Rupert Murdoch supports SOPA. We are neither surprised, nor any less certain we are doing the right thing to oppose it.

Artists – my friends.

Don’t believe the people who pay you – they pay you scraps and confiscate your content, enslaving you to sing for your supper. They invent celebrities to sell bullshit, the glamour and proximity of that keeps you shackled to a false hope; that having an agent, getting signed, going to the gym or extending your education will be a sure-fire way to get you there.

That won’t happen. The odds are worse than Lotto.

Those things do help, but the real possibility for exposure, of making a difference, is through the internet. With the marvels of technology, you can deliver high-quality content, to people all over the world, INSTANTLY!!!

The people who get paid to delay, and release, and package, and advertise, and print, and waste resources, and useful human lives; to make content delivery cumbersome, controlled and costly are exactly the people who oppose it.

Without piracy and intellectual property law…

Maybe, at worst, a few A-list actors will find they’re getting paid only one hundred thousand pounds for a film that’s actually worth making rather than getting force-fed 13 million dollars to make a film with some famous tart that gets her tits out, a weak plot, and wango spangly special effects. Some content that makes no point about human behaviour or morality, just encourages you to keep behaving the same way you already do. Wow. And our A-lister is not exactly destitute at 100k, is he? So why do they care? Oh wait…

They don’t.

They shouldn’t – or they’re whores to the machine. The pimp machine.

Who does support SOPA?

The people who get paid to do nothing. To create nothing. Fully formed content rolls past them on a production line and they slap a label on it and go home to eat microwave dinners. Nothing. No value. Pointless humans, stuck in the belly of a beast, wasting perfectly useful lives to build bank so their child can similarly squander its existence but perhaps, this time, even more efficiently.

and

The people who get paid to not do things. Politicians. They get their job by not pissing voters off; and paid in bribes to not follow procedure; by their party to not rock the boat, and most important thing you must not do: You must not agree with the other guys. Why? Because disagreement sells papers. Disagreement makes you think that your opinion is already being voiced, and encourages you to remain silent; and disagreement, because constant agreement between the parties would make it obvious that we’re all living a double-bind. Two party politics, and all democracy when coupled with information ownership, will conspire to make a fantasy world in which you pretend you have a say. You don’t. Not by voting, that’s for bloody sure.You’ve been conned.

and

The people who are paid best when you know least – the media. They report this constructed rivalry between the politicians, and feed it to you like it’s the truth of the situation. They manufacture content that is fascinating enough to distract you; from the screaming, inhumane injustices are being carried out by your people all over the world; from the truth about depression is not an illness it’s your brain telling you that your life sucks; and from the fact that debt and inflation have you hypnotized by a genie that they control [When they report bad weather, product recalls and financial instability, markets fall. When they report sunshine and donuts, markets rally.] Quite a subterfuge is needed to distract them from all that! Some inflated plastic slut overdosing ought to do it. We could use about four of them a year, easy I reckon. Let’s get some plastic sluts on standby. Oooh, look, the politicians are disagreeing again.

But it goes deathly quiet on when it gets to SOPA. Despite Google, Wikipedia and THOUSANDS of other sites blacking out in protest; twitter going berserk with opposition, we can barely hear those mumbled words: ‘Bipartisan support‘.

The corporate entertainment industry, the politicians and the media. They are exactly the three parties that would oppose free information, free content, free exchange of art and ideas.

They are the people who benefit from controlling what you know. Information is power. A smack-addict will often not know what day of the week it is. Rupert Murdoch knows about wars that haven’t even started yet.

Information.

The entertainment industry sell it, the politicians build power from it, and media is only effective when you don’t have it.

Those parties are made weaker by the internet – they seek to contain, control and cripple the exchange of ideas.

And that is the most insidious idea every invented.

Freedom is what people shout when they’re taking it away,
As surely as ‘Democratic’ is a label for countries which aren’t,
Just as child molesters lecture us on morality.

You aren’t free. Democracy is a farce.

BRING IT DOWN! Bring it all down.

And from that crumbling wreckage left by the old system, tendrils of organic, good, simple content will flourish, after struggling for light under the shadow of that odious institution of ignorance. New content evolves, grows, adapts at an incredible rate, incentivised by one thing: To entice an audience. To appeal to their baser instincts or to tickle their ears with poetry, music, science, philosophy, ideas, questions, problems. Porn. Hideous things. Scary things. Funny things. Cats. It doesn’t matter.

If it costs energy to make, then extract energy from doing it. Simple. That is the way evolution works. This environment has changed. Adapt or die off like the inefficient beast you are. You should have grown some pigment, beast. It’s bright out here!

