Wired State

Want the Truth Behind Sarah Kendzior Who Attacks "I am Adam Lanza's Mother"?

I'm not at all surprised that Sarah Kendzior, writing a vicious post, "Want the Truth Behind 'I Am Adam Lanza's Mother' Read Her Blog" turns out to be on the wrong side of the mother who wrote with anguish about struggling to care for her profoundly manipulative, aggressive and violent teenage son with Asperger's syndrome.

Nor am I at all surprised that she is taking a star turn in the highly-trafficked Gawker and even now bludgeoning the poor woman into a "joint statement" that they will "work together" and "not fight the mommy wars". All the while batting her eyes and claiming she didn't know her post would go viral.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Kendzior sure caught the zeitgeist of the many defenders of violent and manipulative Asperger patients and haters of their over-burdened mothers when she wrote on her blog that there was a "real" story behind the anguished woman who said she empathized with Adam Lanza's mother because her Aspie son was so difficult. Kendzior said Lisa Long was a bad mother and a bitch -- and then got her into Stockholm Syndrome and manipulated her into writing a joint statement undermining her original, valid, and necessary blog post. Ugh!

But none of them likely know of Kendzior's own history in her field and her own considerably big social media footprint in a very small pond of Central Asia researchers, and her role as a chronic contrarian on basic principles of democracy, human rights, authoritarianism and Internet freedom. In fact, I sometimes wonder how she and her colleagues at Registan ever get any work done -- they are on Twitter all day. Sarah Kendzior is so manipulative, high-strung and zany, that she once tweeted that she would call the police over my legitimate blog criticism of her analytical pieces, and claimed that normal criticism was "threatening". Needless to say, not only was there absolutely nothing in any post of mine -- all on the record -- that could in any way be considered "threatening" -- obviously no police have ever come to my door over my...blog lol. Meanwhile, her antics in trying to discredit me and others who disagree with her is appalling.

Kendzior -- to give you an idea -- is the kind of person who will use her visible perch to write manipulatingly about what turned out to be a fake Facebook profile of an Uzbek student who committed suicide who never existed -- yet never admit she was the one who really gave the story legs in the first place when others like me critiqued it. She winds up blaming the Uzbek emigre opposition, and not the secret police who obviously planted the story. That's where I first really tangled with her directly -- because I reported on the human rights activist who first took the suicide hoax seriously since it involved an allegation of police torture, and then debunked it herself with thorough research -- although she was never acknowledged by Kendzior and her friends, who had already gotten their loads of traffic gawking from the story.

I've followed Kendzior for years, and in the last year, I've tangled with her directly and repeatedly over what I found to be shocking apologia for the tyrants of Central Asia -- in the most twisted and cunning fashion, by appearing sometimes to be craftily critical of some aspects of their regime, but usually indirectly supporting them by harassing their critics and denigrating the dissidents in these countries. She was the one inciting my banning from Registan.net when I challenged the minimization of the Zhanoezen mass shooting and their ridicule of a respected academic (and abetting the site manager in removing a State Department official's defense of me); she was the one harassing me on Twitter along with her fellow trendy academic Katy Pearce when I stood up to their weird bullying over my perfectly normal analysis of Facebook surges in Uzbekistan; she's the one I've called out for writing a really odd piece this month saying "Don't Talk about Civil Society" (?!) -- and I've written about her strange thesis that we need to stop reporting persecution by authoritarian states on the Internet because that just makes ordinary people who would put up their cat pictures get scared off, and retards progress for the Internet overall.

If this all sounds complicated and strange -- it is. But that's what Saran Kendzior and friends excel at -- they write outrageous things, bully critics, then concoct stories about their critics, and then become earily silent when their handiwork is outed.

In short, Sarah Kendzior has the worst possible ideas in my field of Eurasia studies, doing the job of authoritarians for them -- and with only her aggressive, youthful social media aggrandizement as a means for establishing "cred" -- and not many academic articles, and not respected articles. In fact her lengthy report on media has been criticized by those in the field to the point that I was surprised to discover privately that some rather important people are questioning the report.  Sarah holds the fort as what I call the "office wife" at Registan, a web site notorious for its collection of former and current defense contracters and analysts who provide sophisticated thumb-suckers on why we need drones, even though they sometimes kill children.

Kendzior herself lives with her husband and toddler in the mid-West and lives the pampered life of an academic, pretending to be scared about poor academic salaries and the nomadic life, even as she certain earns a decent salary and gets her way paid to various conferences and of course has her husband to back up the family's finances. She is far, far removed from the kind of life a single mother with four children experiences, or even the real Adam Lanza's mother -- who is dead at her son's hand and can't speak for herself.

In her contrarian and vicious take-down, Kendzior accuses the woman of in fact mistreating her child merely because she threatens the child with calling the parole officer or sending him back to state care -- all totally reasonable and normal things to be doing with a child like this. Why? Because a child like this is completely, totally past the point of being able to "go in his room for a time out" or told to behave and he will get a cookie or an extra hour on the Internet. Only the force of the state works, and that's what people have to realize about this situation.

Kendzior even stoops so low as to claim that when the besieged mother says that she feels some days like "throttling" this kid, that this is some evidence that she is unfit, or violent. That's fucking ridiculous; that's just a figure of speech. This reminds me of that notorious, awful Joshua Nightshade of Second Life, ranting forever as he harassed and stalked me and trolled me on my Second Life blog, that if I said I'd like to "wring his neck," that I was some kind of violent person who needed to be arrested. Totally ridiculous and merely another manipulation. It suddenly struck me: is Kendzior herself on the autism spectrum? I had never thought that Kendzior was essentially a board ho seeking attention -- I thought her opinions, while misguided, were genuine. Now I wonder.

I was happy to see that many people backlashed against Kendzior's horrid, nasty take-down of this mother of the autistic child -- in ways that they can never, ever do on the sites she controls (because she bans them) -- not because she couldn't ban them on her personal blog, but because if she did ban so many dozens of them, they'd all be screaming very loudly all over the place at what a fraud she is for pretending to champion contrarian debate and then squelching it when the scrutiny falls on her.

Says Gawker, flush with Kendzior's analysis:

Relatives, friends, and acquaintances have come forward since Friday's tragedy to describe Lanza's real mother Nancy as a gun-loving survivalist who feared the imminent collapse of the world economy and home-schooled her troubled, autistic son and "battled" with Newtown's public school system.

Hmm. I guess we're going to see that this school shooter is actually the result of the religious right, at the end of the day, eh? Gun-loving! Conspiracy-fearing! Home-schooling! Battling authorities! Why, it's a veritable Ruby Ridge!

But let's go over again what Lisa Long wrote, that not only Sarah Kendzior denied and pushed to the side in attempting to invalidate this woman, but Gawker did as well:

o the son had "pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books"

o "His 7- and 9-year-old siblings knew the safety plan—they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to" -- that means there were many, many such incidents.

o "I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me."

o "That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room."

When the boy refused to put on the black pants requested by his school dress code, his mother used the technique that many parents find will work, and expect to work even with a dysfunctional child like this -- she said that he could not play his video games. When she finally got the kid into the car, he continued to argue with her -- then insisted at the end that he should get his video games back, confiscated due to his actual bad behaviour:

o ""Then I'm going to kill myself," he said. "I'm going to jump out of this car right now and kill myself."

So here's a kid who went from threatening his mother with death to threatening suicide. This isn't just talk. This is dysfunction --and I use this word because I think the issue with Aspergers' patients isn't just that they have a specific mental illness, but it's exasperated because every interaction with them escalates their dysfunction and other psychiatric ailments from which they suffer -- too lax and they grow manipulative; too punitive and they grow violent -- and they never grow up and become normal -- ever.

But as with so many cases -- there wasn't any bed for a longer psychiatric stay, so doctors released the kid with a Zyprexa prescription.

So...After the suicide threat, the mom doesn't cave and decide not to give the kid his video games back -- as many might. She digs in, and says, "After the knife incident, I told him that if he ever said those words again, I would take him straight to the mental hospital, no ifs, ands, or buts." But he did. It got worse:

Michael was in a full-blown fit by then, screaming and hitting. I hugged him close so he couldn't escape from the car. He bit me several times and repeatedly jabbed his elbows into my rib cage. I'm still stronger than he is, but I won't be for much longer.

So here's a kid that threatens to kill somebody with a knife in his hand; he threatens to commit sucide; he bits and screams and hits and jabs on the way to the mental hospital. And the mom's the problem? What the fuck?!

So again:  a violent kid that had to be subdued by police and a paramedic, after grabbing a knife and threatening to kill his mother and menaced his siblings...over a request to return his library books (!!!); a violent kid who threatened to commit suicide because his video games were confiscated over his actual bad behaviour ...isn't the problem. The mom is the problem! Huh?! And Sarah Kendzior is digging into her use of the word "throttle" -- like one of her academic linguistic excursions that are no more valid.

But it can and does get worse, because we are dealing with really manipulative characters in these particular type of violent autistic children:

For days, my son insisted that I was lying—that I made the whole thing up so that I could get rid of him. The first day, when I called to check up on him, he said, "I hate you. And I'm going to get my revenge as soon as I get out of here."

I disagree that this mother doesn't get to blog about this son. She does. She has to because she's dealing with a public menace all along, and the "helpers" around her are set up to coddle him, not her. She hasn't in fact revealed his name in the blog and their name is a very common one -- and if he is this dysfunctional, it's not like he's going to run for office or be a public figure some day. She -- or others -- will be taking care of him for the rest of her life. That's why Kendzior's main beef -- that this woman has publicized her son and ruined his privacy -- is a total red herring. In fact, we need the picture of the angelic little blonde boy that is the type that graces every popular book about these special and different children who can never do no wrong and never conceivably be restrained  -- only society is wrong for misunderstanding them, or their parents for not being sufficient martyrs.

There's a strange call here for the "removal of stigma". The problem with that laudable and noble idea is that it is translated into saying that mental illness is not bad, that it is not harmful to others, and that it is not a problem. But mental illness is bad, and is harmful to others, and is a problem -- and people keep medicalizing it and making it seem "special" and "differently abled" and won't confess it's hell. That's why this mom had to keep her diary online -- to avoid going crazy herself. God bless her!

While it might be good if people began to accept it was nothing to be ashamed of to ask for help or get help for a family member, here's the problem with that lovely idea when it comes to this kind of case: that manipulative, burdersome person refuses to acknowledge that he needs help. He refuses to go to the hospital willingly; no doubt she has a hell of a time getting him to psychiatric therapy, too. He then lies about what really happens and says he will get revenge. This is behaviour you shouldn't stigmatize? Really, guys?

By continually whitewashing the disease and its effects on others by mainstreaming and euphemizing and continually "removal of stigma" -- i.e. rendering adult, factual, pragmatic judgement on this cunning disease -- in fact, you don't get people to take it seriously enough and follow the path of institutionalization. Instead, there is the hope that you can edit human nature and make everybody get along with this condition with just an extra hard-working mommy and some pills. Sarah Kendzior is just doing what she always does in analogous situations in her region of study: blaming the victim, minimizing the tyrant, and cunningly accommodating to him.

