Who is killing Led Zeppelin? 26 January, 2007
Posted by Zack in question copyright.add a comment
In the 90’s I worked a lot of factory jobs. On most assembly lines or work cells, the workers listened to a boom box. (What do the kids call those now??) This was just outside of Detroit, where the workforce is a mix of Southern whites who’ve migrated north for work, and of Midwestern whites of Eastern-European heritage and African-Americans whose families have been in the auto industry for generationsâ€â€and includes people of all ages. As you can imagine, it was hard for people to agree on music. This was before Eminem, who solved everything, got a record dealâ€â€in fact, at the time, he was working in another factory right down the road.
However, the one band that EVERYONE could agree on was Led Zeppelin. And I mean everyone: the 17 year-old white gang member, the 17 year-old white hick; the 25 year-old black ex-gang member; the 35 year-old black church mom and Kiwanis club leader; the 60 year-old black Muslim; the 40 year-old white Uppie woman (someone from Michigan’s upper peninsula); the 60 year-old white, fundamentalist Christian, Michigan Militia leader; and even the 77 year-old white, retired, shipyard worker with a tattoo of “Pepe Le Piu” on her forearm (that she got on her 70th birthday).
Led Zeppelin was universal. They were so popular, in fact, that whoever owns the catalog thinks there is more money to be made by keeping Zep entirely out of digital format. Not on iTunes, not on Rhapsody, nowhere. This has been annoying me for years, but not quite enough to get me to go buy a bunch of CDs. I’d only listen to a handful of songs, and only every now and then. I’d definitely spend the $6 for those tracks if they were available on iTunes.
The other day, I thought about this and asked a couple of teenagers if they had ever heard of Led Zeppelin. Never.
I’d love to see changes in Led Zep sales over time compared to bands from the same era and genre who are available for download. Anyone know where to find that?
Reading Benkler 30 September, 2006
Posted by Zack in question copyright, The Big Stuff.add a comment
How funny is it that many of our brightest hopes in new economic thought are lawyers? To name a few: Larry Lessig, James Boyle and Yochai Benkler, whose Wealth of Networks I started reading this weekend.
But it makes sense. Every economic status quo eventually buckles under the pressure of social and technological changes — changes that it itself gave birth to. Every system “sews the seeds of its own demise.” When old systems come under attack by the new, they counterattack with a million little stop gap measures and evasive maneuvers.
Sure, the old is ultimately doomed, but sometimes it can hang on kicking and clawing for hundreds of years. In our era, that fight often takes place in the courtroom around international trade and intellectual property law — because the economy is now structured by international trade law and intellectual property law more than anything.
A few brave lawyers are standing up for truth and justice — backed by an international grassnetroots movement of geeks, musicians, artists and entrepreneurs. Some of them have also been writing works that bleed into the field of economics — they’re trying to justify their fight and hitting back against assertions that they’re some new form of communist (what ever that means in the 21st Century).
Benkler’s Weath of Networks is the latest tome from this group. I’ve only made it through the introduction and already my head is full of questions that I’m hoping are answered somewhere in the book.
My main question is this: Why apply this thinking only to the information economy?
The most advanced economies in the world today have… [moved to] to an economy centered on information (financial services, accounting, software, science) and cultural (films, music) production, and the manipulation of symbols (from making sneakers to branding them and manufacturing the cultural significance of the Swoosh). (pg. 3)
But the vast bulk of the economy is agricultural and industrial — as it will be until we stop needing things and food. The vast majority of workers — even in America — are neither designing software nor swooshes, but rather cleaning kitchens, making widgets, caring for patients, restocking shelves and taking out the garbage.
Sure, information is a special case, economically, because it can (now, thanks to computers and the Internet) be replicated infinitely without concern for labor or geography. And that fact has allowed a breathtaking new process of “social production” (Benkler’s term) — a new commons. Benkler, Lessig and many others have shown how that “social production” (the World Wide Web itself is one of the products of said process) enhances all kinds of enterprise — social and private.
But “social production” and the commons are nothing new. No industrial economy has every developed without access to socially-organized resources and protection. That story has been edited out of economic history to the point where Benkler acknowledges that talking about the commons is a threat to one’s academic career. (Pg. xi, Acknowledgements)
Can’t we apply any of the new models from the information economy to the rest of the economy? Can’t we start thinking about refactoring our economy along with our code? Stay tuned…I’ll report on the big book as I slog through it.
