"The Negro Motorist Green Book, 1949
“The Negro traveler's inconveniences,” writes Wendell P. Alston in The Negro Motorist Green Book for 1949, “are many and they are increasing because today so many more are traveling, individually and in groups. . . .
The GREEN BOOK with its list of hotels, boarding houses, restaurants, beauty shops, barber shops and various other services can most certainly help solve your travel problems. It was the idea of Victor H. Green, the publisher, in introducing the Green Book, to save the travelers of his race as many difficulties and embarrassments as possible.”
Click here to see the complete edition of The Negro Motorist Green Book in pdf format:
<http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Race/R_Casestudy/Negro_motorist_green_bk.htm>
(Part of the Henry Ford collection at UMich.)
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Dialogue between Bertram M. Niessen and Geert Lovink:
<http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/>
"GL: I am not a copyright expert nor an active Creative Commons evangelist. As a radical pragmatist I use Creative Commons as often as possible. My take on this issue has been to question the uncritical use of terms such as ‘free’ and ‘open’. We should no longer listen to (free) software experts in this regard as they are still in demand in terms of employment, worldwide, and have turned out to be bad advisers when it comes to organizing sustainable sources of income for designers, artists, musicians, writers and others in the ‘content’ business. The question whether computer programmers have the freedom to change code has been too long in the centre of attention. If we care about the so-called precarious creative workers we should shift our attention away from the professions that are (still) able to organize their own income (such as programmers and academics) and start to theorize the new digital labor conditions of the global creative classes and come up with viable alternatives. It is my firm belief that these workers, across the board, are losing out when they work for big contractors and institutions and are getting a. paid less and b. work on short contracts. In these times of ongoing financial crisis we can no longer afford to celebrate ‘free’ and ‘open’ as the default on the Web and pretend that it is everyone’s private business how they are going to make a living. We need to politicize this situation and not presume that ways of making an income is a private matter. The FLOSS and CC rhetoric has kept the dominance of the classic copyright economy in place too long. We need not to go into detail why their gurus keep on defending neo-liberal capitalism. It is not difficult to see that the free code practices and the intellectual property rights businesses have been tolerating each over the years. Pirate Bay and other places where users freely ‘share’ copyrighted material are at war with the interests of the Eleviers and Springers. Free software and creative commons never created confrontational situations—and that should make us think. As alternatives they have created their own modest niches but never created antagonistic situations. After 20-30 years it is time for the cybersubculture to publicly discuss these strategies. At the moment I see the as part of the problem, not part of the solution."
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_Hangmen Also Die_, Fritz Lang/Bert Brecht/has Eisler, 1943;
via Netflix:
<http://movies.netflix.com/Movie/Hangmen_Also_Die/60001105?trkid=496624>
"During the Nazi occupation, Czech resistance fighter Franticek Zvoboda (Brian Donlevy) does his part to defend his country by assassinating Nazi-installed dictator Reinhard Heydrich in this World War II thriller helmed by Fritz Lang. But after Zvoboda finds sanctuary with a fellow Czech patriot (Walter Brennan), the Gestapo threatens to murder 400 of Prague's residents if the killer refuses to step forward."
Given all the negative sentiment toward Germany these days, an interesting film to watch. Czech labor resists German dictatorship.