subject: (Fwd) FC: Napster was only the beginning -- a rant from textz. posted: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 04:46:28 -0000
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Date sent: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 18:07:56 -0800
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From: Declan McCullagh <[email protected]>
Subject: FC: Napster was only the beginning -- a rant from textz.com
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From: [email protected]
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 10:10:54 +0100
To: [email protected]
Subject: napster was only the beginning. an introduction to http://textz.com
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http://textz.com (a.k.a. http://textwarez.com) has been launched on february
28 2001, 10:00 CET. please support our system and contribute textz and bookz
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napster was only the beginning. an introduction to http://textz.com [v0.5]
a spectre is haunting the corporate world -- the spectre of organized world-
wide file-sharing. mp3, to name the most common synonym for the becoming-
distributor of millions of former customers, has clearly shown that the
flows of digital data are much more driven by people and formats than they
are determined by legislation, ownership or the new global rules of the
corporate-political. napster has reverse-engineered the ideology of a whole
industry, and it has finally proven its total, complete and absolute
obsolescence. the transnational companies that are now trying to break it up
have started a war they will never be able to stop. there are going to be
thousands of napsters. http://textz.com is not even zero-point-five of them.
we are not the dot in dot-com, neither are we the minus in e-book. the
future of online publishing sits right next to your computer: it's a $50
scanner and a $50 printer, both connected to the internet. we are the & in
copy & paste, and plain ascii is still the format of our choice. it
shouldn't require a plug-in to read a book on the net, nor should it require
a credit card. the text industry is a paper tiger. along with the mass
erosion of their proprietary rights goes the vanishing of their digital
watermarks. packed today, cracked tomorrow. whatever electronic gadgets they
will come up with -- they are all going to be dead media on their very
release day. forget about your new kafka dvd. i already got it via sms.
this is not project gutenberg. it is neither about constituting a canonical
body of historical texts (by authors so classical that they've all been
watching the grass from below for almost a century of posthumous copyright),
nor is it about htmlifying freely available books into unreadable sub-
chapterized hyper-chunks. texts relate to texts by other means than a href.
just go to your local bookstore and find out yourself. the net is not a
rhizome, and a digital library should not be an interactive nirvana. the
conceptual poverty of today's post-academic, post-corporate public online
services -- and we haven't seen dot-museum yet -- is not and has never been
a desirable alternative to a future that will be controlled by the super-
pervasive data-streams of the upcoming military-entertainment complex. there
are still other options. nostalgia is slavery. stay home, read a book.
information does not want to be free. in fact it is absolutely free of will,
a constant flow of signs of lives which are permanently being turned into
commodities and transformed into commercial content. http://textz.com is not
part of the information business. they say there was a time when content was
king, but we have seen his head rolling. our week beats their year. ever
since we have been moving from content to discontent, collecting scripts and
viruses, writing programs and bots, dealing with textz as warez, as
executables -- something that is able to change your life. this is not
promotional material. facing the unified principles of information -- the
combined horror of global communication and so-called guerilla marketing --
there is no more need for media theory or cultural studies. the resistance
against corporate culture can itself no longer remain in the cultural
domain. you make a mistake if you see what we do as merely apolitical.
we are studying the coils of the serpent, watching the walk of the penguin,
mapping the moves of our wired enemies. intellectual, digital and biological
property -- cornerstones of the new regimes of control -- are the direct
result of organized corporate piracy. they are not only replacing such
obsolete notions as freedom, democracy, human rights and technological
progress. all these new forms of ownership are, in the first place, attempts
to expropriate people's work, data and bodies -- just as the they begin to
acquire, for the first time in history, the technical means to organize them
differently. today's global media and communication conglomerates are
mafias, and we shouldn't count on what's left of the national governments
when it comes to fighting back. "humanity won't be happy until the last
copyright holder is hung by the guts of the last patent lawyer." napster was
only the beginning. the nineties of the net are over. let's move on.
a.s.ambulanzen, berlin/germany, march 2001. no copyright http://textz.com
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