Post
"By leaving politics out [of the psychedelics movement] we just got co-opted by the worst of the worst. Same with the net, it's like we followed John Barlow; 'governments stay away, we don't need you', and it's like 'oh no, the corporations took over'."
#DouglasRushkoff, 2025
https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/331-liana-gillooly
Barlow was responding to the kind of wrongheaded attempts at net regulation we've seen so many times recently; link taxes, youth bans, etc.
(1/3)
What Barlow said was directed at corporate governance as much as it was at state governments;
"Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron."
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
... and particularly tumorous hybrids of the 2; "IP" legislation, DMCA, PRISM, Christchurch Call.
(2/3)
The persistent misrepresention of Barlow and other tech rights pioneers as stooges of corporatism (usually mislabeled as "libertarianism") really grind my gears. @pluralistic wrote a great column on this earlier in the year;
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights
@Rushkoff knows better, and it's sad to see him scoring cheap cool points off someone who's no longer here to contextualise his legacy.
(3/3)
I just finished the first episode of Can't Get You Out of My Head, a 2021 documentary series by Adam Curtis. Curtis is an intriguing filmmaker. The best of his work deep dives the political history of the 20th century in surprising and insightful ways; The Century of the Self (2002), The Power of Nightmares (2004), The Trap (2007), Bitter Lake (2015) and Hypernormalization (2017).
(1/3)
Unfortunately, I think Can't Get You Out of My Head is going to be the other kind of Adam Curtis film series. Like All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, where he tries to collapse hacker culture, the 1960s counterculture, SillyCon Valley and chokepoint capitalism into a monolith, supposedly driven by a unified Ayn Randian philosophy. As if Richard Stallman and Steve Jobs were on the same side of history.
A classic example of what I talked about here;
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/115149586075930819
(2/3)
In the first episode he seems to take Discordianism seriously, implies that counterculturists were all Randian conspiracy theorists, explores the hyperindividualist philosophy of Chairman Mao's paramour and connects this to the Cultural Revolution (its logical opposite), and hints that it's all somehow connected to Boolean logic and computers.
I'll keep to watching to see if he can bring all this together into a coherent and historically accurate narrative. But I'm not holding my breath.
(3/3)
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