I forgot to include this when I wrote about Barlow’s book: a wonderful article from The Baffler about the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As it turns out–and you’ll be astonished to find this out–the group was, is, and will be completely full of shit. Guess who pays the bills? Give you a hint: it rhymes with “Apple and Facebook and a bunch of other assholes who couldn’t give two fucks about civil liberties as long as Silicon Valley is allowed to do whatever it wants whenever it wants.”

But we shouldn’t be surprised, should we? The organization got its start defending thievesOOPS I meant hackers who had broken into someone else’s propertyOOPS hacked into the mainframe and stoleOOPS liberated another person’s work. If they had jimmied open a window and snatched a file, then that would be illegal and wrong, but since they got in via modem…freedom fighters?

But, hey: information wants to be free and that’s why shoplifting books is legal. Case closed and all hail Eris.