“Damn their lies and trust your eyes. Dig every kind of fox!” I here sing one for the freedom to mix it up as you and your honey alone see fit:
http://www.youtube.com/v/JTcHzGbBoe0&hl=en&fs=1
“Hapa” means “mixed race” in Hawaiian. Skin-tone mash ups have profoundly enriched my life, first with the Honolulu Hapa herself and then with our own little hapas. Honolulu Hapa celebrates coloring across the lines, knocks racism, and gives a shout-out to Loving v. Virginia, 88 U.S. 1 (1967)—the case where the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional restraints on personal liberty.
As with the prior four songs I’ve posted in this recent series (Take Up the Flame, Sensible Khakis, Nice to Be Wanted, and Hello, Jonah,), Honolulu Hapa comes with a Creative Commons license that allows pretty liberal use by all but commercial licensees, who have to pay a tithe to one of my favorite causes. Honolulu Hapa aims to help Creative Commons, an organization that helps all of us to mix—and remix—it up. Unlike those other songs, however, Honolulu Hapa adds a special ‘unrestricted use” term effective on June 12, Loving Day.
With
Honolulu Hapa, I conclude my recent series of freedom-loving music videos. Like it or not, though, I’ve got more music-making plans. Next, I’ll record some good studio versions of those (and perhaps some other) songs. Eventually, I’d like to release a fundraising CD, one that might help out some good causes. Silly? Yeah, I guess so. But it does add another data point in support of my hypothesis: Freedom has more fun.
[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and Technology Liberation Front.]
It’s been a big year for tech policy books. Several important titles were released in 2008 that offer interesting perspectives about the future of the Internet and the impact digital technologies are having on our lives, culture, and economy. Back in September, I compared some of the most popular technology policy books of the past five years and tried to group them into two camps: “Internet optimists” vs. “Internet pessimists.” That post generated a great deal of discussion and I plan on expanding it into a longer article soon. In this post, however, I will merely list what I regard as the most important technology policy books of the past year.
What qualifies as an “important” tech policy book? Basically, it’s a title that many people in this field are currently discussing and that we will likely be talking about for many years to come. I want to make it clear, however, that merely because a book appears on this list it does not necessarily mean I agree with everything said in it. In fact, I found much with which to disagree in my picks for the two most important books of 2008, as well as many of the other books on the list. [Moreover, after reading all these books, I am more convinced than ever that libertarians are badly losing the intellectual battle of ideas over Internet issues and digital technology policy. There’s just very few people defending a “Hands-Off-the-Net” approach anymore. But that’s a subject for another day!]
Another caveat: Narrowly focused titles lose a few points on my list. For example, as was the case in past years, a number of important IP-related books have come out this year. If a book deals exclusively with copyright or patent issues, it does not exactly qualify as the same sort of “tech policy book” as other titles found on this list since it is a narrow exploration of just one set of issues that have a bearing on digital technology policy. The same could be said of a book that deals exclusively with privacy policy, like Solove’s
Understanding Privacy. It’s an important book with implications for the future of tech policy, but I demoted it a bit because of its narrow focus.
With those caveats in mind, here are my Top 10 Most Important Tech Policy Books of 2008 (and please let me know about your picks for book of the year):
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Ellen McGirt is undoubtedly a good business reporter. Her recent cover story for Fast Company “How Cisco’s CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist,” is a great piece that shows the many interesting and truly innovative reforms that Chambers has instituted at Cisco.
However, I think McGirt is trying too hard to be clever or just doesn’t understand what socialism really means. Socialism is a political system that uses the force of government to take money from some and give it to others. Cisco is a private enterprise that’s only asking for you to buy their products.
McGirt’s confusion seems to arise from the socialist-sounding rhetoric of CEO John Chambers. He uses what McGirt calls “Collectivist Catchphrases” like “Co-Labor” to describe Cisco’s approach to management. He’s replaced managers (what many consider the avatars of capitalism) with councils and boards; emphasizes information sharing, rather than hoarding; rewards cooperation, rather than back-stabbing ladder-climbing.
But Chambers is no socialist, he’s a capitalist responding to a problem as old as business itself: How do you give those with good information and good ideas, the power to get things done?
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