Internet is a Marxist utopia - Production is in the hands of the masses

[dutchdemocrat]

Very interesting article... especially for the rabid 'anti-commie' brigade on the Internet.

Someone call Karl Marx

The means of production is in the hands of the masses and a revolution is under way

BRIAN D. JOHNSON. Macleans Magazine, Canada

Rollie Pemberton first started recording rap songs in his bedroom at age 13. He'd take a coat hanger, twist it into a circle and stretch a pair of his mother's pantyhose around it to create a buffer between his mouth and the microphone -- a "popper stopper" to keep his consonants from distorting. Pemberton would post his music on the Internet and wage rap battles with other hip-hop bloggers. That's how he got into the game. Now 19, this Edmonton rapper who calls himself Cadence Weapon is a player. His home mixes, released online, drew attention from major labels such as Def Jam, which hired him to remix a single by rap sensation Lady Sovereign -- a 19-year-old Brit who parlayed her own online mixes into a seven-figure recording contract. Last week, Pemberton was getting critical raves for his debut CD, Breaking Kayfabe, a white-hot mix of dissident rhymes and dissonant rhythms. But between touring, he still works out of his bedroom. It's the revenge of the amateur. Or to quote Oliver Square, a track from Cadence Weapon's new CD:

I don't have a licence / But I'm trying to gain prominence / Because I'm living in a house / With a fridge full of condiments.

The days of making it on the Ed Sullivan Show are long gone. For artists of every stripe, the Internet is an open stage. An Edmonton teenager can acquire New York cachet without leaving the house. Through the portal of the home studio, the bedroom is a mouse-click away from the Big Time. And it's a two-way street, travelled by amateur and professional alike. Using camcorders and computer effects, desktop auteur Shane Felix spent three years in his Virginia basement creating a Jedi space opera called Revelations that has been favourably compared with the latest Star Wars blockbuster. And after directing Childstar, a $5-million movie, established actor-director Don McKellar shot a series of shorts with just a cellphone camera. Then there's the rest of us, desperately turning our lives into data.

Documenting your existence used to be simple. Snap some photos. Keep a diary. Memories would gather dust in an attic, to be dug up by a future generation like lost scrolls. But now you can shoot a home movie in high definition on a small camcorder, cut it with the same software used by Oscar-winning editors, get your son's garage band to lay down a soundtrack, burn the video onto a DVD, post it on a website, send it to friends by cellphone, and promote it in a podcast that you record while driving to work. If you happen to pass a plane crash on the way home, as a "citizen journalist" you can shoot the accident scene and get it on the evening news. Later, if you're so inclined, you can have sex while a webcam streams your digital flesh live to the Internet.

The explosion in digital technology has taken us beyond home entertainment. We've entered a new age of mass communications that would make Marshall McLuhan's head spin. The medium is not just the message, it's the messenger. The new medium is you.

To borrow a bit of branding from Apple, the company that has tried to trademark the lower-case vertical pronoun, you could call it the iRevolution. Its icons are the iPod and the cellphone. They're not home computers but body computers, fashion accessories that now want to be cameras, TVs and radios. The iPod has become a sex symbol of self-expression, a hi-tech fetish that's helped us see the media as something to be individually programmed. With a computer and high-speed Internet, anyone can be a mini media mogul -- producer, director, editor, recording artist, deejay, veejay, journalist, porn star. In the jungle gym of digital data, we're all double-jointed.

The iRevolution is reversing the engines of the Industrial Revolution, and repatriating the means of creative production from the factory to the open hearth of cottage industry. In fact, it could be argued that the home studio is fostering a democratic renaissance in the arts the likes of which we've never seen. Traditionally, the major cultural industries -- movies, TV, radio, music and publishing -- have been controlled by large corporations. If you wanted to be a filmmaker, broadcaster or rock star, you had to rely on the system to sponsor your dreams. Media conglomerates still monopolize pop culture, bankrolling production and distribution. But their grip on the creative process is slipping. With affordable pro technology, artists can create at home and distribute via the Internet. It's a phenomenon that Tyler Cowen, economics professor at Virginia's George Mason University, calls "disintermediation" -- a seven-beat word that means removing the middle ground between producer and consumer.

SNIP

http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/technology/article.jsp?content=20051219_118037_118037
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[dutchdemocrat]

1. Or even think Bigger...

Or you can think bigger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity">Technological Singularity