 

Sen. Lieberman is Right, Congressional Panel Should Scrutinize Violent Video Games Too

Congress people are trying to respond to the horror in Newton, Connecticut practically, with proposals for legislative change.

That will obviously start with guns first, regardless of the gun lobby, as the sentiment is doubling down on this and may not dissipate this time.

But before there can be legislation, first there has to be a panel. We really do need to scrutinize these mass public shootings that have grown more and more frequent and try to understand why they happen and what their common ingredients are and where they can be stemmed. They are complex, but they need studying as a patterned phenomenon precisely because more and more of them are occuring even as the Internet and social media amplify them -- and make them possible -- more and more.

For many, the simplistic answer inverting the gun lobby's "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" is that "guns do kill people, and people don't kill when they don't have access to guns". Yet even if you tighten up regulation, you won't get as far as you need to -- the shooter's mother had guns legally and he used them. And the argument won't do for many Americans who see the Second Amendment as their only bastion against encroaching stealth socialism -- and they aren't wrong to feel this way, even if the form it takes seems nasty.

Because they are right -- lots of people even with assault rifles don't commit these atrocities. Even so, you'll never persuade me that ordinary citizens need assault rifles with clips that enable a hundred rounds, or that a kindergarten teacher, even if she had such a weapon herself, will be able to act quickly and efficiently enough to mow down a possibly better armed and determined shooter. What, you want her to come to school in a bullet-proof vest every day with a rifle slung over her shoulder at the ready?!

Nor will the simplistic answer do that "the media causes this by covering the shooters and making them heroes" -- because that implies that you should censor the media. Hey, you really think a bi-partisan panel (!) can decide how to cover shootings and what to focus on and what to hide? Really? And the news will never leak anyway?

I really hope there will be such a panel and it will look hard at every aspect of these public atrocities -- and look at:

1) gun control -- face down the lobbyists and libertarian loudmouths and look at where this might be fixed in three areas -- registration and the problem of mental illness, easy availability of assault rifles and ammunition (especially bought over the Internet).

2) mental illness and Asperger's -- The DMV recently removed this disease as such and put it in under "autism spectrum". There is so much wildly differing research on autism's causes and effects, but no, it is not true that no, there is no violence associated with autism. Of course there is violence associated with autism. The Aspies' lobby of course wants that downplayed and becomes hugely indignant about any stereotyping or profiling. But the purpose of scrutiny and admission of connections isn't to violate people's civil rights or harm them with discriminatory profiling. It's to enable government and school authorities, parents and community leaders, to watch out for signs that the deadly mix might be occuring -- and help prevent it so that other peoples' rights aren't violated either -- like their right to life and education.

3) violent video games, movies, and online MMORPGs that feed a culture of violence and extremism. Yes, these need to be studied not only to confront the industry with voluntary self-regulation, but to see if there are patterns in combination with other things like autism/mental illness that suggest parents should try to avoid or reduce the playing of these games for people with these conditions -- instead of leaving them to be babysat on the Internet because they are hard to take care of.

4) media coverage -- while nobody is going to persuade the media to muzzle itself and not cover these incidents, there could always be self-governance by media and guidelines if they were really persuasive. I think this will be the least easy piece of it, as many of the shooters are dead or mentally ill and can't tell you whether media coverage instigated them to their deadly deeds or not -- and in any event wouldn't be trustworthy sources. Psychiatrists piously telling everybody that they shouldn't glorify shooters or show the scenes of their mayhem or the huge police response seem to have forgotten about the public's right to know.

Note that senators don't have the allergy that the gamerz on Gawker do to scrutinizing the connection between violent video games and real-life violence:

Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut who is retiring, supports such a ban but said there should also be a national commission to scrutinize gun laws and loopholes, as well as the nation's mental health system and the role that violent video games and movies might play in shootings. Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois said he would support such a panel, adding that it was time for a "national discussion" that included school safety.

And again, the purpose of such scrutiny and probing in a hearing and a penal isn't to ban violent games -- they are already rated for adults -- or censor people's First Amendment speeches. The purpose is to make the moral and social remedies needed outside of prosecution by law to address this challenge.

Everybody is putting up helpful hints about how you talk to children about this atrocity.

My suggestion got killed by New York Times censors, but it goes like this:

By the time he is eight or even younger, your little soldier has already seen thousands of realistic murders on television or in the movies, or even participated in thousands of realistic murders in video games -- even if those murders are only furry woodland creatures. In fact, he may already be playing more sophisticated war games and have killed realistic people on the screen.

So your job isn't to tell him that there are mean people in the world who shoot little kids; he may already be on his way to becoming one or at least has simulated one by playing a game or repeatedly watching a movie. Your job is to tell him that killing people is unacceptable, and the games and popular culture that celebrate it are just games, and should not be converted to real life.

That if you kill real people, their mommies and daddies are really sad. That often mass murderers commit suicide because they are cowards if they shoot little kids -- and maybe reality hits them when the realize the kids in their video-like enactment aren't re-spawning, they commit suicide. Yeah, have that kind of exactly frank discussion.

In fact, go the extra mile and don't let an unformed, morally undeveloped eight-year old only one year past the age of reason play such murderous killing games or watch such violent movies. And yeah, I realize that when he goes to his friends, or over to Divorced Dad's new home with his new wife's older kids, or to his uncle's house, he gets those games anyway. And that's why you talk about them early and set the moral stage about them, as you do about drugs.

Even a six-year-old you may be talking to about this horror may already have become a little soldier in the big nihilist online war of all against all -- don't be naive.

 

Kevin Systrom, You Have a Chance to Make Web History, Don't Lose It!

Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram who sold his popular photo-enhancing company for a record $1 billion to Facebook, is in trouble lately with California state regulators. California Corporations Department is seeking to determine if Facebook’s acquisition of the photo sharing service was in the best interest of Instagram investors, the New York Times reports. He says Twitter -- from whom he his locking up everybody's pictures lately -- never made him a firm offer. In any event, even if it kinda sorta did, he preferred going to the more viable Facebook. I don't see what's wrong with this, but I'm not a tax and regulation expert, so we'll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, all the techocommie and techolibertarian geeks (they are in the same camp now, trying to liberate our content for their piracy-based business models) are screaming and saying Systrom should turn this whole thing into yet another Creative Commons licensing scheme and just keep skimming content.

I say, no, Kevin, you have a historic moment to turn the corner on the early Internet's hippies and socialists in web 1.0 and web 2.0, to leave behind the Howard Rheingolds and the Clay Shirkys and the Joi Itos and the Mitch Kapors and all the rest, and make a buck for yourself -- and everybody else.

I've already written about how Anil Dash is in the way of history and how we don't need more Creative Communism, we need to add real dollar Commerce to the model to make it viable. Not this dead-end UI that only leads to more ad dollars for Zuckerberg with our free content, and nothing but loss of time for us:

But this more viable mode where we can GET PAID even for amateur pictures and blogs:

But what this depends on is Kevin Systrom, and whether he can turn the corner from being just like every other script kiddie with a big idea and become like every other oligarch who will be dead in 10 years, or make history, leaving the pastoral, collectivist communist past of the Internet far behind in the dust and moving to the modern age.

It's good that Kevin has already declared the opposite of "liberation" of content for Twitter and others, and decided that private property needs to have digital rights on it. Good!

Now go the extra mile and figure out how you do get content out of the box -- you enable people to sell it! Maybe for pennies, but you sell it!

 

Anil Dash, You're in the Way of Progress

Anil Dash has one of his furious posts up, reminiscing about the old social web that he and his friends dominated in the early years, and fulminating about all these greedy kids who became billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom of Instagram that are so unlike him and his altruistic buddies who just made cash with start-ups and consulting, but not THAT much cash, geez.

And Anil wants everyone to return to that bucolic, pastoral past of technocommunism, where everybody was equal and shared, and where people were "civil". You know, like the Well! (Or hey, the early days of Typepad when people like me could get paid by the company's ads, which they've now pulled if you don't have a big traffic? You mean like that lol?)

So...I've already responded to the bad ideological part of all that, but what is glaringly missing here?

Anil puts out a "mock-up" of how he thinks privacy and intellectual property rights could be handled with Facebook (and by extension, other big platforms), and uses as a model Creative Commons, which I call Creative Communism, as the foundation of his concept, like this:

So on your Facebook, you can be a meany and deny people the use of your content -- pictures, songs, designs, scripts, whatever -- OR you can be a good commie and let people use it for FREE but in exchange for tagging your name OR you don't care if they even do that, you are such a good commie!

NO OTHER CHOICES. JUST STARK, BRUTAL TECHNOCOMMUNISM.

The oligarchs keep making money off your ad clicks; they keep giving you free service, you keep giving them the free oil to grease their wheels in all your freely-distributed content, and at best, you get a pat on your head with your name tagged. Thanks, guys! Think I'll go back to farming game gold in Farmville! Not!

But there's another way, a way suggested to us by Larry Rosenthal (c3), who has always conceived of Creativity, Community, Commerce -- the three Cs -- as another vision for what digital content creation and sale and consumption could be on line.

So I re-fashioned Anil's silly commie dashboard as follows, and put the money part in for the normal people like us:

In my vision, there's a fourth option that takes you away from the technocommunism of the first three options where the craven platform holders and ideological commissars like Larry Lessig and Clay Shirky and all the rest force you to share your content for no pay. As Larry puts it:

The idea of Creative Commons has run astray, it has become a cult, one run by personality and a perverse agenda that as “marketed” leads to the destruction of all value beyond that of it’s founders fame. Those who create and exist in a “commercial society” MUST finally decide their value and not the value “assigned to them and their works” by a very few, living in university tenured , all fees and drinks paid for lecture circuit circle.

And that option must be this: RIGHT CLICK AND PAY ME DAMMIT!

C3 with commerce as the option is beautiful, and doable, and only ideology stands in the way. It only requires a little engineering that is no different than any pay site in the universe like Amazon or ebay, using PayPal or any other payment system. For extra credit, make a micropayments system with a separate microcurrency that hooks up to the games as well.

So if I see somebody's nice sunset picture they've shared with me, I can tip them and at least send them a quarter -- or whatever price they set.

If I want to use their picture on my Pinterest, I can pay them a quarter -- they deserve that much.

If I want to use their picture on my blog, I can pay them a quarter -- or maybe if they are really good photographers, they will set that price to one dollar or even five dollars, and I will gladly pay them.

They'll pay me, too, if I write a poem for them or a song or a script or make a design. And so on.

If I'm Coca Cola or Wal-Mart or Sony, I can return to the last century's concept of "paint the town red," and I can offer people to put my logos on their Facebook page or blog -- and get paid for doing that.

Or they can pay me for a picture of myself drinking the Coke. In fact, if we want to go further, we can make one payment box that is for ordinary people just wanting to tip a blog or pay a dollar to use a picture off Flickr or Facebook on their Pinterest or Typepad blog. And another box for commercial, high traffic blog or TV/radio rates.

Trust me, this is a wondeful, wonderful thing that can both save these gigantic platforms, usually only churning VC  cash, from becoming dead dinosaurs in 10 years.

