“When man entered the atomic age he opened a door to a new world. What we’ll eventually find in that new world nobody can predict.”

Dr. Harold Medford, THEM!

They understood…

a half century ago.

Even pop scifi movie makers appeared to understand…

That a threshold had been crossed, a new world found, a new reason to both hope and fear the future, that unmapped country.

When you look at those pop sicfi films from a half century ago – from the best to the worst – there is a common theme: we are not what we were, we have become something new, even as most of the old stays with us, even as our everyday appears mostly unchanged. We have become something new and we’re not ready.

But there’s no choice, they say, no choice at all. There’s no going back.

Fundamentally, this is, I think, what sets the pop scifi of the 1950s – the source material for many of our machine dreams – apart from what we see currently: the mixture of hope and fear, warning and celebration, seems to have disappeared, like morning mist. Perhaps Blade Runner, that extended meditation on loneliness, was the last great filmed example.

What has taken the place of the old nightmares which once walked hand-in-hand with the old dreams?

Jehovah.

Don’t talk to me about Jehovah.

Before that pan dimensional piker appeared on the scene, stealing my worshipers, claiming my territory, I lived an exceptionally beautiful life; really, I can’t begin to describe, not in this clumsy mortal language, the eye searingly radiant splendidness of the life which was – gone now because of that monotheistically obsessed bastard.

Mind you, I brought it on myself. “Zeus, why don’t you leave off the shape shifting and raping for a bit?” Hera nagged. But when you’re a god, you do as you please, yes? Listen, don’t try to bullshit me, you would’ve done the same you self-righteous jackass. In days gone by, I might have assumed the form of a kangaroo and buggered your mom, or yawned and lovingly inserted a lightning bolt at light speed up your left nostril, just because it was a lazy Sunday and left nostrils temporarily annoyed me.

That’s just how it was.

Well of course, Yahweh, Jehovah, whateva comes along – with the help of his masochist of a son (and what the hell was that little show? Executed on a cross by the graceless Roman Empire? You know what Herakles would’ve done if they’d tried to shove him up on one of those things? Try to picture hearts and entrails and severed heads…everywhere…bloody well right) – anyway, Mr. “I Love You” comes along and says, “come unto me, all who are weary and burdened and I shall give you rest.”

Of course the monkeys soaked it up, ran to their little meetings and huddled together for warmth. And really, who could blame them? After a long stretch of my bullshit (and you can’t be fooled about yourself: I admit it, I was a shit head much of the time what with the trans-species sexcapades, the cosmic chess games with mortals as pawns, hurling lightning up asses, killing Cronus and Rhea to pump up the Olympians…and so much more – long rap sheet children), they were done, over and out with the old ways.

And the thing is, for the longest time Yahweh was right up there with the rest of us – thundering from the sky, sending heralds to mete out punishment, making bizarrely arbitrary decisions just because. He was a small time war and harvest god for a minor tribe of goatherds who smelled so bad the fucking goats couldn’t take it; we all knew him of course, he’d show up to meetings, drink ambrosia and get fucked up like the rest of us. But he had plans. Hera and Aphrodite saw it, Athena and Ares too. “Watch that one”, they said. Even Shiva, who scared the shit out of everyone (and let me tell you, he’s a true bad ass, you don’t play with Shiva..total nutter) whispered, in that rough way of his, about “keeping an eye out.”

But none of us saw his master stroke, the move that slid in under the god-radar: the slimy operator sent his son to become one of them, to eat and sleep with them, even die right in front of them, at their grubby hands (and it was a messy death too, not quietly in bed surrounded by grandchildren and a weeping widow). Not only that, but he sold the whole thing, which really was a carnival side show for immortals, as a sacrifice for mortal benefit. Brilliant. Not one of the old gods could match that move’s deftness. One of the greatest marketing maneuvers ever. But there was more: not only was it a sacrifice but a sacrifice to restore a lost harmony between humanity and Yahweh!

A lost order that had no room for the rest of us.

Oh, it took a few centuries but soon enough we were pushed to the margins like a bunch of punks. Look out everybody, the new kid’s in charge! Only he wasn’t all that new and it was all a slick act.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the fucker gloats, holds his perceptual conquest of practically one half of the world over our heads (still doesn’t mess with Shiva though…he’s not crazy and the Indian team possesses some serious worshiper mojo even today).

