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kliuless (2)

“I’d had a career as a professional musician and what I started to see is that once we made information free, it wasn’t that we consigned all the big stars to the bread lines.” (They still had mega-concert tour profits.) “It was the middle-class people who were consigned to the bread lines. And that was a very large body of people. And all of a sudden there was this weekly ritual, sometimes even daily: ‘Oh, we need to organize a benefit because so and so who’d been a manager of this big studio that closed its doors has cancer and doesn’t have insurance. We need to raise money so he can have his operation.’ And I realized this was a hopeless, stupid design of society and that it was our fault. It really hit on a personal level—this isn’t working. And I think you can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point you just have to say there’s too much wrong with these experiments.” [more inside]
posted by philip-random on Jan 9, 2013 - 105 comments

SF author and mefite Charlie Stross speaks about video games in 20 years. [more inside]
posted by nushustu on May 18, 2009 - 80 comments

Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. An essay by Jaron Lanier.
posted by mr_crash_davis on Aug 15, 2006 - 70 comments

Jaron Lanier talks about philosophy, computer science and physics. Suppose poor old Shroedinger's Cat has survived all the quantum observation experiments but still has a taste for more brushes with death. We could oblige it by attaching the cat-killing box to our camera. So long as the camera can recognize an apple in front of it, the cat lives.
posted by kliuless on Nov 20, 2003 - 11 comments

21C Magazine Paul Miller (re-)launches an ambitious new magazine. Looks promising with such "Confirmed Regular Contributors" as Howard Bloom, Alex Burns, Erik Davis (yay!), Samuel Delaney, William Gibson, Jaron Lanier, Rudy Rucker, Douglas Rushkoff, R.U. Sirius, Bruce Sterling, and Margaret Wertheim :)
posted by kliuless on Sep 22, 2002 - 24 comments

Did you read 'One-Half of a Manifesto' by Jaron Lanier in the December Wired? (The original post is better because of the Reality Club.) I thought he was dead-on in his assessment of 'cybernetic totalism'. His argument takes some of the boogey (as in man) out of Bill Joy's neoapocalytic treatise. (Incidentally, this article also turned me onto EDGE.) (more inside)
posted by Sean Meade on Dec 16, 2000 - 11 comments

After reading the great discussion following mathowie's post on Dr. Dre, I was reminded of an article, "A Musician's Manifesto," from a while back found at http://www.musicisum.com/manifesto.shtml, but apparently musicisum.com no longer exists. The original NY Times Articles (1, 2) where I first read about the manifesto are down, but one of them is available here and here:

[A] more ambitious alternative: to devise an entirely new way of doing business. That is exactly what Lanier is doing. Recently, he drew up a five-point strategy, formed a musicians' collective called Musicisum with Kristen Stavola and signed up more than 45 artists to begin a noble experiment that involves the Internet, subscription fees and music filling stations.

Here is Jaron Lanier's home page, and he links to all those dead links above also. A mystery. I emailed Jaron; but did not hear back from him, anybody have some insight as to what happended to Musicisum?
posted by ericost on Apr 19, 2000 - 1 comment