Just a little something that's on my mind

There's an interesting discussion going on at Slashdot right now about whether broadband video is going to be the death of DVD. Interesting? Sorry, I meant inane. In fact, all the discussions of DRM, content, or audio and video in general lately have just driven me nuts. They debate the various sides of physical versus internet content in terms of how people "use" media. How do you "use" music, they ask? Use music? Fuck you. First of all, the US lags behind other countries in terms of broadband availablity. These discussions are so one-sided, because it's such a small percentage of people in on them; just because everyone there has broadband or TiVo or IPods doesn't change the fact that everyone else doesn't give a shit. It's like some weird bubble world that the other five and a half billion people in the world don't care about. Don't care about and aren't even aware of. Why? Because it's completely irrelevant. DVD and the film industry might have some effects, but they are a relatively new industry. The music industry as we know it, too, is barely a century old. But music itself is as old as man. Probably the oldest art and cultural form that we know of.
People were making music for as long as they could talk. We're talking about thousands, ten thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years. Even the printed word is not as old, though story-telling has been around since the dawn of time as well. Music and story-telling go hand in hand. In many ways, I feel music is the purest and most universal forms of art and culture. Everybody listens to music, and every culture makes it in some form. When your precious machines break, when the DRM schemes become so crippling as to be unusable, and when the power goes out, there's still going to be music. The only people who care about how you "use" music are the numbnutzes in offices selling it to you, who can't make music to save their souls, and who couldn't give a crap about what music even is. Fuck you. And those of you with your IPods and your downloading, and your constant searching for the "next cool sound" are really just on a quest to prove how much cooler you are then that jock who beat you up while blasting hair bands from his convertible. All art has reached a point where it's just about how much cooler the artist is than everybody else.
Film, or the film industry, has reached the point of ludicrousness as well. Film was just an evolutionary step from naturalist theatre, which grew to big near the end of the nineteenth century that the spectacles they tried to recreate on stage were no longer viable to produce live. Naturalism is just a construct of the Victorian age. Progress? It came so late in the story of human kind not because the technology was there, but because no culture to this point had the need for it; naturalism is a limiting and fruitless form of art. Photography is just an excuse for boys to take pictures of girls. Fuck film. Despite its potential, the industry that grew up around it is just a way for men to prove that they're cooler than you while channeling young girls' natural tendency to whore themselves into "acting" careers. No, no, we want to see you express emotions, and can you do it while only wearing a towel? Fuck that. When the power goes out, how are you going to get them into bed then?
A lot of flack has been given to the recent Gates monstrosity. But it didn't make sense to me until I heard Cristo describe it as a "collective memory" experiment. Thank you, Cristo. Sure, he needed to sell sketches and photos of it to fund it, but that's what artists do; find ways to pay for their art. The Gates themselves were a way of giving everybody a shared experience. A "remember when" way to pinpoint one special moment in our shared history. You can't package that and slap a DRM on it, and hump it on the internet. You can't "use" the Gates. And that's what music and storytelling is at their heart - shared experiences. Even when the power's out. Who cares if technology reaches the point where it's too crippling to even use? Britney Spears? We got a barn full of twenty years' worth of technology all in semi-working order. If need be, we can probably fix it up as well. There's no such thing as an obsolete technology. If it was invented once, it can be invented again. And we got mountains of books as well, which is still the most efficient and universal method of sharing information. If you can't crack the DRM on the latest e-book, you can always borrow a real book. And if all the book publishers in the world suddenly went belly-up, you can still make your own damn copies. And if the Soviets came back to life and outlawed the Xerox, get a fucking mimeograph or a typewriter. And if they take that and break all your pencils, get a fucking piece of coal and write on a shovel. The fact isn't that information *wants* to be free, the fact is that Information Is Free, and you would realize that if you unplugged your goddamned computer and stepped outside for once in your life.