The ad supported model on the internet and TV is far more expensive for the users. For example it allows inflation of the worthless products by creating a value disconnected from the utility of a product (AKA a religious experience). At the same time the model disrupts the value and the payments for the creative output of the creative class and concentrates the centralized wealth around the media servers and transmitters. The free is ultimately impoverishing.
September 2011
I read somewhere last week, among the Facebook rants on Reddit, I think: “If you don’t pay for a product, you are a product”. You are being sold. It also must include all ad supported media like the good old TV, generally MSM, certainly Google and the majority of the Internet. The tremendous influence on the design, the content and even the “spirit” is obvious. It doesn’t mean that everything that is free makes the consumer himself a product. Naturally the exchange of ideas is the most primal form of human interaction. Yet when the presumed “free” exchange is deliberately staged and “orchestrated”, it turns an actor into a product. It’s a rather different ballgame. I shun being a product as much as possible.
Egon Schiele, The Bridge, 1913. Private collection, New York City
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We don’t need no thoughts control. ►click to continue
A simple, on the surface, but extremely elaborate in style and thinking, dense in ideas podcast from John Gray. ►click to continue
Just because I feel like it. The first video is a dancing “na nah” chick next to Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, the site of the tent city and the birthplace of the new Israeli revolution. Great vibe. ►click to continue
The Earliest Photograph of Karl Marx, 1861. Marx is 43 years old.
Please read the first part of the Communist Manifesto (or listen to the 40 min recording of the chapter Bourgeois and Proletarians) and tell me what do you disagree with? It’s a challenge. The first part is relevant because there Marx describes the history and his astonishing vision for the developed capitalism. Where he erred was in the anticipation of how the collapse of the bourgeoisie will come about (as John Gray so eloquently narrated). It is shockingly prophetic, all the way to the current globalization. Karl Marx wrote it 1848 when he was only 30 years-old, more than 150 years ago. Here is a taste: ►click to continue
John Gray delivers a seminal BBC talk about the evolution of capitalism by substituting the the bourgeois with the middle-class (delivered on Friday, Sept. 2, 2011): ►click to continue
A Lost Alcoholic
by Ben Atlas on 09.30.2011.9:05am · 0 comments
I have this idea for a novel. A recovering alcoholic, struggling with his addiction, finds himself stranded in a tribe inhabited by people who metabolize alcohol like a decaf coffee for example. So this alcoholic is surrounded by people who are constantly, recreationally drinking with no buzz or aftereffects. They like the taste, so they say. He is torn between destroying himself with drinking or not being able to relate to a single human being in his core, fundamental experience. His incessant dream is to share a drink. Naturally a metaphor… What would be your choice?