We are witnessing a return to the cultural norms that prevailed before the advent of mechanically printed texts.

In those oral and folk cultures, practices such as adaptation, appropriation and recombining – what hip-hop calls "sampling" – were not only accepted but lauded.

The printing press brought a new regime, in which individual printed works were held to be utterly unique and an author's ownership sacrosanct.

But now, new digital technologies are spinning the wheel back to its pre-Guttenberg position (closing the parenthesis).

Cultural production will be understood once again as a dynamic, collective process rather than the work of a single lonely genius, laboring alone in a garret.   more »

omg omg omg this is da song i wanna die with - luv her!!!

Alicia always puts everything she has into her performances and they are so genuinely emotional.

I love seeing her perform because you can tell she's feeling it. She's not some over-rehearsed fake artist.

What you see it someone loving what they do and the songs coming from the heart.

Unquestionably, Alicia Keys was the breakaway star of the event. She really torched the roof off with her Category 5, gale-force radiance.   more »

If we re-read history, we will find that the American Revolution (financed in part by the other power, France) was an anti-imperialist and egalitarian revolution.

Not only was it a violent revolution against the empire of the other George, the king of England, against this empire's theft via foreign exchange designed to finance its own wars, but also against the vertical structures of absolutist, aristocratic and estate-based societies of old Europe.

The United States is born on the basis of a radically revolutionary and progressive ideology.

Its first constitution was the political and institutional materialization of an ideology that well into the 20th century was condemned by European conservatives as a popular subversion, responsible for the annihilation of all noble tradition, for the exercise of a social practice that was identified as the "devil's work": democracy.   more »

Just as the London bombs in the summer of 2005 were Blair's bombs, the inevitable consequence of his government's lawless attack on Iraq, so the potential bombs in the summer of 2007 are Brown's bombs.

Gordon Brown has been an unerring supporter of the unprovoked bloodbath whose victims now equal those of the Rwandan genocide, according to the American scientist who led the 2006 Johns Hopkins School of Public Health survey of civilian dead in Iraq.

While Tony Blair sought to discredit this study, British government scientists secretly praised it as "tried and tested" and an "underestimation of mortality".

The "underestimation" was 655,000 men, women and children. That is now approaching a million. It is the crime of the century.   more »

Live Earth concerts took place around the globe. Their aim was admirable, but if we are serious about climate change, then telling concert-goers to change their light bulbs and take the bus once a week is not enough.

Our refusal to acknowledge climate change has very deep roots - too deep to be addressed by feel-good concerts.

After all, we have known about climate change for a surprisingly long time. The first serious warnings came in 1965 and climate change has been at the top of the political agenda for 15 years.

Live Earth played strongly to powerful denial strategy in all of us: the adoption of minimal and token behaviour as proof of our virtue.   more »