Jeff Jarvis ripped into Lawrence Lessig and Mark Cooper's new book over the weekend. He has a lot to say about the subject - Jarvis was the creator of Entertainment Weekly, and is a professional in the journalism industry, and he gets quite irate at Lessig's brand of anti-capitalism.
To be absolutely honest, I've never been a great fan of media consolidation, and I worry about the potential for corruption. On the other hand, the internet has proved to be pretty well ungovernable, which from my point of view, is an excellent result.
Jarvis makes the point that the Lessigs and Coopers are truth-seekers, in the obsessive, forceful sense. I think I've always feared truth-seekers - idealists. People who passionately search for Truth are terribly prone to think they've found it, and all too often, what they've found is one of a billion blind alleys, snake-oil nostrums, or superstitious suppositions. Given a choice between media rule by passion, and media rule by greed, I will always take greed. Greed is rational. The real danger in a capitalist system is its perversion by noncapitalist forces - that the capitalist harbors secret passions that work against his absolute financial self-interests. While this is a worry, it hardly serves to replace a fear of passionate bias with the certainty of it.
Monday, November 03, 2003
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