Is somebody trying to remove access to the culture of humanity?

[WhiteLove]

I don't know about you, but I am seeing a very alarming trend going on right now all over the world which is basically about sucking up and drying out information from the masses all over the world - information that contains traces of human culture or any information that humans could thrive from.

It all started with the move from LP to CD. Once the music had been made digital, it was on purpose destroyed in quality down to very poor 128 kbit/s MP3 quality. At the same time books and magazines started to become disitributed in digital format, all of a sudden huge stores containing human cultures all around the world were made smaller or even closed entirely. At the same time YouTube grew bigger and what we are now seeing is the removal of crazy amounts of videos. Instead we are seeing tons of channels forming, all behind NDAs, the rest is basically just a lot of copied crap.

And what makes it even more alarming is that your attempts at buying some of the original art, like for instance to buy a CD by Hanson called "The Walk" (Hanson - The Walk (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GMW7Z6W/sr=8-4/qid=1477164823/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1477164823&sr=8-4)) becomes increasingly difficult, like either you are informed it won't ship to your location or it is insanely expensive, or the payment method is not accepted, like this CD I mentioned -you get only 1 last copy of this one for 61 USD. Who would have thought a few years ago that to buy an album in CD quality you need to pay 61 bucks for it! What?!!

And look at the amount of information on the CD, it's like totally sucked up, you cannot get any information at all about the product, not even the songs on the CD in this case.

So, there is some force in the background that is literally trying to dry out and restrict access to products/information with value, especially products/information that contains human culture - it is almost as if some AI robot is measuring the amount of human footprint in the data online and comes up with strategies about restricting access to that information while at the same time trying to enforce lower quality into it, through copyright, laws, regulations, business, technology limitations etc.

And when it comes to music, not only has the quality been reduced, but you can see a pattern where the same art is missing across all online streaming sources, meaning access to that art in some cases is now entirely gone, you cannot get the CD online, you cannot find it in stores and you cannot access it on streaming services online.

So this means that we are basically beginning to see a totally new phenomenon emerge that humanity has never seen before and that is the trend of having huge amounts of cultural value permanently taken away from the public. What we in the past took for granted suddenly no longer is a possibility.

Can you imagine the amount of culture that various giant media & entertainment businesses are keeping away from the public in their vaults? It's really incredible how much art is kept away from the general public. It appears that businesses are being used as weapons for mass destruction of information.

What we are now seeing indicates it will be increasingly difficult to get access to information, like information in general, and especially high quality art expressing human culture - I find that to be an incredibly alarming trend!

So what do you think, who is behind this, what's going on, do you have any information about this particular topic and how do we collectively stop this?

I love culture, music and art, this pisses me off!

Here is an example of how extreme it has become and I think this touches on the truth:

Ringmakers of Saturn Hardcover – August, 1986 Norman R. Bergrun
(https://www.amazon.com/Ringmakers-Saturn-Norman-R-Bergrun/dp/0946270333/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1477167402&sr=1-11&keywords=rings+of+saturn)1 new from 5,900.00 USD

Try to put this book in the shopping bag, it's yours for 5900 USD, costs you 46 USD per page you read! Amazon is actually selling it for this, no questions asked. Normal!

Luckily the producer of the YouTube videos can decide how much to compress the audio vs. the video and there are examples where already at 240p it starts sounding sound, I mean good. :waving:

Ha, this one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99gnFIOj9SI&t=25m27s) slipped through the net.

And this one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MNTX9WR4PI). (BTW. incredible sounding on Tidal)

Much Love :heart:

[norman]

I hear you.

I'm probably not as convinced as you are that it's a specific targeting on these things. I see it as a general 'fault condition' in the way technology is now impacting humanity. it requires less and less actual human input and more and more it generates it's own from it's outputs. In electronic terms, that's called oscillation. In audio terms, oscillations are a hell of a noise that's got nothing at all to do with what the human is doing. Further more, the natural response to this condition should be and used to be, to cut the power and shut it up. That's my current recommendation also.

