Marxist or Matrix?

Hi everybody...a couple of random articles for you right now, selected primarily because  Marxist and Matrix are very nearly anagrams of each other:

* Someone Call Karl Marx
This article comes from the Canuckian magazine Maclean's [by way of Fark], and its premise is that in the networked, digital age, everyone can be a publisher (also known as a content creator), so we're no longer reliant on big media companies with their expensive printing presses, television studios, etc.

I will let the elbow-patched academics
argue with whether that's truly a Marxist worldview, but the gist of
the article is that capitalists no longer own the means of production
-- the proletariat does.

(I'm pretty sure that Marx didn't have celebrity gossip Web sites, viral video and pet blogs in mind when he wrote the Communist Manifesto, though.)

This is not exactly a new idea (one recalls all the cyber-utopian stuff that came out around 1996 -- I'm looking at you, Nicholas Negroponte), though new developments have given it new legs.

Among those developments, of course, is the big ole Sphere o' Blogs, though I would also include:

* RSS & Content Syndication, which makes it easy for people to subscribe to other people's content.

* Lower barriers
to creating and distributing multimedia content, through cheaper and
more-accessible technologies like digital video and desktop video
editing, podcasting, etc.

* The idea of "remix culture,"
where consumers sample, reshape, and reform the media they consume,
then redistribute it, turning themselves into content producers in the
process.

Whatever the social-media flavor of the month is, it's the latest extension of the Internet as the ideal medium for many-to-many communications, so consider this the next chapter of the revolution. Power to the people, and all that.

* A Matrix Christmas
Speaking of remix culture, this link comes from the often-edgy, usually-hilarious, and frequently-profane Something Awful: It's a video reworking of The Matrix movies as a holiday special:

The
actual movie is a 30.2 MB .AVI file (which is largely a photo montage
with some video and animations); you can also see a lot of the
digitally-altered photos in the featured thread.

Lots of very geeky humor, though I do note a disproportionate number of references to A Christmas Story.

Thanks -- Joe