mostly journalistic, for some reason

Clay Shirky is an interesting man. This discussion notes the fascinating parallel between the effects of the printing press on the Church's monopoly of religion, and the effects of the internet on newspapers' monopoly of news. DRM and other horrors are in fact quasi-religious panic, an attempt to remove power and knowledge from the hands of the people on the grounds not that it isn't good for them, but that it threatens your control. I'd be happier about this if it weren't for the fact that there are still die-hard pockets of religious fundamentalism insisting on the Bible as absolute received Word of God in the face of all its contradictions, five hundred years after the invention of the printing press allowed non-priests to see such contradictions for themselves. This suggests a likely scenario in which fundamentalist groups of the dying breed of copyright lawyers infest the twenty-sixth century with apocalyptic on-line demonstrations, to the derision of educated beholders. Like the fundamentalists using their access to the Bible to protest the dissolution of its monolithic truth, future copyright-protestors won't be able to help using the medium of their downfall to protest its existence. We can haz irony. Yay.

And while we're on the subject of newspapers, in the Department of Billboard Poetry: VILLAGE EATS GREEDY GIANT! This is an absolutely beautiful re-statement, in a fairy-tale vein, of the classic man-bites-dog trope. I cannot for the life of me imagine the actual, real-world context, except that vague visions of righteous revenge on hungry cannibal pumpkins are drifting through my head...