Popularity - the shining path
Thinking about Tony Pierce and Elizabeth Spiers this morning. Tony’s job at Buzznet ended. Buzznet is one of those attention aggregation places I think. I met Tony and Mark in New York last fall, but never actually clicked through to Buzznet. I do click through to Busblog from time to time, to find out what hip and virile young men who blog are doing in the real world. But not Buzznet.
Gawker was another one of those spaces I didn’t find much time to visit, although I did click through a couple of times after meeting Elizabeth Sneers at BloggerCon. I fell in love with her of course, so naturally I checked out her blog, but really what mid-twenties people who can afford Manhattan do there is just heart-breaking so I haven’t done too much stalking on that front.
I visited the Internet Social Director’s blog this morning, and found out the news about Shakespierce there. Then I read Tony’s Busblog post and noticed that in his recap of the last year with Buzznet he left out meeting the old fat blogger from Wisconsin and his wife on the lower east side, but he did mention meeting Halley at SXSW and I resolved to go back on my diet and write better so I will be more memorable.
Why this makes me think of Jaron Lanier, I don’t know… maybe it’s about fame and money? I don’t know how he’s fixed, but I think he caught some money during the Web 1.0 bubble. I read somewhere he sold a company. Anyway, after his Edge essay I shared a few thoughts about why I think his characterization of the anonymous good works at the Wikipedia as Digital Maoism is so much happy horseshit, boring and stupid on the face of it. A friendly acquaintance wrote, “I think you’re illustrating his point perfectly, because you tend to want to be popular, at the expense of thinking for yourself.”
And this made me think of Elizabeth, whose salty snarkiness put her on top, and of Tony, who is feeling down right now for lack of a J.O.B., both of whom are enormously popular and both of whom work their tails off for love of the work. And I thought of all the compromises I’ve made to stay friendly with people rather than to demolish them and make them understand once and for all that they are truly no better than chimpanzee shit splashed on the walls of the primate exhibit at the Cincinatti zoo. And I thought of all those people who believe in a two party democracy to whom I pander, and all the people who believe in “god” whom I seldom if ever directly confront about the absurdity of their beliefs. And the libertarians. And the librarians fro that matter. And I thought about how Swift and Defoe had it easy because nobody had written over the top satire before and besides it was easy getting by with a pseudonym if you also held an endowed chair or something.
And I thought about how Lanier has no degree but he’s been chief scientist on Tele-immersion, and the Internet 2 thing, a real 2.0 venture and not some smarmy invention of the marketeers, and I realized that dead sea scrolls aside, Jesus probably was pronging Mary Magdalene but that doesn’t make my lack of faith in his godhead any more or less profound… even though his mom was a virgin, I’m SURE.
And last night Beth really said it all when she observed that people talking about the Dan Brown Davinci thing movie always say that the book was great but the movie was not so much, and what does that tell us about the critical faculties of the 21st century American reader?
And the critic is not an inventor, not so much an author as a sounding board, so my friend’s observation is probably true… I hold back because I am looking for friends. Or - and this is worse, much worse - I pick subject matter to lampoon and lambast in hopes of finding popularity among people whose lamentations harmonize with my own. Not because I really give a shit.
lala
