The word ‘Communist’ is weighed down by many negative connotations. Soviets, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky – all these people started with an impossible socioeconomic ideal, and through the methods of dictatorship and oppression that we commonly associate with ‘Communism’ today forced it upon an unwilling populace. But the ideal of Communism is hardly restricted to political and economic factors, nor is it synonymous at all with the connotations commonly attached to it.

It is said that a Communist economy can only exist when one of two conditions are met:

• Human nature is perfectly altruistic (or nearly so)
• There exist resources without scarcity.

The first requirement, though feasible on small scales (mostly with religious motivation – Acts 2:44-46, or medieval monasteries), will obviously never be accomplished on any whole society. There is a certain critical mass of people that once a commune reaches that number, then people will begin to leech off it, eventually leading to its downfall. Human nature is inherently self-interested, and often selfish – people want something in return for their work at the very minimum, and prefer in nearly every case to get more out of a system than they put in – the tragedy of the commons. And without the altruism of a most often religious nature, even the smaller communes could not exist.

It is also obvious that one can never draw out enough physical resources from any place on the Earth and in any sector to eliminate scarcity. However, there is one plane in which the amount of resources available has the capacity to outpace theoretical consumption: the internet.

The internet is certainly not the perfect example of the Communist ideal, but there are several important elements of it in its structure. First of all, it has nearly infinite capacity for contribution and consumption. It costs nothing past the price of the electricity used to duplicate a piece of data, nothing past the time spent to create and contribute to the system, and nothing past the bandwidth to consume from the internet. Now bandwidth is certainly a big cost for high-traffic sites, hosts, and service providers, but given the contracts given by the government to upgrade the internet backbones, it would seem to be less of a problem than the telecoms are making it.

Secondly, it’s decentralized, and thus necessarily redundant. Any good Communist system is necessarily divided up into smaller “communes” so as to quarantine renegade sectors brought low by leechers, and also to protect it from attack from without: in both cases, if one part goes down, the rest doesn’t. The internet was designed with this in mind. If any of the main DNS servers were to be caught a nuclear attack, the others would seamlessly take over and the internet would still be there serving news and updates.

Third, it’s all-inclusive. With the internet progressing as it is, and with all the web technologies available now, the Web 2.0 revolution – the democratization of information – was all but inevitable. People now on sites like Newsvine, Blogger, or Technorati can bring their own content to the wide world of the internet for free – a sizable threat to major media companies, but they seem to be coping. The problem for this comes when we take away Net Neutrality: suddenly, big media is back at an advantage. Popular sites, especially ad-supported ones like Youtube would instantly go under – they’re barely paying the bandwidth bills as it is; they certainly couldn’t handle an extra cost like that. And given the bandwidth they use, it certainly wouldn’t be a cheap extra cost. The telecoms’ “free ride” argument is bogus: Bandwidth costs add up substantially for high-traffic sites, making the operation of any moderately successful site an expensive endeavor. But like any good Capitalist, their interest is in maximizing their own profit by any legal method – even if that entails changing what is “legal”. So rather than raising their own prices to the consumer (bad PR, after all), they’re going to raise them indirectly by passing the cost to every website that wants fast access to the end user, the costs of which will be passed on to the consumer in a more diffuse manner, but will inevitably be far greater than the cost of a direct price hike.

Abolishing net neutrality can be described as Soviet in more ways than one. Before the Russian revolution and the ensuing civil war in 1917, the Soviets – especially the Bolsheviks – were quite idealistic in their brand of Communism. But after the war, their idealism turned to stony pragmatism: in order to achieve the abolition of private property, they forced it on the peasantry by means of an omnipresent central state government. In achieving an aspect of their ideal, they destroyed the core. Likewise the telecoms, from the ashes of their glory days of Blue Sky Research, are trying to achieve one plane of a noble goal (more bandwidth resources – presumably, the money they raise from the producer end of the internet will go to upgrading the internet backbone) by destroying the soul of the internet – the essence that made it successful in the first place.

I know I’m late to the iTunes 7 party, but there’s a reason for that: I’ve been working on something, but I’ll get to that later. Right now, the latest version of iTunes, version 7, is standing beneath my web browser obsequiously serving out tunes for my listening pleasure. Not much has changed, it would seem, with the way iTunes is used as a background application (what can change?), but Apple’s goal is to keep you using iTunes in the foreground as much as possible.