[Ernie Nemeth]

Seems the attention span of the public is alarmingly low. It started with canned news and the thirty second byline. Headline news in encapsulated form, for those busy and on the go. I really noticed it with music videos as the scene would change every few seconds, not long enough to gather details.

But for me the most blaring example has always been the scientific culture and its incessant need to peruse its pedigree every time a science presentation begins. It's as though Newton and Einstein and that ilk were the only ones with brains and the rest of us are just dummies. They set the stage in this intellectual hierarchal fashion every time so as to usurp authority before it can even be questioned - and then go on to talk some nonsense that can now not even be refuted. I hate their litany, and dismiss their authority.

I think what you are noticing is the reaction to that truth - that the public has on average the potential for about ten seconds of focussed attention before they loose the thread - and interest.

Culture has been bled grey of its color and inured of its vibrancy. This is the culture of the future in the making. Same stores, same rules, same likes, same desires, same fears. No room for true analogue interactions, including LP records. Deceit and trickery require those gullible enough to consume pabulum as their main fare.

Very few understand how anything works in our modern world, and yet here it is. We live here in blissful ignorance but naïveté is short lived among the wolves. Many have found that their blessed system only works so long as everything is left unquestioned and just assumed to be as they were lead to believe it is. Test the system, stand up for your rights and see how long you remain disabused of the notion of the malevolence of those in power and their so-called justice.

[happyuk]

"It all started with the move from LP to CD. Once the music had been made digital, it was on purpose destroyed in quality down to very poor 128 kbit/s MP3 quality"

This statement convinces me that you – indeed most of us – are still thinking along old world order lines.

Start with albums. Unless you are Pink Floyd, the question is: why? CDs are dead, and were always a rip-off. And vinyl was always cheap, easily-scratched expensive **** anyway. Even downloads are over. YouTube has taken them all out of the game, along with all the other streaming services like Spotify.

You can still make an artistic statement and you can make it as long or short as you like. BUT NOT AS AN ALBUM. No one cares anymore. I love music more than ever, I just don’t want anymore bull**** albums with perhaps at most two great tracks on them.

It’s all about building up a body of work, one GREAT track at a time. Can any band do that these days? Apparently not. Look at U2, they gave their last album away, going on TV to tell everyone it’s the best set of songs they’ve ever written and what happened? We’ve already forgotten about it. Why? Because there is not one GREAT track. Not one. They are still be great live and their back catalogue is still as good as it ever was but we don’t need another ‘good’ U2 album. We’ve already got some, thanks.

This is not like 1976 before punk came along and gave all these pretentious tedious rock bands a kick up the arse. Rock was not dead then and rock is not dead now. It’s just that the game has changed as all games do.

Same as television. It’s almost otherworldly how Saturday night TV, for example, is still Saturday night TV. No one watches when they’re 'supposed' to anymore. They already have it Sky-Plussed or similar. They watch when they want to watch. Game Of Thrones was given a kicking for not attracting enough viewer ‘ratings’ when it was shown first time around. Did it matter? Of course not. Because we had the box-sets, we had the repeats, we had the Netflix to find it on. You put together all the people in the world who are Game of Thrones addicts and place them next to whatever the ratings are whenever they show an episode live and the two figures have nothing to do with each other.

New World Order? Bring it on baby!

[lastlegs]

There is more truth to the theme of this thread than generally perceived. I have been collecting sets of encyclopedia for some time. I have one for every decade from 1920 to 1990 in the world book and Britannica. The size remains the same in spite of the increase in knowledge. I am a historian and have 158 semester units in history Almost everything I have ever been taught is wrong.

I started with the encyclopedias long ago. I made a list of all American women by going page by page in the 1920's edition and then I would check to see how long they stayed and I tried to determine common denominators for selection. What the public can know has always been tampered with. I had a book by a famous British academician who has over 25 books listed on Amazon but not that one. I stupidly loaned it to someone overseas and wrote about it on the net. Both our houses were broken into and nothing was taken.

