[P2P-F] Media in Starship Troopers

Fri Sep 16 00:04:56 CEST 2011

When I watched Starship Troopers again recently, it occurred to me
that the "Federal Network" newsreel formats were reminiscent of a
pre-Tim Berners-Lee, pre-Web vision of the Internet as a "Information
Superhighway" full of streaming content.  It's as if access to the
Internet is mediated entirely by AOL -- but an AOL designed by Rupert
Murdoch and Roger Ailes.

As a matter of fact the reason I watched the movie again was that I
recently read a piece by Mike Masnick speculating on what the Web (if
it could even be called that) would have looked like had TBL patented
the hyperlink.  He said access to the hyperlinked Web would be
mediated entirely by walled-garden Internet services like AOL or web
portals like Yahoo that could afford to pay royalties.  This made me
think of those Federal Network newsreels with the "Would you like to
know more?" hyperlinks embedded in them.

Comments?
--
Kevin Carson
Research Associate, Center for a Stateless Society
http://c4ss.org
Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective