The Game

To understand the game
Needs rising above it.
Until, beyond,
At the root of meaning
One finds the reason,
And in disdain,
Loses the appetite to play
Thus losing the game...

A Pirate's Life, Just Not For Me?

I came across this thoughtful post (titled: Piracy was my shot at equality) in my morning trawl through the internet, and it really resonated with me; if you replace "Bulgaria" with "India" throughout this piece, and made a few other contextual amendments, I could've written it!

Piracy has become a four-letter word. In the public square, everyone agrees it's bad. Then everyone not in the US goes home from the debate, starts up uTorrent, and downloads Season 1 of House of Cards...

A lot of these people are 'pirates' only because Netflix is stupid enough to (despite being, y'know, an online company) not optimize its access to the global market-place. Or because the big evil "Studios" demand distribution in this country and not any other (this doesn't really apply to House of Cards though, methinks?) Others (even so called rich young brats) pirate it because they simply don't have the money to buy it. Still others pirate it because their government has decided that the depiction of duplicitous politics and (gasp!) sex and swearing is a no no for its populace of tender asexual lambs.

But is it really all that bad a thing? This is a question I've struggled with pretty much ever since I got access to the Internet - what, a little less than 20 years ago? What follows then, is a rumination on this still unresolved conundrum...

The Worldstream (and yelling: STOP!)

I consciously stay about a month behind in reading long-form items in my Google Reader stream. This is one of the reasons why I am only now reading this article by David Gelernter; and despite the fact that all the comments it has received on Wired basically accuse him of smoking something while writing it, I find it to be... well, visionary. Among other things, this napkin sketch the author did for Wired (on the left) struck me as one of the best representations of the new paradigm.

The web is changing - or has partially changed, and irrevocably so. We have gone from the "Web" metaphor of the 90s (when Google could capitalize on the way pages linked to one another to come up with a Page Rank) to the "Stream" metaphor, where companies like Twitter lead from the front, and those like Facebook or Google or Pinterest get it with their Timeline and Google+ products. In the Stream, you're not looking for things of interest alone, you're looking for things you should be looking at right now.