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[Michael]

The Oil of the 21st Century
Perspectives on Intellectual Property
http://www.oil21.org

"Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century" - this quote by Mark Getty, chairman of Getty Images, one of the world's largest Intellectual Proprietors, offers a unique perspective on the current conflicts around copyrights, patents and trademarks. Not only does it open up the complete panorama of conceptual confusion that surrounds this relatively new and rather hallucinatory form of property - it must also be understood as a direct declaration of war.

The "War Against Piracy" - a preventive, permanent and increasingly panic-driven battle that defies the traditional logic of warfare - is only one of the many strange and contradictory crusades that currently take place at the new frontier of Intellectual Property. Under the banner of the "Information Society", a cartel of corporate knowledge distributors struggle to maintain their exclusive right to the exploitation and commodification of the informational resources of the world. With their campaign for "Digital Rights Management", the copyright industries attempt to simultaneously outlaw the Universal Computer, revoke the Internet and suspend the fundamental laws of information. Under the pretext of the "Creative Commons", an emerging middle class of Intellectual Proprietors fights an uphill battle against the new and increasingly popular forms of networked production that threaten the regimes of individual authorship and legal control. And as it envisions itself drilling for "the oil of the 21st century", the venture capital that fuels the quest for properties yet undiscovered has no choice but to extend the battlefield even further, far beyond the realm of the immaterial, deep into the world of machines, the human body, and the biosphere.

But while Intellectual Property struggles to conquer our hearts and minds, ideas still improve, and technology participates in the improvement. On all fronts, the enormous effort towards expropriation and privatization of public property is met with a strange kind of almost automatic resistance. If piracy - the spontaneously organized, massively distributed and not necessarily noble reappropriation and redistribution of the Commons - seems necessary today, then because technological progress implies it.

Technological progress - from the Printing Press to the BitTorrent protocol - is what essentially drives cultural development and social change, what makes it possible to share ideas, embrace expressions, improve inventions and correct the works of the past. Human history is the history of copying, and the entirely defensive and desperate attempt to stall its advancement by the means of Intellectual Property - the proposition to ressurect the dead as rights holders and turn the living into their licensees - only indicates how profoundly recent advancements in copying technology, the adaptability and scalability they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, are about to change the order of things. What lies at the core of the conflict is the emergence of new modes of subjectivation that escape the globally dominant mode of production. The spectre that is haunting Intellectual Proprietors world-wide is no longer just the much-lamented "death of the author", but the becoming-producer and becoming-distributor of the capitalist consumer.

The world has irrevocably entered the age of digital reproduction, and it is time to revisit the questions that Walter Benjamin raised in the light of photography and film: how to reaffirm the positive potential and promise that lies in today’s means of reproduction, how to refuse the artificial scarcity that is being created as an attempt to contain the uncontrolled circulation of cultural commodities, how to resist the rhetoric of warfare that only articulates the discrepancy between the wealth of technical possibilites and the poverty of their use, and how to renew the people's legitimate claim to copy, to be copied, and to change property relations.

In order to deconstruct - and to develop radically different perspectives on - the "oil of the 21st century", there is an urgent need for approaches that provide fewer answers and more questions, produce less opinion and more curiosity. The coils of the serpent are even more complex than the burrows of the molehill, and the task is to trace, with the same bewilderement that befell Franz Kafka at the advent of the modern juridical bureaucracies, the monstruous, absurd and often outright hilarious legal procedures and protocols of the Intellectual Property Era.

[Michael]

This one came from Jana's thread on thoughtforms, and is indeed outstanding:

[Jana]

William McDonough, Queen Rania and Van Jones are Global-thinkers.
I am collecting a list of these visionaries. Perhaps I will call them World Visionaries. If you have any more people in mind for my list, please tell me. Geoff Lawton with his greening the desert is on the list too.

[Michael]

OMG!    I hate to do this to ya, but here's some lists:

http://www.shiftinaction.com/luminary_links
http://integralvisioning.org/article.php?story=aa-translucent

I'll see if I can narrow it down a bit...

[Jana]

Hey did you do all that work Michael, huge!  thanks I will plow thru your lists...I am looking for a particular blend of inspiration, innovation and oration...and ...ie: clear.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=22FquY2ujMw  —Van Jones, the green economy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nm2LDrhm5Q  —Mosaic, Iran Sanctions
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yrpu8-JBaY  —Charlie Rose, Future of Tech

RAM is apparently doing two WKSs in Boulder next year, I got his new intimacy book, looks good.

You want to look out for John Doerr also, not enough of him out there tho so you noetic people need to do an interview with him for youtube!

www.apolloalliance.org/  —Three million new jobs~freedom from oil. The Green Jobs Act of 2007--training low income American workers for high-skilled jobs in the new clean energy economy.
http://greenforall.org/ —help build a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty…working to bring “green collar” jobs to urban areas.
www.stepitup2007.org/  —Hub for climate change action and legislation action: calling for 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, and a Green Jobs Now mobilizing our society to help fix homes and businesses so those targets can be met.

[Michael]

Hey did you do all that work Michael, huge!  thanks I will plow thru your lists...I am looking for a particular blend of inspiration, innovation and oration...and ...ie: clear.

Yup, that was me.  I also wrote/compiled/edited all the internal links, which are bio pages for each of the 160+ "luminaries"  in the 1st list.  That's one of my favorite jobs at IONS btw...

Many of them are less than optimal, and some seem to carry a slimy agenda of one sort or another, but all are visionaries, and are striving to implement a shift in the zeitgeist.  I'll try to help sort some cream off the top of that puddle.