I’ll start out with the positive things first. I like the new sidebar layout. The old layout, though functional, always annoyed me to some degree because the playlists were on the same level as the entire library, even though they were all technically subsets. This new layout is organized very well. The new iPod features also look very compelling, though as the FireWire bus on mine has shorted out, I have yet to try them for myself.

Another thing that one notices about iTunes is that it took a lot of cues from Windows Media Player, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Upon seeing WMP 11’s new emphasis on cover art, my initial reaction was “Cool, I wish iTunes would do that”. The 2 new views make heavy use of cover art – one a cue from WMP, and the other bought from a small developer. I won’t get much use out of either of them, but they’re undoubtedly cool.

But iTunes 7 wasn’t all bliss. The initial “wow” factor of all the new features was dampened by a “WTF” reaction to the new interface. Aqua is, apparently, passé now that Apple has moved on to grayer pastures. “Lickable” has been replaced with cold hard steel, something reminiscent of the XP widget scheme (ironic that Apple is moving away from Aqua just as Microsoft is just discovering it with Vista). These widgets are most likely a foretaste of things to come in Leopard – and the simpler gradients are also giving rise to rumors of a completely vector-based interface. That would indeed be really cool, but certainly not at the expense of Aqua.

This is where the announcement comes in: Introducing AguaT, the complete Aqua solution for iTunes 7. Not only does it go back to the iTunes 6 look, it also aquifies some of the widgets that were metallifized several versions ago, as well as doing another trick or two. You can check out the program page for screenshots.

Taking cues from WMP is, like I said earlier, not necessarily a bad thing, but on the other hand, it certainly can be. A complaint I’ve had since version 6, though more accentuated now, is that I don’t like the way iTunes is becoming a catch-all media organizer like WMP. I can hold practically any sort of media in iTunes now a la WMP – something I don’t want in my music player. But, to my relief, iTunes does have options for disabling all the superfluous junk in the sidebar like Podcasts, Videos, TV Shows, etc. So until it demands that I respect its video functions, I’m ok with it. iTunes 7 really is a great upgrade – the features are compelling, and thankfully the homeliness is only skin-deep.

Is it just me, or has Vintersorg been getting lamer with every album release?

First of all, Till Fjälls and Ödemarkens Son were both great albums. Strong melodies, a powerful bass voice, heavy and fast drums, and noticable folk-influence all made for a great sound – despite (and at times even because of) the harsh vocals – perfectly exemplified in songs like När Alver Sina Runor Sjungit and Fångad Utav Nordens Själ. Even the mellow instrumental Trollbunden was a masterpiece.

Then comes Cosmic Genesis. Oh dear, he’s singing in English. The folk influence and Swedish language are suddenly gone, but despite the esoteric ramblings of songs like Astral And Arcane and A Dialogue With The Stars, it still has strong melodic tracks like Rainbow Demon and The Enigmatic Spirit. It’s not as great or unique as his first few albums, but I could live with the new Vintersorg.

Then, as if Cosmic Genesis wasn’t a lofty enough title, his next album is titled Visions from The Spiral Generator. Though it opens strongly with the brief-but-catchy Quotation, the entire rest of the album is basically more of the esoteric rambling of Cosmic Genesis. And worse, the generally octave-higher melodies seem to have been tacked on as an afterthought, and the growling is a lot more dense. Lyrics like “I intersect the shining pulsator/When I travel in this spirit simulator/Receiving visions from the generator/E.S.P. Mirage” – they don’t mean anything. I could write a new Vintersorg song by jumping around randomly on the melodic scale singing from a thesaurus and interspersing it with sections of mucosal growling. Besides Quotation, A Star-Guarded Coronation is really the only worthwhile track on the album.

And The Focusing Blur. This album was so bad it made me want to puke. Everything that was bad about VftSG was worse here. A Matrix Odyssey, for example, has to be the lamest track I’ve ever heard. “With whom shall I have this dialogue? The mad, the noble, the wit?…”. The voice that section is spoken in sounds like deliberate silliness, except I know it’s not. And that makes it painful to listen to.

Vintersorg says his next album (due soon, though I don’t know when), Solens Rötter (The Sun’s Origin), will be written entirely in Swedish again, with more folk influence. Then again, he also says it will “still be forward thinking”, and will certainly not be another Till Fjälls or Ödemarkens Son. I’m tentatively hopeful for it, but we’ll see.