On the Death of Steve Jobs

Since yesterday, the Internet and the old media news outlets have been all abuzz over the death of Steve Jobs, cofounder and recently retired chairman of Apple. (I almost said Apple Computer, but they dropped the "Computer" part after the iPod became all the rage roughly a decade ago.) You're probably wondering what I think of the man. Sure, he was a visionary and all that, but he adapted to the system more than nearly anyone knew. Over the years I found myself appalled to find a John Lennon turning into a Bill Gates (and I mean the hated, ruthless Gates of the '90s). I should mention that though the first computer I ever used was a Radio Shack TRS-80, the first I ever truly loved was the Apple II. From the fateful year of 1984 on, I was a confirmed Macintosh cultist. And yet I was this poor kid who could never afford a computer of my own until I got a hand-me-down IBM Personal System/2 from my grandfather. Running Windows 3.1. That was in 1998, when I was already in my twenties.

Why did Jobs and Gates end up blurring together in my fevered brain? It was their management style, which is of course business standard. Capitalism is a very dog-eat-dog system. "Social Darwinism" may not apply to humans, but it sure as hell applies to corporations. It's my opinion, probably idiosyncratic, that corporations are private governments. The corporate world is a world made up entirely of absolute monarchies, all eternally at war with all the rest. Business, as they say, is war. But this is a war with no end and no victory, I probably could never have made it in business. I may have a bit of a vindictive streak, but I'm no general.

Steve Jobs is being hailed as a genius and a visionary, and I don't doubt any of it. The President hails him. The stars hail him. His competitors, enemies, and ex-friends all hail him. If I were to add one more encomium, I would only be adding one more echo to an already deafening echo chamber.

During the middle of July last year, as I was failing once again to complete my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel during JulNoWriMo, I dropped it the moment the inspiration came to me. It turned out, of course, to be the "deadly distant beginning" to Chaos Angel Spanner, my long neglected manga project set (since 1994) in 2014, which was now morphing into a long five-volume novel. It now had a new name, thanks to TV Tropes: Press the Reset Button. The next thing I wrote was the first chapter, "Spanner in the Works". The chapter began as a story idea I worked on in my Project Notebooks in the years between 1999 and my discovery of NaNoWriMo in 2006. It was a riff on the 1984 Macintosh commercial. Then I remembered the entire history and development of Apple after 1984, and I realized — 2014 will be like "1984"! So I drafted the man himself into the novel, or more accurately his image, as if he were a fictional character (which in 2014 he now is). The rest was easy.

The chapter has expanded since then. The original chapter is now the fourth installment. It is now in its final form, now that the man whose face is on the screen has died. It's called "Enter the Monkeywrench". Read it here..

RIP STEVE JOBS 1955-2011

Real-Life Bad Companies: America's Universities! or, Aaron Swartz and the Great Intellectual Property Heist of 2010

The article: Feds Charge Activist as Hacker for Downloading Millions of Academic Articles (Wired)

Online activist Aaron Swartz, a near-founder of Reddit, has been charged with the federal crime of "hacking" for downloading ostensibly public-domain academic papers. "Hacking" is a term borrowed from the same media panic as "cyberporn". What's he really charged with?

1. Copyright piracy.
2. Theft of trade secrets.

You see, these ostensibly "public domain" academic papers are not public domain at all. They are owned by the universities that publish them, under the strictest copyright license of all: not the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that protects corporate entertainment product from the likes of those heinous pirates, namely people who rip their CDs to their hard drive, but the Uniform Trade Secrets Act and Economic Espionage Act which put corporate trade secrets under the same "top secret" protection as military secrets. In this case, the intellectual property protections on the journals the papers are published in are among the strictest in the entire intellectual property field: the licenses are restricted to a select few, namely select researchers at the copyright-holding universities, plus researchers at other universities and research institutes that have paid the sky-high licensing fees. The reason? So that the science can be patented, and the patents licensed to corporations, for a lucrative payoff to the already ultra-rich corporate trustees.

