The Good Room – Frank Chimero

Another brilliant talk from Frank, this time on the (im)balance between the commercial and the cultural web.

Remember: the web is a marketplace and a commonwealth, so we have both commerce and culture; it’s just that the non-commercial bits of the web get more difficult to see in comparison to the outsized presence of the commercial web and all that caters to it.

This really resonates with me:

If commercial networks on the web measure success by reach and profit, cultural endeavors need to see their successes in terms of resonance and significance.

Ghost in the Cloud | Issue 28 | n+1

The rapture of the nerds:

Transhumanism’s simulation theology

The Spirit of Flickr and the Problem of Intent - mor10.com

This is a superbly-written, empathetic, nuanced look at the issues around Creative Commons licensing, particularly the danger of inferring a “spirit” in a legal agreement.

“Spirit” as it’s being used in this conversation is a relative term. You have the spirit of the user, the spirit of the license, the spirit of the community, the spirit of the service, and the spirit of the law. All these can align and all these can diverge and that’s OK. It is also the reason we have a legal system that sets clear parameters for how things can be interpreted: Spirit is relative, legal decisions and documents are not (at least in theory). The whole idea of a legal contract (under which we can find CC licenses) is that there is no room for interpretation. The meaning of the document is singular, unambiguous, and not up for debate. Of course this is purely theoretical, but that’s the idea anyway.

The problem arises when the spirit – or intent – of the user when applying a license differs from the actual legal interpretation of that same license.