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[FYI] (Fwd) FC: Napster was only the beginning -- a rant from textz.
- To: debate@fitug.de
- Subject: [FYI] (Fwd) FC: Napster was only the beginning -- a rant from textz.
- From: "Axel H Horns" <horns@ipjur.com>
- Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 10:00:37 +0100
- Comment: This message comes from the debate mailing list.
- Organization: NONE
- Sender: owner-debate@fitug.de
------- 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://textz.com is hosted by project gnutenberg
(http://gnutenberg.net). if you're looking for webspace for a
textwarez project, feel free to contact us
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