“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
- Banksy
”
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“Spread and participate in culture. Remix, reuse, use, abuse. Make sure no one controls your mind. Create new systems and technology that circumvent the corruption. Start a religion. Start your own nation, or buy one. Buy a bus. Crush it to pieces.”
“The battle of Open vs. Closed is not a zero sum game. Both have their time. It’s a sin wave. First, closed, proprietary solutions come to define a new way of fulfilling a use case and doing business. They solve a problem simply and elegantly and blaze a path to market awareness, acceptance and commercialization. Open, however, always follows. Whether it’s a year, a decade or a century, Open. Always. Wins. The only question is how long, as an industry, are we going to keep our tail tucked between our legs in front of the the great giant proprietary platform of the moment or are we going to get our act together to ensure the “Time to Open” is as short as possible. It takes courage, co-ordination and vision, but we can all play our part to shorten the time frame between the invention of a proprietary app and the absorption of that value into the open web platform.”
The Open Web Is Dead – Long live the Open Web | Chris Saad
My brother-in-law pointed out that Saad actually misses some lessons from history: open systems & communities actually lead the way. It’s the later closed, proprietary versions that commercialize those behaviors, seemingly-generally by packaging them in a way that’s palatable for mainstream users, before being disrupted by open.
Open, closed, open…
“Experiments that work well have a thousand fathers and mothers.”
“The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.”
“The mismatch between Silicon Valley and Congress isn’t just that Silicon Valley isn’t engaged enough with lobbying Congress, but that Silicon Valley has this outmoded idea that your ideas succeed when they are right, as proven in the marketplace, rather than because you were better at making a backdoor deal than the next guy.”
As a kid, the best skate spots were always the one’s that required hopping a fence, ducking a rope or dodging a security gaurd.
This picture captures how I’m thinking about the biggest opportunities for startups in 2012.
It’s going to be a big year for hopping fences and playing in markets where we’re not supposed to be.
image via thebenjamins-thebenjamins
“KICKSTARTER IS FUTURE OF ALL CREATIVE. PAID FIRST, THEN RELEASE TO WORLD OPEN, NO COPYRIGHT. ARTIST KEEP ROOF, WORLD GET ART, NO ONE GET SUED.”
