Week 4
True
This future is the most likely scenario IMHO, and it should be possible to convert from one kind of "esteem currency" into another. There can be trade, commerce in this world, hence there is no need to bring Marx into the discussion.
There are a few holes in the article - "single hierarchy", that is, "the hierarchy that rules all others" is not a communist or capitalist concept, it is second wave industrial.
"[In] Doctorow’s book [.. r]eputation, like capital, can be accumulated in an unequal and self-perpetuating way, as those who are already popular gain the ability to do things that get them more attention and make them more popular. Such dynamics are readily observable today, as blogs and other social media produce popular gatekeepers who are able to determine who gets attention and who does not, in a way that is not completely a function of who has money to spend [..].
The ideal of a post-scarcity society is that various kinds of esteem are independent, so that the esteem in which one is held as a musician is independent of the regard one achieves as a political activist [.. This] is not a world of no hierarchies but one of many hierarchies, no one of which is superior to all the others"
Excellent comment
Knowledge likes to spread, it likes to combine with other knowledge. This inherent tendency makes it very different from other forms of "property", then, the controls needed to fit knowledge based goods into a second wave straight-jacket must be much, much more draconian. The defenders of the old system still do not fully grasp this fact.
"The embryonic form of class power in a post-scarcity economy can be found in our systems of intellectual property law. While contemporary defenders of intellectual property like to speak of it as though it is broadly analogous to other kinds of property, it is actually based on a quite different principle. As the economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine observe, IP rights go beyond the traditional conception of property. They do not merely ensure “your right to control your copy of your idea”, in the way that they protect my right to control my shoes or my house. Rather, they give rights-holders the ability to tell others how to use copies of an idea that they ‘own’. As Boldrin and Levine say, “This is not a right ordinarily or automatically granted to the owners of other types of property. If I produce a cup of coffee, I have the right to choose whether or not to sell it to you or drink it myself. But my property right is not an automatic right both to sell you the cup of coffee and to tell you how to drink it.”"
https://youtu.be/Fgh2dFngFsg
There are some interesting observations: that Supreme Court has a blindspot on copyright, the legal filter that works well against even pornography does not function on copyright. United States has a cultural tug-of-war between "containing (prohibition)" and "letting go", IMO the issue of slightly offensive content are handled / are used to being handled through this prism. But copyright is seen as an entirely different beast.
And I tell you why: because copyright is closely linked to the issue of property - a concept that strikes a different chord in America.
And oddly enough the issue of property becomes crucial for the struggle between waves - as it has once before. We all know American Civil War, a major struggle for power between agrarian and industrial forces, revolved around the issue slavery and at this time according to the law of the land, black people were seen as property. Antabellum America decided they were not, took steps to correct this shameful mistake. Today, there is another fight, again between waves, around yet another definition of property. Is knowledge property? How much of it belongs to someone / anyone?
"Mathematicians plan to launch a series of free open-access journals that will host their peer-reviewed articles on the preprint server arXiv. The project was publicly revealed yesterday in a blog post by Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal winner and mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK.
The initiative, called the Episciences Project, hopes to show that researchers can organize the peer review and publication of their work at minimal cost, without involving commercial publishers [..].
Each journal, or ‘epijournal’, would have its own editor and editorial board, and authors could submit their arXiv-posted papers to their journal of choice. The journal would then organize peer review, perhaps using workflow software provided by the CCSD. Peer-reviewed papers would be posted on arXiv alongside their un-reviewed versions [..].
Gowers has strong views on shaking up research publishing — last year, he kick-started a boycott of the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier"
Aaron Schwartz Memorial
The hashtag #pdftribute is very active. A lot of people are pissed off - academics started posting their PDF articles online in protest, making them freely accessible after Aaron Schwartz's death.
Aaron Schwartz, mentioned here and one of the main actors in the fight against SOPA, has been found guilty and was facing 35 years in jail for downloading academic articles. He committed suicide.
"Was Aaron a terrorist? Or a cracker trying to profit from stolen goods? Or was this something completely different? Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.
Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed [..].
[Aaron] is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying [..] And if you don’t get [proportionality] you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.
For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House [..]
In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.
Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame."