/patternHunter [/ph]

I believe that the greatest threat to continuous innovation is the notion of intellectual "property." This concept presupposes that ideas are things that can be owned, stolen and therefore need protection.

I remember reading a passage in "Turtles All The Way Down" where John Grinder refers to Judith Delozier's thesis on oral traditions in which stories are constantly updated over time to meet the needs of the current context. Doesn't intellectual "property" negate this adaptation, impede collaboration and drive people apart?

In the world of software development, many developers realize that "ownership" is foolish and nearly guarantees that their "solutions" will fade away. Just look at the growing open source movement (Linux, GNU, etc.) that has pressured even the mighty Microsoft to publish their source code (although it is currently "read-only).

Of course, open-source collaboration undermines the value of authority and “credentials.” A person’s opinion is only as valuable as its utility. The fact that someone founded a field, originated a line of thinking or has an advance degree may be interesting (especially for historical purposes) but is otherwise meaningless. Certainly, this practice is potentially threatening to those of us who have benefited from being in positions of authority (myself included).

Open-source collaboration moves intellectual pursuits into a world similar to that of sports. The thought of Barry Bonds trademarking his homerun record to protect his status defeats the purpose of the game. What makes the game interesting is that every new player is actively encouraged to challenge the accomplishments of those who have gone before.

As an illustration, I offer the following is a quote from author Douglas Rushkoff's article Electronica: The True Cyberculture:

As with the Internet, however, Electronica has a lot of people, mostly businessmen, scared. Unlike rock concerts, raves don’t focus on the stars. There are no rock heroes to worship, only records and CD’s by relatively anonymous artists. Just as the Internet tends to destroy the illusion of authority, electronic music removes the cult of personality from the music scene, and this makes it a marketer’s nightmare.

In contrast, I would argue that disputes over copyrights and trademarks, perhaps even the "protections" themselves, create barriers to collaboration. To claim "intellectual property" (an oxymoron, in my opinion), even the most marginal idea often carries some kind of "don't steal from me or I will sue your ass" type of warning. A prominent NLP trainer (who I will not name) performs a twisted version of "Change History" with each new tape series in which every other contributor is increasingly marginalized into "spell checkers" at best and outright thieves at worst. It should be no surprise that this person's creative output has faded into oblivion since the start of his attacks.

By contrast, science has grown by treating collected publications as a commons where authors and researchers are encouraged to build upon the work of others as long as they provide proper attribution. That doesn't mean that the journals collecting these articles are free nor does it mean that plagiarism is acceptable; it means that the works are in the public domain and therefore "free" to use by others who wish to challenge or build upon those works.

Could it be that the notion intellectual property itself is a barrier to the collaborative intelligence that makes us human?

Cory Doctorow: "Kevin Kelly has posted a detailed explanation of the process by which you can get your self-published DVD, CD or book listed on Amazon. It's a great idea for those evangelical, get-the-message-out micro-publishing projects that have more than 10 or 20 potential customers -- you can print a couple hundred media objects at your local print-shop for a fraction of what a vanity press will charge, and then turn over all the post-office and payment crap to Amazon."/Boing Boing/

Cory also has describes the "best way to get a link published (on the amazing Boing Boing blog):" /Boing Boing/

Fascinating argument: "A shocking recent study has discovered that only 13% of Stanford professors are Republicans. The authors compare this to the 51% of 2004 voters who selected a Republican for President and argue this is 'evidence of discrimination' and that 'academic Republicans are being eradicated by academic Democrats.'

"Scary as this is, my preliminary research has discovered some even more shocking facts. I have found that only 1% of Stanford professors believe in telepathy (defined as “communication between minds without using the traditional five senses”), compared with 36% of the general population. And less than half a percent believe “people on this earth are sometimes possessed by the devil”, compared with 49% of those outside the ivory tower...

"This dreadful lack of intellectual diversity is a serious threat to our nation’s youth, who are quietly being propagandized by anti-astrology radicals instead of educated with different points of view." /Intellectual Diversity at Stanford (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)/

Tharos proclaims, "This is the Cyberpunk Reading List, accept no substitutions!" In this case, I am not one to argue... /magister23/

Larry Carlson may be one of the most creative and trippiest Flash artist I have ever seen. This is definitely worth checking out for some consciousness engineering! /The wonderful world of Larry Carlson/

"Tomkins was an expert at studying facial muscles and what they revealed about people. His theories bordered on phrenology: [Tomkins] could walk into a post office, it was said, go over to the 'Wanted' posters, and, just by looking at mug shots, tell you what crimes the various fugitives had committed" /Boing Boing/

Two very different interpretations of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly: The new Richard Linklater film starring Keanu Reeves and the much darker Darkly from RustMonkey productions

According to this quiz, I am William Gibson! /Which science fiction writer you are/

Communitities in Cyberspace Home "is devoted to exploring new forms of social organization and the changing concepts of community as social groups develop within computer networks. Contributors examine changes in the nature of personal identity, social organization and the connections between real-world communities and their extensions in cyberspace."

