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In Respawn Colin Milburn examines the connections between video games, hacking, and science fiction that galvanize technological activism and technological communities. Discussing a wide range of games, from Portal and Final Fantasy VII to Super Mario Sunshine and Shadow of the Colossus, Milburn illustrates how they impact the lives of gamers and non-gamers alike. They also serve as resources for critique, resistance, and insurgency, offering a space for players and hacktivist groups such as Anonymous to challenge obstinate systems and experiment with alternative futures. Providing an essential walkthrough guide to our digital culture and its high-tech controversies, Milburn shows how games and playable media spawn new modes of engagement in a computerized world.

In his review of the book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, by Francis Fukuyama, Robert Solow makes the following remarkably candid comment: … I, for various reasons, would like him to be right. Academic economics likes to pretend that economic behavior is pretty much the same, always and everywhere, almost uninfluenced by socially conditioned perceptions and norms. If Fukuyama's thesis could be proved to be right, it might help to loosen up the profession's view in other contexts as well. Unfortunately, the book does not meet Solow's criterion of proof, and he concludes: I believe that the sorts of things that Fukuyama wants to talk about are more important than my colleagues in economics are willing to admit. I would rather they are talked about imprecisely than not discussed at all. But imprecision is not a virtue, and “for example” is not an argument. To convince economists that organizational structure matters, it is necessary to point to objective measures of economic performance that are affected. We have argued at length that the business groups in South Korea and Taiwan are different, and that these differences are rooted in the exercise of authority and market power in the two countries. We have also shown that the predictions of the authority/market power model – in terms of the size, vertical integration, and horizontal diversification of business groups – match up remarkably well with contrasting structure of the groups in South Korea and Taiwan: this was our first test of the model, in Chapter 4. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most analysts, it is an unexamined article of faith that the so-called “Asian miracle” is a push rather than a pull story, a supply-side narrative in which the administrative efficiency, entrepreneurial energy, and productive capacity of a select group of Asian economies created rapid economic growth. Drawing on new data that allow us to examine disaggregated trade data as if they are historical documents, we find clear evidence that pull factors relating to the organization of intermediary demand and the demand responsiveness of Asian manufacturers must be counted among the most important causes of growth in, and divergence among, Asian economies beginning in the initial period of industrialization and continuing through today. A level of economic activity that we call “intermediary demand” (by which we mean a range of market-making activities that include, among other things, merchandising, retailing, and the infrastructure of product procurement) had, and continues to have, a major impact on the organization of Asian economies and has, in interaction with local conditions, decisively shaped the different rates and divergent trajectories of growth throughout the region. Using our revised Walrasian framework to conceptualize Asian firms, we not only need to examine the interconnectedness of markets within countries, as we did in Chapters 3 and 4, but we also need to examine the interconnectedness of markets between countries. Part I shows that differences in the interconnectedness of markets within countries had systemic repercussions for the organization of those economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“In response to the new challenges created by the internet and the converging of communications media, the industry is working very hard on systems of encryption and watermarking and collaborates with the government to set up a strong legal framework and to educate the public about the value of music.” Frances Lowe, Director, British Music Rights, The Performing Rights Society “It is sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is.” Lars Ulrich, drummer of heavy metal band Metallica “There was this bloke and there was me and we really got along. Our friendship was founded on our mutual passions for pop music, indolence and substance abuse. We would sit around together, heroically stoned, and play records all day long: punk records, soul records, horny disco records like ‘Hot Stuff’ by Donna Summer . . . ” Dave Hill, music journalist Twentieth-century listening and its spaces Artists, fans, and the music business share an uneasy but symbiotic partnership. Dave Hill's homosocial friendship, exploring music not through performance but through listening to purchased recordings, is a deeply twentieth-century subjectivity, reflecting the basic premise of much musical entertainment since the invention of sound recording. This involves a set of paradoxical relationships. For one thing, ‘music’ is a phenomenon that can and perhaps should be considered and enjoyed in and for itself – but to facilitate this enjoyment it has become a commodity, bought, sold, and consumed, to the regret of many composers and performers such as Lars Ulrich. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The predicament: a musical culture at the margins From the perspective of the first decade of the current century, the career of high-art concert music during the twentieth century is not a story with a happy end. A significant number of contemporary participants in the world of so-called classical music, particularly journalists, look back at the twentieth century as an era of deepening gloom and decay. The last century, it is argued, bequeathed to the next an unresolved and deepening crisis. The traditions of instrumental and vocal music cultivated in the public sphere since 1750 gradually lost their appeal and a significant hold on the public imagination. Despite striking developments in the transmission of music by electronic means throughout the twentieth century (thereby ensuring music's wide accessibility), classical music moved to the periphery of culture and politics. In particular, new music for the concert stage commanded less attention during the second half of the century than at any time in the previous two hundred years. The suggestion made by Carl Dahlhaus in 1972 that the Mahler revival of the 1960s might function as a bridge between the traditions of the nineteenth century and the avant-garde of the twentieth seems, in retrospect, not to have been prescient. The embrace of Mahler coincided with a shift away from modernism. The accessible postmodernism of Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, and Arvo Pärt has not succeeded in creating a resurgence of wide audience interest in new music, the brief success of Henryk Górecki's 1976 Third Symphony (Symphony of Sorrowful Sounds) notwithstanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]