What’s not to like about Jaron Lanier? The musician/intellectual grates rather less than the soi-disant plutocrats he hobnobs with over at Edge.org.
Anyway, we loved the dreadlocked one-man thinktank’s futurist interpretation of a world with no Napster, or, more accurately, a word in which filesharing is outlawed. ‘If we make Napster-like free filesharing illegal, we’ll have to rid ourselves of either computers or democracy. You can’t have both.” Ah, yes, the slippery slope. Always good for a self-limiting, tendentious, overweening, unintentionally humorous argument.
The punchline? He’s probably right! God love ’im.
Posted on 2001-01-13