Listics

I woke up this morning feeling like a bottom feeder, a detrivore, a great carp sucking up decayed bits of organic matter from the Interwebs floor. I am stuffed with negative criticism and a growing ill feeling regarding most of the online personalities who have been flogging their “personal brands,” their “global microbrands,” their “start-ups,” and their fantastic views of how much better life can be in this brave new webby world.

I’ve choked on the bolus of libertarian individualism that everybody else seems to have swallowed. I’m tired of the ill-informed and the self-interested pushing “alternatives” like Ron Paul into the conversation and using up band-width that should be tuned to larger issues. So many of those around us are like epiphytic plants, each one an exotic orchid or bromeliad, finding purchase high in the forest, attached to the trunk of some sturdy tree but requiring no soil, no roots to grow.

I’ve been reminded of the old Bay Area versus Rte. 128 distinction, the seventies and eighties competition in the computing network trades between the East Coast companies (like BBN and Stratus) and the West Coast companies (like Cisco and Tandem). Twitter reminds me of nothing more than the days in the sixties, sitting in front of an Anderson Jacobson terminal pumping TTY protocol through an acoustic coupler down a phone line direct dialed into a machine front-ending a CDC3600 and using those 300bps connections to chatter with each other through that multi-million dollar router.

There weren’t as many of us then, and some of the psychedelics were legal. Other than that, what has changed? The consciousness and the conscience of the community has changed, that’s what. In those days Ayn Rand was some kind of an intriguing (though nutball) social science fiction writer. Nobody believed in what she was peddling except adolescents and some fringe characters in what was called the John Birch Society. Who would have believed that forty years later the Chairman of the Federal Reserve System would craft fiscal policy based on her ravings? Does this mean that someday the L. Ron Hubbard fans will get their turn as policy makers? I’m almost afraid it does. I can speak to that issue with the certainty that the Republicans and Libertarians who believe in free enterprise above all, who support a person’s right to choose which metaphysical path they’ll follow over a person’s right to choose how they will manage their own reproductive health, that all those true believers on the right have solid enough opinions that anything I say won’t rock them.

But here in the microcosm of the blogosphere, can we critique each other, challenge each other’s ideas, can we criticize without alienating? Is there still a marketplace of ideas? Do you shop there? Are markets conversations or not? Is it worth having a conversation with an ignorant person? How many “evangelists” does this web religion need? Can we trust our global network to people who support the likes of Ron Paul, a man who renounces the United Nations, eschews the idea of global governance in favor of USian supremacy?

I started this post thinking I’d be taking a couple of scatter-gun shots at the “personalities” who have embarrassed themselves the most over the past few days during the French Web Conference, LeWeb3, in Paris. Robert Scoble, whose career seems to be public property and whose every move thousands of tech bloggers actually remark upon, used the conference to create a public story covering his separation from his company. Michael Arrington, who feeds this Photoplay version of the people and companies involved in developing consumer class networking products, provided the backdrop with a well-timed blog post. Hugh MacLeod… what can I say? Has he found “his bottom?” Joi Ito flew through Paris on his way to a Creative Commons birthday party in San Francisco. And how about that “Creative Commons?” It certainly provides a foundation that finesses international copyright protections, but is that necessarily a good thing? Scoble thinks so. Dave Winer seems to have a balanced perspective on Creative Commons. He released RSS 2.0, the XML code set he largely authored, through Harvard’s Berkman center under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, but his web publication, Scripting News, is copyrighted.

A couple of bloggers died this last week. Marc Orchant, whom I did not know, and Anita Rowland, whom I knew through blogging. Marc’s death, I think, got Dave going on his frequently revisited idea of a blogger’s graveyard, a place for the accumulated web work of anyone who can afford it to be archived and served. Writers are certainly aware that they have a body of work in the trunk that will survive them. Some bloggers have a sense of entitlement to perpetual attention, online real-time access to their blog forever. For that bunch, Phil Wolff came up with a few tips regarding wills and such.

I began this post with an intention to criticize, but in truth there are so many entry points for criticism that I’m not sure I’m up to it. For example, I don’t want to feel like Loren Feldman when I tell Robert Paterson that his choice to do PR for Blackwater is questionable on the face of it. There are plenty of ideas I’d like to promote, efforts that provide me buoyant and positive feelings, feelings that at least get me off the bottom if not up in the epiphytic heights with the web evangelists and Venture Cartoonists. But this post is about bottom feeding. It’s about reviewing the ill feelings that so many of the evangelists and the cartoonists bring to the table. It’s about why twitter is a better medium for many of these people because they can’t read and write very well and they only understand very simple things.

I really do hope that Hugh recognizes the root of his problems, that he can be spared from what we recovering addicts call a “low bottom.” I really do hope that Robert finds well-compensated, honest work that makes use of his talents and that he enjoys. And I really do think that Dave comes up with bright ideas more often than your average bear and deserves credit for them.

That whole Robert Paterson and Blackwater thing really sucks though, and it deserves another post or two. Talk about your Soldier of Fortune masturbatory fantasy life….

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