Re: <nettime> Call for support: Pirates of the Amazon, taken down by Amazon.com

[olia lialina <olia@profolia.org>]

> What is perhaps more disturbing however, are the openly hostile and
> aggressive Internet user comments in blogs and on digg.com. Unlike in a
> comparable situation only a couple of years ago, the majority of
> commentators failed to see the highly parodistic and artistic nature of
> "Pirates of the Amazon".  

Yes, exactly, users don't want to be disturbed, and their reaction is
more scary and frustrating than all the legal letters in the world.

Last summer another student of Dragan Espenschied's web development
course at Merz Akademie published a beautiful service -- Web 1.0.
It offered to the users of social network StudiVZ (German FaceBook)
to see their own profiles and profiles of their friends in 90es
aesthetics, with under construction signs and star backgrounds, as if
they made them themselves as if being online was fun again.

Of course the school was contacted by StudiVZ's system administrator
with the request to shut down the project. But this was not the reason
why the student gave up. All what is left is the documentation:

http://web.1punkt0.net/docu
login: olia
password: netart

It was the flood of hate messages he got from the users of that Social
Network. They didn't want to have fun and, what is more alarming, they
were blaming Web1.0 project for violating their privacy. Clean layouts
of StudiVZ, Facebook and others make users believe that their data is
save there. That they are protected and professionally taken care of.


Both of these projects state a simple truth that almost everybody
knows: filesharing is mainstream, what is on the web is public.
Strangely these are still taboos. Users don't want to be reminded of
them.

forever yours,
olia










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