Musician David Lowery gave an in-depth interview to Salon last week that’s well worth a read for his unminced-words portrayal of Silicon Valley’s “more radical, ideological” elements’ approach to culture and their customers alike. “This phrase gets bandied about called ‘permissionless innovation’. The idea is that you just do stuff without asking permission. In the down-the-rabbit-hole never-never land of Silicon Valley, they seem to present this unabashedly as if this were a good thing,” he says. “The bigger fight here is that if they can do this with our songs, with our lyrics, then they can do it with your Instagram photos, they can do it with your Facebook profile, they can do it with anything you put on your Web page without your permission. That’s what permissionless innovation is. I don’t think the majority of people want that.” And it’s something that he sees applying to the Beastie Boys / GoldieBlox dispute. “With GoldieBlox, though, this is a company that says, ‘Oh, we’re Kickstartering these girls’ toys’, but then they go and preemptively sue the Beastie Boys using a really big and powerful law firm. This isn’t David and Goliath, but it’s been represented that way.”
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Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…