I have a huge leather set printed in England in 1904 called the Historian's Encyclopedia of history. Really mind blowing what they thought back then. I recently acquired an 1854 set of the History of Greece--12 volumes written by a German. His arrogance as an author is so agenda oriented that I understand a lot more how the wars with Germany were almost inevitable.

I am really into watching foreign movies on Netflex. And at my age I often fall asleep reading the subtitles. I fall asleep not because I am bored but exhausted. I recently watched 48 episodes completely in Turkish and with a Turkish cast and creators translated to the Magnificent Century about Sultan Suleiman in 1520's. Combine that wi
ith the Dutch movie Admiral which is about the first democratic republic in 1602 with over 20,000 ships and you start to get the really big picture of what was really going on.

As a historian would I thought differently about history is I had known the Dutch had a democratic republic destroyed by England simply to monopolize trade. Absolutely. In all textbooks college levels of world history I came into contact with--it is never mentioned. And of course all those texts are American or British. The British on a whole are much more aware of this than the Americans. Most British take all views of history with a jaundiced eye.

[mahasamatman]

You have quite valid points that access to information can be easily managed once they become digital, they can remove all instancaes of a specific information from the internet with few clicks (which was almost imposible when they were written on books, there were always a possilibty of a copy being kept elsewhere), but this is just a transtition of how we interact with technology in my opinion.

Big companies might have some control over the information but for the first time the public have also power to create and manage their own libraries and keep their information which we call it "crowd sourcing". As a software developer i have access to almost infinite information about whatever i need via "open source" projects (i also try to contribute as much as i can), we have wikipedia (and power to create our very own wikipedia too because it is open source).

I am even member of a group that digitizes old books into e-book formats and share with our bittorent group. (we chose books which are not available as an e-book format and also not so easily found in books stores, because they are flooded with garbage books like twilight saga)

The public has now have much more responsibility for keeping the information for themselves.

[shaberon]

I would have to say that the Encyclopedia and most historical texts were thought control from the get go.

In Europe during the Middle Ages, there wasn't really free speech; troubadors and playwrights used allegory to express things that we can openly say now. Our criticisms don't affect the status quo very much, but I haven't been burned alive yet--although I am sure there is a crowd that would love to see that happen.

Prior to CD, rock music was hugely crushed by commercial interests. A lot of those bands would never have played that way, if it wasn't for some business telling them they had to. Only a minority of bands are capable of producing good full length albums anyway, and this has been mostly of an underground nature, largely unaffected by CD format or stupid managers.

But yes, big money and central control pretty much always sanitize things and makes them as weak and generic as possible. How much of that is intentional, and how much they figure promotes their best business interests can be hard to say, but I think it is a mix of both.

Many vinyl LPs were quite good quality. If you treat them gently, they should hardly degrade at all, and are the only source of "real" recordings, i. e. sine waves, even from Youtube I can hear the difference between an LP rip and a CD. I don't really see how an album could be an "old world" thing at all, being less than a hundred years old as an item--pretty modern. A player piano is older than that.

[lunaflare]

I am a Shakespeare appreciator; meaning, live performances based upon the original (first folio) text.
The language is sublime with words, characters and scenes containing complex webs of levels and layers of meaning (as symbols are wanton do).
The text is also in the literary style of the times; Iambic pentameter which gives a lyrical and compelling cadence and beat.

Now-a-days (if Shakespeare is performed) many directors take great liberties in adapting and "modernising" the text.
The variations and musical additions- hip-hop for example- may have the poetic bard turning in his pauper's grave. Yes, at least these plays are still performed; enriching the present with the language and sentiment of the past. I do believe art, music, literary works were more elevated in days of yore.

There is something powerful in a text that retains its original form even if the literal meaning is not always consciously understood.