And you wonder why America is falling behind China and India so rapidly in science.

Basically, Aaron Swartz is being accused of bank robbery. The bank pulled the heist on is called JSTOR. It is ostensibly nonprofit. Its real purpose is to keep academic research away from the prying eyes of the unwashed rabble so that it can be lucratively licensed to corporations. Swartz, fired by the hacker ideal of "information wants to be free", was trying to pull a Robin Hood: his goal was to take this proprietary research and put it into the public domain. This makes him the Bradley Manning of academe.

The issue, of course, is Intellectual Property. Now, go to the bottom of this post and look at the copyright notice. You'll see that it bears a Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike license. Creative Commons was created as a way for individual creators to get around the draconian protections imposed by the likes of DMCA for the benefit of giant corporations with large IP portfolios. It's for us peons who aren't conglomerate executives and their IP lawyer hired guns.

America's universities do not believe in Creative Commons or in open-source research. They protect their scientific research with corporate intellectual property laws so they can license their intellectual property to corporations. Like their agent corporation JSTOR, they are nonprofit institutions in name only, for-profit corporations in actual fact. And that's why Swartz, like Manning, is doomed: he robbed giant corporations of their precious intellectual property the same way bank robbers rob banks of their gold. Which, legally, is the same thing. Except an intellectual property robber can't flee to South America: the banks aren't everywhere, but the IP administrators are.

Bradley Manning will be executed for treason for certain. And Robin Hood, remember, was caught and executed by order of the tyrannical King John of England. Due process? What due process? When corporations are raped — and, as Manning found out to his horror, the federal government is the most merciless of intellectual property trolls — there is no such thing as due process. In this respect, MIT, and American universities in general, are no different from such predatory corporations as Carter-Ruck, News Corporation, the RIAA cartel of record companies, and any bank that's "too big to fail".

Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

Future Shock

Remember future shock? It's the shock that overcomes you when you can't handle what you perceive as too much change in too little time. The term was coined by futurist Alvin Toffler, and it's the subject of the book that made him famous. If anything, the speed of change has accelerated since the book came out in 1970, and the shock registered by those who can't handle it has become more extreme, to the point of madness. The ultimate expression of that madness is 9/11 — so far. But far more people have come to adapt to the accelerating rate of change; some of us can even be said to surf evolution. The 21st-century world we live in today was nothing but science fiction in the 20th century.

In this entry, I'll be dealing with fiction as well as society. We tell ourselves who we are through the stories we tell.

AugNoWriMo & 50/90: Panic Time approaches!

Let's see. It's the middle of August. How many words have I written for AugNoWriMo? A little under 2,500. How many songs have I written for 50 Songs in 90 Days? Well, I've got 5 posted, but none unlocked. It's the middle of each.

Yep, it's almost that time of the month again:

Panic Time!

For those who don't know, Panic Time is when I panic and write almost all the words required to win any WriMo. It started with NaNoWriMo, of course.

Here's the tough part: Panic Time for two WriMos instead of just one! Not just for AugNo (novel writing; my goal: 50,000 words) but 50/90 (goal: 50 songs in 90 days, of course) too. Making it even harder still is my efforts to increase my presence and influence on Twitter, complicated with my increasing preoccupation with social media stuff starting with FriendFeed. I even started a new blog at Posterous (you can find it here, including my most popular post ever, my whiny complaint with the irresistibly catchy name, "Social Media Is My Crack"). Plus, blog platforms have started going social as well: Blogger using Google Friend Connect, and Posterous using its own built-in social subscription system.

All this is getting a bit overwhelming. It's hard to obsess over Twitter and write at the same time. So, I might just want to ease up on the tweeting some while I catch up with my word and song counts. It doesn't really pay to get focused on one thing at the expense of more important things.

But before I can write, I first need to shift my attention. That's been pretty hard lately. But Twitter can wait. Got work to do.