[cross posted at Wisconsin Coalition for Network Neutrality]

Network Neutrality legislation is already convoluted. It frames the conflict between the telcos and the cable companies, with AT&T and friends seeking a legislative mandate for competition in video distribution markets that cable companies currently dominate. Public utilities franchises, the Commerce Clause of the constitution, rules governing common carriage, and more are all muddled together in a complex market that cries out for a clear set of regulations that protect the people’s right to use the virtual commons of the internet in a way little different from our rights to use the public highways.
We need free access with no monopoly manipulation that segregates the “little guys” from big media and gives big media a priority within the network. I think we can come back to this highway metaphor again and again. This post is not to lay out any of the complexities of the issues before us, there is plenty of time and space for that, but rather to create a clear distinction of “us” and “them.” WE support net neutrality. THEY support a tiered structure that permits the stewards of the Internet public trust to manipulate the market to their own ends. WE support the four Internet Freedoms laid out by FCC Chairman Michael Powell. THEY support their own freedom to dominate markets, control content, and maximize corporate profits by dictating what they feel is appropriate use of the Internet.
What are the four Internet Freedoms? Here’s how Michael Powell laid them out…

Freedom to Access Content

First, consumers should have access to their choice of legal content. Consumers have come to expect to be able to go where they want on high-speed connections, and those who have migrated from dial-up would presumably object to paying a premium for broadband if certain content were blocked. Thus, I challenge all facets of the industry to commit to allowing consumers to reach the content of their choice. I recognize that network operators have a legitimate need to manage their networks and ensure a quality experience, thus reasonable limits sometimes must be placed in service contracts. Such restraints, however, should be clearly spelled out and should be as minimal as necessary.
Freedom to Use Applications
Second, consumers should be able to run applications of their choice. As with access to content, consumers have come to expect that they can generally run whatever applications they want. Again, such applications are critical to continuing the digital broadband migration because they can drive the demand that fuels deployment. Applications developers must remain confident that their products will continue to work without interference from other companies. No one can know for sure which “killer” applications will emerge to drive deployment of the next generation high-speed technologies. Thus, I challenge all facets of the industry to let the market work and allow consumers to run applications unless they exceed service plan limitations or harm the provider’s network.
Freedom to Attach Personal Devices
Third, consumers should be permitted to attach any devices they choose to the connection in their homes. Because devices give consumers more choice, value and personalization with respect to how they use their high-speed connections, they are critical to the future of broadband. Thus, I challenge all facets of the industry to permit consumers to attach any devices they choose to their broadband connection, so long as the devices operate within service plan limitations and do not harm the provider’s network or enable theft of service. Freedom to Obtain Service Plan Information.
Consumers should receive meaningful information regarding their service plans
Simply put, such information is necessary to ensure that the market is working. Providers have every right to offer a variety of service tiers with varying bandwidth and feature options. Consumers need to know about these choices as well as whether and how their service plans protect them against spam, spyware and other potential invasions of privacy. Thus, I challenge all facets of the industry to ensure that broadband consumers can easily obtain the information they need to make rational choices among an ever-expanding array of different pricing and service plan.

This post is called “Wisconsin Whip.” Wisconsin has eight US Representatives and two Senators. (See the convenient table below). Our job is to whip these people into supporting network neutrality and the four freedoms as legislation emerges during this congressional session. This is not a partisan issue. It is not about Democrats versus Republicans. It is about preserving the rights we have now and not giving them up to either the telephone companies, or to the cable companies or to some alliance of both. Contact your legislator and see where s/he stands.

At this time of year, I like to watch the birdies fighting. They fluff their feathers at each other and then comes the squawking and close-in pushing and pulling and then, and then… well not much happens then, but all that feather ruffling and pushing and pulling is quite exciting for me. I like to watch it.

Today I was gratified by that same push and pull in the vLoggerverse… Amanda and ze sitting in a tray, k-i-s-s-i-n-jay… you know?

