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Our first LP release, HURLY BURLY AND THE VOLCANIC FALLOUT - GIANT ROBOT JETPACK \\ THE NEW CLEAR LAWN CHAIRS - VOTED MOST CHILL IN HIGHSCHOOL is out! It's shipping now. This record means so much to me. It's a split. Double A-Side, two covers. The Chairs' side was recorded in 2014 or 2015 (it's hard to say, Jon says "I'm 19 years old" and "Now I'm 20 years old" in the same song, the lyrics to which were written they day he recorded it.) It is a snapshot of the metro atlanta music scene of that era, an ode to the majesty and shame of Swayze's Venue in Kennesaw, GA.

It was also one of the first releases Analog Revolution put out as a DIY label, way back when. We released it on cassette and CD. Now it is once again available on cassette, and for the first time on LP. Now, In the time since, Jon of the New Clear Lawn Chairs has gone on to join Michael Cera Palin, which is admittedly a very different jam from Voted Most Chill in Highschool, but you may know him better as their bassist.

The other A-Side is Hurly Burly and the Volcanic Fallout's Giant Robot Jetpack. It features coverart by Will Dover. It was the first album recorded at the Ellijay Makerspace, shortly before we officially opened to the public. It features the co-founder of Analog Revolution, Ryan Stoyer, on bass, and the current AR person at AR, Violet, on vocals and guitar. You may also know Violet from her work in Doctor Deathray. You may not know that Hurly Burly and the Volcanic Fallout played the Analog Revolution kick-off party. ~10 years ago, before we opened our record store, to coincide with the release of the first issue of our Magazine, Hurly Burly and the Volcanic Fallout played a secret set under a bridge in an abandoned go-kart park in an undisclosed location.

Both of these bands have been with us since the beginning (or before!) and I am so thrilled to be able to bring them both to a wider audience via this Beautiful Volcanic/Nuclear splatter LP (produced by Physical Music Productions in Nashville)

You can get the record now on Bandcamp.

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DIY MEDIA

I wrote this in 2015 and updated it slightly in 2017. These ideas are central to all the work that I do.

Comcast (through merger with GE/NBC/Universal), Viacom, Disney (who now controls most of Newscorp/Fox’s media), CBS, and Time Warner currently control 90% of American media. This media oligopoly is more dangerous than we often give it credit for. These five companies exert incredible power over our modern political landscape. (They are responsible for things like the DMCA, and the TPP, EME, and today’s Net Neutrality decision, in addition to our ever increasing copyright terms.)

They collectively control so much of our political and economic landscape that it’s difficult to effectively understand, or begin to trace, the breadth of their influence. And that’s without stopping to consider how much the media we consume can shape our views. It’s hard to believe that the near constant coverage of President Trump in the months before the election didn’t influence his performance in the election.

We are constantly bombarded with entertainment and news media from these five companies, to the point that it is nigh inescapable. Even if the companies that feed us our news and entertainment were benign (and, don’t kid yourself, they aren’t), it would be nearly impossible to keep their biases out of our media. Simply put, we cannot afford to have such a vital part of our society controled by so few.

If we’re ever going to actually effect social change, we’re going to need to provide home grown, community alternatives to the media produced by the entrenched power structures represented by these mega-corporations. We need to hit them at their bottom line, which means creating (and consuming) compelling community TV, Film, Games, Prose, Music, and other art.

Many are already working towards these goals, and we should support them. Others are considering embarking on path towards DIY media. We must encourage and support them. As consumers, we must actively support the creators who choose to work independently.

See, it’s like this: When we buy stuff from major corporations, we transfer money (and therefore power) out of our local communities, and in to the pockets of CEOs and shareholders. When we make stuff, or buy stuff from our communties, that wealth (and power) stays within our communities.

Until recently, there were economic and logistic obstacles that prevented comunties from providing the same kind of Community alternatives for most kinds of media. Thankfully, this is no longer true.

Kids in their bedrooms can record and produce an album that sounds “professional” with a few hundred dollars worth of gear, or record an album that sounds “good enough” with a smartphone or a laptop and some free software. Countless news stories of the last few years broke on Twitter, or Facebook thanks to a citizen journalist and their smartphone. There have been many TV show style series released on the web, from amatuers and professionals alike.

People are making their own media, and that’s awesome.

For the first time in the history of mass broadcasting, anyone can reach an audience of millions. (Sure, at the moment, we largely rely on corporate behemoths like Google and Facebook to do it, but the DIY Tech movement is well underway with decentralized services like Mastodon going strong, and new platforms being developed every day.)

