I read a couple of provocative items tonight. Joe Bageant’s “Escape from America” provides distance and perspective on the malaise affecting us all. Joe says,

Tomorrow I will not worry about losing my ass in the declining real estate market. I will not commute three nerve grinding hours a day, or nervously engorge myself in front of my laptop for hours on end. Nor will I or wake up with the crimes of the empire running like adding machine tape in my head, annotated with all the ways I contributed to those crimes by participating in the American lifestyle.

And I read this from Eric Fair, a man whose sleep is not as settled:

I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.

I suspect Tom Matrullo belongs in the “sleeping well” category… I’ll mention two of his recent posts. The first provides sweet and thoughtful contrast to some recent rantings and maunderings from Dave Winer. Tom says,

Dave Winer thinks National Public Radio needs to do more listener-driven programming - his example is “This I believe”-type podcasting.

I thank the stars every time it occurs to me that Winer does not program anything on NPR.

Doc says he’s thinking about how NPR can get more funding.

I don’t believe Dave’s “solutions” go to the heart of the matter. And it’s unclear where Doc wants to go with his question. I’ve been thinking about NPR’s trajectory for a while, having listened fairly continuously since the early 70s, when its major news formats began taking form.

Over time, NPR has developed chattery, abrasive noise. This, plus it’s fallen victim to the self-enclosed feedback loop of playing to the audience that fills its coffers.

Not unlike Dave, I think. A week or so ago when Dave gratuitously inserted himself in a speaking role at the 2007 Public Media Conference I asked him why he didn’t choose to attend and learn, to listen and contribute as a member of the group instead of bullying his way into the front row, pontificating, and wasting bandwidth with a rant that will be self serving and ill-informed. He didn’t get my drift. He’s preparing though, thinking about his own contribution to public media and mulling that over in his blog. Today he says,

Monday, February 12, 2024 by Dave Winer.

9 times out of 10, I don’t give money to public radio stations, because once you do, you never hear the end of it.

A few weeks ago, in response to a request for support from On The Media podcast, I gave $100 to WNYC. I don’t even live in NY. Now I’m getting a steady stream of spam from them with all kinds of special offers. This really sucks.

Of course I have asked to be removed from the spam list, and how tacky is it to ask for a pledge less than a month after getting a gift of $100.

A hundred bucks. What can I say besides I think that about covers Dave’s contribution to public radio up to now. Hey, but how do I know he hasn’t dropped a six figure contribution into KPFA, his local public radio station, or subsidized KQED to the tune of a million bucks? I don’t know that. I only know that after he laid chump change on WNYC, he thought that gave him the right to have input to their fund raising process. I’m hoping he’s not there to waste the air while I’m in Boston next weekend.

In a separate but perhaps not unrelated post, Tom notes that “…calling for the commodity-driven markets to have the relationship modalities of gift economies remains a call that goes unanswered.” I’ve tied this thought to something Bageant said, “Everything is a goddamned identity in America, writing included. Identity is a racket in a nation of media controlled clones. And besides, who wants to be a one trick pony in the consumer zombie parade?”

These are rough words, but perhaps at least tangentially relevant to the VRM conceptual initiative that Doc has underway. Giving the “consumer” the illusion of control by providing an automated approach to resolving problems like single sign-on and fraud protection sounds like more of a sales job than a community building exercise to me. But this observation is just a shout out. Doc and a lot of serious people have been working hard on the VRM and Digital Identity stuff. It’s going to take me more than a few nights casual reading to catch up enough to offer an informed opinion.