Surviving the Culture Wars

The talks I attended were stellar. The conversations I had on the expo floor were powerful. SCaLE 7x was, in fact, the best weekend of my life. I got to hang around with Jono Bacon, among others. Expect lots of revisions to this post, mostly expansions particular talks.

The best:
Stormy Peters - Companies & Communities (read)
John Todd - Open Source in an Economic Downturn (it wins)
Ross Turk - Open Source Business for Hackers (watch):


The day after SCaLE ended I got to have a conference call with Jamie Boyle and Joi Ito, the Chairman of the Board and CEO, respectively, of Creative Commons. You can listen to the call here:

At about 34 minutes in, in the middle of one of my questions, you can hear a car peel out. I was mortified by embarrassment, but in retrospect it's hilarious. I was calling from a park in Boyle Heights, a physical commons, since I needed a space to listen to the call and take notes away from middle-school kids. As it started to rain, I had to take shelter under a tree with some construction workers from a project nearby while they were cooking some tacos for their lunch break. As it lightened up a bit, they offered me one. Too glued to all of Jamie's words, I didn't want to take any time away from the call. "In a bit," I said. Half an hour later, the call was over and the workers had left, with one taco left on the grill for me. I learned an amazing lesson about community, and it's hard to articulate completely. Here's how I usually think it: "We're all in this together." Our commons are something we all intuitively understand, through our basic understanding of each other's basic human needs and those needs of our common planet, we can also intuitively understand what needs to be done. All that is left to do, is to do it. With that, I give the Legacy of Lessig:

It is more or less a combination of all his talks up until now, and even still in a modern context.

P.S. I might be busy as I have some internships to apply to.

P.P.S. At the end of the call Joi mentions rebranding? I thought this was good:

And this is even older:

I guess digital natives like myself are biased. True enough, the possible brand confusion with closed captioning must be rectified.