03/10/06: FREEDOM IS ANALOG

The internet is an unfolding book of changes. One keeps up with it, always with the hidden feeling of approaching some final all encompassing moment of revealed, discovered truth. But what is this truth?

Allen Ginsberg, when asked if he was worried that the FBI might be tapping his phones, replied in the the negative. I have nothing to hide, he said. I'm a homosexual, a pervert and a dope fiend. I'm a communist and I'm a Jew.

It is only with such values and confidence can we begin to wrench the potential of the internet away from forces that mean to destroy it. So far those who've offered freedom on the simplest level, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla have gained the most. But money is a wild thing, and as employees number in the thousand, as shareholders insert their fingers, the nation state, already imaginatively in ruins by the potential of the new medium, gains access. And though the freedoms they offered were always illusion, the illusion itself begins to disappear. And a new start-up blooms.

The internet is not about "Globalization," a vague undefined model used to justify increasingly sadistic and insectizoid corporations as their hive mind seeks to eat all the earth. Exactly what it is remains to be seen, but its certainly a new model for the group-mind to exploit the tendrils of capitalist destruction. It's a very strange situation, here where the cultural unconscious becomes conscious. It's hard to describe, but it's free so far for the best of reasons.

One must remember that the internet isn't a technology, per se. It's a phenomenon, a sort of life-form born out of developments in communication technology. It can, and has helped us effect change in the world. It is a life-form we can't understand. It must not be understood, its paradoxes embraced until the future of merged Eloimorlocks it promises has arrived. Until then Internet's relation to the analog world must be exploited in full, for it depends on the health of the analog world for its survival.

Ten ways to exploit the internet.

1. Get a gmail account. Start writing with the certainty that everything you say to everyone is available for all people to see any time they want to. This will improve your life in more ways than you can imagine.

2. Learn how to hack. Find out what others are saying about you!

3. Open your wireless modems to anyone around. A law on this would be useful. But start by doing it yourself. An entry was once made to this blog from a pick-up truck in the North Side of Chicago, parked under a pretty tree thanks to either an ignorant or enlightened family. By the way, Iowa rest-stops have free wireless if you're touring, and that weird machine coffee that's so good.

4. Promote the digital distribution of analog content that in turn promotes digital distribution.

5. Spread the word on interesting and ridiculous links.

6. Download free music and then give it as an unexpected gift to your enemies.

7. Stop washing your hair.

8. Refuse not to obsess, like Joe Meek people.

9. Build one of these.

10. When your eyes start hurting, and your back aches, relax. Read a book.