The thing is, that we are demonstratively now living in exponential times, to use the cliche, (Terrence McKenna would no doubt be gratified), with information, and its purveyors growing exponentially.  Thus the need for more and better meta-filters of information, such as media-maps. 

I am trying to both learn about, and stay abreast of meta-filtering techniques and softwares, at the same time as learn about, and stay abreast of the people, sub-cultures and communities rising and falling, ebbing and flowing, and ever accelerating in this oh-so-strange time and place we live in.  Video, and the now arising video web-tools seems to be about the best way to do that at this point, simply due to the "information quality-quantity/time ratio", with meta-filter tools to find the best/most relevant video and supporting documentation. 

I see myself moving deeper into this maelstrom in the future...   


Thanks for the latest Van Jones links...he's most definitely someone to keep front and center on your radar screen.  (as an aside, I just posted one from him on the new free-short video site that I admin for IONS, which will go live Tues or Wed this week, called "It's not too late".  www.oneminuteshift.com  )

Thanks for the heads up on John Doerr.  I see him in the TED roster, and will take note.  And thanks for the Charlie Rose conversation,  - very interesting...

[Jana]

Yes World Visioneering is a certain type of thinking that that both sees the stickiness of the problem, is not pessimistic or optimistic, but can still see steps on how to proceed, within the exponential complexity of the problemocrasy...and automatically sees that the problem is the solution! Without overt slimey agendas, such as look at me, an't I grand, I got to the top of the shitpile first, jump on my bandwagon, you "should" be doing this, cash, credit card or blowjobs.

Looks like Charlie Rose might have an interview with William McDonough but can't find a working link

Keep em coming fast and swift...I got the feeling we have just scratched the surface, just think of all those brainiacs who are so buried in the vaults of academia we may never reach them through the dust. More orgs like Bioneers, Noetic and Ted will flush them all out.

Awesome bunch of work you did there

[Michael]

Thanks Jana! 

Problemocracy eh?    Sounds about right...

Speaking of media maps, this has got to be the lazor blade of the cutting edge, (at least for now  )  It get's really interesting after the first 1/2...


http://universe.daylife.com

[Jana]

Very cool videos Michael.
Found some real-newz sites:


AH Oh you might want to take a look at this article on GM crops and honey.
http://worldvisionportal.org/wvpforum/viewtopic.php?p=1627

http://worldvisionportal.org/WVPforum/portal.php  —Cool Forum
www.iamthewitness.com/  —Mother Load of Real News
www.question911.com/

http://worldvisionportal.org/wvpforum/viewtopic.php?p=1752#1752  —Nucs across America-Hopefully this was Cheneys last wad.

[Nickeson]

Jana,
Just what are you taking these days?
I click on your link to the "Mother Lode of Real News" and get things like:

The people who promote Global Warming are not "Liberals", "Greens", or "Environmentalists". They are Zionist Jews, and they are trying to use Global Warming to manipulate us and make money, as Hufschmid explains here:

Or are you pulling our electronic legs?

SN

[Jana]

t is the best source of global metanews I found so far to try and figure what is going on, I didn't see the Global Warming comment, but any thinking person would automatically see that the author was both uninformed and antizionist, and move on, it doesn't discount from other information on the site...stuff you don't hear about thru other media. I found that thru worldvisionportal...listened to a goodish talk, however I am not convinced the zionists/Israel are running the show...I think it more a complex mix of individual corrupt entities that have a economically motivated life of their own. It is newz to me that the zionists "are" the leaders of the Masionry.
The bombs across america is the most significant event of 2007, but it barely raised a peep.
http://worldvisionportal.org/wvpforum/viewtopic.php?p=1752#1752  —Hopefully this was Cheneys last wad.
Don't read my posts if you value your sanity. We have all just scratched the surface of the scab on the devils back.
Apparently the Arabs are starting to "own" the US.

[Nickeson]

Jana,
Are we on the same page? I click on that link and see only raging anti-semitic screeds with no news at all. Now that might be only my perspective on the matter. If there is any real news on that site then my perspective is a little skewed and I must face the fact that I spent 15 years of my life as an investigative journalist totally in vain.
SN

[jimtzu]

steven... i clicked on the last link and all i saw was the story about the nukes on the plane.  nothing inflammatory, no diatribes.  i tried it a couple times.   

[Michael]

I think Steven was referring to this one:  www.iamthewitness.com , which is quite yucky in its antisemitism.  But it did yield a couple of interesting vids for me, in a fairly quick perusal, by C-Span of a David Ray Griffith speech, and an Alex Jones speech, both of which links I lost, so you have to findem for yerself if yer interested.

BTW, I spent a long night last, viewing the latest (for me) 911 vid, 911 Mysteries, which was very impressive indeed.  I might post the Google link, or you can probably look it up if you haven't seen it yet and are the least bit interested...  they make the best case yet on the demolition aspect of the crime.  Sent me on another merry link chase long into the night... 

[Nickeson]

Tzu,
If you click on the "iamthewitness" site, the one to which I first referred:

www.iamthewitness.com/  —Mother Load of Real News

you find something different than just the nuke story. There is a nonfunctional link on this site to a story about lost nukes in America which I assume is the same as the Dave Lindorf piece. But that link is the last in a long list of links to various sites that are headlined to be evidence of such things as Israel being the mastermind behind Turkish foreign policy, that the international Jewish conspiracy was behind the assassination of all US presidents etc.