But all that’s going to change…and soon.

In his most recent book, ” A Brief History of Neoliberalism“, David Harvey analyzes the neoliberal turn that first Western, and later, practically every economy on Earth took to varying degrees of depth over the past 30 or so years.

Several key features of neoliberalism are dissected:

1.) Neoliberalism as a power restoration technique (i.e., restoring to capitalists the margin of power lost during the post war years of high growth and detente with labor)

2.) Neoliberalism as imperfect tool against stagnation and the problems of over production

and

3.) Neoliberalism as a method for monetizing practices and spaces previously excluded from market concerns and controls

To properly understand the strategic concessions Microsoft made to the entertainment industry — concessions that led MSFT to deploy a software-based version of the Advanced Access Content System ( AACS) in Windows Vista — you need to carefully consider that third aspect of neoliberalism.

Enter the Advanced Access Content System

Briefly, the Advanced Access Content System is a platform, created at the behest of the entertainment industry, whose sole purpose is to enforce a (it is vainly hoped) completely un-crackable environment for “premium content” to flow through from player — device or software-based — to a display and/or audio output. Of course, the phrase “premium content” is a term of art inasmuch as the actual content might be anything from a slapdash teen sex comedy to the most subtle examples of musical or filmed art.

The motion picture and recording cartels have long been disturbed by the fact that people could record, remix and redistribute “content” at will. Over the years, many copy protection schemes have been tried; all have failed. Advances in computing power and storage capacity — moving in parallel with advances in cryptology — have finally made the old dream of an automated copyright enforcement system achievable.

Achievable, because under the AACS system, ‘intelligent’ hardware is constantly on the lookout for security breaches (for example, interceptions of the content data stream from player to output) and empowered, so to speak, to take action. What sorts of action? Actions such as actively preventing component outs from working if the HD-DVD or Blu ray disk you’re trying to view has been flagged as being compromised (or more specifically, if the cryptological “key” associated with the disk has been compromised, leading to your play privileges being ‘revoked’ by the key issuing authority).

All high definition hardware — players, digital sets, audio units — are designed to enforce this automated copyright infrastructure. Your HD-DVD or Blu Ray player will talk to your high def display over what are called High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection compliant outputs. Together, they’ll ensure that RIAA and MPAA copyright concerns are being addressed wherever and whenever “premium content” is being viewed.

The addition of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) component in Vista enables MSFT and its entertainment sector partners to create false scarcity – that is, by using the technology to limit, constrain and otherwise interfere with your ability to use “content” as you’d like, they can treat lectronically stored movies and music as metered commodities in defiance of what the technology could do and has done, until the AACS era.

The Era of False Scarcity

Microsoft wanted Vista to be marketable as a media platform (and MSFT also wanted to create the de facto standard for software based AACS implementation) so they crafted a complex encryption/decryption methodology within the operating system that obeys — and then some — AACS rules. Doing so gave them negotiating space with the entertainment industry.

As any user of consumer electronics and Microsoft software knows, shit happens. The copyright enforcement, content monitoring and encryption/decryption technologies in next gen players and Vista are always on. This exacts a performance price from the devices (because our CPUs and memory are good, but not so good that they can effortlessly do both content presentation and advanced cryptological functions without exhibiting some problems at least some of the time) and especially from the software, which is very brittle and prone to malfunction.

But beyond the false piracy alarms, stuttering playbacks and other technical annoyances that are already being seen in the wild, there’s an overriding fact to keep in mind: AACS gives the entertainment industry the ability to treat the products you buy as leased objects, which can be (say, in a case of revocation resolution) the source for ever renewable revenue long after they were originally purchased.

It also creates a method for modularizing in unprecedented ways — and therefore monetizing — functions that were previously considered more or less all of a piece, such as playing and therefore viewing the disks you buy.

In order for this system to work as planned, all devices must comply with the AACS standard. The idea is to close all potential areas of escape. Eventually, perhaps after 5 to 15 years, the full magnitude of the lock-in will be in effect as older DVD and audio players are retired.

It’s rumored that Hollywood and the RIAA are fully aware AACS is, despite all their efforts, eminently hackable, and that the true target of these new constraints are ordinary people who don’t have easy access to workarounds.

The goal then, is to have a lever that can be pulled at any time to extract more income from “consumers”.