Hey everyone, I had a bit of an interesting idea recently. We should have our own Libre Culture Lemmy Book and/or Film Club! The rules are quite simple.

Any content we choose to discuss must be either in the public domain or must have a license that’s approved for free cultural works.

Every three months, we vote on a new film or novel to read, or a collection of short stories that are about the length of a novel combined. Other media could be allowed as well. Downvoting suggestions isn’t allowed, unless the suggested content is inappropriate.

I can’t wait to see how this’ll go! Please let me know what you guys think of this idea, and let’s begin voting in this comment section what we’d like to watch/read in March!

  • @wraptile
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    4 years ago

    I’d propose starting off with Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity as it’s often quoted to be cornerstone reading for libre culture yet I know many people hadn’t had the chance to attend to it (including myself)

    Lawrence Lessig, “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era” (The New Yorker), masterfully argues that never before in human history has the power to control creative progress been so concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, the so-called Big Media. Never before have the cultural powers- that-be been able to exert such control over what we can and can’t do with the culture around us. Our society defends free markets and free speech; why then does it permit such top-down control? To lose our long tradition of free culture, Lawrence Lessig shows us, is to lose our freedom to create, our freedom to build, and, ultimately, our freedom to imagine.

    Or for fiction I’d go with Blindsight by Peter Watts that is one of most popular creative commons sci-fi works of the century:

    It’s been two months since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since - until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who to send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn’t want to meet? Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder, and a biologist so spliced to machinery he can’t feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior, and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find - but you’d give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them.

    • @LofenyyOPM
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      14 years ago

      Blindsight definitely appeals to me, but I really like the idea of doing Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. I haven’t read it myself either, it’d be an excellent start to this thing that we’re starting!

    • @appa
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      14 years ago

      Can I upvote more than once for Blindsight? It was the first book I thought of.