My dad forwards me a lot of those funny emails. Some of these are chuckle-worthy:

#10 Golfer: “I Think I’m going to drown myself in the lake.”
Caddy: “Think you can keep your head down that long?”

#9 Golfer: “I’d move heaven and earth to break 100 on this course.”
Caddy: “Try heaven, you’ve already moved most of the earth.”

#8 Golfer: “Do you think my game is improving?”
Caddy: “Yes sir, you miss the ball much closer now.”

#1 Golfer: “That can’t be my ball, it’s too old.”
Caddy: “It’s been a long time since we teed off, sir.”

Mark Woods curiously apostrophe-less blog, wood s lot is the blog I’d most like to have with me on a desert island (coming through port eighty into my magically wireless connected browser, I suppose). Last night I was talking with another bloggist, a woman who is no slouch when it comes to write-aciousness and brains, talking about the brilliant creative minds and the dedicated authorial spirits in the blogosphere. Mark Woods name was near the top of our lists. Mark’s work at Woods Lot never fails to inform, never fails to nurture the spirit, always sets the mind ablaze with new directions for inquiry, and often buttresses the sure and certain knowledge that there is great evil afoot in the world, and great good. Happy Birthday Mark! You reflect so much that is so important to all of us, I’m proud to be a virtual associate. I’m pleased to be acknowledged in your sidebar. Sometimes I cruise by your place and you have some deep exploration going on that makes me wonder “who is this guy?” I think of you in your over the garage gluation and scissorology scriptorium and I know that you go back to the days of paste-up, like me, and I wish I knew you better. Again, Happy Birthday and please allow me to raise a glass in toast…

What are we for? What are we against? After I spammed a bunch of my friends with an urgent call to activism in support of network neutrality principles, one wrote back as follows:

I don’t see here what bill exactly, we are objecting to. Is it a house bill? a senate bill? what’s the number? Government web sites are time consuming in the best of circumstances, but it’s much easier to find bill wording if we have a number. Do you have it? if you do, and you send it to me, I will look into the issue further. Before I write congresspersons, I need to read the bill.

How embarrassing. I think the bathwater is just the right temperature, but what have we done with the baby? Wait… it must be around here somewhere. (Blogger rustles through stacks of old Network World’s and New Yorker magazines…) Ahh… here it is, from the Save the Internet FAQ: Congress is now considering a major overhaul of the Telecommunications Act. The primary bill in the House is called the “Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2024″ and is sponsored by Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-Texas), Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Rep. Charles Pickering (R-Miss.) and Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.).

The current version of the COPE Act includes watered-down net neutrality provisions that are essentially meaningless. An amendment offered in a key subcommittee by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), which would have instituted real net neutrality requirements, was defeated after intense industry lobbying against it.

But it’s not too late yet. A full committee vote on the measure — and another opportunity to save the Internet — could happen as soon as April 26.The Senate is moving more deliberately on the issue. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has introduced the Internet Nondiscrimination Act of 2024, which would ensure net neutrality. And Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (R-N.D.) are expected to introduce a bipartisan amendment supporting net neutrality when the Senate takes up its own rewrite of the Telecommunications Act later this year.But neither chamber will support the free and open Internet without widespread public pressure. To keep the Internet free and open, Congress needs to hear from millions of Americans right now.

Our daily fishwrap limits guest op-ed pieces to seven hundred words. A writer should be able to pump out seven hundred words about anything. If he’s a good writer, his seven hundred words might even make sense. An eloquent writer will just be getting cranked up by the time he hits the limit. I’ve noticed that bloggers seldom approach seven hundred words. Take Kevin Drum. Kevin seemed like a good bet in this regard because he’s so very op-eddish in what he does. But today’s “Immigration Update” - less than five hundred words including a passle of adverbs and a long quote from Mickey Kaus. Most of what Kevin posts (”most” by number of posts and by volume of text within the posts) is way short of seven hundred words.