"...Unlike Virtual Reality, which immerses users in a new digital environment, Augmented Reality (AR) -- a broad class of user interface techniques intended to enhance a person’s perception of the world around them with computer generated information -- aims to enhance the analog world...Users, via wearable display screens, see the non-virtual world around them with digital information superimposed into their surroundings." /Smart Mobs/

"(William) Gibson himself has criticized the appropriation of his ideas, arguing that the irony in his writing often gets erased by those who over-enthusiastically and over-simlistically embrace his vision of the cyberfuture." /i function like i'm a girl/

"Co-link technology is very simple to use. After a link is clicked, a small menu opens at the side of that word with a list of directions (co-links) and an option to add a new co-link. Thus, clicking on a link does not discharge the automatic loading of a pre-specified page. Instead, a menu of one or more associated readings is presented to the interactant, multiplying the navigational possibilities. While traditional links are still configured as unidirectional vectors, they can now become multidirectional with co-links technology. In other words, many directions can be chosen from the same link." /Smart Mobs: Collaboration is the future of hyperlink creation/

"Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe (is) the only book I know that is explicitely describing a possible future of blogging... Cory decided not to envision blog communities as based on geography, nor on special interest, but on the time of day when people are online. Thus larks from Europe and owls from America would blog simultaneously. Thus, communities are based on Time Zones, with each individual choosing the time zone according to one's own sleeping patterns. There are wars between EST and GMT tribes and a variety of other intrigue, making for some exciting reading.

Of course, it is just fiction and Cory probably made a conscious decision to base his communities on unrealistic criteria and let the readers translate the message into the real world. When I first blogged about this Cory found out about it (he checks his Technorati, too, I guess) and posted a link on BoingBoing. As a result, I got almost 17000 hits over a period of one week - the very first week of the blog! It helped that Andrew Sullivan picked up the link, too. But it is interesting how many LiveJournal folks spread this link across the blogosphere, much more than Blogger or Typepad-style bloggers." /Science And Politics/

"Russ Belk, a consumer behaviorist at the University of Utah, said (Markus) Giesler is one of the best-recognized experts studying high-tech consumer behavior.

'Perhaps it was his earlier success as a musician synthesizing jingles for advertising, but Markus has a way of seeing harmonies and disharmonies between people and technologies,' said Belk.

"According to Giesler's preliminary research, the iPod isn't simply an updated Walkman. It's an entirely new beast: a revolutionary device that transforms listeners into 'cyborgs' through a process he calls 'technotranscendence.'

"Unlike the Walkman, the iPod taps into a 'hybrid entertainment matrix,' in which functions like random shuffle are a key construct, not just a cute marketing device." /Wired News/

"(W)hy does a crazed mutant like Tom Peters focus his energies on business? (I don't sense that its about the money). Shouldn't he be writing Kerouac-esque tales of travel and adventure? Or blowing minds ala Timothy Leary?" /Hobopoet/

“The tribes are taking over the world […] Tribes are agendas. Aesthetics. Ethos. Traditions. Ways of getting things done. They’re competitive. They may not all be based on time-zones. There are knitting Tribes and vampire fan-fiction Tribes and Christian rock tribes, but they’ve always existed."– Eastern Standard Tribe, Cory Doctorow.

"Second Life resident Duuya Herbst is a real-life descendant of the Deeni people, a small tribe among about 15 others living in the northwestern United States, who were virtually wiped out by the U.S. government in the late 1800s. With no surviving pure-blood of the actual Deeni tribe alive today, he is trying to salvage the spirit of his ancestors in an online community and save a language spoken fluently by only 10 or so people on the planet." /The Second Life Herald/

Wow! Now this sounds like a lot of fun: "Really Leary is a staged alternative reality, more commonly known as a rock musical comedy. Really Leary tells the altogether plausible story of the presidential election of 2052, which pits two cryogenically-thawed 20th century icons (the fully-restored Walt Disney and the head-only restored Timothy Leary) against one another. The campaign unfolds on the Disney Asteroid (DisneyRoid for short), an off-world corporate tax haven controlled by the feisty, God-fearin’ Purlie Gates, daughter of Bill Gates’s second clone (an unfortunate Beta version, plagued by troublesome code errors reminiscent of early Windows operating systems). You’ll follow the campaign from defrost to debate, with the victor decided in a dramatic showdown as the candidates go head-to-head on the interactive presidential game show, Choose Your Chief." /Really Leary/

"We're using technology to extend the human nervous system. The Internet is a kind of global prosthetic extension of human consciousness. It wasn't consciously intended as one but it amounts to one. -- William Gibson, No Maps For These Territories" /The CodeMode Chronicles/

"Steve Crandall recently pointed me to some research on mirror neurons. Scientists have recently discovered ‘mirror neurons’. V.S. Ramachandran posits that the discovery of mirror neurons ”...is the single most important “unreported” (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade…” /The Social Software Weblog/

"A recently discovered system in the brain may help explain why we humans can get so worked up watching other people." /NOVA/

"it seems this person's foremost responsibility is tracking online conversations and doing business intelligence based on her research. This is still not what I would call 'Dialog Faciliation', but is a good step towards that role. And, as Marqui's post would suggest, some other people at Marqui are actually charged with responding to internet dialogs." /RSS Marketing/

"You cannot imagine my horror, however, when my eyes met pages filled with saccharine, pastel artwork depicting cold-eyed androids that were clearly not of our realm. In a Beautiful Mind moment of schizophrenic clarity I saw the book for what it was: not a gentle introduction to life's most profound curiosity, but a primer for the parasitic offspring of an invisible invasion!" /The Cuddly Menace/

OSN2005 will be a summit for all those interested in working with social networking processes, tools, and media. In addition to attending many workshops, panels, and presentations by leading experts and practitioners, attendees will have the opportunity to be part of a community with a significant role in defining the future direction of online social networking. If you want to help shape this industry, come to OSN2005! /Online Social Networking 2005/

"For a while there, U2 was making William Gibson music. That was the most interesting stuff they ever did, at least to me." /Zenarchery.com/

Too scary! But kinda cool too! /AdCritic Interactive/