Meeting notice: The 02.March.19 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested topic: NanoMarxism A random basket of NT enthusiasts is likely to hold four beliefs: it is essential to protect the individual from the depredations of the state; that the institution of private property is essential to such protection; and that increasingly, as we come closer to making perfect copies of physical objects, intellectual property is going to be the only property there is. (With the possible exception of real estate. However, depending on what assumptions you make about the nature of space law, not even real estate might be private property in the conventional sense of a preferred location.) A fourth might be that if there is one body of doctrine that the last century has slain past any hope of resurrection or reconstitution it is Marxism, both as an entirety and in all its constituent concepts. So it is a bit of a surprise to reflect that that same basket is likely to contain a consensus that on most of the IP issues now attracting controversy the right side is the one that wants to weaken IP, or at least not defend it. It is even more interesting to see how often the language that is used to advance these opinions is Marxist in concept though not in tone or, thank god, in terminology. When technical people talk about the virtues of open source they come very close to appealing to what Marx called the general mind - - the spontaneous and uncommodified social intelligence of the society. The arguments against software patents often sound like restatements of the theory of the expropriation of labor value by capital. The vision of file-sharing sweeping the copyright industries into the dust bin of history looks much like Marx's theory of revolution -- in which new and more powerful configurations of productive forces explode out of the matrix of the old regime and then bury it. Could it be that the technical culture is unconsciously reviving Marx? If you believe that history is, if not malicious, then at the least mischievous, you would have to expect that it would have some surprise of this kind in store for us. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon. -- Jules Verne, 1865 <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.