19 Jan The Future is here, Swedish-style: NYT article
In Sweden, Twitter Is Democratic, and File Sharing Is a Religion
Excerpt from the article:
“In an age of mass communication and increasing globalization, a country depends largely on how it is perceived abroad,” reads an official note explaining the project, known as Curators of Sweden. The government calls it “the world’s most democratic Twitter account” and a global first.
That claim could not be independently verified, and many governments do not run official country-name accounts on Twitter. For example, @UnitedStates is a South Dakota supporter of Newt Gingrich for president and @China is apparently a young Westerner named Laura who, naturally enough, does not make her tweets public.
The move follows another and arguably even more tech-forward development in Sweden late last month, when the country’s Administrative Services Agency granted formal recognition as a religion to a group of Internet activists and others who claim file-sharing as a religious practice.
Isak Gerson, the 20-year-old head of the Sweden’s newest registered religion, the Church of Kopimism, told The Associated Press in early January that he and the other 3,000 practicing Kopimists consider the copying of files to be a sacrament, all copyrights to be heresy and the sharing of music, movies and other forms of protected media to be a kind of holy devotion. The group also holds the computer keystrokes CTRL+C and CTRL+V — shortcuts for copying and pasting — to be sacred symbols.
Read the rest here:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/in-sweden-twitter-is-democratic-and-file-sharing-is-a-religion/