Facebook exists to make the world more open
Mark Zuckerberg in the Facebook IPO filing.
What a joke.
Kill Hollywood
That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.
How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?
SOPA Is Inevitable
More on what I was saying earlier…
Marco Arment has this exactly right. We may have beaten these variations of SOPA and PIPA, but the sad fact of that matter is that they — or something like them — will eventually pass.
Obviously, all things being equal, such bills should never pass. But all things aren’t equal. As with most things, this is actually all about money. The MPAA and the other content lobbies are going to continue to pump money into this until they get what they want.
And again, they will. Consider this: SOPA and PIPA came this close to passing with MPAA head Chris Assclown Dodd banned from direct lobbying. Why is he banned? Because there’s a law that requires politicians to be two years out of office before they can lobby.
Dodd vacated his U.S. Senate seat on January 3, 2011. In a year, he’ll be able lobby all he wants. He’ll be able to directly buy the support of all his former colleagues. He spent 36 years in Washington as both a Senator and Congressman. You think that doesn’t matter? He’s going to be the best lobbyist ever. Which is exactly why the MPAA picked him.
Arment’s hope that people stop supporting the MPAA by stopping watching films clearly isn’t going to happen. But the idea of supporting campaign finance reform to eliminate bullshit lobbying is a good one.
I don’t even know what I want to look at most days ending and beginning the day in this way. The first and last things are almost always the same sites. Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, turned to in small rotation in between whatever else I try to do. Waking up begins with wading with what has accumulated in feed at each of these electronic locations while I’ve been unconscious however long. Sometimes while I’m dreaming I seem them there too, reading or writing emails to people who may or may not exist inside that fold, status updates culled out of my head and slipped into me the same way they do when I’m awake, though drummed from somewhere in me instead of someone else. Maybe.
Why apps are not the future
Dave Winer speaks truth.
He may have coined the term “natural born blogger” but it applies to him more than just about anyone.
