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  Control Shift Option: a new essay at artcontext by Andy Deck
  Topics: Internet, art, technology, Microsoft trial, society  
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The essay entitled "Control Shift Option" which appeared in this
year's "Trail of Cheers Calendar" is now online, so if you don't
have the calendar, or prefer to read without the discontinuities
of the printed version, you will find it at:

	http://artcontext.com/crit/essays/cntlShift/

Following several quotations, it begins:

  If artists have been moving to control the Internet, then they 
  haven't been moving fast enough. At the end of the century the 
  concerns of the artist are beyond the purview of the historic 
  Microsoft treaty negotiations. Far from being an unacknowledged 
  legislator, the artist is subsumed by the term "Internet Content 
  Provider." After defining ICPs as "individuals and organizations" 
  with Web sites, Judge Penfield Jackson asserts, no doubt erroneously, 
  that "most ICPs charge fees for placing advertisements on their Web 
  pages."1 What he means by ICPs are the media empires that figure to 
  hold the most prominent positions in an emerging transnational media 
  system. Such empires, together with their related oligarchic political 
  tendencies, ought to be on trial, too, but they are not. Instead, 
  concentration of power is mistaken for progress, excitement about 
  innovation justifies complete competition, and laws adapt to a 
  decidedly incomplete array of options.  


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