Libertarianism, anarchism and morality: discussion of Aaron Swartz at Crooked Timber.


Two years in the pen bunking with car thieves would wipe the smirk off his face. [update: I was right. Sadly he couldn't deal with even 6 months]

And a new tag: Futurism and Data Culture. I've added it to older posts as well.


"In 1955 , a man got an idea…"
Wired:"Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Believe In Privacy"

Zuckerberg

"When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'
"And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

"We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

"A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

Sun Microsystems

"You have zero privacy anyway," Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his company's new Jini technology.
"Get over it."

I said this years ago, and I'll say it again: downloading is theft. The fact that it's ubiquitous means models of distribution have to change, a decision based not on idealism but realism. But idealists call it "progress".

A commenter at CT

I wouldn’t steal a pair of pants. But if my computer could make free duplicates of pants I wouldn’t feel the least bit guilty about copying my friend’s pants and then passing along more copies to friends and strangers.

So if I spend 10 years of my life writing a novel, the difference between the expense of printing it and the ease of uploading changes my relation to it as the author.

None of this is a defense of endless copyright and the corporate dominance of information. But the answer is not the anarchism of a leaderless Borg.

Summer repeats: two on mash-ups.  Click through to read Ursula Le Guin on plagiarism.