It can start creating that web 3.0 which has the 3D content and the ability to commodify digital creations and sell them (as in Second Life).

Finally, these lumbering beasts that suck out all our value and convert it into unstable cash for themselves will have a viable busines model for themselves and us!

The platforms can take a percentage of sales or a percentage of the cashout to PayPal or sell the microcurrencies -- just as Linden Lab does for 40,000-70,000 people who show up every day at secondlife.com to buy and sell, and make at least a $75 million profit for this little company, and something like $450 million a year in digital sales for the creators who are the prosumers of the platform.

Why is this so hard? Why don't we have this yet? Why are the engineers mumbling about security and difficulties that they don't for Amazon or the New York Times?

Because technocommunism. Because ideology. Because conservatism and pastoral ideals.

Bring on the modern age! Bring on the urban! Bring on Community, Creativity, Commerce!

Who Was Adam Lanza Online?

I'm going to go with my hunch that it was the Internet and violent video games and culture that poisoned Adam Lanza's soul -- and of course, I'm aware that he may have been mentally ill. Most news stories describe Lanza as "autistic," by which they mean he was "on the autism spectrum," and in his case, "high functioning," as he graduated from high school three years early. (Say, what a bad idea to have 13-year-olds who are already socially maladjusted and have them graduate school early and then not have a viable place to put them.)

He's also described as having "Aspergers," and you can be sure that even the most aggressive and hateful Aspies we know in Second Life and real life (and I've had really extensive exposure to some of the nastiest) are going to insist that their condition does not make them prone to mass murder. And they might be right. It might be other things in combination with this condition that do that, like insanity, drugs, or even violent video games.

Thinking about this person and his life from what we know online, which isn't much, and learning that he was not talkative in school, had no obvious school or after-school activities except the technology club, didn't even get a yearbook picture, etc. I thought to myself: well, then he lives his life online.

That means that somewhere online, is Adam Lanza's avatar or avatars or online persona.

No, he's not "Adamo Lanza" related to Second Life -- that person isn't American, is obviously much older, and even allowing for Lanza's brilliance, couldn't have been writing at the age of 12 or 13 in 2004 and 2006 sophisticated articles about Second Life's banking system -- that's clearly someone else.

And he wouldn't use his own name if he were a shy and awkward Aspie. He would have a nick or an avatar name. So somewhere, there is someone who fits this profile -- who has maybe been missing since Friday.

Once such forum where the denizens believe that a member named "5.56 SS109" could be Adam Lanza is zoklet. The name is apparently reference to guns although the wits on this forum have dubbed it "his penis size".

I never heard of Zoklet and it's a little hard to figure out what it is because it's an unsafe site and you have to keep risking malware and harassment to visit it -- and I just don't play with that. But from what I gather, it's a site where people cynically discuss mass murder and public suicides among many other topics like the Trayvon case. So that makes it like lots of discussion forums in the Metaverse, I realize, but this one seems a little more interested in guns and mass shootings than most.

If you don't mind malware risks, see here, here, and try a Google cache here.

Some people on this forum are convinced 5.56 fits the profile of Adam Lanza, and despite being a board mod who vigorously banned others, he is missing now. He liked guns and had other features that they seem to think "fits". They could be wildly wrong, of course. "In the hall of mirrors that is the Interwebs, we may never know," as Urizenus Sklar has put it. One of the forum participants who was banned by this board mod pleaded innocence; he had discussed the fact that many mass shooters committed suicide after killing others, and 5.56 apparently angrily denied this fact and cited counter evidence. They discussed the case of the man who shot 7 people at a workplace.

Another incident involved a Columbian girl who killed herself publicly and dramatically, and 5.56 commented that she had "spoken in school today" -- like "Jeremy Spoken," the quintessential school shooter glorification video (like the other school shooter glorification video, Pumped Up Kicks).

We're also seeing that sure, Adam Lanza played violent games.  Or that he was a lonely gamer. Of course we must never, ever, ever draw ANY conclusions from these descriptions, because they were games with furry woodland creatures and not people, and gaming doesn't cause people to simulate things in real life, ever, or else, millions of people would be killing people, and not only a few dozen. Sure.

Not surprisingly there is already a theory that Adam Lanza planned his mass murder out on 4chan.

Who knows if that has ANY basis in reality.  And even if we could prove that the Anonymous chatter on Anonymous's 4chan was THAT guy, the shooter, and he really did discuss it, brag that he was going to do it, get egged on, and told "pics or it didn't happen" or all those other lovely forums retorts, there would be a zillion people, especially 4channers, who would tell you that 4chan culture never, ever, ever, ever has anything to do with mass murder -- ever!

And there is an arrest of another teenager in Oklahama who was also said to be planning the exact same sort of mass murder in a school on the exact same day.  I have no idea what to make of that story.

I wouldn't put it past any of the Anonymous script kiddies, of course, to backdate and make up all this stuff to make it look like they are relevant -- and naturally there will be all kinds of people checking date and time stamps.

I'm sure Adam Chen will figure it all out for us! Oh, he's explained that 4chan has jumped the shark! Excuse me, it's Redditt where all the cool kids like Tizzers have gone! So many Adam is on Redditt!

Gawker tabulates all the "weird kid" stories about Adam Lanza, but we know that a lot of these things, seen through the lens of the "propaganda of the deed," are coloured by hindsight.

Whatever is found now may be impossible to see as it was in the beginning. Even so, I think somewhere there's an Internet persona who might have manifested all the traits of a mass killer, and been celebrated instead of challenged.

 

 

The "American Malignancy": What is the Connecticut Shooter's Motive?

