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innerspaceboy · 07-09-2016, 06:38 PM

For the past few months, I've been immersed in literature, documentary films, essays, and manifestoes centering on privacy rights in the digital age and on copyright reform in light of the post-scarcity digital economy.

What follows is mostly for my archival reference, a summary of the best media I've found relating to these topics. Each title is hyperlinked to reference information on the work or to the work itself, as are links to the bibliographies of the authors who published them.

While many members of the forum may find this exquisitely uninteresting, my aim is that a user might find something here of value, which either supports or challenges his/her ideas about the digital economy. Perhaps this archive will introduce them to a work which inspires or enlightens them, whether to cryptographic security measures or to a heightened awareness of the need for legal reform to reflect this technological revolution. If even one person is influenced by this entry, then it has served its purpose.

REFERENCE MATERIALS AND OTHER INFORMATION RESOURCES

Books discussing Copyright Reform, Free Culture, and the Digital Economy as it Pertains to Media:

Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity by Lawrence Lessig

Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi

Moral Panics - Copyright Wars by William Patry

How to Fix Copyright by William Patry

The New Media Monopoly: A Completely Revised and Updated Edition by Ben H. Bagdikian

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

The Piracy Crusade: How the Music Industry's War on Sharing Destroys Markets and Erodes Civil Liberties by Aram Sinnreich

Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source by David M. Berry

Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century by Alex Sayf Cummings

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens CreativitybySiva Vaidhyanathan

The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) by Siva Vaidhyanathan

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop Itby Jonathan L. Zittrain

The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalismby Matt Mason

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Futureby Cory Doctorow

The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mindby James Boyle

Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industryby Gareth Murphy

The Anarchist in the Library by Siva Vaidhyanathan

On Consumer Culture and Propaganda:

Propaganda by Edward Bernays

Media Control, Second Edition: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda by Noam Chomsky

The Essential Chomsky (New Press Essential) by Noam Chomsky

Consumed - How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults & Swallow Citizens Wholeby Benjamin R. Barber

Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond

Planned Obsolescenceby Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Republic, Lost: Version 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig

and (R)evolution: A Journal of 21st Century Thought by The Anarchists of Chicago (no record of this zine on the web - refer to physical copy)

Related documentaries, literature, and subjects for further exploration:

I journeyed further down the rabbit hole this evening, compiling a roster of related documentaries, lit, talks, and articles discussing our technological future.

The list of documentaries included several anti-capitalist features, each cautioning the viewer about the inevitable economic brick wall to which the globalized world is speeding. Films such as:

HUMAN RESOURCES: Social Engineering In The 20th Century
The Power Principle
ZEITGEIST 2: Addendum - the followup to the original film by: Peter Joseph w/ focus on money, corruption, scandals & Jacque Fresco / The Venus Project.
The multi-award-winning feature, Four Horsemen which lifts the lid on how the world really works
Will Work For Free - a documentary by Sam Vallely on the subject of technological unemployment
and Owned and Operated - a mosaic of the world through the lens of the internet. Showing our lives as consumers, under the thumbs of privileged individuals and their methods of control

There is also a documentary on the similar Burning Man culture titled, Gifting It: A Burning Embrace of Gift Economy (2002). View the trailer here.

As I work my way through these films I've been jotting down key concepts:

Anarchist communism (also known as anarcho-communism, free communism, libertarian communism, and communist anarchism
antimarketism (societies altogether abandoning currency and markets, instead opting for alternatives like gift economies)
post-scarcity economics
Copyleft
Kopimism
Access to Knowledge Movement
Sharing Economy
The Virtual Revolution
Open Access
Mutual Aid
Moral Economy
the Free Culture Movement
Open Culture and Remix Culture
the Open Content Project
Creative Commons
Read-Write Culture
Free Music Philosophy
The Commons
Free Content (the New Commons)
File-Sharing (a consumer gift system)
Post-scarcity economy - Digital Abundance
Information Society / Knowledge Economy
decentralism
and The Venus Project (discussed in Zeitgeist 2)

and unavoidably, Marxism and anarcho-communism keep surfacing as closely-related subjects.

Related Literature:

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-brainers Will Rule the Future
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971)

One of the definitive starting points for these areas of politics and economics are the writings of the intellectual and political activist, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky identifies as a libertarian socialist and a sympathizer of anarcho-syndicalism.

Wikipedia offers a summary of his political positions here.

And this article cites several core texts of decentralism. Among them are:

Kirkpatrick Sale’s Human Scale
Herbert Agar’s Land of the Free (1935)
Leopold Kohr - The Breakdown of Nations (1957)
E.F. “Fritz” Schumacher - Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973)
Wilhelm Röpke - A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market (1958)
Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave (1980)
Robert Nisbet - The Quest for Community (1953)
Peter Kropotkin- Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899)
Gilbert K. Chesterton - What’s Wrong with the World (1910)
Gilbert K. Chesterton - Outline of Sanity (1926)
Allan Carlson’s Third Ways (2007) is a lively account of Chesterbellocian distributism
Henry Calvert Simons’ trenchant essay “A Political Credo” remains a classic
Michael Shuman’s Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in the Global Age (2000)
Gar Alperovitz - America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy (2005) - a sweeping analysis of what’s wrong with modern-day America

Digital Rights Publications:

John Perry Barlow’s 1990 article at EFF.org - Crime and Puzzlement
QuestionCopyright.org
FreeCulture.org
OpenMedia.ca
The Open Rights Group (UK)
2600: The Hacker Quarterly
WIRED.com
Information Wants to be Free: Intellectual Property and the Mythologies of Control (written by R. Polk Wagner and published by the University of PA)

Crypto-Anarchism / Cypherpunks:

I've just received an internet privacy milestone artifact in the post. I'd spent the last week delving into the politics of crypto-anarchism and the cypherpunks. (The "crypto" does not refer to a covert political position as it does in the term, "crypto-fascism", but instead refers to politics concerned with privacy in the digital age.)

Pictured below is the second EVER issue of WIRED, published in May of 1993. The masked gents holding the flag on the cover are the early cypherpunks, including the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and fathers of Bitcoin.

Their core philosophy back in 1993 was that government can never be trusted to protect civilian privacy on the internet and that it was up to private citizens to develop technology to protect it.

John Perry Barlow is among those featured - the man who published A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996. (The archival record album of which I featured on my member journal.)

These men had incredible foresight of that which has come to pass in the 20 years since the issue's publication!

For more on the subject, read the free eBook, Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World by Jeffrey Tucker.

For more on privacy measures you can implement to make your surfing more secure, visit the Crypto Party Guide and review their Handbook.

And here is an excellent guide to securing your browser.

Thank you.