Listing entries tagged with seoul

off to seoul   12.17.2005, 7:02 AM

Over the next couple of weeks I will be traveling in South Korea, the land that invented moveable type (1234), and which to this day is cooking up the future of the book on a high flame: from massivly multiplayer online games, to Samsung's Ubiquitous Dream Hall, to the massively multiplayer citizen journalism site OhmyNews. It will take me about 20 hours to get there but I feel I'll be stepping a few years into the future. I expect... well, I have no idea what to expect. And all this futurama is only the tip of the iceberg. I have a camera and it shouldn't be too hard to find an internet connection, so expect a few postcards.

Posted by ben vershbow at 07:02 AM | Comments (1)
tags: MMOG , citizen_journalism , conferences_and_excursions , future , korea , samsung , seoul , travel , video_games

copyright lawyers remain richest professionals   09.20.2005, 12:50 PM

Or so is the case in Korea, where the custodians of intellectual property law ranked first (apparently for the sixth straight year) in a recent personal income survey. An interesting nugget blown down the pipeline from Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo, in an article barely longer than its headline. Though I am only able to explore the English-language edition, it seems to be a newspaper with no end of information, but little in the way of analysis. One has the feeling of reading oil, a lubricant for the economic wheels that have delivered a war-torn and psychologically divided nation into material prosperity. Korea is now a major regional power of the so-called global information economy.

The Chosun trifle nicely animates the highly abstract, but fascinating "A Hacker Manifesto" by McKenzie Wark, which I recently began reading. The manifesto is a Marxist tract for the information age, redefining the eternal class struggle in terms of intellectual property - the post-capital form of property - which is controlled by a new ruling class, the "vectoralists." The vectoralists - Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, or the big pharmaceutical companies would be the most obvious examples - control the vectors, or channels, of communication, and seek to subjugate the "hackers," who Wark defines as a newly coherent class of idea makers - programmers, inventors, artists and philosophers. It's an important book, and convincingly argues why the intellectual property debate is central in the struggle for liberty.

That the vectoralist class has replaced capital as the dominant exploiting class can be seen in the form that the leading corporations take. These firms divest themselves of their productive capacity, as this is no longer a source of power. They rely on a competing mass of capitalist contractors for the manufacture of their products. Their power lies in monopolizing intellectual property -- patents, copyrights and trademarks -- and the means of reproducing their value -- the vectors of communication. The privatization of information becomes the dominant, rather than a subsidiary, aspect of commodified life.

He goes on to quote from Naomi Klein:

"There is a certain logic to this progression: first, a select group of manufacturers transcend their connection to earthbound products, then, with marketing elevated as the pinnacle of their business, they attempt to alter marketing's social status as a commercial interruption and replace it with seamless integration."

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:50 PM | Comments (1)
tags: Copyright and Copyleft , IT , capitalism , class , communism , copyleft , copyright , hacker , hacking , intellectualproperty , korea , law , lawyer , manifesto , marxism , naomiklein , patent , seoul , vector , vectoralist , wark