\n ![](\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/dowbrigade\/ibook.jpg\")
As as the
\n cardboard boxes climb towards the ceilings and the passageways of our
\n apartment become more and more obstructed with suitcases, packing cases
\n and garbage bags, the flashes of disorienting panic get more frequent
\n and severe. <\/p>\n
We are so not ready. Too much to do and too little time.
\n Who will take the cats? Where has #2 son disappeared to now? Why hasn’t
\n he
\n fixed
\n the holes in the walls of his room like he promised? <\/p>\n
We try to calm ourself by getting busy with packing; packing boxes, packing
\n suitcases, and packing our iBook with all of the digital culture we can
\n get our hands on. <\/p>\n
So far, on this tiny 5-pound, 12-inch device with a
\n 60 GB hard drive, in preparation for the Great Experiment, we have stored
\n the entire output of William Shakespeare, all 14 books in the Frank Herbert’s
\n Dune
\n series,
\n four
\n novels by Dan
\n Brown, including "The DaVinchi Code" and "Angels and Demons" (which we
\n are more than halfway through and hope to finish and delete before leaving
\n the country), hundreds of short stories and 8 novels by Philip K. Dick,
\n a recent rip of Pynchon’s "Gravity’s Rainbow",(in our humble opinion
\n the greatest novel
\n in
\n the English language and worth rereading for a fifth time), hundreds
\n of seafood recipies and card games, every issue of "The Incredible X-Men"
\n published between 1993
\n and 2003,
\n 3 full seasons of the Simpsons, movies like Kill Bill, The Lord of the
\n Rings (II & III),
\n The Butterfly Effect, and 21 Grams, the last three episodes of the Sopranos,
\n the first 6 episodes of TV classic The Prisoner, over 2,000 individual
\n cuts
\n and
\n dozens
\n of
\n complete
\n albums
\n of
\n music, several computer programs we have been dying to get better at
\n using, like Adobe Photoshop (with "Secrets of the Photoshop Pros") and
\n Macromedia Flash (with "Creating Animations in Flash") and several games,
\n like "Diablo II" and "Baldur’s Gate" which we have never had the time
\n to learn enough to survive more than a few minutes before getting slaughtered.<\/p>\n
Plus, as we write, there are a number of computers strewn around the
\n Greater Boston area which are busily downloading and compiling further
\n digital detritus for our possible perusal, as we STILL have over 30 gigs
\n of available space on our hard drive. We have started to think of our
\n iBook as a digital ark, carrying much of what we consider the epitome
\n of modern
\n American
\n art and culture to enrich our three months on the beach and in the mountains
\n in Ecuador.<\/p>\n
Part of this digital archive was obtained "legitimately", via educational
\n discounts and public domain downloads. However, a lot of the material,
\n especially the music and video, was obtained through P2P programs like
\n Lime Wire and Bit Torrent. For the purposes of this discussion, our use
\n of
\n these tools is purely academic and investigational, and all of these
\n files will be promptly deleted after a single painstaking review to
\n make sure they are as advertised, complete and uncorrupted.<\/p>\n
We are currently exploring the capabilities of Bit Torrent<\/a>, a "next generation" Despite the availability of some copyright-free torrents and the efforts This may have something to do with our enthusiasm for the idea. We are However, so far the RIAA and other guardians of cyber-chastity do not Meanwhile, we are amazed at the capacity of this little machine to find, Thought of in another way, should a xeno-anthropologist in the far, far Meanwhile it is scary the degree to which my worldview and emotional Of course we realize the mistake, the sin, the trap of becoming so attached But hey, it’s the persistent possibility of miracles that makes life As as the cardboard boxes climb towards the ceilings and the passageways of our apartment become more and more obstructed with suitcases, packing cases and garbage bags, the flashes of disorienting panic get more frequent and severe. We are so … Continue reading
\n P2P file sharing program which purportedly makes it easy to download
\n large files (video mostly) more efficiently. It is still somewhat hard
\n to use, time consuming and unreliable, making it favorite of unreliable,
\n undergraduate geeks.<\/p>\n
\n of visionary programmers like Andrew Grumet to integrate bit torrent
\n into practical next generation applications like independent video broadfeeds
\n and aggregation, Bit Torrent at this point is still primarily a pirate
\n tool. <\/p>\n
\n attracted to anything with a wiff of the outr?, outlaw, rebel or iconoclast.
\n Even
\n the word "Pirate" itself brings to the Dowbrigade’s mind more of the
\n demented jocularity of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Carribean than the
\n present-day reality of, for example, murderous modern Maylays who waylay
\n yachts and trawlers and rape and pillage and leave no
\n witnesses. Downloading movies and TV shows via Bit Torrent has
\n that elusive air of cutting edge danger and risk to which we are unfortunately
\n still addicted, even in advancing middle age.<\/p>\n
\n seem to be actively persuing Bit Torrent users, perhaps because of the
\n decentralized
\n nature of its P2P connections and the fact that the technology is still
\n so hit and miss frustrating that it is beyond the technical capacity
\n or patience threshold of the far majority of internet users. The list
\n of media captured in our iBook that opened this post represents but a
\n tiny
\n fraction
\n of the "torrents" we have attempted to download over the past two weeks.
\n We are willing to bet that at this very moment there are dozens of brilliant
\n nerdy undergraduates vying to become the next Mr. Napster by creating
\n a dependable, attractive and easy-to-use implementation of the BT protocol.
\n When one of them succeeds, we are sure the RIAA will sit up and notice,
\n because it will become wildly popular.<\/p>\n
\n acquire and store the essence of what passes for "culture" in the Dowbrigade’s
\n world. After thinking about this we have concluded that it would be theoretically
\n possible to recreate almost all of Western civilization exclusively from
\n the contents of a single 60 gig hard drive. <\/p>\n
\n future, long after the disappearance or transmogrification of the human
\n race, somehow come into possession of a single functional hard drive
\n from our era, he or she or it would be able to study and understand the
\n 21st century homo sapien world better than all any of the academics of
\n today are able to understand past cultures through the study of the art,
\n literature, architecture , relics ruins and remains available to academics
\n today. If the hard drive in question belonged to the Dowbrigade, the
\n reflected view of society might feature lots of robustly unencumbered
\n female figures and seemingly silly flights of fancy, but who is to say
\n that these are not as representative of the tenor of our times as the
\n formula for interferon or the fine points of counterinsurgency? <\/p>\n
\n well-being are becoming dependent on this five-pound slab of plastic,
\n metal and silicon. Over the next three months it will be our companion,
\n our post office, our library, our TV, our newsstand, our juke box, our
\n confidant, our journal, our game chest, our worthy opponent in games
\n and puzzles, our cookbook, our darkroom, our calculator, our telephone,
\n our scrapbook, our window on the world and our lifeline to our past.
\n It seems a miracle that one object can fill so many roles and desires.
\n Our preciouuusss.<\/p>\n
\n to a mere physical object. Permanence is an illusion, the worship of
\n technology is a sickness, and pride in possessions is a karmic quagmire.
\n Considering how deeply we have sinned it would indeed be a miracle if
\n the miraculous iBook survives the trip to South America without being
\n stolen, dropped, drenched, forgotten, confiscated, sat on, short-circuited or
\n smashed.<\/p>\n
\n worth living.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"