The English speaking Book industry centered in USA – “a coalition of the world’s largest book publishers including Cambridge University Press, Harper Collins, Elsevier and John Wiley & Sons” – has managed to shut down possibly the largest private book repository in the world with public access, containing among its 400.000 downloadable books enough copyright violation works to have a court judge warrent an order of closure.
The Publishers cheered. “It is a victory”, said Stephen M. Smith, President and CEO of John Wiley & Sons. “This action reflects our commitment to protecting secure, safe, and legitimate use of the Internet”.
Legitimate use of the Internet! Are they crazy? Or plain stupid!?
Their BS-spin is cooking up pretense agendas – as if the internet was a road and it had been taken over by robbers stifling progress for all and the way forward was to rid the road of robbers.
It’s quite the reverse, actually! The Publishers acting on behalf of everyone become the robbers, wanting to hold back natural evolution, and the road connects everyone with everyone.
The Internet is the World, brothers and sisters. The Internet is the world speaking to itself, and the powers that be are doing their damndest to stop the World from developing.
The world is not just using the Internet,
the World is being shaped by the ability of people to communicate instantaneously, and it is happening fast.
Yes, you are afraid, and naturally so:
Everything is verging towards a massive change – what doom sayers need call “a collapse of the old ways”. The natural response of government and real power is to try and stall the progress, to give businesses time to adjust – have the economic structure invent itself to retain a high motivational factor in order to keep the wheels turning, even if there is not much hope. Then war will step in, or famine, or natural disasters, or TV, or plain threats of loss of more jobs, or food (food is not quite an issue yet in the western world), something will come about, which will be aided, orchestered in the desired direction by the Powers that be, towards a retention of stability – by shifting the world’s attention to easy, understandable, physical occurances, and away from abstract change in the freedom of expressing needs and opinions.
Yes, yes, yes, you are right. Lack of cohesion IS setting in. And the fault is in communication – in your blatant disregard for what communicative desire IS:
We all create with our minds. Creation in a human being is a communication process adjusting inner needs and talents to outer needs and limitations. Creation means acknowledging both needs and change. Creating more ways to hang on to power and earn more money IS creation in the sense of the word, you could say. All creatures resist death, in any way possible, by shedding all factors of existence that present themselves as burdens.
Same with big business. Big, old mono-businesses have no momentum to be inventive players like all small businesses rushing to accommodate change, and begin the process of dieing, which to some is a horrible thing, while to others just the balance ever so slowly shifting towards an inner collapse. And in that process the old ones stand in the way of the creativity and devolopment of the rest.
Such refusal to roll over and die is very well, and even encouraging too. But when dinosaurs of the book industry refuse to change, refuse to invent technology and go first, refuse to accept other people doing it for them, and when they can have the power to turn the global network into a pet from their own fear, lazyness and lack of flexibility in a changing world, and when they present their refusal to neither die nor change by claiming moral superiority over the rest of the world, as in “our commitment to protecting secure, safe, and legitimate use of the Internet”, its time to
STOP THIS NONSENSE
There are many ways to affect change. People could be guided, but nobody powerful wishes to guide them. People could be consoled, but nobody powerful possess neither sufficient heart nor responsibility or means of consolation. The empowerment is coming from below instead. Call it “a revolution”, if you will, but just remember: A revolution is not always a succes. A revolution, a turning of the cards, can lose by succeding. It can die in the instant the troops (i.e. people) start poring in. And become mainstream, and nobody sees or notices it. And all the industries will rush to exploit its present potential of momentum.
The right word in this regard is evolution. And that just happens, no matter what. It counts the factors of every action, every opinion, every occurrence, every shift in the equilibrium. But what is inside this is freedom to shape the future from your own needs and regard for necessities, quality and essence. Except you are bound by law.
The book industry, along with all the other copyright moguls, have the law on their side. The law of ownership keeping the world economy and industry stable. They CAN win over the whole globe on the pretext of protecting stability.
IF that happens, they themselves will wish that they had been able to pull out of their abject refusal to step down and let flexible initiative take over. The consequences of the refusal to die of all the old World right-owership coalitions are that monitoring and privacy violations will see a marked increase in stress related deaths. Lowered life expectancy in the western world, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the arab world. A brief new flood of physical mail as a way of retaining privacy. Then illegal subnets. Then back to status quo. There is NO way of stifling communication and creation that has tasted the freedom of access to a bigger world. Only misery will follow from trying to stop individuals’ need for expansion into the minds of everyone else.
Ahead lies only total monitoring, or letting go. Demand for security converging with rising desire of privacy. We are seeing the tip of the iceberg, and flocks of anti-restriction memes will soon inhabit the space of “Free Will”, if nothing is done about this habit of trying to control the masses.
We are the masses. The Earth. The 99%.
Un-controling the masses has never been done, I think. Letting go of the leash, after the fact of control. Not in any age. So, history serves as no indicator of un-controlled masses, other in a very limited fashion – in times of war and civil disturbances.
The future in that regard is a blank slate, and the economy and thus personal empowement springing from capitalism demand it stay relatively blank for the masses. And the only way to that goal is through control. Control on a global scale makes the future predictable, for the select few to benefit from, and everyone else to fall in line behind. On a moral high ground to protect the world from itself…
Is this better than the freedom to fail?
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Inspirative source: http://torrentfreak.com/book-publishers-shut-down-library-nu-and-ifile-it-120215/