"What pervasaive meme can we come up with that will be strong enough to counter the powerful theft/piracy images? Let's all blog aloud and get the juices flowing, shall we?

Ownership of physical property implies exclusive use. I own my lawn mower, it's in my posession, in order for you to use it I must relinquish its use to you. You shouldn't loan it to your neighbour in turn without my permission, especially as that extends my inability to make use of it. If you take it from me, I am left without its use altogether. I can ask to be compensated for the loss. I lose a physical entity, and therefore control over its use.

Ownership of intellectual property does not imply exclusive use. You can play my music without depriving me of it. You can loan it to someone else without affecting my use, although you should ask my permission. I never lose my ability to have full use of the work. What I lose when you use my work without my permission or recompense is control over its use.

Obviously these are two very different concepts. Yet they're both called ownership . Concepts of theft and piracy of intellectual property just don't fit. How have such ill-fitting analogies come to permeate our conciousness?"

"Given the nature of communicating online, one person's failure to log on for days, weeks or months at a time can cause concern in the people who continue to log on regularly. It's especially worrisome when the person who isn't signing on was living with a known illness. While "killing" online personas happens all the time, the real tragedy occurs when a real life death happens and is chalked up to a person just not logging on anymore."

"Set in the near future, Global Frequency depicts a multiracial, multinational organization of ordinary people who contribute their services on an ad hoc basis. As Ellis explains, "You could be sitting there watching the news and suddenly hear an unusual cell phone tone, and within moments you might see your neighbor leaving the house in a hurry, wearing a jacket or a shirt with the distinctive Global Frequency symbol...or, hell, your girlfriend might answer the phone...and promise to explain later...Anyone could be on the Global Frequency, and you'd never know until they got the call." Ellis's story responds to significant shifts in the media environment — in particular the increasing role of mobile phones and wireless computing - but also to speculations about their social and political impact."

"Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don't know each other. The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities.... Groups of people using these tools will gain new forms of social power."

"Recent history is the record of a vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind and exterminate all manifestations of that unique part of human sentience, identical in all men, which the individual shares with his Creator. The suppression of contemplative individuality is nearly complete.

The only immediate historical data that we can know and act on are those fed to our senses through systems of mass communication.

These media are exactly the places where the deepest and most personal sensitivities and confessions of reality are most prohibited, mocked, suppressed.

At the same time there is a crack in the mass consciousness of America -- sudden emergence of insight into a vast national subconscious netherworld filled with nerve gases, universal death bombs, malevolent bureaucracies, secret police systems, drugs that open the door to God, ships leaving Earth, unknown chemical terrors, evil dreams at hand.

Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. America is having a nervous breakdown... " [more]

"Now we have new cracks in the broadcast stranglehold on what we know and what we count as interesting. We have one another, unmediated, through the Internet. The Internet should be America's nervous breakdown. And not a moment too soon."

Phil Wolff:Through the black, a flash of unexpected light. BART's Transbay Tube runs under the San Francisco Bay. Connecting Oakland to The City by tunneling through dark, deep brine. Your next time through, peer into the dark. Even at 70 miles per hour you may glimpse the phantom station mid-way through the eight mile submergence. No one's talking about it. Is it an abandoned construction site, peopled by the homeless? A cold war bunker? A cancelled connection to the old Treasure Island Navy base? An exclusive night club with an unbeatable underwater view? A biowar research lab, isolated for the next Andromeda strain? A deep sea diving platform, the better to find jumpers who preferred the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate? An archaelogical site, continuing a 40 year investigation into an alien wreck uncovered by Bechtel during construction? The next time a BART train blows through your station without picking up passengers, remember this. It could be on the way to the mystery stop."

"Most everybody is overwhelmed. And they respond with various defense mechanisms. Denial, isolation, increased greed ('I'll get it while I can'), righteousness ('It's their own fault'). There are a whole set of mechanisms that people use to keep from being open, because the quality of the human heart uncontrolled by the mind is that it will give away everything... We have to find ways to exercise the compassion of our hearts, and at the same moment learn how to know what the limits are and be able to say no without guilt." -- Ram Dass

"Money is Free. Get Used To It."

"Equity markets systematically move money from the less informed to the better informed.

The problem with Managerial Capitalism is not that it's too pervasive and powerful (though it is), but that it is so poor at doing what it claims to do best — allocate people and resources skillfully and compellingly."

Hidden at the back of a pharmacy in rural Bangladesh, its rickety shelves piled high with medicines and condoms, is a thriving mobile phone business. The only sign of any kind of technology is a 20-metre bamboo pole, topped with what looks like a television aerial.

But this is the workplace of Jamirun Nesa, one of 50,000 Bangladeshi women making a living as Grameen phone ladies, as they are known.

Villagers flock to her phone booth in the region of Gazipur, two hours from the capital Dhaka, to use a mobile to call relatives, friends or business associates, paying for calls by the minute.

Life-changing

Grameen phone ladies provide villagers with a vital link to services such as hospitals and to relatives both at home and abroad, in a country with the lowest number of phones in South Asia.

The scheme was set up by one of Bangladesh's largest non-government organisations, the Grameen Bank. It offers women low-cost loans to set up a mobile phone exchange in villages where there are few if any landlines.

"I started the business as there was no other phone nearby," said Jamirun. "I saw it as a good business opportunity."

The mobile has literally changed her life.

"I get more respect now," she says. "Before people in the village wouldn't talk to me but they do now. "I also have more respect from my husband and family."