"The future is fun! ... The future is fair! ... You may already have won! ... You may already be there!"
Wow. That was really a horrible experience! I went on this geek dude's call-in Internet/social media TV show yesterday and I can't remember a worse experience since being strip-searched and interrogated by the KGB on the Soviet border. It really chilled me, to see the totalitarian face of social media up so close, and personal.
His name is Steve Gillmor -- I never heard of him before going on Twitter. Of course, he's, as they say in Russian, "widely famous in small circles". He's one of what I would call the Gang of Four (Some days that Gang is Scoble, Calacanis, Winer -- or on other days Arrington, Israel, Feldman or others -- it's a shifting Gang lol). They're in the Berkeley Cybersalon, or basically in the Silicon Valley tech set who are either making or power-using or taking over social media in a huge way. (A typical feature of this Social Media FIC is that they, too, constantly say there is no Social Media FIC).
At first I thought Gillmor's short and pithy twitters were thoughtful and funny, when he wasn't just geeking out on tech, and I thought his very spare and white looking news site, apparently relaunched lately, pretty interesting. But then I began to see him chiming in with Dave Winer and others who were filling up the blogosphere with this Wright-speak. Winer was telling everyone to go watch Bill Moyers interview with Wright, and read this speech of Wright's, and follow that justification of Wright, and the usual Hillary-pillory.
So when I saw the news on the wires that Obama had -- shockingly -- denounced his old pastor finally, and disassociated himself from his wacky rants, I thought, wow, I wonder what Dave Winer, who has been flogging Wright so hard will say now! What will they all say, those folks trying to whitewash Wright! So I just wrote a one-liner and a link to the news piece on Obama, and wrote @scobleizer, @davewiner and @stevegillmor as he had just had a news show devoted just to Wright *and because they are all Valley tech social media dudes trying to get into politics these days*.
I wrote a grand total of...four twitters. Here they are:
Prokofy @davewiner why aren't YOU as outraged as YOUR CANDIDATE about Wright? http://tinyurl.com/5f5wnw 03:03 PM April 29, 2008 from web in reply to davewiner
Prokofy @davewiner you guys really get nutty when you go so far as to try to right the Wrong Rev Wrong here. Stop it. Get over it. Move on. 03:04 PM April 29, 2008 from web in reply to davewiner
Prokofy Neva Prokofy ""What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for," Obama said." 03:05 PM April 29, 2008
Prokofy Now, could we get the same thing from @davewiner, @stevegillmor and all the other Obama flaks on here please?! 03:06 PM April 29, 2008 from web
That's it. Those four tweets. That's what this entire drama is about lol.