The Shape of Our Community

AKMA has reconceived his blogroll as a new university, the U of Blogaria.

Jeneane has imagined a new Walden populated with the bloggers who have come to matter to her.

It isn’t surprising that these tropes come from two of our most passionate, warmest bloggers. AKMA and Jeneane’s metaphors give shape to the community — and, for once, that is the right word — that blogging allows. Odd that blogging, a literary form that looks to the outside observer like the most self-gratifying form of self-expression, turns out to be a way for us to be with one another.

On the other hand, this is only odd because ever since the invention of that large capital expense know as the printing press, writing has been a one-to-many broadcast. Now at last writing is a collaborative experience; we’re seeing an Hegelian “synthesis” of the self-assertion of writing and the mutuality of conversation. We are, in short, writing ourselves into existence together.

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Halley Is Normal

Halley’s in a mock snit because I dared to refer to her as normal. To be precise, in writing about how we’re getting admirably personal on the Web, after talking about RageBoy I said:

Take someone who doesn’t have RageBoy’s penchant for laying himself out as his own best argument: Halley Suitt. Halley is normal the way the rest of us are normal (i.e., not the way RB isn’t).

Halley writes:

Don’t you know I’m a Chris Locke wannabe?! I don’t wannabe normal like everyone else.

Hey, Halley, tell me about it! Aren’t we all RB wannabes? But you left off the end of the paragraph:

(And, by the way, for a normal person, Halley’s pretty remarkable.)

So, let me amend that. The truth is that Halley is totally fucking weird. Ok? Can we be friends again? (But RB is still less normal than all of us.)

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The Day Ashcroft Stopped Flying

Here’s what gets me. Joe Conason writes in Salon (in the pay-for-content section) that in July of last year, “U.S. and Italian officials were warned, according to a Los Angeles Times report, that Islamic terrorists might try to hijack an airliner and crash it into the summit location, with the hopes of killing Bush and others.” Then, “Almost simultaneously, on July 26, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft abruptly stopped flying on commercial aircraft, reportedly due to a ‘threat assessment’ by the FBI.”

Conason says the White House says that this was due to threats unrelated to al-Qaida but the CIA has told CBS that it knows of no such threats. (Remember, this comes from the same people who first lied about Air Force One being targeted, and then had the chutzpah to sell the photos of Our Hero high-tailing it.)

Why isn’t this telling detail being more widely reported?

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The Internet of Groups

Dave Curley writes:

You’ve probably already seen this since it’s making the usual plastic, etc. rounds. Essentially, it appears that a PR company — presumably hired by Monsanto — planted postings on a listserv that ultimately lead to Nature retracting an article.

Leaving aside the question of whether or not the article should have been published, this, to me, helps show how the internet’s strength as a “create your own identity” medium is also a weakness: on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, and nobody knows you’re a lying PR weasel.

Yes, astroturf lobbying exists in the physical world, people are planted in opposing groups, and so on, but it’s much harder. Just as the internet makes it so much easier for me to contact you and communicate/connect with you, it also makes it that much easier for me to lie to you.

I’d like to believe that our ability to sniff out imposters means that this despicable practice won’t take hold. But the price we pay for our willlingness to trust others — a requirement for us to be social — is our capacity for being made fools of. Does this mean that malevolent corporations will inevitably poison the well of conversation? Perhaps. But , if they do, we will together figure out ways to preserve our ability to talk within a circle of trust. Places like epinions.com and amazon.com already take some of the logical steps such as letting us see a person’s aggregated reviews.

But we haven’t taken the most significant step yet. So far, if we want product information, we seek out a discussion about that product. As a result, we’re mainly reading the views of strangers. The obvious solution to the trust problem is to seek out a discussion that starts with the people, not the product. We want to be able to consult our friends — real world or virtual — first: “I’m about to buy a digital camera? Any of you have any recommendations?” The “you” is the defining term here. And if the circle of “you”s doesn’t know much about digital cameras, consulting a second-degree circle would probably get you your answer.

