Today’s Guardian/Observer has a good piece on philosopher and Imp of the Perverse, Slavoj Žižek. He remarks,

[T]he problem is always the same. It’s the enclosure of the commons. Marx was talking about land and property when he wrote about this, but today intellectual property is our commons, information is our commons. Something that Marx could not have predicted is taking place today: we are witnessing a strange regression to the same kind of enclosure of the commons, and people having to pay rent to people like Bill Gates for intellectual property.

Also, Žižek’s performance in the vastly entertaining Pervert’s Guide to Cinema is not one to miss. A favorite scene moves between Hitchcock and Coppola’s excellent film, The Conversation:

“Gaze is that obscure point, the blind spot, from which the object looked upon returns the gaze…After suspecting that a murder is taking place in a nearby hotel room, Gene Hackman, playing the private detective, enters this room and inspects the toilet. The moment he approaches the toilet in the bathroom it is clear that we are in Hitchcock territory; it is clear that some kind of intense, implicit dialogue with Psycho is going on…“