A TEDx “Orange Coast” talk “Tapping into the Hidden
Innovator” by Jack Andraka (book reviews March 18, 2015), about 8 minutes,
brings up some important points about open access, YouTube link here. Maybe embedding isn’t fair here, with the
Roman toga and beefcake, and maybe this would make a nice short film for an
Angelika pre-show, but the comments about whether there should exist a “knowledge
aristocracy” do matter. Paywalls, and
bureaucracy surrounding peer-reviewed scientific papers do matter, particularly
if other researchers don’t have the thousands to pay list price just to see
previous work. That is what Aaron Swartz was fighting, “the privatization of
knowledge”.
In my own novel, “Angel’s Brother”, I use the word “royalty”
where Jack uses “aristocracy”. And
unfortunately or not, in the novel the “royalty” takes the people back and gets
to live on. (I even coin the term “erotic
royalty”.)
There’s also the mention of “applied dreaming”, which could
be renamed “lucid dreaming”, and that’s what the world of Christopher Nolan’s
2010 masterpiece “Inception” is all about.
But in the world that I grew up in, knowledge was
indeed passed in hierarchal fashion. And that’s still the view of places like
Russia and China, where there is concern that open access to certain things
will interfere with stability (in Russia, it is perceived as endangering the
birth rate). There is a view that social
solidarity is important in its own right for a group to survive, even if the
aims at the top are not completely legitimate.
This would be a good place to mention a column in the
New York Times, p. A21, “How the tax code hurts artists”, link here. Add to that category screenwriters, actors, entrepreneurial
filmmakers. The problem is the way the
Alternative Minimum Tax works.
Pictures are from the NIH campus, Bethesda MD, my visit, March 2015.
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