The products of modern hobbyists can rival and surpass the output of media conglomerates both in terms of quality and consumption in nearly every field. In fact, with the exception of a couple of NPR or BBC endeavours, most successful modern podcasts/audio dramas are community-centered productions.

Make Something!

At this point, I feel like the act of creating media outside of the control of a multi-million dollar corporation is a radical act in and of itself.

Media controls our perception of reality. Current media companies are monopolistically huge, and thanks to modern copyright law they exert undue control over the figures of our modern folklore

Studies have shown time and again that when people experience fiction about people, they identify and empathize with those people.

We experience the world through our media. We use it to contextualize and understand our environment. When the most popular TV shows and Movies are about renegade cops and violent vigilantes that take the law in to their own hands, we internalize and normalize that.

We have to control our own media.

The bit I mentioned about copyright before is why the Creative Commons foundation is so important. Copyright reform might be a defining battle of our age, but we can skip it by embracing CC.

I currently view independent media production and distribution as among the most significant and necessary acts of protest available to regular folks.

This was the message Punk was supposed to teach us, before it got co-opted by shitty white supremacists, and people so afraid of teenage girls that they burned down the whole institution.

We gotta make our own stuff, even if it’s garbage. But beyond that, we gotta support one another when we make stuff. A lot of Punk (and a lot of late 60s/early 70s Jazz) was recorded on potatoes, basically. It was of “low quality” compared to the output from the major labels of the era.

But it was also radical and revolutionary, and some of it unquestionably changed the face of modern music.

So, what I’m saying here, is don’t worry if your stuff is “good.”

Make it. Get it in the world. Share it.

Support One Another!

So, what can you do? You can make things. You can consume things. You can seek out independent media, and support it (by paying the creators, and spreading the word.) You can get off Facebook, and join something community run.

Right now, the DIY media community is just beginning to stretch it’s legs. We have found what appears to be a viable funding model through services like Kickstarter and Patreon, though these are not without fault. We are building the communication channels needed to enable solid Content Discovery (though this is still the largest problem facing the community today.)

So, consumers of media, I encourage you to intentionally seek out experiences that weren’t designed by one of the major players, and support community creators financially when possible.

Hop on Bandcamp and listen to music that was recorded in someone’s bedroom. Seek out independently produced films on Youtube. Go watch something out of the Public Domain. Listen to a podcast. Enjoy some fanfiction. Play some Indie computer games (no really), or read some independently published novels. Actively and intentionaly spend even a small portion of your media budget on something that wasn’t produced by one of the big 5.

And Creators: Keep making weird, wonderful stuff. Every piece of media created outside the sphere of influence of the big 5 is an act of protest. Keep fighting the good fight.

The effects, while slow to start, will snowball. If we work together, and support one another, we can break the hold this oligopoly has on our media. We can take our culture back.

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I’ve spent the better part of the last 6 months watching my friends build something that we’re calling New Ellijay Television. I’m really excited about it. It launches November 5th. Think about it like Public Access TV, but for the modern age.

New Ellijay TV is a collective of producers, directors, writers, and actors based in Ellijay, GA.

We are focused on creating visual media for our community and beyond. We’re making a new kind of Television for a new kind of small town, and providing a community based, home grown alternative to major streaming platforms.

This is a project of the Ellijay Makerspace and is the culmination of the intersections of many of my beliefs, values, and interests. It’s a thing I feel very strongly about.

Why?

Right now, if someone makes a video, they’re going to put it on youtube. Youtube is going to make money on it (the creator might too, but less than youtube does), and youtube is going to use that video as a gateway to indoctrination. It algorithmically suggests followup videos “based on your views” which serve as a feedback loop, constantly directing you towards more and more extreme content.

Youtube (like most other tech companies) makes it’s money by producing outrage. Outrage drives eyeballs, and the American right has learned to weaponize that feedback loop. Youtube is an indoctrination machine that also enriches a small group of far away millionaires and billionaires. Put simply, youtube is a tool of oppression.

If I want to watch video, and I’ve decided that I won’t give my attention to youtube, I’m stuck with the things that come out of four or five major corporations who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and telling stories that promote their ideology.

Copaganda, Misogyny, Bigotry.

Every second I spend watching a Disney or a WB owned property through legal means I directly enrich the people who stoked the outrage machine that led to, among other things, the election of Donald Trump.

