Linkwad.

Back again. Let’s get it:

• A three-part primer on tagging, via @BoingBoing.
• Keyboards affect how you think.
• Politics destroys empathy. In case you didn’t already know that.

Linkwad.

Honeymoon photos coming soon! Promise.

• I don’t know if I buy the “Internet is killing serendipity” argument, but this essay makes the case as well as any I’ve read.
• The history of the reeeeemiiiiiix.
• Just FYI: “Everyone else is just as bad” isn’t really a good defense, Internet commentariat.
• Obviously, the answer to “Why do we need SOPA?” is, “We don’t.”
• Pitchfork’s impact and history. For you lazy-ass TL;DR types: “A Pitchfork review may ignore history, aesthetics, or the basic technical aspects of tonal music, but it will almost never fail to include a detailed taxonomy of the current hype cycle and media environment. This is a small, petty way of thinking about a large art.”

No future (part 2).

At the risk of being hyperbolic¹, you should listen to this Titus Andronicus track while reading this Cory Doctorow essay:

As we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits, and all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship. This stuff matters because we’ve spent the last decade sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it’s just been an end-level guardian. The stakes are only going to get higher.
…
We haven’t lost yet, but we have to win the copyright war first if we want to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policies for them; to examine and terminate the software processes that runs on them; and to maintain them as honest servants to our will, not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.

I think most people will remain blissfully² ignorant of this problem–every time Apple releases a new iOS device, people clamor to be allowed into their walled garden, and the piracy, copyright and patent wars³ rate similarly low on people’s priority lists. Which is an extremely long, link-heavy way of saying: “I am very pessimistic.”

Linkwad.

• Jonah Weiner’s Louis CK interview and profile.
• This eye-controlled computer is excellent, but undoubtedly already patented.
• For Baltimore job creation, filmmaking > racing. For the record, fixing potholes > racing. PS: the Brew is now on Kickstarter.
• Skip past the Tebow part for some actual knowledge on fourth down calls, momentum, and challenges.

Piracy on the high HTTPs.

Matt Yglesias has a good point about the misguided economic logic¹ underpinning strong copyright laws like SOPA and Protect IP:

Returns to being a superstar content creator are much much higher in 2011 than they were in 1981. That’s because the potential audience is much bigger. It’s bigger because the world’s population is larger, it’s bigger because many poor countries have gotten significantly less poor, and it’s bigger because the fall of Communism has expanded the practical market reach of big entertainment conglomerates. At the same time, the cost of producing digital media content has fallen thanks to improved computers and information technology. Now step back and ask yourself why we have copyright in the first place. Well, it’s because policymakers think that absent government-created monopolies there won’t be adequate financial incentives to go out and create new content. That’s not a crazy thing to believe. But the implication is that if globalization and technology drive the returns to content ownership up, we need less IP protection. Instead, we’ve consistently gotten more.

And as everyone from Valve² to Louis CK³ has shown, people are still buying things!