how to do all that far more safely. The MPAA and the RIAA have done more to promote piracy than they’ve done to inhibit it. Every time they make some dramatic move, piracy increases by leaps and bounds. I seriously doubt there’s any way to stop it now short of shutting down the internet. It seem inevitable that democracy (of a libertarian sort), though it may not prevail within the system as a whole, will become the order of the day on the internet—or at the very least on the Dark Net.

systemic bigotry

I wrote, a while ago, ten or twelve years maybe—and this opinion may have been (a bit) truer back then; or else I may just have been deluded)—that systemic bigotry against minorities was slowly but significantly disappearing and all that was left was (more or less) isolated individual bigots acting outside of the official policies and procedures of the system. Whether or not that was more the case back then, it is certainly not the case now. Either I was wrong or we have backslid as a culture; or some combination of both. This is the case, at the very least, among police departments, but probably it’s true throughout the “system” that “runs” our culture; bigotry prevails as a systemic problem, and it seems to be getting worse. Bigots react against the bits of freedom and equality that minorities win for themselves via protest, persistence, and activism. The rock-headed and/or brainwashed Neanderthals and their clinging, sycophantic women can’t stand it that society is gradually turning to the left. It always does, except when the fascists rebel against it to temporarily set back the course of history and intelligence. And they are backlashing now, in the persons of police officers who stand defiantly against a culture that is intent upon changing for the better. The cops represent a large bloc of idiots who are crawling out of their holes in the earth to “support their local police.” Can you say “race war”?

thugs or idiots

♫Just like every cop is a criminal…♫

All cops are either thugs or stupid. You have to be a thug or an idiot to want to become a police officer in the first place. And, for a majority of cops, you also have to be a Neanderthal. If someone would do a long-term study, they’d discover that all of the rookies who would have graduated into good police officers quit after a few years when they find out what it’s really like to be a cop. I base this premise on the fact that those cops who would otherwise actually be good cops are in fact not, simply because, in order to be that good cop, they must choose to turn a blind eye on what’s going on among their fellow officers, which is what makes them a bad cop. You can’t be a good cop and ignore the bad ones in your ranks. Frank Serpico was an extreme rarity. As a law enforcement officer, you have a duty to weed them out. That’s why every cop is a criminal, by deed or by implication and association.

ineffectual property

The music industry, and later the movie industry, weren’t on top of the technology; they let it get way out ahead of them, probably because it would have cost too much to gear up to it. So how much is it costing them now? Hundreds, maybe thousands of times more than it would have if they hadn’t been looking to make the greatest profit possible and failing to develop long term plans. They deserve privacy. They throttled down the public’s access to their products because they couldn’t find their way to a business model that would incorporate the new technology. So consumers went ahead and developed that technology themselves, and released it onto the world for free. Then, out of their desperation, instead of taking their licks and gearing up as Johnny-Come-Latelies, the corporations went crying to the government to help them protect the “intellectual property” that “pirates” were “stealing” as a result of the industries’ own incompetence. This is a perfect case of blaming the victim for what you do to yourself.

little pricks

Wilhelm Reich said that sexual repression resulted in authoritarianism. I never read that it was an inevitable process, but I would think not; probably just a tendency, however likely. But Reich did strongly make the point that fascism rose directly out of authoritarianism, implying—if he did not state it outright elsewhere—that fascists are sexually repressed.

I would add that, following from the above logic and adding in a little bit of Freudian-like content, fascists have small penises. It makes sense. Men with big dicks tend to use them in other ways; it’s those little pricks that cause all the trouble, by projecting their inferiority onto others whom they see as weaker than they are and thus compensating for their insecurity.

You see it all the time, cops, bureaucrats (A-holes in general) proving to themselves that they are “real men” (despite their lack of length) by imposing their will on others, beating them, and even shooting them down in the street. A bully is a bully, whether in a schoolyard or on the force.

We’ve begun to work on the problem of bullying in schools and other institutions, but we’ve yet to turn our attention to the bullies who would kill us in our streets and even in our homes. And, because we fail to do this, the rules and policies that law enforcement uses to “police” us are becoming increasingly lax. Stop-and-frisk becomes jump-out; bean bags and rubber bullets become full metal jackets; choke-holds become death grips. The “authorities” believe that, if they can kill off enough of us, the rest of us will fall into line, become good little, compliant, unknown citizens.

But, instead, what is going to happen is they are going to start a war—a revolution. And it will be our own fault, because we haven’t done what we have needed for quite a while now to do: insist that the A-holes stop spying on us in the name of terror threats that don’t actually exist (save the terror for the terrorist and leave the citizens alone), stop beating us senseless, and, especially, stop shooting us down in the streets. Because, if we don’t get this message across to the “law” enforcement “community,” the next step is tit-for-tat. We’ve been there before, several centuries ago. But, again?

democracy, then and now

The history of humanity is a long-running battle between the desire for the freedom of democracy and the oppression of the masses by selfish, greedy, power-hungry autocrats. No news there.

There have been several break-throughs the oppressed have made in the enduring quest to be free of assholes, one of the more impressive being the American Revolution. Still no real news.

But that revolution, despite its promise, did not last as long as most people want to believe. It didn't take too long for the autocrats to reassert their dominance. It is their forte, after all.

This anti-revolution eventually resulted in the formation of The Corporations. It only took them so long because the democratic ideals of the American Revolution were so difficult to overcome.

But overcome they did, leaving us with what we have to tolerate today, remnants of a revolution that only pretends now to democracy. But hope is not lost, not by a long shot. Today, we also have...

The Internet. This far-reaching technology has been the greatest revolution since 1776. Perhaps even greater. But, like its predecessor, the autocrats, who want it all for themselves, are usurping it.

The fascists who control The Corporations, with the aid of their governmental stooges, feel threatened by this vehicle of unfettered democracy, and for good reason. True democrats use it to be free.

Using the internet, the true democrats have been with increasing effectiveness foiling the fascists' attempts at ubiquitous control. At this very moment, the fascists' are fighting back hard--in government.

The outcome of the battles now raging in congress and at the FCC (and most likely in any number of yet to be determined governmental offices) will reveal whether or not American democracy survives.

Or reconstitutes itself, since a good argument can be made for its demise, the corporations having killed it off and replaced it as it slept with alien pods that it grew in places where no one was looking.

But, lately, we have had a form of democracy, on the Net. We have been able to communicate freely, and that communication has been the bane of corporations as citizens slowly discover what they are up to.

So what choice do they have but to try to take it all away from us? Us. It's ours. A public utility. If the fascists are to continue to succeed, they must stifle the effectiveness of our communication. Up the Net.

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