SpiralTruth

Around 12 AM last night, Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing got pointed to a major fuck up and wrote about it. That fuck up was owned by none other than Warner Music Group, and since there are about a bazillion blogs on the Internet, Warner would normally have had nothing to worry about. Except that probably everyone who has written a blog post knows of Cory Doctorow. He’s like that kid in the back of the class that never stopped pestering the teacher with questions. You didn’t like him growing up, but then maybe you got to that age where you started doubting your own infallible wisdom just a bit, and you realized how easy it is to compromise between your ideals and “the way it is”. Love him or hate him, you have to admit that turning pissing contests with authority into a business model at the peak of an age where the Corporation has almost complete dominion over us is a pretty decent achievement. It was sort of like watching David and Goliath and knowing how the story ends while you’re watching it unfold. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was hardly mentioned by the mainstream media outlets, but everyone who really matters in terms of the future of the music industry already knows. Within minutes of Cory’s post, WMG’s page on YouTube was blasted with the fury of thousands who had been given the ability to scrawl their thoughts on virtual corporate walls without any fear of punishment. But unlike their physical counterparts, these walls can be copied and spread around the world within seconds. As Mark Phelps knows all too well, little things can become very big things very fast these days, and nothing ever truly dies once it gets online. If you’re still fuzzy on the details, today some poor dolt at Warner told YouTube to take down the company’s own videos, which were linked to on a subsidiary site. The company almost literally shot itself and the entire recording industry in the foot – and it has ironically become the latest victim of the anti-piracy crusades. First those clueless bastards on Wall Street and now this. It’s a great time to be young. No matter what we do, it’s hard to imagine we could ever make a bigger mess of things. It’s times like this that I like to reflect on how the Internet was developed out of the fear of the Establishment. It was a military thing before the rest of us got a hold of it and turned it against its master. Anyone who thinks there’s no room for poetry in this so-post-modern-it-kills-us era… well… what do you call this? Pictures from before Warner tries to flush it all down the ever-narrowing memory hole:


And links: Warner Music to Warner Music: You are pirates!
Warner Music Group on YouTube