When Kevin gets cranked up though, he’s liable to go for twice the magic number. His recent rebound regarding net neutrality is a case in point. At first he gave it the typical Political Animal treatment, three hundred words amounting to “Duh, I don’t get it.” But to his credit he dug deeper, presented a balanced review of the pro and the con, and came down in favor of net neutrality regulation and government subsidy to support the regulated environment. I liked his answer, even if it did exceed double the seven hundred word limit on a daily fishwrap op-ed.

The generic blog-post is telegraphic. A post is a signifier comprising a few words, a link or two, and maybe some graphics melded to convey a little meaning and to influence the visitor’s perception one way or another. I like to add a little slide whistle audio just for that Spike Jones effect. Some prefer the end blown fipple flute.

Writing is for readers, and genres provide a nice filter. But there are plenty of prolix bloggers and the “blog-post equals short mixed media presentation” equation isn’t always true. Consider Mike Golby, Shelley Powers, or Kathy Sierra. Kathy seems quite intentional, hitting that sweet spot of rational discourse between six and eight hundred words consistently. Mike is given to passionate expository excess. His posts are over when they’re over, and that’s when he has wrung all the feeling from them and set armies marching from both ends of the Nile with secret goals and deadly intentions. Shelley strikes a balance between these two I think. She prepares her work quite intentionally, and she taps a vein of pure golden emotion and feeling while she does so. I am doubtful that any of these three can be counted as a fipple virtuoso however.

The lengthy composition, the academic op-ed that may run to 1500 words is usually larded with adverbs and adjectives, qualifiers that if elided would pull the verbiage back toward that magic number. Consider Alex Golub, once a quotidian blogger of nicely short posts, a fanfic boy of the lowest order, and a serial novelist. Now that he has sunk into the welcoming arms of academia, now that he is sucking as it were at the hind-tit of the great mother of all knowledge, now that he has reconstructed himself by hauling his surf board to Waikiki and settling into an adjunct position, we find him writing involutional anthropology of the type Meg Mead would have been proud to pierce her navel to write. Rex has always immersed himself in the cultures he studies, be they the cannibals of PNG, the bloggers of Hyde Park, or the undergrads of Manoa. Even after reading Alex’s recent piece in Inside Higher Ed, one remains puzzled regarding whether or not “reading Kierkegaard’s analysis of the sacrifice of Isaac through a Derridean lens could help explain nationalism in Indonesia.”

What magic is there in seven hundred words and why should we be so limited? The guest writer in the daily rag is doing it for a cause, world peace in seven hundred words. The anal compulsive para-professional boomlet organizer of Web 2.0 phantasmagoria does it because she really knows no better.

As for me, I think I will attempt it here for the discipline. If Jeneane can run her thirty posts in thirty minutes sprints, then I can be permitted the occasional op-ed.

Sure, they both look good in a pink sweater, but what else do ze Frank (the show) and Amanda Congdon (Rocketboom) have in common? My assignment was to compare and contrast two of the current crop of America’s favorite vLoggers. Okay… I picked a poor day to compare and contrast. Amanda’s hair was great. ze Frank’s was not.

Content:

ze: world of warcraft, bush, sliding, polls, tony snow, power move, logo, immigration, poop

A: interactive north america gas price map, the all terrain wheelchair, black light tattoo, evil genius chronicles and amigo fish, sheep as billboards, walmart

Maybe tomorrow there will be something to compare. Today’s winner… ze Frank. Totally. Rocketboom was totally neither boing boing nor engadget. the show was totally… the show!

From a letter we received last month:

We know that in the past you have used the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) [United Way] to channel your gift to the American Friends Service Committee.  Since 2024 the CFC required AFSC and other non-profit organizations who receive funding …to sign off on a “Counterterrorism Compliance” form which required AFSC to check our employees and grantees against a number of governmnet “watch-lists.”  In 2024 using these lists was a requirement.  In 2024, after the ACLU won a suit questioning the constitutionality of the requirement, the CFC form was edited to instead suggest the use of these lists.

