For Posterity

Michael writes a weblog. Sometimes quick snippets. Sometimes long stories with substantial amounts of stuff to say. A different way of seeing the world. Sometimes uncomfortable, but always interesting to read. [*]

Once I asked him how he keeps his writing, where he collects his observations and stories for posterity. He told me how he archives his stuff, how the software he uses generates files containing all his previous posts.

Then he added, In the end of course, nothing survives.

Posterity is indeed a relative thing, I agreed. And I told him about a photograph that hangs on my wall.

I have a black and white photograph of my grandfather and his father and mother and siblings. It was taken in about 1908. My grandfather's father's father was a soldier in the Civil War. He and his father and his father are buried in a cemetery in a town where I spend time in the summer. That's posterity enough for me, I said.

I'd consider it a win if 94 years from now my son's children can read my rambling just as I look at that picture today, if they can visit my words just as I visit the cemetery.

Lovely definition of a win, Michael said.

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[*] http://www.oblivio.com
1:23:26 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

Centralized Control

Adam Engst at MacTidBITS has a great piece on CSS and DMCA and the evolving world in which we have less and less control over how we individually use the information we've bought.

In the end, Professor Gillespie argues that the true power of the DMCA is not so much related to its effect on copyright but these ways it weaves established organizations like large manufacturing corporations, research universities, and media conglomerates into what Professor Gillespie calls a regime of arrangement.

In otherwords: constraints on the use of information to ensure that the big boys at the center run the show and that there is no (legal) challenge to them from the fringes. Engst goes on to point out that recent trends are otherwise, suggesting that this effort to consolidate control is not coincidental but rather a direct reflection of the gradual erosion of central control in general:

If there's one theme we take into the 21st century, it's decentralization, and you can see it everywhere. The PC overtaking the mainframe, Napster changing the face of music distribution despite the recording industry's best efforts, DeCSS causing the movie studios conniptions, Linux successfully challenging the mighty Microsoft's server operating systems, even the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - all are examples of the power of decentralization and the ever-increasing clash between these forces of decentralization and the centralized power structures that control everything about our world.

And they've got the law on their sides -- because they buy the boys who pass the laws.

12:26:58 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []