Archive: Author: wade tillett

they keep them there, behind stone walls. 

they lock the doors at night. 

sunlight is not allowed. 

there are small boxes that monitor the humidity. 

the walls are white and smooth without shadows. 

the floors are silent. 

the people are small and huddle and whisper. 

do not touch. 

there are no clocks.

what time is it?

you have to be really important to have your work displayed here. 

anyone can come and look. 

they will kill you if you try to take one. 

that’s ok. 

i don’t want one anyway.

“Why must we drop the chalupa?”
-quote from Jason Sheets

The end of mass media (a media strategy).

You can almost picture the special programs – full blowout news coverage on every channel, computer animated intros with lots of dramatic whooshing and crashing sounds and various icons flying at you, interviews with all the famous movie stars and politicians and sports celebrities. And for the end, a sappy long good bye with music by celine dione or someone and various snippets of slow motion crying and laughing. (It always did amaze me how they could have one of these cheesy videos incorporating even the last game of the world series made and played as soon as the last game is over.)

Everyone can cry and lament the passing of this great shared mass culture. Advertisers will come on and explain how worried they are and how they just dont think they will make any money any more but since it is for the best, they will go along with it. The genX’ers will all whine about the good ol’ days when they could all get together with anyone and have something in common with them – their amazed love and awe of Seinfeld. Religious leaders will talk about the death of absolute truth and social responsibility and how great newspapers were.

Think about it – if one celebrities death (a princess or former football star) is worth so many billions of dollars to the media industry, think how many trillions they could make by staging their own death. (Coca-cola already did this trick of staging its own death when it introduced the ‘new’ coke. They got advertising beyond what you could pay for through the news, word of mouth, special programs. All by pretending to be idiots. All by removing their product. And then the triumphant return of coca-cola ‘classic’. One of the greatest media scams ever.)

Where has the media gone? It used to cost X dollars to get a certain candy eaten by ET, or a certain car driven by James Bond, certain toys with the happy meal. It costs more to get jeans with an advertisement sewn into them than jeans without an advertisement sen into them.

But now it is time for a customizable environment. The user designs the product. The user chooses the media s/he wants to experience. Now it is about the possibilities that are offered by a certain company. One stop shopping allows more possibilities because of the inter-relations within. Now we can get insurance from our bank. (A big thanks to congress for clearing the way for mega-corporations like we’ve never seen before so that the United States can expand its international monopoly of money transactions through the sale of stocks, insurance, loans, etc. through goliath banks with more money than almost any countries GNP) Through product personalization we have the ability to purchase our self. The media absorbs into the interface. The media plays dead. The media pretends to be transparent, neutral, a tool merely, better yet, an aid.

“The search engines can occupy such a central position only because they are assumed to be neutral in a certain way. Offering a service as opposed to content, they appear as neutral mediators. Is the mediator in fact neutral?… the less resistance offered by the access system, the more neutral, transparent, and weightless it seems, and the more plausible appears the suspicion that it cannot be a question of the nature of a thing, but of a naturalization strategy.” (Harmut Winkler, Subject: Search Engines: Metamedia on the Internet?, Readme!

* Demographic Summary
* AltaVista users are an upscale and educated audience who make more purchases online.
* -86% of all users have attended college, the highest of any search engine.
* -AltaVista households have an average income of $64,000
AltaVista User Profile

“GoTo.com ranks query responses by how much a company is willing to pay to have its listing posted, with the highest placement going to the highest bidder.” GoTo Searches With a Capitalist Engine (Wired)

The media creates an entire world of media and does not call it media. Everyone is invited to join in the utopic world of language and entertainment where ‘anything goes’. So long as it does not end in action outside of this language world of non-action. Media sets up a sandbox. Like they did for “the rebel” with James Dean. Like they did for the political acitivists of the 60’s. Like they did for all of art. By absorbing the Dadaists the media could relegate them to a desried and limited area. Activism that is held as the highest and most ethical form of political discourse in the media world is non-action activism because this can be limited and absorbed into a media world which has no risk. Free speech – not free action. This is the founding of the capitalistic political subversion. By fooling oppositions into operating within the limits of a harmless virtual world whose physical power structure increases upon usage – no matter the content. (The media runs its own ‘oppositional’ news programs on whether the media is spending too much time on the presidential scandal story.)

“To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle through the mirror of crisis, negativity, and antipower: this is the only solution-alibi of every power, of every instititution attempting to break the vicious circle of its irresposibility and of its fundamental nonexistence, of its already seen and of its already dead.” (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 19)

can we produce a framework for life, for chance, as with the sheet in the wind.  provide criteria which will take life w/ chance.  where upon we let go + give it a life of its own.  free of our control.  (spark memory and let it burn)  we set up a context which will incorporate life + chance.  something which self perpetuates + renews + changes.  like a sheet in the wind.  random lights on a skyscraper.  curtains in the breeze.  rain on the roof.  sand on a black floor.  headlights on the walls.  neighbors voices laughing in the gangway.  the smell of coffee.  or bacon.  crickets.  shadows.  drafts and breezes.  the clang of pots and pans.  soft voices in the morning.  the creak of a house.  the squeak of a floor.  a refrigerator hum.  the clanging of the gate.  a door as it opens, squeak and draft and light and sound, into the dark womb of morning.  a clock ticking.  a car starting.  leaves blowing on their branches.  thunderstorms are rolling in.  lightning in the distance.  dimly lit blue clouds against a bottomless night.  stars.  lots of stars.  and the moon.  and moon shadows of course.  queen anne’s lace.  dandelions.  the ripple of a creek.  sunspots, the yellow and then the purple ones.  big puffy clouds floating across a sky too big to imagine.  the smell of the crook of your arm on a warm summer day.  bullfrogs.  bats.  briars.  detours.  and the long way home.  fields so thick they cut your arms.  the horizon.  fog.  the muffled tv of the neighbors.  and the blue light it casts on the walls.  windows from the road.  yellow boxes of light casting yellow boxes of light into the darkness.  a snow covered ground brighter than the sky.  a warm burning of whisky in your blood.  voices in the distance.  are they coming or going?  a dog’s bark.  a rooster’s crow.  a door slams.  the garbage truck in the alley.  languages i can’t understand.  fresh bread, moist and warm.  calloused skin and blisters.  water in the ears.  goose bumps.  footsteps.  the call of newspaper boys.  street musicians, guitar soundless to the incoming train.  train whistles.  the ticking of a turn signal.  wheels on a wet road.  the city lights sprawled beneath you.  sunrise.  sunset.  curvy mountain roads.  gravel roads.  alleys.  snowflakes as big as a quarter.  steam on car windows.  frost patterns on kitchen windows.  water.  reflections.  the view through a crack.  taking off your glasses.  camping.  the smell of smoke.  driving without a destination….
 

“the basic idea behind cage’s music is the lack of authorial intention.  yet each musician should play her or his part with the greatest attention to each and every detail, carefully and calmly and with extreme control, that is, as perfectly as possible.  during the entire piece absolute precision has to be the guiding principle.  each musician has to play her or his part as if he or she were alone and without allowing oneself to be pushed aside by the others or drawn to them.  our goal is to allow the tone-to-be-played to play itself and not to let ourselves be influenced by what the others are doing.  one should never intentionally try to bring things into harmony with the others.  / one should have the impression that one is no longer playing the music, but instead that one is being played by the music.  it is only then (when your own intentions do not dominate the music) that the music can make itself known.  / do not inflate anything intentionally, and do not reduce anything intentionally.  do not interpret.  do not phrase.  do not play figures.  avoid banalities and everything you have ‘at your fingertips’ and what might remind someone of something.  add a detail only when it wants to add itself automatically; otherwise refrain from adding it.  / when we play ‘thirteen’ in two different versions, we do so full of uncertainty, for it may be that the music will be sensitive to or wounded by any and all intentionality, or even that it will unmask our intention and stand in the way of its realization.  and numerous questions will have to remain unanswered.  if we are bold enough to carry out this experiment, then let it be an experiment in the spirit of john cage, an action without a predictable outcome, suspenseful and certainly revealing.  these versions cannot be the final ones.  they are attempts at finding a position with respect to the tones, as when one tries out various sitting positions while learning to meditate (and no one learns the art of meditation in a short time).  the versions are snapshots along a path with a goal that remains beyond our view, at least beyond our direct field of vision.  / it was john cage, almost more than anyone else, who stimulated me to think about what music might mean for our life and what it might enable us to do if only we were able and ready to let it be free.  if one cannot view emptiness and nothingness from the zen perspective, if one confuses selflessness with a weakness of the self, then one will not understand john cage.  and this may mean the failure of his project: our lack of independence, our indolence, our lack of courage to engage in a creative act in independent fashion – we, as musicians and listeners.  i wish us such courage.”  (manfred reichert, liner notes to ‘thirteen’ by john cage)

this is what i want to make clear, i believe that we are still in the same situation. that this progress is only a step in an evolutionary process.

evo·lu·tion
1 : one of a set of prescribed movements
2 a : a process of change in a certain direction : UNFOLDING b : the action or an instance of forming and giving something off : EMISSION c (1) : a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state : GROWTH (2) : a process of gradual and relatively peaceful social, political, and economic advance d : something evolved
3 : the process of working out or developing
4 a : the historical development of a biological group (as a race or species) : PHYLOGENY b : a theory that the various types of animals and plants have their origin in other preexisting types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations
5 : the extraction of a mathematical root
6 : a process in which the whole universe is a progression of interrelated phenomena (m-w.com)

evolution as the constant changing present. not evolution as better, but evolution as change. there is no past to recover. there is no future to inhabit. there is only a perpetually changing present. evolution illustrates an idea of a journey which can never be recovered, which can only move forward in a continuous and unpredictable line. evolution indicates a continuous rediscovery and remaking of the present which is based on a continuation, mutation, selection. but always a remoulding of the present.

what if we were to become light? what if we could journey beyond the limit of the speed of light? we would only be able to see ourselves in the past. light years away, with an immense telescope, we could watch our self re-enter the womb. we could watch humans re-fold back into their origins. we could finally see the beginning. but we could not change any of it. that is, it already happened. the distance with which we would have to remove our selves from the world in order to see the past is the same distance we remove our selves in time from the past. we could see the past, perhaps we could even communicate it back to our fellow humans still on earth in the present. and as we approached and passed the speed of light everyone else would see our bodies fade. to them it might appear we were headed into the future. but this is the irony of light speed travel…. we can only see the past, and we can never change it. somewhere out there is a fading (expanding) reflection of earth’s past. the same as the pasts of the stars we see at night which only serve to inform our present. despite our desire to escape our present, it is an impossibility. it is only within the present that we can act. the future can never be attained or viewed because it does not exist. we continually make our present. any past which exists is only the fading and expanding reflection of present. any past we see is from another point in space, a point at a distance beyond light. relativity does not remove us from a simultaneous present. it only assures us of an individual perception of pasts based on our particular point in space. action requires a physical connection. this physical connection is the only way in which we can remove the space of the past because we can only act in the present. we can only act beyond light speed, in an immediate manner. it is the distance between my coffee mug and my hand which prevents it from being moved. more importantly, it is the distance in time between my coffeee mug and my hand which prevents it from being moved. the only way i know the coffee mug is from its past, from its reflection. the space between my hand and the coffee mug makes my perception of it relative. i do not perceive the coffee mug in real time, but rather i perceive its past at the speed of light. thus the reality of images is the reality of the past. an individual perception of pasts based on your viewing point in space. the only way in which we can change our present is to be immediately involved in it by the destruction of space, by overcoming space, by a physical force, by touching. only touching eliminates the time deficit implied by space which prevents us from action because we can only change our present. we can only act in our present. even our perception is not in real-time. it is limited to the quickness of our nerves and synapses and our brain’s processing speed. but our action is in real time. when we add up all the time lost between our nerve endings and the distance between our hand and the coffee cup, the time deficit is very small. that is our uncertainty is small because the fading and expansion of the object are barely removed from us in space-time. but they are removed from us. which is what ensures the fact that we can not change them – distance. the uncertainty expands with space and time. uncertainty is a result of our removal from the present through light perception. uncertainty is large a microscopic scale because the removal from the present becomes obvious. the distance between microscopic things is so relatively large that the implications of removal from the present beome obvious. on a macroscopic scale, dealing with the speed of light and light-years of distance, this removal from the present also becomes obvious. whether or not we over come the speed of light, nothing can overcome distance. the only way we will ever be able to influence the present is through the elimination of space, through the elimination of the past, throught the elimination of difference. through direct physical contact with the present. this may come in the form of the emission of sound or light waves, but the reception of these waves can never overcome the distance. the emission of light waves is a physical process of creation. the reception of light waves follows the same effect as sound waves. relativity could be classified as the doppler effect of light. there is still a removal in distance and in time which prevents us from changing the present. what if we were to become light? how would we change our present? it is only our physical bodies which allow us to change the present, to overcome the time-deficit of space and have real consequence within our present. it is only within the present, it is only by overcoming distance through direct physical action which we can create. if we could move faster than the speed of light we could change our perception of the present through various filters which allow us to filter out, beyond the speed of light, those light waves of the past which we do not wish to see. but this does not change the reality which created these light waves. if we were to reach out and touch something which we had filtered out or added in, it would be different than our perception. what we touch is always different from our perception. beyond the speed of light would be the same as virtual reality, we can add or filter out what we wish by removing our self from the present. by delaying our present. this is the future of personalization and customization, a present delayed to accommodate processor speed. reality will be presented through goggles and headsets which delay reality long enough to change its perception. reality is recorded, processed (changed and filtered) and played to the viewer. the delay in reality is only limited to the processor speed. the faster the processor speed, the more ‘real’ the perception of reality can be. but remember it is only the perception of reality which is being changed. when we reach out to touch these things, only then can we truly change them. only then can we create. only through the capturing of the physical brain signal can input be established. we can change the methods and the speeds, but the only way to overcome the past, the only way to change our present is to be directly and physically involved. to overcome difference. to overcome space. to overcome distance. to overcome time. this is how we create our world, through our direct physical interactions. through our consumptions and excrements. through our chemical and atomic reactions. through our breath and through our footsteps.

when nothing is in its place, lies disorder
where in the desired place there is nothing, lies order.
(brecht qtd. in baudrillard. simulacra and simulation 155)
what is beyond a.c.? what is beyond l.a.? what is beyond our ability to design? (forgive me, for i am twenty-five and just now catching up to the modern era.) what is beyond our body? what is beyond death? is not our life a life after death? is not what we inhabit beyond the physical? it was not a coincidence that l.a. was the last city for the west to inhabit. (new york, chicago, i am clinging to the last reality of modernism. the reality not yet achieved. the difference between design and reality.) l.a. is a reality designed. an oasis in the desert that i have never been to; which i never need to go to because now i live beyond l.a. right here in my own perfect reality. a series of utopias connected. what is beyond utopia? what is this life i live now? is this a new question? or have we been in the same predicament since we realized we could alter reality. take shelter from the rain? build shelter from the rain. the apocalypse is past. armageddon happened. we are in the new millennium. a new heaven and earth. one that we can pass our hand through. walk through walls. what can i claim as my own? what can i claim as real? what is beyond my control? how much longer? (and there are children starving within a few blocks) there are thousands of choices… every one is my design. every one is your design. and these designs are what manifest…. an uneven division. the ascension was only for a few.  utopia is not for everyone.  utopia excludes.  only a few go to heaven.  what is beyond god? now we are god… an unconscious god – hardly. we are semiconscious gods. surrounded by our gluttony. unable to realize the consequences of our most minute decision. we are blind gods equipped with a mirror. we live a life beyond death. we never meant to attain…
this is how the west was won.  by parcelling it out.  by division.  by grids and maps and deeds.  by ownership.  subjection through objectification.  modernism was a breech.  the realization of our own present.  the realization of our own desire.  the ascension to self-consciousness attained.  utopia achieved.  the west conquered.  la is the last city.  if you can call la a city.  la is a mirage.  a city of angels and twinkling lights viewed from above.  la is beyond compression, beyond urban, beyond ascension.  the last city fading.  la is the link between city and non-city.  between urban place and non-place urban realm.  between history and eternity.  between reality and design.  la is beyond utopia.  la is disappearance.  we cling to reality.  we hold on to it as we know it is slipping.  it is already gone.  rome, venice, barcelona, paris, new york, chicago…  these are the cities of the past.  they exist only as caricatures of themselves.  they continually relive a reality they once had.  they are historical revisionist.  they are preservationist.  they have mayors that like wrought iron fences.  disneyfication isn’t the evil here.  disnefication is inevitable.  disneyfication is the direct result of reality lost.  of our absolute control.  the only reality we have now is reality preserved.  canned reality.  as matt martin suggested last night, reality is a commodity.  something to be marketed, bought and sold.  something which we attempt to preserve in order to preserve a reality.  even if it is not our own; we somehow feel that by preserving the innocent tribe in a bubble we have preserved a reality.  we preserve naivety and innocence.  we preserve factories and the L and the canals and the skyscrapers and nature.  we preserve difference.  we preserve the void.  and now that we have cut the cord.  we float free without bodies.  we circulate without cities.  we inhabit non-space.  we exist in a realm beyond belief.  there are still people inhabiting earth, the excluded wandering the realm of exclusion, and i can walk amongst them if i so choose.  and this choice means i can never be real.
“if it is nihilistic to be obsessed by the mode of disappearance, and no longer by the mode of production, then i am a nihilist.”  (baudrillard, simulacra and simulation, 162)
http://members.uss.net/~kkim/daily/west.txt

Saturday, Anne and I wandered into Graceland Cemetery.  Well, I shouldn’t really say we wandered into it.  We saw it from above as we were riding the L back from waiting out the rain at the beach.  So we got off at the next stop and walked back up to it.  Surrounding the entire cemetery is an eight foot brick wall with six lines of angled barbed wire on top.  So we had to walk a long ways to get to the actual entrance.  And it makes you wonder if all the barbed wire is really necessary, it’s only tombstones right?  After a few blocks we found the entrance on the corner, complete with security guards.  We walked right in.  The first thing that hits you is how quiet it is.  You can see all the buildings around you, out above the wall and tombstones, between the trees.  And there are quite a few pigeons eating the mulberries that have fallen onto the new black asphalt and not been smashed into a slippery goo by a tire yet.  But you can not really hear any of the hustle and bustle of the outside world.  And then you notice how immaculate this place is.  The grass cut to the perfection of a golf course, the trees are perfect shapes, the blacktop doesn’t have a crack, I think they might have even paid extra to have the sky made a little bluer here on the inside.  And, of course, you notice the tombstones.  How they are arranged, their size and wear and tear.  “So and so born at such and such a date, died at such and such a date.”  That is the most of them, then there are the larger ones which attempt a short biography in stone.
“Where the dead wander the dead,” I said.  I couldn’t help but feel that I was on my way out at least.  This is not the space of circulation.  This is not the space in-between.  This is a space carved and guarded.  This is a space given over to death, to the objectification of life, to life without life.  Yow would think there would be a lot more pigeons than what there were with all the trees.  But then pigeons are parasites, and mulberries don’t compare to french fries.  It is difficult to be a parasite on death, for pigeons at least.  Humans and maggots and human maggots have built up a whole economy around it.  This space has been forcibly removed from life.  There is no chance here.  This is absolute control.
We walked for a long time.  I don’t know how long, maybe ten minutes, maybe ten days.  It is kind of like going to the beach, it doesn’t matter how long you are there, it feels the same when you leave.  You have opened your self to a space where time doesn’t pass.  The security guard drove by and told us they closed at 4:30.  We said ok and as she started to drive off we realized we had no idea what time it was.  “4:22” she said.  We started heading back.  At least we thought we were.  Then I started to doubt it.  It didn’t seem to be getting any more familiar.  I’m not going to say I panicked but I started to get worried.  Could you think of a worse fate than being trapped in here.  Alive but wandering the dead, you start to question how much life you could really bring to the space of the dead.  (Luckily the police came by and pointed us in the right direction, which was the direction opposite which we were walking.)  All these monuments… aren’t monuments supposed to be how we remember directions?  I think that is what some planner or somebody said anyway.  Directions didn’t matter.  Because this is a solid not a space.  There is no room for life between, for movement and circulation.  The void has been held back, quarantined.  There are no connections, there is only one large piece of stone.  And you enter it and you are stuck in time.  How can the present affect you?  The sky is only a backdrop.  A blue piece of stone.

so here we are.  half-conscious slaves to images we have constructed of ourselves.  disciples to a god created in the image of man.  stone-cutters for the tower of babel constructed of language, a network of information.  pilots within an effectively limitless objectification (effectively because we are still limited to objectification, to communication while absent from the present). 

what would a history of objectification include?  we must trace a line through the history of language, of art, of building, of god.  objectification can not be removed from its context.  (if only foucault wrote a book on the history of god)  i think that if we traced a history of god, we would find it to be a history of our objectification.  since god represents our highest ideals of our selves, since god is an image of our self, our greatest objectification.  perhaps primitive images of gods involved golden cows and wooden statues and what not, but this was to limit god, to physically objectify him.  the physical forced god into a limit which was external to language and change.  god became dynamic, imbedded into and available through language.  as we freed god from his body, we simultaneously freed our selves from our body, to give our selves a soul.  god was proposed to be beyond limits, beyond objectification, yet god remained a series of exclusions based on a binary language.  god was good not evil.  perhaps beyond this god became more inclusive.  a part of everything.  one god, one world, one soul.  without definition, without existence, the void.  god evolves simultaneously with language, since god is based on language.  god becomes language.  and it is this point that the tower of babel is struck down by fission.  it is at the point when man becomes god, through his self-objectification – language.  and it is only by destroying language that we can move off the tower of babel.  the completion of the modern project was the equivalent of the last stone on the tower of babel.  the completion of self-objectification.  our selves made into a giant stone image.  beyond the tower of babel?  babel.  beyond an all-inclusive image?  beyond something that means everything?  beyond definition?  beyond belief?  beyond meaning?  sitting atop the tower of babel, we have conquered it all, constructed a language which includes everything and is therefore meaningless, a language which is equivalent in meaning to babel.  the final stone of babel gave the realization that there was no more.  every stone had been included and there was no more.  every word meant every thing.  upon completion of the circle there is no circle.  this is the realization of our ascent to god.  that we have included god in our selves and therefore there is no god.  that we have included meaning in our language in our language and therefore it has no meaning.  we climbed above the clouds, beyond our ascent, beyond our ability for meaning, beyond our ability for belief.  only a beautiful blue void at the top of a meaningless tower.  (it is only a labyrinth if you are looking for a way out.)

“There is no more hope for meaning.  And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal.  But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself….  This is where seduction begins.”  (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation 164)

the internet has the potential to give equal opportunity, to allow the free distribution of information, to employ a slef-guided education.  the internet has the potential to allow the small guys to compete with the big guys, to identify niche markets and communities organized around similar philosophies.  to allow all access to information. and eliminate the need for tremendous overhead.   with only a few dollars every person can have access to the entire world of information.  the internet changes everything.
what a load of bullshit.  remember a few years ago when there were new books every day saying all of these exact same things by re-arranging the words?  they were books published… by publishing companies in soft cover.  everyone loves to explain the internet as this glorious land of the free, all the while getting a couple bucks from a publishing company for hawking another book.
meet the new boss, same as the old boss.  what i love to hear about is amazon.com.  people talk about this like they are so innovative.  they seem to miss the fact that amazon.com is the very antithesis of what the internet should be.  amazon is the preservation of various middle men which supposedly no longer need to exist.  why do we need amazon to sell us the books when we could buy them directly from the publisher?  why do we need the publisher to sell us books, or even make books for that matter, when we could see them directly at the author’s web site?
why?  because good luck finding that author’s web site.  the power of the internet lies within the ability to navigate its information.
“Most of the top sites are portal sites, which gather and classify
information for their users. Ms Gorman says: “Only a few companies,
such as Yahoo, can do this. They are big companies with deep pockets,
the mass marketers.”
However, as more pages are published, being seen on the Web is
becoming more difficult. Even the best search engines catalogue only
16% of the Web’s 800 million pages.
The World Wide Web, widely thought of as an endless myriad of choice,
appears to be shrinking.
It is not shrinking in the total number of Web sites being published –
that is rising faster than ever – but in the number of Web sites surfers
visit and how long they spend there.   (Web is shrinking)
the reason that amazon.com has been so well received is that it provides a power transition.  as consumers it allows us to remain within the comfortable and limited mass media culture we have grown up in.  we can still take joy in the fact that someone else we know will know how cool we are when we read that book because they’ve at least heard of it.  we have become dependent on the filters of mass media to tell us what to read, in the case of search engines, to find us what to read.  people go to cnn.com for news because that is the company that they got their news from before.  they are ‘trustworthy’.  of course, they programmed that trust.  now we have the possibility of an inversion of mass media.  instead of millions of silent listeners sitting around a radio, we have millions of writers speaking to no listeners.  in the end, most people just want what everybody else has.  this is how mass production works – producing masses.
the big question of e-commerce is the ability to control.  you often hear television and radio stations saying how the internet is a porn filled hate filled place and that laws must be enacted, censorship must take place.  but the larger control question is apparent in amazon.com, they could upload all those books and let everyone download them, but how would they control the distribution?  how would they make money and preserve the middle man (them)?  what is to stop someone from downloading it for $5.00 and then posting it for free on their web site?  well, there are numerous devices which can be employed.  adobe is coming out with a text locker that will put a lock on the file until the fee has been paid, similar to software keys.  so we have another middle man – adobe.  over the next couple months you can expect to hear an all out media blitz for fatbrain.com where anyone can post their writing and receive royalties.  that is, 50% of their royalties.  the other 50% goes to fatbrain.com.  for doing what?  anyone can post their own internet site and submit it to the search engines right?  why do we need fatbrain.com?  so that they can bring the users and control to you.  from a consumer standpoint, it is the same as going to wal-mart.  from a writer’s standpoint it is the same as renting a space in the mall.  you could set up shop in the back of your truck in the parking lot by the intersection… but who is going to find you?
so this is the internet now… that great bastion of free speech becomes inundated and slowed to a crawl with innumerous ads pointing to gargantuan sites and indexes where we can download no longer free information guarded under lock and key and pay someone 50% for doing nothing.
on the plus side, guaranteed there will be a crack for the key….