Sister Alicia’s social experiments
led to Mancuso's merriments
his dance hall full of sharing
all from a nun caring
to break the rules of her superior.

The birth of disco
later napster
the parties were an explosion
not necesarily ignition,
but parallel process
like two needles chasing parallel grooves
like record needles made by samuri sword makers
It's all about chances and evolution
Leary, the johnny appleseed of deeper consciousness
beyond hierarchy and other mind trips
took a risk (like Sister Alicia),
throwing the party without permission

pirate radio, computer hackers
like the luddites in reverse
using technology to speed change
and maybe chaos that seems to create fear
At the current price of canvas
and competing for gallery walls
grafitti artists
return to cavepainting roots
seems to go back, but really forward.

"new ways to share ideas that advance the common
good, private interests move in to stop this from happening"
ironic that steve jobs learned from Xerox and the open sharing spirit
of Homebrew Computer Club
and in order to create the world's biggest company
built a closed system
can you say bye-bye flash?
 but far from reviled, he's loved
so not always is the innovator punished
and not always can the old ways win
and the Internet still remains somewhat free
but
who killed the electric car
once again, Japanese manufacturing appears
this time not needles but a prius

from essay
Xerox PARC
influenced by flower power.
Some were hippies
themselves. According to John Markoff, author of What the Dormouse
Said: How 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer,
“There was this very interesting parallel between the way they worked
with psychedelics—which was about augmenting human potential—
and the works of a man named Doug Engelbart [a pioneer of humancomputer
interaction, who, among other things, invented the mouse],
who was attempting to build a machine that he thought would augment
the human mind.”

Fred Moore. Moore saw money as the root of all problems
Altair
Homebrew Computer Club

then 1980's
cocaine
selfish but maybe practical?
studio 54
and Bill Gates
 the creator of BASIC asks to be paid
and to his side
how can you do much without being paid - i mean unless you have a rich uncle that you forgot about, we have to pay the rent
"software was widely considered private property by the early 1980s."

(or if not a rich uncle, Jimmy Wales,  made a fortune as an options and futures trader in Chicago, and then decided to pursue his passion.

WHAT IF BILL GATES NEVER WROTE THAT LETTER? WHAT WOULD THE WORK LOOK LIKE?

Then cocaine is out, and it's escstasy
and we "Transcend and include" we remix disco to make house
bringign back ghost of Mancuso
the rave is invented
"Huge crowds
united for the night to thumb their noses at the authorities and imagine
a different world."
but this may be moving to a new drug called Ayuhuasca
shamanic
natural
and unlike cocaine thus far doesn't cut out the middle man (shaman)
and this may be fueling the future of burning man

Rave was flower power’s wild grandchild
escstasy makes community without commitment
shared values and aesthetics do emerge
but no expecations

UNIX and Linux
and Tim
Berners-Lee invents HTML
and doesn't worry about getting paid for it, doesn't even cross his mind how to do that

but Stallman would say don't cry for him
 , “Free software is a
matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should
think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer.’”*

if you think about free as freedom and a right/privielge and chance to share
vs.
free as in "no free lunch" practical mindset

Firefox the latest vote
in an election that never ends
and this bring us
my friends
to the merging of the evolution of the computer, and conciousness
we are computers
the mind is constantly polling its sub routines
before each output
many calculations.
The Web “the future is opensource everything.”
wikipedia works, take that Bill Gates!
Wikipedia = 5.3 million
articles, 100+ languages. Every
day thousands of new entries are added, and thousands more are
edited and improved

Jimmy Wales is to encyclopedias what David Mancuso is to DJing.
Both Mancuso and Wales changed the game, because they saw new
possibilities in the idea of sharing.

"It’s not about nonprofit versus profit—it’s about proprietary
versus closed. If I share my code, I’ll share it under a license that says
you can use it for anything you like, but you have to share your
changes as well. And that provides a level playing field—we’re all
agreeing to share our knowledge. It struck me that this kind of social
structure and social agreement could be used much broader than just
software. One of the things that came to mind was an encyclopedia.”

Like Linux founder Linus Torvalds, Wales recognized that our
future could be open-source everything. “Some of the general principles
apply almost anywhere. In many cases, businesses are losing out
on opportunities because of their information-hoarding mind-set. They
don’t realize that their customers know more than they do.”
Wildly successful Net-based businesses such as eBay, Amazon, and
MySpace are based on the strength of their communities and the content
their users contribute for free. The technology these businesses are
based on—the code that powers the Net—is also free. If there was a
huge cost involved with adding pages to the Internet, or using it, none
of these businesses would be able to function in the same way.
Many businesses that give content away for free are making money
and growing fast. The open-source Linux software set up by Linus Torvalds
as a hobby in 1991 is today used by Google, in Motorola cell
phones, TiVos, and BMWs. Many companies, including Intel and IBM,
have programmers working full-time developing new free software for
Linux, as they obey the laws of Linux and put back some of what they
take out. By distributing their core software for free, Linux now powers
forty-three million personal computers worldwide. By selling customized
software that runs on top of the free open-source software, it’s
predicted the market for Linux products will be worth $35 billion by
2008. To paraphrase Stewart Brand, author and founder of the Whole
Earth Catalog, information wants to be free, but customized information
wants to be really expensive. Linux is a great example of a company
that follows this dictum.

Harvard Business School published a report in 2006 that
surveyed a range of businesses and concluded that introducing problems
to outsiders was the best way to find effective solutions. A European
Union report released in 2007 specifically endorsed open-source
software, claiming that in “almost all” cases, long-term costs could be
reduced by switching from proprietary software to open-source systems
such as Linux.

