Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy

Really enjoyed the look back at a time we shared with other nerds.

So well researched that I have begun to think that the author must (have) be(en) a member of the scene himself; maybe the footnotes and sources are used just to paint a picture of nonaffiliation?

good book, got the five finger discount

I find it comical that this is only offered in a hard copy format.

The book starts out strong and gave me a lot of flashbacks to time gone by. I wasn't in the Scene in any meaningful way(per the book I was a "lamer") but there was enough nostalgia factor there. About halfway through or so it started to become a bit more like one professor's attempt to take a little data and extrapolate it into a book. At times he is judgmental and his politics leak through (i.e. heavily Left). If it were an analysis of some tribe in Africa or Asia he'd probably get a bit of yelling at for being "orientalist" or some other catchy term for being judgmental of cultures one isn't part of.To me the most interesting thing was understanding how things were made...Less so his social analysis on minimal input. I now understand why Malinowski talked about participant observation in ethnography: looking from the outside is just too limited.

From the moment I opened the cover, I was excited. As a practitioner in this era of the networked world, I was looking forward to a more holistic understanding of the larger ecosystem in which I was participating. I was searching for someone who had engaged in the academic complexities of unraveling this world before scrutinizing it under a microscope.This was not the treatise I sought.I will begin my exhibition of evidence with a single item. Let the prosecutor introduce a single photo of page 34 (ironically, not pg. 99; yuk yuk). Beyond this example, the best citations to be hoped for are a specific ZIP file containing an NFO referenced for the purpose of an aesthetic touchstone - you know, exactly the type you are not likely to bother verifying.I would like to think that I exist in a world where this academic sought out firsthand accounts from individuals involved within this ecosystem. Unfortunately, continuing to read this book brought no support or insight into any such activity. By the end, it read as a masturbatory fantasy that seemed more like the imaginations of an opium-addled 19th century futurist, rather than an individual attempting to operate under the rigors of academia. At some point, it devolves into a realm of burdening the reader with its own laziness.