Presented at
REcon 2008,
June 14, 2008, 2:30 p.m.
(60 minutes)
As more of our shared cultured is privatized and turned into commodities we lose control over the meanings that shape social life. Where first-generation hackers transgressed property rights through the breaking of code, second-generation hackers seek to undermine the corporate control over meaning through the often illegal transformation of privately owned meanings. This appropriation of intellectual property by artist, cultural jammers, and ordinary YouTubers reflects a will to subvert the priority given to private property within capitalism. Appropriation, piracy, hacking, and other techniques of dissent enable a form of asymmetrical cultural warfare to be wage against the terror of capital. Dr. Strangelove will outline the central role that meaning and intellectual property rights play in the reproduction of capitalism and explain how corporations and the state are losing control over the production of meaning in the Internet age.
Presenters:
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Micheal Strangelove
Michael Strangelove is one of Canada's Internet pioneers. The Financial Post Magazine has called Strangelove "an international expert on cyberspace and a netrepreneur." In the commercial Internet field he has many firsts associated with his name. Strangelove coauthored the first directory of scholarly Internet publications (1991), founded and published the world's first print-based magazine to address marketing and advertising on the commercial Internet (The Internet Business Journal, 1993), and wrote what may well be the first book to address Internet advertising and consumer behaviour (How to Advertise on the Internet, 1994). The Globe and Mail Report on Business referred to Strangelove as "one of the first Canadians to make use of the Net as a sales tool."
During the earliest days of the commercial Internet, Strangelove created a company that offered practical, business-related Internet and intranet communication, training and publishing services, long before such services were available through other sources. In light of such accomplishments, Canadian Business magazine referred to Strangelove as the "acknowledged dean of Internet entrepreneurs and the man who literally wrote the book on commercialization of the Net."
Strangelove's book, The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (University of Toronto Press, 2005), a Governor-General's Award finalist in the category of non-fiction, explores the social implications of piracy and consumer-generated content. Strangelove lectures at the University of Ottawa's Department of Communication.
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