having failed to make openness illegal using state power, the oligopolists are now trying to make it irrelevant using private power, network effects and hard-wired filters.
After working in fashion e-commerce for years I've come to the conclusion that in e-commerce we do not sell clothes... we sell images of clothes. Compressed, digital versions of physical products. As Roland Barthes pointed out in The Fashion System, a product image is a symbol or metaphor of a product. Media--in this case images--mediates... See more
However they identify, when they show up at MozFest and as they stay connected through the year, they are a group of people rolling up their sleeves and working on something roughly akin to a common agenda. Which is really all a social movement is.
These enormous players have absolute roles and responsibilities in how things work. The medium is the message. We are living in Marshall McLuhan land where the medium forms how we think about things. The way the web is coded determines a lot of how we live our lives online. It’s now not just the web, it’s how Facebook is coded, how Google is coded.
MozFest celebrates the diverse nature of what makes us inherently human and puts the communion back in community, with its belief in solidarity, community building and empathetic empowering change.
We’ve digitized 2.5 million books. Google has as well, but they’re locked up. They locked up the public domain, which we think of as a sin. The library sort of made elite services around it just for themselves.