I’ve been involved pretty deeply with a couple of startups that tried to enable just such conversations. They plunged over the Cliff of Business Models. But organizing the big scary Net around the circles of people you know in addition to around the topics you care about just makes too much sense not to happen someday. Soon.

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New Reviews

Denise Howell gives Small Pieces an excellent write-up in her law-centered blog, Bag and Baggage. Thanks, Denise!

It’s going to take a bit longer to thank Alex Golub for his review since it’s not a review so much as a critical piece. In the best sense. In fact, it is a superb response to the ideas in the book. He kicks at the spots in my “argument” that most need kicking and, most important, he laughs at my jokes.

Alex is an anthropology grad student at the Univ. of Chicago who maintains an excellent site about Hans Georg Gadamer. And although he engages with my book as if it were a moderately serious intellectual effort, he writes passionately, personally and with a ragged edge I enjoy:

The book starts small and you don’t get the theory ’til the end: He spends most of the book shaking the big can of whup-ass he holds in his hand and giving you an I-dare-you, ‘don’t make me open this big can of whup-ass’ look. And when he finally does open it in the last two chapters, you realize Why You’ve Been Fearing The Whup-Ass All Along.

He takes me to task most systematically on the question of knowledge. Alex thinks I approach this too much from the philosopher’s viewpoint according to which knowledge is the defining human experience: “I think he places too much emphasis on ‘truth’ and not enough on ‘body’. We do not just laugh – we cum.” (I told my publisher I didn’t have enough “fuck”s in the book!) Furthermore, he says I get stuck on “knowing” rather than seeing that underneath the change in knowledge is a more important change in the nature of convincing, i.e., rhetoric. To this I reply with an emphatic and enflamed: Yeah, that’s right! So, take that! That chapter was trying to do something fairly specific: kick the pins out from the traditional view of knowledge that leads us to absurd, anti-human, anti-body ideas about what it means to be a human. On the other side of the Dam of Knowledge there’s all of life, including jokes, porn, mysticism, mindless entertainment and RageBoy. I didn’t mean to imply that on the other side of the Dam is only a different type of knowledge. At least, I don’t remember meaning to imply that. In truth, I believe Alex has smoked out a genuine prejudice and consequent blinkering in the chapter.

Alex uses this to help make his larger case: “I guess what I’m saying is that philosophy can only advocate for lived experience for so long before it’s out of its league.” What else does Alex the anthropology graduate student think is needed? Hmm. Wait for it … Anthropology!

David has taken us 90% of the way, but to get over the finish line he needs [not] only anthropologists to help him along, he needs artists and artisans – the people who weld, sing, dance, fuck – as well.

To which I reply, vehemently, that little vein in my forehead throbbing: Absolutely correct! I didn’t intend this to be the last book written about the Web. We need poetry, science, religion, and every other way we humans have devised to understand ourselves and our world.

So, let me be clear: I love Alex’s review. What a gift.

(Here’s an amusing picture of Alex.)

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The Joy of Lying

Greg Carter points us to Brad Blanton’s amusing and provocative site on the concept of radical honesty. On its surface, the site is bland, but if you poke around you’ll find pockets of genuine voice (and a whole lot of o’er-weening self-confidence). Here’s a snippet of a description of one of Brad’s seminars:

This is an eight day program which provides you with the hilarious experience of a new family based on honesty which will give you all the training necessary to sustain ongoing transformation for yourself and ongoing torture of your real family and friends back home. It will also serve nicely to mess things up at work.

Now, Greg points this out because of my recent comments about the importance and inevitability of lying. Judging from what I can glean from Brad’s site, he seems to think that there is such a thing as The Truth and that we either tell the truth or we don’t, although he acknowledges that there are many ways in which we “lie” (i.e., don’t tell the truth). The difference between us is that he doesn’t like any of ’em, whereas I’m quite fond of a whole bunch of them. In fact, our human relationships are so complex and mutually refracted that there is no such thing as The Truth, and shaping and shading our stuff together constitutes much of the joy of sociality. Two people just telling one another the truth would alternately boring and insulting. Oh, and, by the way, it’s also impossible.

