(This bit is Sontag)

…r had before. But it means that you can’t keep original or profound meanings intact because inevitably they’re disa…

Ignorance of context obviously creates its own profound meanings. I suppose this lament is one of the modern era moving into the post-modern – am I meant to weep for originality qua originality? I can’t, because I am a child of the latter.

…ct, file the takedown requests. However, it was not for the usual reasons, such as a fear of lost royalties, or a legal reassertion of authorship rights. For the moment, I will let you …

It absolutely was a reassertion of authorship rights, if not for the reason of protecting their legal status.

…for requesting content removal. Part of the blame also lays with copyleft, which uses near fundamentalist fervor to argue that “sharing” only exists outside of the realm of copyright . As a result, copyright has bee…

This is dead on. A capitalist exchange is depersonalizing; “open source” often no less so. If copyright is a cold legal expression of the idea that I am the one with a right to dispense with something, then my right over the thing is part of what makes my giving it away meaningful.

… existing images. Surprisingly, their only real concern was that any content in Wikipedia must be usable for free throughout perpetuity… but in the realm of copyright, aren’t ‘perpetuity clauses’ the first sign of a bad contract? Doesn’t the very concept of perpetuity bely one party’s desire to unfairly control, and an absence of trust? And so my German Wikipedia prof…

The rejoinder is naturally “well, maintaining all those relationships and permissions just won’t scale.” Scale is depersonalizing.

…nwittingly sabotage themselves. Meanwhile, in my own authorial practices, I attempt to be openly hypocritical. I speak openly about how my hyp…

“Open hypocrisy” is a phrase I’ve not heard before and I adore it.

…sults limited to active videos? What possible reason could there be for continuing to list pages of removed content months after the fact? ) The person then referred their…

Later in the piece she acknowledges she didn’t quite understand how linking here-and-there works, so don’t judge her for asking this question to which you might feel there is one obvious answer.

…nd indiscriminate distribution. I strongly believe that, in the face of today’s dominant internet strategies which emphasize populism, there is a real necessity to cultivate offline forms of digital culture. This means sharing information in more controlled and precise ways than generic upload-archiving, such as through hard formats or direct and encrypted file transfer between known persons. People become so indoctrinated in dominant cultural nonsense about information’s value only being determined by the breadth of its distribution, that we have culturally lost skills for understanding secrets, and their protective power. This is even happening in queer and transgendered communities, which historically rely on strategies that step in and out of closets… Someone may think they’re a fa…

This is something absolutely all of us should be thinking more about. Friction in acquisition of digital content can be constructive as well as destructive. The model of “control” we have is the user account and it’s simply not good enough.

…nsibility in content removal by replacing removed videos with a statement like, “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Terre Thaemlitz.” YouTube and the rest are such corporate zombies that they can’t imagine there being any other basis for someone wanting content removed , and they refuse to implement a…

This is fascinating because it doesn’t seem quite right. A copyright claim is the rationale by which she has the right to demand removal, not the basis for such a demand. Later on she speaks of “copyrighting recordings” in a way that also suggests an understanding of copyright that doesn’t line up with what I think I understand.

…int… only it wasn’t my fault. I presented them with all of the links on their website that I had followed when filing my removal request, proving that there was no mention anywhere about claimants being publicly named - which they duly ignored. I asked if they could at least remove my name from the copyright claim notices (ie., editing it down to just “no longer available” or “no longer available due to a copyright claim”), but they said they could not. I was told my only option was t…

This is also interesting. Deletion of material from the internet leaves scar tissue. What are the benefits and costs of allowing such a thing to be anonymous? It seems YouTube’s rules are in this one small thing not aligned towards copyright holders, but toward site users… Rare, for them.

…ity - to which I responded that I did not wish to act like an anti-piracy agent , and the very nature of their s…

And yet that’s exactly what the behavior is!

The lack of an economic motive doesn’t make what she’s doing there magically different. (I would note that when she points to allowing a recording to stay up because she felt it qualified under fair use, she is acting differently than the anti-pirates do.)

…onomics, nor authorship rights. Rather, they are about an eradication of any specificity of context and audience that occurs when information is shared through populist models of making all information available to everyone. This is particularly true with r…

Specificity has decayed in digital culture. Can it be rebuilt? Is it inherently unreachable? (If someone mentions crypto-anything I’ll find a way to punch you through the internet)

… have a good feeling about this. Maybe because, as a result of the climate they have created, these days my website is to their social media what the ‘mom and pop shop’ is to the shopping mall. My mood to reset the upload od…

This is the quote that dogstar referenced that drew me here. It’s a comparison that bears even more fruit when you consider the contemporary decay of the shopping mall and the peculiarly physical aspects that one would have understood to be the mall’s advantage over the mom and pop shop.

…n. Yay! Good for you, assholes! I call them assholes, because whenever I play a track they cannot identify they insist I tell them what it is - and get really angry when I refuse… which invariably means as soon as their app identifies another track they are back in my face, smugly, like, “How ya like me now, bitch? Thought you lost me there for a minute, didn’t you?” There are no kudos for a DJ finding a special offline track to share with the dancers in that moment. Club goers have increasingly little desire to process the club experience in reality - only via online devices. It’s social-media-online-app-smart-phone-always-online-fuck-you-I-own-this-world culture at its most annoying, and ultimately most meaningless. Then, while doing a rare bit o…

I have a lot to say about this chunk that I can’t put into words mostly because the ease of finding things digitally that have been brought into my life through social means is very important to me. It’s important because there is meaning in “this is a track I heard Terre Thaemlitz play in a DJ set” or “this is a band my ex-boyfriend was really into” that there isn’t in “this is a track Spotify algorithmically selected and put on my Discover Weekly.” In my life, being able to preserve the experience of the track played at the club is trying to maintain a social context in my general appreciation/consumption of music. The default social expectation of ephemerality vs. the default social expectation of identifiability – not sure there’s quite the Good Side and a Bad Side to this one as she makes out.

…f they have of yours on there!” I could only think of the night before, and how wonderful it would have been to meet someone that excited and curious because they couldn’t find any sound examples online, and positioned that absence in relation to something being “underground.” So here we are, a few months l…

I knew a guy from his working as a barista in a cafe I visited a lot. His real Thing was his underground rock band. They toured internationally and were still underground. He talked about how they weren’t really meant to get big. I have pondered how he spoke about that in my heart for years when I think about art and mass appeal.

…gence of current online trends. And while I do not want to officially dictate how my projects are used, I wish to make things a bit more low profile, and encourage listeners to experiement with other, more personally responsible, controlled, contextual and meaningful forms of distribution and support. In other words, I wished to quietly keep the music acting queerly. Sadly, my actions, which were in some way intended as a gesture of humility and smallness, were transformed into arrogant property claims. If anyone has been offended, or…

Again, there is tension here – the “open hypocrisy”. To make things more low profile she must officially dictate how her projects are used, and she does.

Is this “acting queerly” in a digital context? (Not a rhetorical question meant to suggest the answer must be “no”; a real question to think about)