The headline is misleading. I thought I was in for reading about some open source version of Ableton or something about laws and sampling/remix culture :)
The headline is misleading. I thought I was in for reading about some open source version of Ableton or something about laws and sampling/remix culture :)
To read the subheader you have to go the site; since trying to do so hung up Firefox, it's not going to happen anymore. It will be added to my filter of bad sources along with Nautilus, the New Yorker, etc.
Ableton is audio production software, so it's easy to understand the first thoughts going in this direction. Mine did too, though not specific to any one software package. I even imagined "Seizing the Means" to be about some novel way of averaging signals to produce new signals.
Not one thought about antiquated audio distribution formats ever popped into my thoughts from the title. Why one would think reading of the actual article would be required is a wholly other topic on the interpretation of an articles title upon first reading of the title alone.
"This title is misleading because this article is about something I don't understand. I assumed that since the source was a literary magazine, this must have been about radical open source software, which has nothing to do with class tensions."
"Therefore, for working people to be free, they must seize control of the means of production."
Marx is explicit about a class here, the working class, and implicit about who it should be seized from. His full oeuvre is not implicit though and is quite clear that it is the capitalist class it should be seized from. The term seizing the means of production has for 150 years been widely understood as a call or reference to class struggle. Missing the framing of class in the title is a misreading.
Now imagine reading the title without ever having read Marx.