[p2p-research] Stunned and hurt Baffler guy figures out that Swedish pirates aren’t Canadia...

[Kevin Carson]

  Sent to you by Kevin Carson via Google Reader: Stunned and hurt
Baffler guy figures out that Swedish pirates aren’t Canadian Marxists
via Wired: Beyond the Beyond by Bruce Sterling on 3/4/10

*I sympathize with much of this guy’s obvious bewilderment, but he
somehow imagines that these phenomena he describes can be resolved by
the just and righteous values of a Canadian teachers’ union.

*I’m cool about Canadians, teachers and even unions, but thinking they
can resolve the difficulties this gentleman denotes here is like
imagining that “progressives” could hold their breath and make Haitian
earthquakes go away.

http://www.thebaffler.com/viewArticle/121/0/1/

(…)

“Remember what pirates like: Parrots. Eye Patches. And gold, best of
all. Mason’s argument was sensible enough: Pirates aren’t
anti-capitalists, they’re punk capitalists. “D.I.Y. encourages us to
reject authority and hierarchy, advocating that we can and should
produce as much as we consume,” Mason writes in the opening chapter of
his homage to piracy. “Since punk, this idea has been quietly changing
the fabric of our economic system, replacing outdated ideas with
twenty-first-century upgrades of Punk Capitalism.” (…)

“As Mason suggested, piracy isn’t just another business model; it is
the greatest business model of them all. Its secret, as we shall see,
is getting people to work for you, for free. (…)

“Behold the majesty of digital communitarianism: It’s socialism without
the state, without ideology, and, best of all, without the working
class….

“And so we have our conversation about the enormous cultural
restructuring that is going on, but we are having it in a senseless
vocabulary where “content” takes the place of “art” and “information”
substitutes for “culture,” “knowledge,” “literature,” “music,” “cinema”
and “meaning.” All the mysteries of the creative process are flattened:
the fickle nature of the muse, the idiosyncrasies of scholarship, and
the tenacity required to compose a novel. All are reduced to nothing by
analogies derived from the logic of computer code, data processing and
high-tech business models.

“But a deeper problem arises when the idiom of technology supplants
traditional social criticism. The “freedom” promoted by the software
community always turns out to be the libertarian version. It’s about
freedom of information: the desire to see how something is made, to
tinker, and to pass those insights and innovations along. Copyleft, as
the advocates of this all-purpose transparency call it, is not “left”
in any traditional sense; it has nothing to say about entrenched
systems of economic privilege or limits on profitability. Likewise, the
open-source movement does not provide the blueprint for a fairer social
order. …”

(((Nothing wrong with this that progressive values couldn’t cure:)))
http://tjcnyc.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/social_mess_big.jpg





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