[FYI] (Fwd) FC: Napster was only the beginning -- a rant from textz.

["Axel H Horns" <horns@ipjur.com>]

------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent:      	Wed, 14 Mar 2001 18:07:56 -0800
To:             	politech@politechbot.com
From:           	Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Subject:        	FC: Napster was only the beginning -- a rant from textz.com
Copies to:      	textz@textz.com
Send reply to:  	declan@well.com


**********

From: textz@textz.com
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 10:10:54 +0100
To: textz@textz.com
Subject: napster was only the beginning. an introduction to
http://textz.com

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   http://textz.com (a.k.a. http://textwarez.com) has been launched on
   february 28 2001, 10:00 CET. please support our system and
   contribute textz and bookz
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   napster was only the beginning. an introduction to http://textz.com
   [v0.5]

   a spectre is haunting the corporate world -- the spectre of
   organized world- wide file-sharing. mp3, to name the most common
   synonym for the becoming- distributor of millions of former
   customers, has clearly shown that the flows of digital data are
   much more driven by people and formats than they are determined by
   legislation, ownership or the new global rules of the
   corporate-political. napster has reverse-engineered the ideology of
   a whole industry, and it has finally proven its total, complete and
   absolute obsolescence. the transnational companies that are now
   trying to break it up have started a war they will never be able to
   stop. there are going to be thousands of napsters. http://textz.com
   is not even zero-point-five of them.

   we are not the dot in dot-com, neither are we the minus in e-book.
   the future of online publishing sits right next to your computer:
   it's a $50 scanner and a $50 printer, both connected to the
   internet. we are the & in copy & paste, and plain ascii is  still
   the format of our choice. it shouldn't require a plug-in to read a
   book on the net, nor should it require a credit card. the text
   industry is a paper tiger. along with the mass erosion of their
   proprietary rights goes the vanishing of their digital watermarks.
   packed today, cracked tomorrow. whatever electronic gadgets they
   will come up with -- they are all going to be dead media on their
   very release day. forget about your new kafka dvd. i already got it
   via sms.

   this is not project gutenberg. it is neither about constituting a
   canonical body of historical texts (by authors so classical that
   they've all been watching the grass from below for almost a century
   of posthumous copyright), nor is it about htmlifying freely
   available books into unreadable sub- chapterized hyper-chunks.
   texts relate to texts by other means than a href. just go to your
   local bookstore and find out yourself. the net is not a rhizome,
   and a digital library should not be an interactive nirvana. the
   conceptual poverty of today's post-academic, post-corporate public
   online services -- and we haven't seen dot-museum yet -- is not and
   has never been a desirable alternative to a future that will be
   controlled by the super- pervasive data-streams of the upcoming
   military-entertainment complex. there are still other options.
   nostalgia is slavery. stay home, read a book.

   information does not want to be free. in fact it is absolutely free
   of will, a constant flow of signs of lives which are permanently
   being turned into commodities and transformed into commercial
   content. http://textz.com is not part of the information business.
   they say there was a time when content was king, but we have seen
   his head rolling. our week beats their year. ever since we have
   been moving from content to discontent, collecting scripts and
   viruses, writing programs and bots, dealing with textz as warez, as
   executables -- something that is able to change your life. this is
   not promotional material. facing the unified principles of
   information -- the combined horror of global communication and
   so-called guerilla marketing -- there is no more need for media
   theory or cultural studies. the resistance against corporate
   culture can itself no longer remain in the cultural domain. you
   make a mistake if you see what we do as merely apolitical.

   we are studying the coils of the serpent, watching the walk of the
   penguin, mapping the moves of our wired enemies. intellectual,
   digital and biological property -- cornerstones of the new regimes
   of control -- are the direct result of organized corporate piracy.
   they are not only replacing such obsolete notions as freedom,
   democracy, human rights and technological progress. all these new
   forms of ownership are, in the first place, attempts to expropriate
   people's work, data and bodies -- just as the they begin to
   acquire, for the first time in history, the technical means to
   organize them differently. today's global media and communication
   conglomerates are mafias, and we shouldn't count on what's left of
   the national governments when it comes to fighting back. "humanity
   won't be happy until the last copyright holder is hung by the guts
   of the last patent lawyer." napster was only the beginning. the
   nineties of the net are over. let's move on.

   a.s.ambulanzen, berlin/germany, march 2001. no copyright
   http://textz.com

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   (http://gnutenberg.net). if you're looking for webspace for a
   textwarez project, feel free to contact us
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