Every second I spend watching a Disney or WB owned property through illegal means increases my investment in the stories that they are telling, and my acceptance of the way that they tell those stories.

CSI and Law and Order and Brooklyn 99 increase people’s trust and goodwill in police, regardless of their lack of basis in reality.

So what is the alternative?

We make our own videos, and we make our own platform through which to distribute them. This is much easier than it sounds. The technology already exists, and is free.

I run a small video sharing service already and it’s fine. I make videos, others make videos. No one has to accidentally watch a tirade against feminism masquerading as a review of a new movie or video game.

But it’s not designed to scale, and it’s not especially discoverable. (Scale is a trap, and discoverability is the defining problem of the next 50 years of technological progress, but more on those later.) It’s just me, and some random other people from the internet. There’s no Vision behind it, but it proves that what we want to do Can Be Done.

Enter New Ellijay TV

We have a vision, we have an audience, we have a target. We’re making TV for Ellijay first, and we’ll be happy if the rest of the world is interested too. We have more than a dozen shows planned, with hundreds of hours of footage already shot, and 40+ hours of original footage (and another several hundred hours of public domain historical archives) ready to be released right now.

We have the tools, equipment, space, and crew to create a new kind of television. We will tell the stories that matter to this community, showing the realities of our lives, engendering sympathy for our communities. We will keep Money and Power and Attention out of the hands of the large corporations who seek to destroy us, and within this community, where it can empower us.

We will transform Ellijay through the power of participatory media.

If it’s that easy, why hasn’t someone already done it?

Folks on the far right of the political spectrum are actively working on it. OAN, NRA TV, whatever Glenn Beck and Alex Jones are up to today. This is independent media made for a very targeted audience, designed to Extract money and power and attention from a community and use it for destructive political and social ends.

(Means.TV has been very successful recently, on a similar scale as the right wing groups mentioned above. They are making things I agree with, following an ethical production model, and generally doing a good job. But they are making TV for people who agree with them already.

Means Morning News would not fly in small town appalachia, watch it for yourself, you’ll understand why. We have to meet people where they are and invite them to Participate.)

Other not-horrible-groups have recognized the potential revolutionary power of video in the past, and have come close to what we’re building here. (Broadside TV and Lainsville TV were the most successful historically.) but we have a technological edge that they did not.

We’re not dependent on the FCCs goodwill or negligance to broadcast, we’re not dependent on physical infrastructure (we’re tethered to the internet for now, but we’ll exist beyond the internet eventually, just wait.)

If you’re interested in more of the history of these other groups, I have written about them:

The forgotten history of DIY Media

Guerilla Television Revisited (revisited)

and you can see some of the videos they produced:

The Videofreex interview Fred Hampton shortly before police murdered him without cause

Lainsville TV UFO Sighting

Mountain at the NY Pop Festival

TVTV on Guru Maharaji

I am not aware of any footage that is currently circulating from Broadside TV, but their archives are currently housed at the University of Northern Tennesee, and I would very much like to liberate them.

Now what?

Now we make TV. We get members of our community to make TV with us. We get people around the world to make TV with us.

We expand.

If that sounds like your cup of tea, come make TV with us. Even if you can’t participate in person, the principles we’re following can be applied anywhere. Work with us to reach out, to enlist participation, to make this thing everything it can and should and must become.

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small technology, small economy, small community

Many of the major technological and cultural innovations of the last several hundred years have served to flatten the world, eliminate or obviate distance, and bring us closer together as people. Printing, transportation, telephone, radio, television, home video, and the internet have each, in their own way, made our impact on the world bigger, and made parts of the world smaller.

But this came at a price.

Technology is not a net good, or even a neutral force. Technology is a Force Multiplier. It reshapes the world to fit the vision of those who design it, regulate it, and wield it. Oil companies poison our lakes and rivers, slowly boiling our planet. Facebook tracks everything we do online and uses that data to make us miserable. Disney owns an outsized portion of modern folklore. The FCC decides who gets to launch a radio station, and under what circumstances. Television turns reasonable people in to rabid fans of raving monsters, and turns raving monsters in to celebrities, politicians and thought leaders.

It does not have to be this way.

It is this way thanks to a combination of factors, most of which can be summarized as “The Profit Motive.” For some companies, making people angry is a surefire way to drive Engagement, and driving Engagement is a surefire way to make money. For other companies, the money lies in controlling our access to our own culture, gatekeeping who is allowed to tell stories, and when, and how. For these major corporations, there is no incentive to Help, to Improve. There’s no money in making the world a better place.