Systems based on sharing expand the way information is used, and
in doing so expand the market for that information. As this dawns on
more of us, the question will not be “How do we stop this happening,”
but “How do we facilitate it?” The challenge of successful social networks
in the twenty-first century will be figuring out how to create a
dedicated dance floor like the one at the Loft, and how to keep people
contributing to open-source projects and social networks, devoting
their time and expertise the way they did at the Homebrew Computer
Club. To better understand how this might work, let us look at an
example of an industry that decided to fight a new system based on
sharing, when it should have been adapting to it.

in the name of empowering artists, the record companies were the paraistes/pirates
marketing machines
and a bottle neck
now music is more free

Having the backing of a major label with the marketing muscle to
put you on every record store shelf and TV channel used to be the only
way to the top, but who needs the majors in a world where people
watch music videos online and record store chains are going out of
business? File-sharing has created a new middle class in music. The
musicians in this middle class might not go platinum, but they are making
a living.

Many artists welcomed the changes file-sharing brought because
they felt the same way as Jeff. A study by the Pew Internet & American
Life Project asked three thousand musicians and songwriters their
views on file-sharing in April 2004. A total of 35 percent of those
polled said that file-sharing was not necessarily bad, because it helped
market and distribute their work; 35 percent said file-sharing had actually
boosted their reputations. Only 23 percent of those asked agreed
that file-sharing was harmful; 83 percent said they had deliberately put
free samples of their music online.

"Suing consumers trying to figure out a new
distribution system makes about as much sense as only allowing the
DJs who promote your records to collect them between 2:00 p.m. and
4:00 p.m."

you can't fight progress
funny how it was the luddite workers
and then became music companies
movie companies
and Bill Gates


A 2004 Harvard study that matched the hard
data on downloading against the actual market performance of the
songs and albums being downloaded found that any negative effect
downloading has on CD sales was “statistically indistinguishable from
zero.” The study concluded that file-sharing was actually boosting CD
sales for the top 25 percent of albums that had more than six hundred
thousand sales.

i don't believe that, but that's the thing - you can'at fight progress

yes "When an industry responds to a Pirate’s Dilemma by
fighting rather than competing, it runs the risk of missing out on new
opportunities."

but no guarantee. might make more sense for the artist or company to sue and be selfisha nd paranoid- but there are larger forces at work here -- evolution

“Crazy” by the group Gnarls Barkley hit the number-one spot
in the UK from downloads. as the hit goes: “You really think you’re in control? “Well, I think
you’re crazy.”

in other words,l;arger forces

John Kennedy, summed up the music industry’s new position on the Pirate’s
Dilemma it faced: “At long last the threat has become the opportunity.”
The music industry found out
the hard way that resistance is futile.

Instead of fighting change, his computer company saw a way to
“embrace it in a heartbeat,” legitimize it, and became one of the most
powerful players in the music business in a few short years. Apple beat
the majors for the same reason the Homebrew Computer Club beat
Xerox back in the 1970s: they were the first to treat the threat as an
opportunity. The trick is not to fight, but to be the first to market.

we near a world full of open-source 3-D
printers could be terrifying to some, but a step ahead for progress
bill gates was wrong, people find the time, and doing what they love, often figure out some way to make  a  living.
but why not artists?

“I realized that it ought to be possible to design a 3-D printing
machine that could make almost all its own parts,” Bowyer explains.
“You’d have to put the machine together yourself. But it would effectively
be reproducing, albeit with help from a person. . . . The best definition
of biology is that it’s the study of things that reproduce. My
proposed machine would reproduce, and so a lot of biological laws
would automatically apply to it, the most obvious one being Darwin’s
law of evolution.”

Open-source culture has the potential to turn the 3-D printer, or any
other object or idea, into a living organism.

leading schools are embracing this - open source and free university courses

blogging excites kids to learn and express themselves  - no more barriers just cuz you are young
sharing of science data

Seti@home - shared computing

By sharing
disk space like it was Loft space, distributed computer networks
are faster than our most powerful supercomputers with enough PCs in
the chain. Stanford University had signed up fifteen thousand PlayStation
3 users by April 2007, who donated their console’s spare processing
power to biological research. This distributed computing network
of PlayStation 3s is faster than the fastest supercomputer in the world.

Lawunderground.
org is attempting to democratize the legal process, using
law students and volunteer lawyers to pool their knowledge and provide
free access to legal information in the form of a wiki, which generates
legal advice based on the questions you ask it.

Systems creating free substitutes
for all kinds of basic processes and services that used to be based on
sharing are things you had to pay for, as advice from doctors, lawyers,
and teachers becomes as downloadable as music. The customized
information that lawyers, doctors, and teachers give will still be expensive;
this isn’t about undermining their ability to earn money. What’s
actually being undermined is the very idea of why we work.


As Pekka Himanen observes in The
Hacker Ethic, capitalism is based on the notion that it is our duty to
work.


We live in a world that has been governed by competition for several
millennia, but increasingly competition has to compete with cooperation.
Work-centeredness was long ago replaced with self-centeredness,
but this drive to express ourselves is also forging a new community
spirit. As Linus Torvalds writes in The Hacker Ethic, “The reason that
Linux hackers do something is that they find it to be very interesting
and they like to share this interesting thing with others. Suddenly you
both get entertainment from the fact you are doing something interesting,
and you get the social part.” Our work ethic is more of a play ethic.

CAN ARTISTS TURN THINGS THAT USED TO BE "WORK" INTO PLAY? BRINGING ART EXPERIENCES INTO THE OFFICE AND THE FACTORY (VR?)


Many think that open-source models are about giving everything away
and not making any money. While this is true of some, it’s a choice.
They are about sharing information, but it is possible to manage what
you share so it’s a win-win situation for you and others.

BILL GATES GROWN UP?