I guess the problem, here, Jacques, is that you’re trying to hold back the floodgates when they’re already open.

Nifty, I know this one too. Why are you blaming the victim, Mark?

Nobody ever celebrates the co-opting and misuse of their jargon.

Not sure about that, FDB. Sociologists are quite happy to have people talking about “Protestant work ethic” even if it’s a bit of a distortion of Weber’s argument!

There’s an irony in this. Liam just nailed it.

This works better because open source does not necessarily dictate a social structure. It specifically refers to a model of licensing for software; that’s what it was coined to describe. Some FLOSS projects are highly cathedralesque, some are bazaaresque. Some practice structured anarchy, some are feudalistic, still others are democratic. Some use rotating dictatorships.

Do you see my point?

Oh really? What would happen if I start to rail about firemen, chairmen, workmen, husbandry, midwifery, etc etc? A lot of these terms have been evicted from the language and bugger linguistic evolution.

It just saddens me when words lose their original meaning because they become applied to anything and everything willy bloody nilly. “Paradigm shift”, for instance, used to have real explanatory power. Now it’s pretty much expected language for the introduction of things as ‘revolutionary’ as new toasters.

I don’t want to see ‘open source’ go the same way. I am reclaiming this word, this term, for the geeks to whom it rightfully belongs. If it’s OK (and it is) for my GLBTI brothers and sisters everywhere to reclaim queer, gay etc then it’s OK for me to reclaim ‘open source’ for oppressed geeks everywhere.

It’s very lazy thinking to assume that, just because young people do things differently from us, that they’re doing nothing, and to substitute a few stereotypes for reality.

yes, but in that general sense, why not go all the way back thru the entire history of adaptation? Because once you do you end up with nothing less & nothing smaller than the system of textuality and the mechanics of mimesis themselves: every text quotes and every text re-presents.

Lessig and other crusading types (eg the authors of the ‘libre society’ manifesto http://www.makeworlds.org/node/66 ) have a rhetorical stake in emphasising the unbroken continuity of traditions of quotation because doing so places current copyright principles in the worst possible light. And Lessig, with respect, is a lawyer, not an aesthetician, and I don’t think he really cares much about understanding different mutations of intertextuality.

I prefer to hold for as long as possible a sense of the historical and formal differences between different modes of adaptation. Mashup or bootlegging in the limited sense I find most interesting is a specific product of the present age and its combination of the following elements - P2P and fast internet, DIY culture, cheap easy and ubiquitous audio engineering technology, the heroic romance of bricolage and piracy, and the notion that the archive of culture is now the matrix in which we are all wandering.

I do agree that some people (Negativland in particular) were doing a version of mashup before it got popular but minus the internet element I think it’s better to call the previous iterations something else.

Remix artiste Vicky Bennett (People Like Us) has the right idea: she calls her work ‘avant-retard’, a wonderfully appropriate and specific label for her practice.

You can have a million street marches, but they will achieve precisely zip unless government and/or business elites get on board.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this.

The great exemplar was Vietnam. In Feb and March of 1968, the “Wise Men” counselled LBJ, against his own better judgment, to dump Nam.

One of their arguments was that they were disturbed by the noise in the streets and the noise from their own children at the dinner table.

These elites may well have hung tough, but for the disquiet over dessert.

So in this case at least the argument can be made that the elites were responding to the protest movement.

The same applies in different setings to the women’s, union, and Irish Unionist movements in Britain up to 1914, as described by George Dangerfield.

In sophisticated polities this is how it often works, because elites are usually intelligent enough to know when they have been backing a loser, and when everything has to change in order that everything remain the same.

Anyway, back on topic, the one “form of cultural practice” concerning the Iraq War that most appeals to me (boring sod that I am) is the documentary. And this conflict has arguably produced better documentary coverage — while the war is still underway — than any previous conflict in history.

Unfortunately, it often doesn’t get out to Australia — not even to the art-house cinemas. I’m thinking particularly of this film, which the US critics were raving about — “the best and saddest film of the year” — but which, as far as I’m aware, never got a release in this country (at least not in Adelaide).
http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/noendinsight?q=no%20end%20in%20sight

Does anyone know if SBS has shown it and I missed it? Will I have to buy a DVD from the States (and then somehow get around the NTSC vs PAL issue)?

I think the post was trying to suggest that it’s difficult to measure causation in these things. There are some very interesting questions raised as to how public opinion (and no one denies - whatever inferences might be drawn about electoral consequences - that public opinion in all countries concerned is now overwhelmingly against the war) is formed and shifts under conditions which are quite different from those of previous wars in terms of how that opinion can shape itself as well as being shaped.

The irrelevant diatribes of Jack Strocchi certainly don’t assist in exploring what are some interesting questions. I think the reason why the post advanced the points it did as tentative hypotheses was to stimulate a discussion that might go beyond the usual stuff.