Police are saying now they have found "compelling evidence" on the gunman that "may" explain motive. They don't say what it is.

Yeah, I get it that it won't be a video game box. So what? The nexus of violent video games and movies, and the Internet's amplification and acceleration powers, will undoubtedly have played a role. My son is one of those people who both argues against gun control and against my theory of violent video games, not surprising, given his demographics. But he does point out an interesting idea -- that it's Internet-enabled and cell phone-enabled chat that can give a loner like this without friends or community ties those malicious connections that can help spur him to deadly action. Chatting about angry ideas of killing people and finding nasty receptive audiences who egg you on, online, can be the tipping point.

But we don't know that this killer was in any chat rooms or IRC channels or anything of the sort. When the police say they have evidence, I imagine it's going to be either:

o a vial of powerful psychotropic drugs that can induce violence in people, like Risperdal, commonly given to troublesome youths

o or some other illegal drugs like meth or crack cocaine or roxies that make for violent, crazy behaviour

o money or banking statements or something that shows he had a financial dispute with his mother who perhaps wouldn't allow him access to funds that he wanted or believed were his

o a break-up message from a girlfriend or boyfriend on his cell phone or social media

And so on.

The other factors for this youth -- that he was bright -- maybe a genius -- that he graduated from high school even three years early but was socially awkward -- that he was on the autism spectrum -- that he was goth -- none of these will be examined with any dispassion so that people can ask whether people who exhibit a lot of these signs and have become unmanageable by parents shouldn't be in the general population but should be in restricted settings.

It's extremely hard to get people locked up for cause in America. Supposedly, when someone is sufficiently a danger to themselves or others, they can be put in psychiatric detention against their will. In practice, it is unbelievably difficult, and even when achieved with court orders, can be for only very short time periods of 2-4 days, which don't do anything to solve the problem and sometimes don't even yield a coherent diagnosis. We wouldn't have so many public shootings -- and subway pushings and other exhibitions of mania in America -- if it were easier for the parents and teachers and employers who along the way, watch the troublesome behaviour of alienated young males -- to lock them up. Why, the very posing of the notion in this fashion yields a firestorm of ACLU-type civil rights criticism. The rights of the victims seldom count in these discussions.

I'm the first to say that we have criminalized boyhood and even manhood. Fifty years ago or even twenty-five years ago, two boys who scrapped with each other over "respect" or "turf" or a "girl" or some other issue of male machismo would blacken each others' eyes and bloody each others' noses behind the barn, and then get back together and play baseball with each other the next day or leave a wary line in the sand that they didn't cross again. No adult authority figure -- much less the police -- would ever get involved in their scraps.

Today, such fist-fights in a schoolyard or a sand lot can lead to a police call and incarceration, or a trip to the emergency room and forcible administration of powerful psychotropic drugs. This has become a particular problem in the New York City schools, where authorities have trouble admitting the politically-incorrect truths of violent repeat-offenders in minority populations, and have no other facilities but jails or mental hospitals to put these violent youths, so they use drugs or "bar therapy" as some lawyers call prison. This works just grand to spawn another generation of the same kind of thugs.

I read an interesting post by Chemi Shalev in Haaretz called The American Malignancy and the Slaughter of Innocents.

I don't agree with everything she says, but she makes her points forcefully and eloquently. School shootings have taken place also in Finland, where suicides are very high, in Norway of course, where Breivik attacked the social democrats' youth camp, and in Germany. In Russia, mass shootings occur also -- but are usually terrorist attacks. Obviously school shootings in America, where there isn't a political manifesto or participation in some extremist group in most of the cases, don't fit into the "terrorist" category, although the Fort Hood Muslim shooter should fit in that category, and in my view, so should the killer of the Sikhs in their temple. Hate crimes directed at a group due to their affiliation in a symbolic organization, whether a religion or a government or military, strike me as fitting the "terrorism" definition; school shootings aren't terrorists of that nature, unless we concoct a theory of "the propaganda of the deed" related to the alienation of youth raised on the Internet.

In any event, I certainly accept her diagnosis that this is an American malignancy, and an American malignancy directly related to the American innovation -- TV, violent cinema, then violent video games and the Internet and MMORPGs. All of these forms of media ranging from passive to participatory to simulative are all Made in America and I think it behooves Americans to think more about what their relationship is to mass public murders.

Perhaps, when President Barack Obama was shedding a tear, he grieved not only as a parent who thinks of his own children but also as a president who cries for his beloved country. These unthinkable but nonetheless recurring bloodbaths by shooting are peculiarly, if not exclusively, American, a stain on its image that gets brutally bigger as time goes by.

It is this combustible mix of angry American young men, often disturbed and usually white, spurred on by the pervasive and always growing presence of limitless violence in popular American culture, together with the easy-access, open market of guns and ammo, which together produce these shooting slaughters with such sickening regularity.

She talks about the high number of guns and gun deaths in America and the gun lobby, and then concludes:

Nonetheless, the presence of 350 million guns and the relative ease in acquiring them are not enough to explain the growing incidence of mass shootings – 16 in the past year alone – or their increasing lethality. One can make at least a circumstantial connection between the fact that 6 of the 12 deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past five years and the concurrent explosive growth of the Internet and social media. These have provided fertile fields for growing the most horrid of hatreds and for spreading them far and wide.

