interview with john perry barlow

reason magazine has an interview with the eff's john perry barlow that i found interesting. it's about copyright, libertarianism, politics, media, etc. it touches many of the same themes as the alan moore interview i linked to earlier, so if you enjoyed that, take a look at this one as well.

The way most people get paid for work done with their minds is on that basis. Lawyers, doctors, and architects don’t work for royalties, and they’re doing fine. Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.

Trying to own intellectual products and creating an economy of scarcity around them as we do with physical objects is very harmful to the development of culture and the ability to speak freely, and a very important principle not talked about much, which is the right to know. I think we have a right to know. It shouldn’t be something we have to purchase.
[...]
But by virtue of our abdication, a very authoritarian, assertive form of government has taken over. And oddly enough, it is doing so in the guise of libertarianism to a certain extent. Most of the people in the think tanks behind the Bush administration’s current policies are libertarians, or certainly free marketeers. We’ve got two distinct strains of libertarianism, and the hippie-mystic strain is not engaging in politics, and the Ayn Rand strain is basically dismantling government in a way that is giving complete open field running to multinational corporatism.
[...]
You now have two distinct ways of gathering information beyond what you yourself can experience. One of them is less a medium than an environment -- the Internet -- with a huge multiplicity of points of view, lots of different ways to find out what’s going on in the world. Lots of people are tuned to that, and a million points of view have bloomed. It creates a cacophony of viewpoints that doesn’t have any political coherence at all, a beautiful melee, but it doesn’t have the capacity to create large blocs of belief.

The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.

personally, i've given up on libertarianism. the vast majority of people like being lied to and given milk in little cardboard containers with bendy-straws and being told that it's nap time. that's why i'm supporting morgan freeman and the redemopublicratican party, which runs on the following platform: "and of course, when elected, the redemopublicratican party promises a boot stomping the face of every american for eternity. that is our solemn vow." (read the whole series over on pinkerton's blog...pretty funny.)

regards,
absentee-ballot jesus