But while you die, beast, do not rely on charity, begging us to please take our content from you when you offer predictable, plastic, thoughtless garbage that we can find in exactly the same quality, more efficiently, in a more useful form, for free.

Make it easier, better, or more immersive. Offer some value!

If I went to buy milk, and tethered outside the shop was a blotched black and white cow with bulging, pink, clean udders – I would milk that cow. That cow would probably enjoy it. The shopkeeper might not enjoy it. He might complain, (in my mind he has an awesome Vietnamese accent) babbling incoherently about “You steeeeeeling from meeeee you damn coowwww”, between the streams of ‘pzzzzhiiiinng, pzzzzzzhiiiiinnnnng’ as needling, healthy, hot streams of free milk pzzzzzzzhhhhiiiiinged onto the wall of my metal milk pail. I am so milking that cow in my mind right now. Oooh, yeah. Hot milk.

And now I’m milking it in your mind.

That is not theft. It’s lost sales.

Theft is when I have shit, and you steal it, I DON’T HAVE IT ANY MORE. That whole ‘not having it’ part is why we’re not keen on it. Piracy doesn’t do that.

And most importantly: Knowledge, ideas, paintings and plays and memes. None of this stuff came from a nowhere.

No dude just built a wheel…

He saw someone rolling a large load over some logs.
Saw them bringing the logs from the back to the front,
over and over, logs from the back and to the front,

and he thought:

What if they just stayed with the load?

BRILLIANT.

But…

He built that upon the shoulders of the idea of the lumberer,

Standing, sweaty, atop a hill, after felling a tree

who saw his timber rolling away,

down the hill,

again,

 

And in the midst of his exasperation it dawned on him: “Cor, it does that quite well”

 

And he wouldn’t have learned that timber rolls quite well,
If he hadn’t an axe,
To chop the tree,
hack off the limbs,
to make the timber
that rolled quite well.

No-one owns ideas, for every new idea is just an old idea repackaged. I’d like to thank the guy who invented poems that look, in shape, like their subject. It made that last bit fun.

You do not deserve to get rich off ideas, but if you are clever, you will.

Do not selfishly swat at people, keeping them away from your old ideas, which you repackaged from someone else and then shoved into a suffocating little privacy box, saying “No, that’s MINE”;

Come up with new ideas. Share them.
Freely.
Selflessly.

It strengthens bonds between friends, social groups and common interest groups, between creators and their audience. It’s good – it’s what art is about, sharing an idea. When you share a joke with a friend, and they repeat it, what do you want – money? No. We want recognition. That’s all. A tip of the hat.

And then what happens? He adds to it and tells people, and they do likewise. That idea gets better. And better. And better – because you are allowing more minds to work at once on the same problem.

Imagine scientists working on a slick new nano-ultra-slippery surface that could potentially propel walkers or cars down a speed-lane like in Mario Kart. They probably won’t have considered the problem of the people using it being dickheads like the ones on treadmills you see on YouTube smashing holes into walls with their faces.

If you share your knowledge, if you share that problem, a team of programmers working on artificial intelligence might start to design a dickhead-proof car that steers itself towards the speed lane.

[SPEED LANE ENGAGED]
*he’s pressing the accelerator still*
[DISENGAGE FOOT CONTROLS]
*now he’s turning the wheel*
[JUST IGNORE HIM]
*he’s turned the ignition off*
[JUST TURN HIS LIGHTS OFF AND HOPE HE GOES TO SLEEP]
*shit, he’s trying to get out of the car*
[RELEASE SLEEP GAS]
*do we actually have that*

What if some guy gives the computer a female voice. That’s all. Just copies all their coding, and changes its voice. Makes her all dominatrix husky, and the dickheads love it. They all want it, and they listen to it, so it works when she says “If you keep playing with my buttons I’m going to put you to sleep, Richard.”

Did that guy steal from the programmers? No. Surely their stuff, their coding and ideas, in the public domain, was already being used. They’re probably working on something else now. And for the rest of us, isn’t it just a faster way of getting speed lanes for dickheads? After all, the programmers started working on the car the moment they saw the scientists were inventing a the speed lane.

Because it was all in the public domain.

If you’re going ahead full steam, and someone sees what you’re doing, they shouldn’t be able to catch you, or whatever progress they are now making is the new ‘full steam’. If they do catch you, and match you, and beat you, then copy them, or try something new!

Protecting ideas makes ideas atrophy and die. Ideas become great when a guy rolls a load on a log past the man who’s about to invent the wheel.