Archiving Stuff

A followup remark to the post below:  business English is going strong and "Amerish" (emphasis on "mer") was Gene Fowler's moniker for the not-actually-English the Americans have going.  Both of these might co-exist without the LAWCAP emphasis on the King (some private person) owning everything by default.  We shall see.

I'm using Cyberduck FTP client to suck down a snapshot of my 4Dsolutions.net website, which has some unused (unserved) content.  I'll probably stash this 255 MB to a thumb drive for safe keeping, but then how "safe" is a thumb drive in the rough and tumble of someone's personal collection? 

As I work on tying off loose ends, I think of Kenneth Snelson and how disciplined he was about archiving.  If our correspondence survives, it's likely thanks to him more than me.

The plan to warehouse a lot of my stuff at one of the schools is an attractive possibility, as in that context I could let go of a lot of it.  I'm also storing for others, mostly in my garage, but also in the basement.

Mel and Lindsey used to live in the basement (as house guests, not renters), per a previous chapter.  I have mostly Mel's stuff by now, and a box or two from Sunanda.  Lindsey did a good job cleaning out when she moved to Corvallis.  I keep her altar going in the back office.  Mel helps tend my altar for Dawn when they swing through.  I've lost touch with Micheal S. (that's how he spells it).

Everyone faces these same questions, about how best to archive stuff in time capsules.  Some stuff we destroy. 

I've sensed the internet was more secure than my personal circumstances so most of my writings and digital pictures went to the cloud.  These blogs for example.

Intellectual Property

Corporations have made it harder, not easier, to share.  Geeks had to fight back by inventing copyleft, which in various derivative forms kept the economy going in spite of itself.  But the FBI still put warnings all over the DVDs saying "no sharing, or else!".

What if you're ideologically opposed to content A, but A is being pumped out to the world by Obnoxico and to counter it, you need to see it.  Are you obligated to give money to those pumping out said content?  That's more of an ethical question than a legal one.

On the legal front, of course you can't show Disney cartoons to Syrian refugees or to Mexican families camped along the border, because the UN and/or USG has no budget for entering the tightly controlled movie business.  Moving digital content around is under the control of LAWCAP, we all know that.  The FBI tells us so.

As engineers, some of us feel leery about artificially creating scarcity where none exists.  It's like Jesus doing the miracle of loaves and fishes, but then the loaf and fish people come in and fine everyone because miracles are not allowed.  The electronic revolution has created a number of miracles, such as perfect, low-cost copying, that are an anathema to those growing up using "private property" as their metaphor for anything intellectual.

My general sense is Anglophone law, i.e. law cast in the English language, has a half life, which could be a lot shorter than predicted given how slowly LAWCAP has been able to adjust in the face of GRUNCH.  That's code language, obviously.  If you've done any homework at all, you know what I'm talking about.  If not, get an education?

Village Lore

The GST PWS (personal workspace) is typified by researchers comparing notes on telemedia, with Youtube providing the early sandbox for many, who then move on to more virtual environments. I've followed essentially this same path, uploading to Google early (Alphabet) and later giving my Synergetics lectures.

In researcher mode, we go back to Greenwich Village.  My core question is whether Bucky's term there had anything to do with Bohemians using "square" to insult other social classes. Philosophically, that would make sense, while journalistically it's somewhat too good to be true, which is why I'm compelled to play the skeptic.

Lets be clear that I'm not operating entirely outside the realm of possibility, as Fuller was a one of the "village idiots" (meant affectionately) along with "Will and Ariel Durant, e.e. cummings, Theodore Dreiser, John Sloan, Burl Ives, Zero Mostel, Edgar Varese, Brancusi, Isamu Noguchi, Diego Rivera and hundreds of other shining lights of literature, art, theater and academia" (I'm quoting from a blurb on Amazon).  He and Isamu got along famously.  I would later visit the Best of Friends exhibit, set up to memorialize their relationship. We also visited Kenneth Snelson on that trip.

But what about the Ginsberg crowd i.e. William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Patti Smith and like that? Neal Cassady definitely talked about "squares" but where had that started?

Romany Marie, the Queen, established her centers, one might say prototypical of Centers Network (for which I volunteered, later in New York's history), which influenced my marketing around Coffee Shops Network (CSN).  How these centers served more than one generation of "beatnik" is the documentary focus of my research this morning.  I'm not making a podcast out of it, but others might. The radio audience is especially receptive to Village Lore given how much of the output was audio to begin with.