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Geekery Today: posts from May 29th, 2001
Globalization Protests Become Video Game at Orgy of Commercial Capitalism (posted 29 May 2001)
At the E3 in Los Angeles, one of the world’s biggest orgies of commercial capitalism, Rockstar Games unveiled an upcoming game loosely premised on the violent elements of the anti-WTO mass protests in Seattle [Indymedia Newswire]. Sometimes the world is just so damn surreal that it defies commentary….
The Battle for a Grassroots Internet Experience (posted 29 May 2001)
Jon Katz writes an interesting article on the battle between corporate power and individual creativity on the Internet in Technology And The Fast Food Nation [Slashdot]. I am a bit tired of all these apocalyptic Woe is me, AOHell will take us over
articles when so much of the Internet experience can be and is being defined by brilliant and revolutionary bottom-up forums like, well, Slashdot, and the Independent Media Centers, and FreeSpeech Internet Television, and Blogger, and even the user-community aspects of big corporate sites like Amazon.com and Salon.com. This is a battle that we can easily win, if we keep up the kind of decentralized networks that these tools allow and promote them. Of more concern, of course, is the continuing amalgamation and control of Internet access points through corproate mergers and sweetheart telecom legislation. What can we start doing to reverse this? We need to start looking towards microfinance to keep small entrepreneurs afloat. We also need to look to building guerilla network infrastructures such as are already beginning to crop up, and making these infrastructures accessible to people other than hardcore geeks. And, of course, we need to work at the legislative level to oppose the continuing progress of corporate privilege and corporate power over telecommunications. The best part about these bottom-up Internet technologies is that they may provide a key component of creating the political and economic networks we need to make all this a reality.
