Battleangel

I have to agree with The Inquirer that Fortune’s latest reporting from the P2P world does cast a shadow over Bram Cohen and BitTorrent. While not factually incorrect, and many of the tidbits obviously relayed by Bram himself, it does kind of focus mostly on how weird he is, what a slacker he is and consequentially project some of that onto the technology and community. Just as to reinforce the feeling among Fortune’s intended audience (the economic elites) that P2P isn’t JUST illegal and dangerous but ALSO perpetrated and championed by social outcasts and misfits.

INQ - FORTUNE MAGAZINE has done a bit of a hatchet job on the creator of BitTORRENT Bram Cohen.

Daniel Roth claims Cohen is suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism, and lashes out with a series of charges ranging from writing the BitTORRENT code on a Dell laptop, to living off credit cards, to possession of long brown hair that flops in front of his eyes.

Indeed, the article smacks of the same sort of colonialism and exoticism that one often finds in records detailing far away peoples in far away lands. Only with a dark twist and a looming suspicion Fortune is trying to do the industry’s bidding.