I present this as an example of the power of the mash-up to comment, contrast, parody, satirize and otherwise take the piss out of anyone or anything which affects us all.
Removing the power of the people to speak back through culture only serves to give power to assholes like this funky jerk with a great set of pipes. Support fair copyright reform, like Net Neutrality it is a vital component of Free Speech.
Here’s a clever PSA from the folks at Rocketboom that shows exactly how to post your video works that are protected under Fair Use and prevent them from being arbitrarily removed from YouTube by ignorant dickhead ill-informed legal counsel of Big Media.
The Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies explains how YouTube makes it easy to dispute a wrongful copyright claim.
For more information on the YouTube takedown process, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation at http://meme.ly/DisputeYoutube
Like Jimmy Guterman who posted this on BoingBoing I am always inspired by Lessig’s take on culture, copyright and the need to bring back some sanity to the process of protecting our creative works and our social worlds and finally find an ending to the crazed legal and cutlural wars that have been waged throughout this past decade.
William Kamkwamba is a young Malawian innovator who gained attention through the simple act of crafting a windmill to help irrigate his family farm and to generate a basic supply of electricity - at the age of 14.
I’ve posted before about how the future is being invented in garage laboratories and there is plenty of talk flowing through the interwebs about shit like steampunk, makers, hackerlabs and other cultural shifts that are seeing people become more than mere consumers of technology. The tech has become so ubiquitous in our lives we are now dissembling it, re-arranging it, renovating it, re-purposing and innovating tech products and tech knowledge to build the world we choose to live in.
DNA sequencing in the basement - next to the home brew kit - is not only inevitable, it’s already happening. Robotics, tesla coils, hovercraft, solar arrays, radio astonomy observatories, high altitude photography experiments - you name it and someone is yanking apart an old appliance and building something that is righteous, bizarre and absolutely necessary.
Kamkwamba built his windmills from necessity - he needed water to grow food - he needed electricity to communicate and see within the darkness. The materials he used were cobbled together from a junkyard. The most valuable resource he had at his disposal was knowledge.
We do well to remember we are not just living in a knowledge economy but also a knowledge culture. As the economic shit continues to hit the fan - and it will - and empires collapse in upon themselves and the comforts of consumer culture wane it will be replaced with knowledge - the knowledge that we can make whatever we need in order to survive and thrive and keep in touch with each other. Knowledge can cure hunger - that’s a cool concept - and if we stay connected with each other we will always have access to knowledge - we shall never be ignorant, unless willfully so.
I’ve posted this extraordinary audio and video mash-up by Kutiman before but it keeps popping up and I just love the visceral example it provides of how our tech allows us to craft culture that reflects who we are, when we are and what we are surrounded with.
What you are about to see is a mix of unrelated YouTube videos/clips edited together to create Thru-You. In other words - what you see is what you hear.
The existing materials are re-worked to craft anew an expression that would not have been possible prior to the now readily available media tools - and what we get is far from the usual corporate packaged dreck that is inflicted upon us.
I found this over at Bruce Sterling’s Beyond The Beyond blog and it’s pretty cool shit. Kevin Slavin runs a company called Area/Code and they design cool games that they used to consider were beyond our regular television viewing experience. Here he gives a talk at the 5D: The Future Of Immersive Design conference.
The 5D Conference describes themselves thusly:
From the plasma screen in your media room, to the portable device in your pocket, to the side of a high-rise in Manhattan, savvy broadcasters are creating comprehensive “ecosystems”…, blending television, web, movies and gaming to redefine the experience of television. This panel explores the intersection of design and technology in the creation of “new television”, the experience… created by the blending of media and the interaction of the consumer.
You can watch more videos from 5D here and they’re worth sitting still for cuz these folks are smart and really know how to fuck with your head in creative ways.
All of this falls into the kind of queries Jill Golick, myself and many others have been making as we attempt our self-evolution from the dying existing television industry into the current realms of ubiquitous and immersive digital media.
