From: "jeradonah" <jera at fastmail.ca> Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 13:35:01 -0400 (EDT)
On Wed, 23 Aug 2000 18:57:58 -0700 (PDT), Chuck Grimes
<cgrimes at tsoft.com> wrote:
>
>> libertarians have widely criticized the book, but its central
>> premise, that code is law, was what i was referring to in reaction
>> to your comment...
>
> I ended up buying both Lessig and Michael Perelman's book and am
> about sixity pages into the latter. I think Mike's book is
> probably better, or rather more suited to what I am looking for:
> Class Warfare in the Information Age.
>
> So far the basic idea of the book is that information on
> production or something I call skill and knowledge, has always
> been the commodity that capital wants from labor
not to start a holy war, but i fail to see that. seems to me that our educational system was designed to graduate semi-intelligent automatons, capable of doing routine tasks. henry ford did not want a thinker, he wanted a consumer. workers may have desired to see themselves as intelligent, but that is not what they were paid for. hell, the introduction of the personal computer took out whole swaths of middle management in the 1980s whose primary jobs appear to have been the pushing of information up one more level (something that computers can easily do)...
> so as to
> transform that information into production systems and products,
> or essentially steal it from the labor force. The advent of the
> computer and internet has essentially accelerated and extended
> this process, while reducing and depreciating the class that
> provides it.
without question, those without the ability to think for themselves and analyze their environment quickly and accurately seem to be left behind. but i don't see how this is a bad thing.
ac