In addition to liberating people from evils like racial
violence and oppression by the state, at least some of my fellow libertarians
are keen to liberate people from laws
enforcing patents and copyrights, viewing them not as extensions of property
but as unnatural restrictions on others’ recycling and recombination of
ideas. This view jibes well with the
social media era’s love of memes, trolling, and parodies.
People inclined to that anarchist view should love the 80s prankster band KLF (which may stand for Kopyright Liberation
Front), and I think their entire epic Wikipedia entry well worth reading. For a couple decades, I picked up info about
them in tantalizing bits and pieces, including their origins in a stage
production version of anarchist Robert Anton Wilson’s sci-fi/conspiracy-theory
novels The Illuminatus Trilogy and
their notorious -- and legally-doomed -- sampling of the entire song “Dancing
Queen” for an album that they were subsequently court-ordered to destroy.
The libertarian impulse comes in forms both anarchist and
bourgeois, though, and back around the same time that I (and some of my
favorite peers, it turns out) were reading Robert Anton Wilson in college, I
was also getting to know straight-laced future architect Dave Whitney, who I
finally saw (after a few weeks of wondering) in the teaser sequence at the end
of the episode of This Old House that
aired (at least in NYC) on Saturday, January 18 – so he should figure
prominently in the next episode at the very least, working on the “Arlington
Italianate” house project in Massachusetts being featured for several episodes
of that series.
Dave’s not just an old New England stick-in-the-mud,
though. He’s also the guy who told me about
strange artist/architect/poet
Madeline Gins, who recently passed away, for instance -- not to mention
numerous punk bands. Perhaps history
will see it all as part of a broader nerd culture (and if so, perhaps someday
the extremely clever song “Nerdy
Boys” by Candypants will be elevated to its rightful place in the musical firmament).
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