It will not be easy.

Most new technologies, but especially Digital technologies, experience a period between inception and corporatization during which they florish as a result of a bunch of disparate people with distinct goals who Explore the space that the technology creates, often without regard for profit of any kind, or at least with some motivation beyond pure profit. Then there is, usually, a period of contraction and consolidation around the things that have made the most money (or, in the case of television, have had the most Regulatory support from the corrupt FCC) and you’re left with HBO/DISCOVERY, Disney, Facebook, and Joe Rogan.

But we can reject the profit motive!

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Intellectual Property is Common Property: Arguments for the abolition of private intellectual property rights

Defenders of intellectual property rights argue that these rights are justified because creators and inventors deserve compensation for their labour, because their ideas and expressions are their personal property and because the total amount of creative work and innovation increases when inventors and creators have a prospect of generating high income through the exploitation of their monopoly rights.

In this essay, I will show that the classical arguments for the justification of private intellectual property rights can be contested, and that there are many good reasons to abolish intellectual property rights completely in favour of an intellectual commons where every person is allowed to use every cultural expression and invention in whatever way he wishes.

https://onlinebooks.io/intellectual-property-is-common-property/

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at Livestream Public

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Hospitals are patient zero for the Internet of Things infosec epidemic

As I have often noted, medical devices have terrifyingly poor security models, even when compared to the rest of the nascent Internet of Things, where security is, at best, an afterthought (at worst, it’s the enemy!).

An excellent feature by Monte Reel and Jordan Robertson in Bloomberg Business, documenting the Mayo Clinic’s experiment with hiring penetration testers to examine the security of their devices. The results were predictably alarming: the devices with the power of life and death over entire buildings-full of people are really badly secured, and so prone to hacking that a KPMG survey found “81 percent of health information technology executives said the computer systems at their workplaces had been compromised by a cyber attack within the past two years.”

On the basis of the pen testers’ findings, the Mayo Clinic instituted a stringent set of security requirements from its vendors, but few hospitals and clinics have the bargaining power to make similar demands. What’s more, vendors come up with terrible solutions to their own security problems. For example, the manufacturer of an automated drug-safe that could be trivially “jackpotted” (caused to dump all its opoids and other controlled substances) “fixed” the problem by requiring fingerprint authentication – from surgical teams who were operating in sterile environments, wearing gloves to protect themselves from infectious agents.

The FDA is remarkably uninterested in this (they seem “to literally be waiting for someone to be killed”). Doctors and administrators are prone to shooting the messengers, accusing security researchers of writing scare-stories. But pen testers and auditors keep finding hospitals that are playing host to all kinds of malware that’s sneakily exfiltrating confidential patient data, and, alarmingly, installing ransomware packages with the power to lock up the whole electronic infrastructure of the hospital.

One thing the authors miss, regrettably, is the other titanic and immovable impediment to auditing and improving medical device security: copyright law. Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony (punishable by five years in prison and a $500,000 fine) to disclose information that would assist in removing a digital lock. Medical device vendors routinely deploy these locks to prevent their competitors from making interoperable products. For example, an insulin pump maker might use digital locks to prevent patients from using cheaper insulin; or a pacemaker vendor could use them to prevent competitors from making their own software for organizing patient data, forcing hospitals and doctors’ offices to buy an annual license to use the original vendor’s software.

This year’s Copyright Office proceedings on Section 1201 of the DMCA included this filing from Jay Radcliffe, who features heavily in the Bloomberg story; in which he documents the ways that DMCA has prevented him from disclosing potentially lethal vulnerabilities in commonly used medical implants (including the insulin pump his own doctor wants him to use).

Whatever commercial and technical impediments exist to securing medical devices – bad vendors, lack of negotiating power in hospitals, the intrinsic difficulty of information security – the DMCA makes it all much, much worse.

But it’s a very good article, despite this important omission. Especially good is the passage in which infosec researcher Billy Rios finds himself critically ill, in a hospital bed, being kept alive by many of the insecure devices he’d been railing against:

http://boingboing.net/2015/11/13/hospitals-are-patient-zero-for.html

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Our current income inequality situation is a purposeful and profitable action of the 1%. #FightFor15 #feelthebern

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got bored while doing film revision, made this instead

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Ben Giles

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Ace Double M-127: The Water of Thought by Fred Saberhagen. Cover art by Jerome Podwil, 1965.