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I dis­cov­ered a bit from Clay Shirky, talk­ing about how tele­vi­sion was the way post-griminess indus­trial soci­ety chose to cope with free time. Included was the bit that enough time is wasted watch­ing tele­vi­sion to pro­duce all of Wikipedia 2000 times over.

I’m cur­rently suf­fer­ing from putting my insom­nia to good use (so far I’ve installed Tracks), so I’ll take the time to post some ran­dom thoughts:

• I was bit­ten by April Fools twice today. The sec­ond time because I was too exhausted to remem­ber that it was April Fools.
• A life with­out hope is not wasted or a pity any more than a life with­out reli­gion is.
• A good friend of mine once told me that if you lis­ten to what peo­ple say care­fully, they will give them­selves away at some point. Like most wis­dom phrased in an open-ended way, I’ve seen lots of con­fir­ma­tion of this and lit­tle contradiction.
• I think a fair num­ber of peo­ple like to dom­i­nate oth­ers with their words. Being on the receiv­ing end of that kind of thing is really exhaust­ing. I think it’s fairly obvi­ously just peo­ple play­ing out their psy­chodra­mas in an envi­ron­ment where you can’t just club and be clubbed.
• State-granted monop­o­lies on cul­ture, art, and media in gen­eral sti­fle cre­ativ­ity, limit free­dom, and exist to pro­tect one power against another. In this soci­ety it’s almost always used to pro­tect the estab­lished power against the new one. Standard Lessig, now apply it to those orga­ni­za­tions we may oth­er­wise sup­port. That pinched-face dis­com­fort you are feel­ing is cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance between your stated pref­er­ences and your desire to defend your principles.

Stealing fromA mashup of Sadly, No! and Slashdot…

Cool lit­tle shot of back­ing up a DVD in Ubuntu via Thoggen.

I recently IM’d some­one who sounded inter­est­ing on an unnamed quiz/dating site, and was pleas­antly sur­prised to find some­one who made me feel dumb. Not that feel­ing dumb is good, just that it’s eas­ier to see the next plateau when there’s some­one there wav­ing at you.

Unfortunately, reach­ing that plateau involves track­ing down a par­tic­u­lar essay by Gayatri Spivak, pro­fes­sor of Post-colonial Studies at Columbia University. The essay itself is from 1988 1985, and it’s not on the web anywhere.

Which is the real mes­sage to pro­fes­sors every­where: if you want your writ­ing to be read by peo­ple other than your­self, your col­legues, and your grant com­mit­tees, please put them online, for free. Yes, Chomsky has a cadre of fan­boys to do such things for him (or at least, that’s my under­stand­ing), but he is also prac­tic­ing what he preaches regard­ing the respon­si­bil­i­ties of intel­lec­tu­als. He may have a cushier job than most aca­d­e­mics, but to my mind that sim­ply means that you should spend a few hours a week wrestling with a com­puter instead of, for exam­ple, a kiln or bag­gie of psy­clotrop­ics. Make web design/publishing your hobby until you get decent at it, then put your shit online so any­one with a net­work hookup or a lap­top can read it.

What I’ve man­aged to glean from reviews of Spivak tends to mir­ror my thoughts any­ways. As a bit of back­ground, I was intro­duced to rad­i­cal pol­i­tics through black nation­al­ism and white anti-racism, so what she’s quoted as say­ing regard­ing the essay doesn’t seem to be any­thing open for debate — par­tic­u­larly regard­ing those known within civil rights his­to­ries as “white lib­er­als,” and their inabil­ity to speak for any­one but them­selves. White peo­ple telling every­one else what they need to be doing, osten­si­bly for every­one else’s ben­e­fit. Where have we heard this bull­shit before? (Hint: It’s the same old racist “White Man’s Burden” that under­girded the whole global colo­nial enter­prise.) White rev­o­lu­tion­ists (love that term, Emma) can’t tell every­one else how to run their rev­o­lu­tion. Yeah, no shit.

But any­ways, with­out get­ting my hands on an actual copy of the damned essay, any read­ing I can come up with is just me rant­ing and rav­ing out of my ass, by turn, so to all you pro­fes­sors: put your stuff online so peo­ple like me can grok it, mmmkay?

Seriously, if you got into acad­e­mia for the money, you really fucked up some­where — prob­a­bly in think­ing that some­thing with zero repro­duc­tion cost can (or should) be commodified.