Emerge and infinity..
One of the popular reasonably-new* linux distributions uses the command ’emerge’ to download and install packages. This seems a unusually apt choice of words when you consider my inifinity argument, which I’ll repeat here even though you all have heard it a billion times before.
All of the wonderful software and music and our DNA and, well, basically, everything is lurking inside infinity waiting for us to find it. That album Mischief Committee did already existed, in mp3, ogg, and wav formats, long before we ever recorded it – lurking inside infinity. Copyrighting digital media is like copyrighting addresses on a number line. What we programmers and musicians do is emerge peices of infinity that were already there.
I’d like to make it clear that this isn’t neccesarily my final answer on this .. my opinions, as on all things, may change as I grow. But it’s where I sit right now.
* = compared with, say, slackware
December 28th, 2005 at 11:43 am
i agree, though i’m less sure about the metaphysical status of this infinity. is it tangible? is everything sitting on a shelf somewhere, nicely labelled and ready for use? or is it floating in conceptual space, just waiting to be actualized? who knows.