Bloggrokker (Scott) Poster

I've got to wonder.
I've really got to wonder about the possibility that we're all living not in the physical, three-dimensional McDonald's/IBM/Rand Corporation/Daimler-Benz/Lockheed-Martin-dominated "old reality," but in a still-three-dimensional virtual environment of ironclad copyrights created and autocratically ruled by McDonald's and IBM and the Rand Corporation and Daimler-Benz and Lockheed-Martin.
Don't fear the lunatic's latest, as my grandfather liked to say. I'm not going to wax Matrix-ic or anything, and hail a blank-faced Neo to avenge the supposed wrongs of a ruthless "machinocracy."
Rather, I'll just leave it to Mark Poster, who writes "the response of our captains of industry is the absurd one of attempting vastly to extend the principle of property by promulgating new 'intellectual property laws,' flying in the face of the advance in the technologies of transmission and dissemination."
Contextually, Poster is here referring to the difficulties of the corporate Olympians in keeping their proprietaries intact within electronic communications. It's hard to disagree with this difficulty--this Internet thing's Anarchyland, don'cha know, kinda like an Emma Goldman fever-dream if she were a forward-thinking futurist.
And we like it that way! Testify, ladies and germs, testify!
And the corporate Olympians? They can't control their proprietaries within virtual e-communities--the e-communities being rife with postmodern pranksters equipped with PhotoShop and Mort Sahl mindsets.
And the corporate Olympian solution? Make the real world, the "old reality," a virtual community in terms of copyright.
I'll explain.
In a virtual environment, everything from the e-world inside those clunky, extinct techno-grotesqueries of virtual-reality helmets to military simulators to MUDs to, yes, the Rupert Murdoch-ized MySpace, somebody, somewhere has the rights to everything contained within those e-worlds.
And, lo and behold, look around, everything in the "old reality" is going copyright crazy, too.
Disney is considering enforcing endless copyrights for Mickey and Donald and Dumbo and everything else they've cranked out during the Waltocene epoch.
Marvel Comics is attempting to legally claim the term "superhero"--a term they didn't even coin.
Fox News wants to copyright "fair and balanced."
Trump tried to make "you're fired" difficult for anyone else to utter.
Union Pacific doesn't want their logo reproduced on anything non-Union Pacific--a real blow to model-train enthusiasts.
A maritime museum in England wants to prosecute anyone who takes a snapshot of anything within their walls--they argue the remnants of history belong to them.
A national park in Utah will do likewise if a photograph is taken--geographic copyrights?
And finally, Michelangelo's David--don't attempt any photographic reproductions in his museum of current residence. Wouldn't you rather throw your cash away on a mass-reproduced gift-shop pic taken by a museum-hired shutterbug?
And so in terms of some of the most totalitarian potential copyright enforcements imaginable, the "old reality" is twisted to mimic a virtual one, where everything, even the most anti-intellectual morsel, falls prey to IP laws reaching into misty infinities.
And Poster's "technologies of transmission and dissemination?"--ye olde Internet?
Who might gain IP control of the Web on a dark future day?
Don't think of the cable companies as mere cable companies anymore--think of 'em as cabal companies.
Just a thought.