The AFSC Board feels that if we cross reference employees and grantees names with “watch-lists” whose accuracy and origin have not been judiciously reviewed, then we would be making ourselves a party to a procedure in which the unsubstantiated charges are used as evidence, and anyone accused by being named on the lists is denied the opportunity to meet their accusers or refute implications that they are terrorists.

The American Friends Service Committee, a Nobel Peace Prize winning group, will not receive money through the Combined Federal Campaign this year.  Nor will they screen  their grantees against the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld team’s blacklist.

Bravo

This started as a post expressing my disappointment that David Weinberger is doing a turn on stage at the Milken Institute. Michael Milken has served some time, not nearly as much time as he was sentenced, and far less time than the judge recommended, but he has served his time for some of his felonies. And then, when he violated his probation, he made it up to us by turning over tens of millions of dollars of fees plus a little interest in order to stay out of jail. And he did have prostate cancer, so it’s easy to understand that while he had technically violated his probation to the tune of hauling in the $42 million of illegal fees the SEC identified, and probably another $50 million according to the current iteration of Wikipedia, it’s easy to see why they wouldn’t treat him like some common criminal, say a guy on the street caught with a joint in violation of his probation. He was ill and he deserved a break.

And while he has been identified as the proximate cause of the crash of 1987 and he was accused of tearing apart viable companies in his corporate junkyard and putting the employees on the street in order to gin up more “high risk securities” to meet the market demand he created with his scandalous greed-is-good philosophy, Michael Milken did get out of jail with a billion dollars in his pocket. His long struggle back to social acceptability includes the Milken Institute.

I guess my bottom line on this has to be that Milken won. His billion dollars bought him the respectability he wanted, and like Andrew Carnegie he will be remembered more for the good he did than for his rapacious criminal greed. We don’t boycott Carnegie Mellon just because it was endowed by a criminal master class of monopolists and manipulators. If people choose to gather annually in the house that junk-bond-greed built, it simply demonstrates how flexible we are as a culture. Besides, “Michael Milken” is ever so much more mellifluous than — say — Ivan Boesky.

I learned this morning from Shelley that Russell Beattie is closing up shop. Shelley observes that we all change over time and that a fresh start for personal blogs is often called for, if only to tidy up the code and clear cobwebs from our thinking.

Russell Beattie has been a fixture, one of those guys in the neighborhood who often has something compelling to say, and whose presence one has come to assume. I think my connection with him was always by linking through to his place following comments at Shelley’s. I don’t even seem to have him on my blogroll! But this morning I have him on my mind.

I’ve been writing this blog in one form or another for maybe four and a half years.  Some of that work has been worth rescuing from the bit bucket.  The interviews certainly qualify, so I’m migrating them over from wherever I left them.  The first one I’ve imported is from the Typepad blog:  the interview with Jenna’s Uncle Rage, the Avuncular Chris Locke, originally posted July 24, 2024.

HJ0125 LRB094 20246 RLC 58347 r

1 HOUSE JOINT RESOLUTION

2 WHEREAS, Section 603 of Jefferson’s Manual of the Rules of
3 the United States House of Representatives allows federal
4 impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of
5 a state legislature; and

6 WHEREAS, President Bush has publicly admitted to ordering
7 the National Security Agency to violate provisions of the 1978
8 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a felony, specifically
9 authorizing the Agency to spy on American citizens without
10 warrant; and

11 WHEREAS, Evidence suggests that President Bush authorized
12 violation of the Torture Convention of the Geneva Conventions,
13 a treaty regarded a supreme law by the United States
14 Constitution; and

15 WHEREAS, The Bush Administration has held American
16 citizens and citizens of other nations as prisoners of war
17 without charge or trial; and

18 WHEREAS, Evidence suggests that the Bush Administration
19 has manipulated intelligence for the purpose of initiating a
20 war against the sovereign nation of Iraq, resulting in the
21 deaths of large numbers of Iraqi civilians and causing the
22 United States to incur loss of life, diminished security and
23 billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses; and

