Listics

On Tuesday Corante hosts a Symposium on Social Architecture.  The excitement begins Monday evening with a tour of the Degas exhibit.  After that, who knows?

"Social architecture," something about bees and anthills perhaps, although I know little about entomology.  We expect wasps to be there of course, and short, middle-aged striving academic careerists, as well as tall and venturesome representatives of the eleemosynary elite.  I’m hoping to meet Zephyr Teachout face-to-face and to add her photograph to my collection of "the Babes of Berkman."

In truth, I seem to always be walking a few paces off the sidewalk at these events, but I’m a writer and I seem to be finally getting the hang of voicing a contrarian opinion without turning it into a self-righteous rant.

I’m perhaps more interested in IP v.6 than I am in YASN, and if Leah or Alex would comp me, I’d be in Reston in December even if I had to crawl.  The social software scene seems to have reached the involutional level of depressing double speak with the introduction of tools like Eurekster… a tagging program that allows you to spin your own sense of what’s what and to keep visitors spiraling inward on your site with never another outbound link to trouble you with loss of sticky eyeballs.  It’s where web 2.0 does battle with web 1.0 and loses. 

But for all the resistance I’m feeling tonight, I’m really looking forward to getting my mind around what the people who will be presenting have to offer.  And I’m looking forward to writing about it.