Yet none of the public figures posturing around this tragedy really want to take on violent media -- it's harder to take on even than the gun lobby. Instead, this is what we've seen:

o Michael Moore saying we need more free health care. Except insane people are notoriously difficult to get to accept treatment. What we need is for the pendulum to swing back to more normal preventive incarceration measures when there are reasonable grounds to assume a person is a danger to himself and others -- and the advances of medicine and governance must be used to make more humane institutions for the addicted and insane, who are generally filling up prisons now only after they harm people. Moore can't accept that consequence of this public health problem, and thinks more free people's clinics will prevent a school shooter or a subway pusher.

o Frank Bruni is raging that Mike Huckabee is calling for more prayer, and even more prayer in school, and that God has been left out of society and this is what we get. Whatever Huckabee's pious posturings, Bruni's rage on this is merely another form of call for public coercive prayer -- only in the form of cloying op-ed pieces and collective Facebook likes where critics are deleted.

o Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, is telling us to shut up and not debate gun control. "Today is not the day for that," he scolds, using even this national tragedy to harangue the right wing. Fortunately, at least the left wouldn't shut up, and made a Twitter hashtag #Todayistheday and began calling for gun control anyway.

o Nate Silver did one of his classic manipulations. He took arbitrary terms that he himself thought were the ones to pick to exhibit the trends on this topic, including "gun rights," a phrase that most people actually don't use; he used sources that he himself acknowledged are different as to their volumes, and then arbitrarily decided that the rate per thousand was the way to characterize their usage (except...if they aren't large or weren't always available, that's not fair), and then he yielded "irrefutable numbers" telling us that demands for Second Amendment rights are going up, and gun control is going down. This is silly, as it may only mean that more TCOT types are on Twitter now than his precious progs. He also fails to give us any analysis as to why the public spiked HUGELY in their concern about gun control around the time of the Reagan/Brady shooting and other shootings of the 1990s, but in our decade, have fallen into oblivion and have evidently become inured -- despite the high presence of gun control advocates on Twitter and Facebook since this latest tragedy.

o Libertarians are out in full force, letting us know with brisk knowier-than-thou efficiency that car accidents kill more people in America than guns; that, oh, I dunno, cancer kills more people. So what? Car accidents and cancer aren't deliberate; few cases of car deaths are intentional, except for some tiny percentage of suicides. Meanwhile, shooting as gun does take deliberation -- it takes methodical planning to purchase or steal in many of the cases; it takes days of preparation and rehearsal and planning (see the Colorado shooter for that incredible amount of deadly work, from procuring the $10,000 or $20,000 worth of equipment as a poor, unemployed med student, to boobytrapping his apartment and dressing himself up as the Joker in Batman).  He got his ammunition over the Internet. Can't we at least plug that loophole? The Connecticut shooter got his ammunition in the mail, too. Is it really legal to ship ammunition, and can't the post office spot it?

With these kinds of braying public figures all over telling us variously that everyone should be armed to prevent school shootings (although the kindergarten teacher whose son did the shooting was armed, and he took her guns); or that we need more free health care (although arrest and forcible treatment is really the issue for the insane); or that more security is needed (the Oregon mall shooting analysts are insisting that police training and store security reduced the number of casualties) -- or of course the need, conversely, to tighten up gun laws, we aren't getting at the substrate. What does Breivik, the Norwegian shooter of 70 people in methodical cold blood in a country with very tight laws, have in common with Adam Lanza, the American shooter of 27 people who took his weapons from his mother, who had registered them legally?

The Internet.

Perish the thought that the mirror of society might be responsible for refracting the rays back in a deadly manner, but it's worth contemplating.

I was once debating some geeks in San Diego at a conference -- among them was the supporter of the reverse engineers of copybot and other SL scripters. A large young man sat on the edges of our conversation, not talking. There was a kind of wistful look on his face that shone through in spite of himself that seemed to me to speak one message: "I want to belong." He didn't join in, but you felt that he wish that he could.

I finally struck up a one-on-one conversation with this youth, who at first readily talked to me, but then became reticent when I asked what his avatar's name was in SL. Finally he confessed it -- and he was one of the most notorious nihilists with a cynical blog who had griefed me and once casually demonstrated copybot on me. Eventually he told me that he literally lived in his mom's basement -- although he paid her rent, he hastened to tell me.

Dad wasn't in the picture and I think he didn't know where he was. I asked him what had poisoned his soul.

"The Internet," he said with a mischievious smile. Indeed.

Underlying all the American malignancy is this:  the violent movies and video games and other media, increasingly interactive and accelerating and amplifying with the Internet and smart phones, that do create the scenario of the mass shooting in the blaze of glory as an anti-hero's dream.

The mass murderers of the 1930s -- Hitler and Stalin -- and their imitators later in Africa and Asia -- employed Goebels' and Lenin's propaganda tactics first to sway the masses. They uses the Big Lie or telling partial truths and other known and documented methods of mass propaganda. Vance Packard later studied some of these same kind of tactics now switched to ostensibly benign tactics in marketing.

But we lack a modern-day analyst of the same kind of mass propaganda of our age which takes both more interactive and more subtle and ubiquitous forms. AJ Keen -- who, by the way, talks about the German and Finnish school shooters in his Cult of the Amateur -- is probably the best we have, but he is very much rooted in Silicon Valley's tech marketing world and earns his bread as "the anti-Christ of Silicon Valley" in fact in the belly of the beast. I don't think that undermines his important work, but I just think we need more figures of the stature of Hannah Arendt who wrote on the totalitarians of her age.

Everyone who has taken on the Internet critically tends to describe the problem as "making us dumber" or "making us more dependent" or "losing our privacy". Authors of massive works like Parmy Olsen, who wrote on Anonymous , become too sympathetic to their subjects; supposed scholars like Gabriella Coleman not only embeds with Anonymous but becomes their most avid whitewasher and cheerleader. Hanneh Arendt never struck thoughtful poses while she described Eichmann's "transgressive" behaviour and mined the literature on carnival and ritual. There's Evgeny Morozov, the advocate of a global Glavit, but for him, the potential school shooter might merely be an insufficiently engaged flaneur.