24 WHEREAS, The Bush Administration leaked classified
25 national secrets to further a political agenda, exposing an
26 unknown number of covert U. S. intelligence agents to potential
27 harm and retribution while simultaneously refusing to
28 investigate the matter; and

29 WHEREAS, The Republican-controlled Congress has declined

HJ0125 - 2 - LRB094 20246 RLC 58347 r

1 to fully investigate these charges to date; therefore, be it

2 RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE
3 NINETY-FOURTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, THE
4 SENATE CONCURRING HEREIN, that the General Assembly of the
5 State of Illinois has good cause to submit charges to the U. S.
6 House of Representatives under Section 603 that the President
7 of the United States has willfully violated his Oath of Office
8 to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United
9 States; and be it further

10 RESOLVED, That George W. Bush, if found guilty of the
11 charges contained herein, should be removed from office and
12 disqualified to hold any other office in the United States.

“Edit me” is a great phrase, evocative of the Fonzi-esque injuction: “Eat me…”, as well as the opportunity Alice in Wonderland was given when she found the bottle labeled “Drink me.”

Relevance?  It’s a wiki thing…

Jerry Michalski is interviewed by the Economist (Podcast here). Jerry thinks that we’re in the “Model T” era of new media tools. Over the next few years we’ll be figuring out how to sort through the flood of information that has resulted from our empowerment. Today, we still need training on the tools, we need to explain what a Wiki is, and how it works. Tomorrow?

Jerry talks a little about the “revert wars” at Wikipedia and observes that “Fixing a Wiki is easier than vandalizing a Wiki.”

The “quantum personal energy” release of the impassioned authentic voices in the blogosphere are contrasted with “Newtonian media.” (“Old media doesn’t want us to have a memory. When we store information we break their business model.”) Highly personalized and individual blogs are compared to the cooperative and anonymizing experience of working on a Wiki.

Ward Cunningham’s invention of the Wiki is acknowledged.

Are you a cynic when it comes to university research and the study of control?  I am, and B.J. Fogg’s value free approach to perceptual manipulation annoys the hell out of me.  On the other hand, he’s undoubtedly on to something.

Martin Seligman makes the claim that fourteen major mental illnesses are now treatable. Who knew there were fourteen or more mental illnesses? In my neighborhood there’s just one… people are fucked-up or they’re not fucked-up. Converting the FU sufferers to an NFU condition, treating fucked-uppedness, pretty much never emerges as a topic of interest down at the Ace Hardware store. We’re long on diagnosis and short on treatment. “He’s fucked-up,” we might say, but seldom will we say that we think someone ought to go sit with the dude until he gets his head straight.

“How fucked-up is he?” we might ask. There’s a gradation of fucked-uppedness that we’re willing to explore. The sufferer may be diagnosed as “sort of fucked-up,” “generally fucked-up,” or “REAL fucked-up.” A guy who’s REAL fucked-up is interesting, but you don’t want to sit too close to him at the hockey game.

I think we’re more interested in changing the situation around fucked-up people if they hurt others. But the service industry that emerges here is more in the nature of shelter and comfort than treatment. Who gives a fuck if you can treat the fucked-up? The trick is to lend a helping hand… remove the battered spouse, the abused child… maybe listen to what the fucked-up guy has to say. If he’s REAL, REAL, REAL fucked up then we have to isolate his ass. The difference between involuntary commitment and a prison sentence is a line finely drawn and perhaps the only real distinction is that the prison sentence has a sunset date.

The fucked-up guy is as likely to get better in the slammer as he is in the bin. What does it mean “to get better?” Would Van Gogh have been better if he was less fucked-up? I think we can leave that to Scoble, Sierra, and Seligman to sort out.

Thanks to Scruggs for bringing Professor Seligman into the center of the conversation. Imagine! Fourteen different TREATABLE kinds of fucked-uppedness. Can I get Thorazine with that?

In which Mike Golby explores the possibility that local web media could tell the story better.