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Totally Clickworthy

Chip reminds us to click on a site that pays for mammograms and one that addresses world hunger. These folks gather a daily donation from various sponsors based on the number of clicks to their site.

Peter Kaminski has a terse but splendid set of materials explaining why the farm bill Bush is backing is a big pile of doodoo.

Tom is his usually hearty, deeply spiced self in a piece on the role of taste in the social filtering news…and he means real taste, the thing you do with your tongue. He’s reflecting on a piece by Alex Golub who brings up a closely related theme in his review of my book, about which I comment above.

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Animated cartoons

JD Lasica, senior columnist for Online Journalism Review and veteran blogger, has an article about why more so few online cartoons are animated. It’s a comprehensive review of the issue with lots of good links and interesting tidbits. It seems to boil down to this: Adding a very simple level of animation doesn’t enhance the cartoon enough while doing it right requires turning cartooning into an expensive team sport. Or maybe we’re still locked into the old rhetoric of single-panel political cartoons and multi-panel “funnies, awaiting the genius who will invent the new genre. We’ll know it because it will seem so obvious as soon as we see it.

Meanwhile, proof that the comic strip is at the end of its cycle can be viewed at mnftiu’s latest Get Your War On where genius is already at work.

AKMA read the above paragraph and apparently took it seriously. Hmm, I can see how the subtlety of the ironic overstatement may have passed him by given that I’m having to add the implication of ironic overstatement after the fact since there wasn’t any in the original statement. Still with me? Too bad. I was hoping to have chased you off by now.

Anyway, AKMA wants to know why I am so confident that the comic strip is “at the end of its cycle” given the strong evident he adduces to show that the comic strip is flourishing. To which I reply: Look over there! Click here for porn! You’re all a bunch of anti-semites! Something! Anything!

Still here? Damn! Ok, so what I meant was that the 4-panel daily comic strip has gone as far as it can as an art form, and the evidence for that is that the only act of genius I can think of in this form is mntfiu’s playing with the form itself. I have no doubt that comic strips will continue ad infinitum but basically as they are. And now you see why I’ve been trying to distract you from this elaboration. It’s just so stupid and so certain to be wrong.

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Eric Raymond: Straight Shooter. Really.

Open Source guru and gun Libertarian Eric Raymond has joined the blogging community with a weblog that promises to be as objectionable as possible as straightforwardly as possible.

Let a hundred flowers bloom (but wear asbestos underwear).

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People who support people are the supportingest people in the world

<whine>
I like Linksys. I’ve had their 4-port router for a few years and it just sits there and works. And once when it stopped working they sent me a new one, no questions asked. Compare this to, say, BestBuy. Yesterday I took our Playstation 2 back because when you play a DVD on it, if the video scene is dark, it stops outputting to the TV entirely and then takes a couple of seconds to bring the TV back to life. Even though I’d purchased the “no-hassle” extended warrantee, they had to send a 14 year old employee to the back of the store to verify that the machine was broken. After spinning through all of “Ocean’s 11,” the child reported that the machine worked fine. The manager graciously agreed to replace the unit anyway. “I’m not supposed to do this,” he said, waiting for my gratitude finally to spill over my natural reserve. “Just don’t tell anyone.” Oh, I might actually tell someone that BestBuy actually believed that one of its customer was telling the truth. Sure, you wouldn’t want that to get around!

Anyway, I’m no longer able to play online games. When I try to connect, it just hangs. I’ve reinstalled Wolfenstein and Quake but to no avail. So, I go to linksys.com and don’t get any useful hits searching for information on games. So, I google “linksys games” and .27 seconds later find the linksys FAQ that tells me I need to open port 27960 “in the router’s advanced feature.” The FAQ tells me to consult the manual. So, I open the PDF manual and can’t find where it tells me how to open a port. So, I google “linksys 27960” and in .36 seconds I find a page — GamesAdmin.com — with a user-written, careful description of exactly how to do the deed. In fact, these step-by-step instructions cover the overall setup of the router and are far better than Linksys’ own. And it has a set of very useful links.

Customers not only know more than the companies they deal with, they also write better. </whine>

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