We keep forgetting that the new shit that is coming down the pipe - if you’ll pardon the sewage analogy, although we are talking about television - is cannot be defined by the old shit that has already gone on before.
It is different shit.
What Slavin points out - admitting his own surprize at the revelation of it - is that television at its best is a mass event in real time. The future of television in that context - with all the new tech at hand - is very exciting.
The blending of gaming and information tech and the ubiquity of mobile devices is going to supplant the existing passive viewer paradigm of the old television industry and replace it with - who the fuck knows? You’ll read a lot of reports these days about how television is adapting to meet and succeed within the changes that are being wrought by the disruptive tech of the net. I consider most of that to be mere whistling in the dark by the old media. Yes, as I’ve mentioned before in this blog, there will always be a place for linear narrative within these emerging models - there will always be mass audience real-time events - but they will be so distorted by the emerging differences that it will be nigh impossible to compare them directly to anything that has gone before.
The old guard of the media industries are desperate eager to find a new business model that will ensure they maintain their assumed role of authority, power and profit over the exploitation of culture as product. The ones who will succeed are those who realize that everything changes and never has it been changing so quickly and so profoundly as it is these days. I’m sure previous generations though the same thing about their own times but Jesus H. Tap-Dancin’ Christ we’re living in a Buck Rogers future today folks! You think for a second that just because someone holds the purse strings they’re gonna stop this rampant cascade of human and technological evolution and innovation? Do you really think anyone is going to be able to find, let alone control, the reins of the net and be able to steer it back into a complacent feeding tube for a docile public? Do you really think the internet is going to end up being just like television?
I sure as shit don’t.
A lot of very powerful and aggressively motivated people want that and are prepared to do everything they can to ensure the outcome they desire. But it ain’t gonna happen. To mix a few metaphors: the dam has burst, the genie is out of the bottle, the horse is out of the barn, Elvis has left the building and that semi-apocalyptic vision of the King, brandishing a Djinn in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other whilst riding a horse acrest a wave that is bearing down upon us all not only gives me the shivers - it gives me hope.
It’s too late to go back - and we can’t force the future to be anything like the good ol’ days.
it just ain’t gonna happen.
I’m always fond of quoting Mark Twain who once said: “History doesn’t repeat itself - but it does rhyme.” The corollary to that is the future will not imitate the past - but it will change us.
Rheingold’s book The Virtual Community pushed me down the rabbit hole of online worlds back in the early ’90’s, got me into The Well, dragged my ass through Mosaic and onto the web and opened my head to the vast possibilities contained within these new worlds we were creating online.
His thoughts here are in keeping with some of my more vociferous rants in the earlier days of this blog and while his presentation in this video is perhaps less lively than his usual vlog postings - it was done for his students and not for broader entertainment value - the message is well worth digging into: Use it or lose it. - And use it wisely.
The freedoms inherent in the digital tools we have at hand are in danger of being oppressed - and ourselves with them - precisely because of the freedoms they grant and the ways in which we eagerly seize, use and abuse them. Having a clear sense of history will give us better means to navigate the path we find ourselves on and, hopefully, keep us from falling prey to the same traps which have defined this past century.
Alan MacFarlane’s Origins of English Individualism comes to mind when considering this - not just because it also has the word Origins in the title - in the way it presents how an old way of life gave way to an entirely new culture born out of the technological changes that loomed (pardon the pun) on the horizon of the industrial age. There’s another similar volume by a different author published around the same year that I cannot for the life of me remember the title of but which impressed me due to its inclusion of traveling theatre troupes along with the emergence of printed broadsides as a disruptive cultural influence. That was back in my Commedia dell’Arte days and I was always on the lookout for that sort of thing. But I digress -
Rheingold’s thing is worth watching - and Zaret’s book is worth reading - all the better to get a sense of where we’ve been, where we are and where we are likely heading. We do well to remember the words of Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself - but it does rhyme.”
