The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces.
Lawrence Lessig
The danger in media concentration
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Traditionally, feudalism has meant a grant of absolute control in return for loyalty. See Marc Bloch, Feudal Society. A feudal lord was granted absolute sovereignty over a population in return for a pledge of loyalty to an overlord. The pledge of loyalty included some specific commitments, often military support and taxes.
The best modern example of feudalism is the popular depictions of gangsters such as The Godfather or the Sopranos.
In this context? Who knows? Feudalism has been used as a general pejorative so often that it has little meaning outside rigorous economic historians.
I am dismayed at Lessig’s confusing choice of terms. Maybe someone else understands him better.
Confusing terms is Lessig’s stock in trade going back to his failed anti-Microsoft crusade of the 90’s.
Wouldn’t want his luddism to be too blatant…
At least he didn’t go for “fascist” although for many of his followers the two terms are interchangeable.
He’s beginning to sound like one of those people who assumes that because he knows what he means, other people do too and would be offended to have to explain himself in clearer language because his “cleverness” wasn’t understood.
I suspect the objective of these statements is approval from like-minded people who have no idea what he is saying.
I hate working with those people, especially when I’m supposed to decipher their gibberish. I do not like having to explain to those people that telepathy does not exist in real life … But thanks, your explanation clears up the mystery of why “feudalism” is being used here 🙂
I actually encountered a writer with this mindset. She never tagged her dialogue, and in more than one of her little short stories, she’d written extended conversations between talking heads. I was not the only one who said, “I don’t know who’s talking here because you haven’t tagged the dialogue.” I even bluntly told her more than once that because she knew who was talking didn’t mean we did. She never seemed to learn that she needed to do so. That was one of the myriad reasons why I stopped going to that writers’ group.
Anyone know what feudalism means in this context?
I was wondering that myself. Some googling turned up a passage in a Lessig book at
https://books.google.com/books?id=qm7ODAAAQBAJ&q=feudalism#v=snippet&q=feudalism&f=false
and a discussion of that here:
https://books.google.com/books?id=wQ8NAAAAQBAJ&q=feudalism#v=snippet&q=feudalism&f=false
He seems to be saying that some intellectual property interests are trying to prevent other intellectual property owners from giving away access restrictions on their property, and that this resembles the feudal ownership system where the system tried to prevent owners from freeing people or other owned property (in order to avoid even the idea that such a thing could be done).