How To Blackmail A Friend

@JamesPowderly promised to release a book years ago. But he never really got started writing it. Now he has to think about getting started pretty soon. Check this out!

Hey James! If you are not getting started soon I’ll sell one of your USB hard drives on ebay! You have 10 days to finish the Introduction and 1st chapter. I am sorry! But F.A.T. sees no other way getting you down on this.

Link to Ebay. (Learn some german) and think about joining the auction. I haven’t looked at the hard drive but I am sure it is very ‘valuable’. ;-)

Preview!
Just to get you an idea on the outcome of James’s book find a first draft of his introduction below.

[…]The Internet is built on a gift economy? In what sense? Historically?
Where? It’s built by the military industrial complex and in large part
funded by advertising and porn. Our buddy Galloway makes a clear
argument that the internet is based on control through protocol not
freedom. And that parts of that decentralized control structure are
good. In the same way some systems of control in nature are good
(genes, natural selection). Others not so good… For hackers maybe it
feels freer than real life because we can manipulate the medium better
than we can atoms and it has seemingly large shadows for a world lit
by billboards and definitively marked by tcp/ip. For some small part
of that Hacker world, ego-boo is how we form social groups, network,
just say thanks, and jerk each other off. But I think it is massively
important that we don’t delude ourselves into techno-deterministic
utopian thinking about the web. For baudrillard and many others, It is
fucked, a priori, by the type of communication it supports, it’s
commercial and military infrastructure etc., for others its the
ultimate and nearly perfect represetation of hegemony, a great place
to entertain ourselves to death, to become otaku and dissolve all ties
with reality, a single point of access for the commercialization of
everything, a way to opt into total information awareness, a means for
the monoculturalization of earth, the birth of the simgularity, the
portal through which we generally atomize and isolate ourselves and
our efforts and basically just kinda stupid. If we are having fun,
that’s cool… But aren’t we just taking dad’s car out for the night?[…]

James Powderly 2010

@James! Have you finally some proposals for the title ready?!?