I really wish our age would produce the philosophers worthy of it. It hasn't yet.

For Once Google Does Something Human and Normal

So You're Sure Mass Killing Video Games Don't Lead to RL Mass Murder?

UPDATE: So even though the police have identified the shooter suspect as a 24-year-old from Hoboken, NJ, who once attended the school where he did the shooting, we are still getting notices like this -- a Ryan Lanza in Hoboken saying "everybody shut the fuck up, it wasn't me". And Gawker is speculating that either there is a hoax, two Ryan Lanza's that split their time between Hoboken and Connecticut, or some mistaken identity. There's even a story that the FB Ryan is saying that the killer Ryan stole his ID. Huh? LATEST: Police identified the killer as Adam Lanza, brother of Ryan Lanza, and that he had his ID.

And so likely we'll go around and around with this, and we'll learn that GASP Fox news reported it wrongly or GASP I reported it wrongly (although read my story -- I put plenty of caveats in my post -- based on what seemed likely reliable information.

And you know something? I don't give a good goddamn. Because the discussion about the connection between violent video games and mass killings must be had.

Facebook and/or Mass Effect is very busy now SCRUBBING any comments connecting their game and the shooting.

The FB profile of Ryan Lanz of Hoboken who plays that game is now DOWN and can't be accessed. Understood. If it's the wrong guy, he doesn't want his privacy violated.

Gawker had a story up saying it was him -- Gawker, the trendy lefty violent video-gaming Gawker said it was him -- and then seemed to have removed the link from Google search via a rewrite ...and then seemed to put it up again (they later put a note that they had rewritten the story but that wasn't admitted for half an hour). Then their fanboyz bashing everybody who thought it was THAT guy even though MAX READ DID TOO. So...it's not clear. We await confirmation. Screenies:

 

Meanwhile, do not let them make you stop thinking about the links between violent video games and mass shootings.  Kotaku, the gaming site, wants you to think only Fox News is the problem (although Gawker reported the same damn thing, although haven't put it on their main story and the evident that Max Read reported it exactly the same way as Fox will be gone from Google soon).

 

MY ORIGINAL POST:

One of the things that is happening now in the wake of the horror of 27 people being killed -- 18 of them children -- in a small town in Connecticut 60 miles outside of New York city, is that people are frantically looking for the killer's Facebook page.

The suspect is identified as Ryan Lanza. That's not such an uncommon name and there are a number of people on Facebook with this name. One of them is this guy, who plays a video mass killer game called Mass Effect. He's from Hoboken, NJ.

He might be the mass killer in Connecticut; he might not have anything to do with him. How did he get from Hoboken to Newton, and why? We don't know. But it seems to be him. In fact, police identified the shooter as from Hoboken, and also as someone who has just also killed his father. So it seems to be the right Ryan Lanza from Hoboken, NJ.

The page for the game Mass Effect is already filling up with comments like this:

"You should take this down--- 18 babies and 26 people are dead. This is unacceptable."

"You should probably get ready for some people to compare video death games to real life death."

"HOPE YOU GET CHARGED WITH THE MURDERS IN CONNECTICUT."

"People are insane enough without stuff like this happening! DO NOT CONTINUE FEEDING THIS CRAP TO IMPRESSIONABLE YOUNG PEOPLE!!!!"

"This is the kind of mocked violence that generates the real one, if in some way you are at fault for the shooting of Ct, the best thing you can do is to shut your website down out of respect for the deceased."

And so on.

And hey, big guys, we know this is a "rush to judgement" and "we don't know" yet for a total fact who this Ryan Lanza is, whether he actually played this particular game even (yeah, we get it that a Facebook like isn't proof and not an indictment) and we also get it that his reasons and motivations -- likely rooted in insanity or drugs -- are not necessarily related to this mass killing game.

And yeah, we are oh-so-cerebral and so precise in parsing these things that yeah, we get it that millions of people play video games and don't kill people; that probably some of those people even commenting on that game site have played violent games but now are sounding off in the horror of the moment.

No matter.

Just this once, using the same speed of the Internet that enabled the news of the horror to reach to everyone, and which no doubt facilitated the shooter's sickness and possibly even his access to ammunition (the Colorado shooter bought his online), we are seeing what the public thinks, and what they find when they look for connections that the game industry is very, very busy denying.

So look at these links for the likely suspect and his game before the game industry gets them scrubbed -- or the FBI.

And yeah, I realize that none of this may in fact be related to the tragedy but I suspect it is related. What's important is that people think nonetheless of what connections there are, and what might be done about it.

 

What We Lost with the Social Web -- Good!

Danil flogging the Goatse. Photo by ptufts, 2006.

My New York City neighbour Anil Dash -- who was the entrepreneur who founded this very site Typepad I'm blogging on, in fact, and who went on to greater glory to wear his Goatse t-shirt at a White House gig -- has a weepy post up about "The Web We Lost".

Good! This was the unworkable web of the technocommunists still hanging on from Web 1.0 and it's good that history is moving them along now and they can stop their slow-walk to socialism with their tools. Well, not completely, because they all worked assiduously to get Obama elected -- they were born for nothing else, really -- but still, there's enough struggle left that it's not over until it's over.

Mourns Dash:

The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we've lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.

Well, in other words, his fellow tekkies, maybe a little more cynical and calculating but as a result, a little more attuned to what customers really want, have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and left the Better Worlding ideologues in the dust.

He recalls with keen nostalgia a site that has absolutely no relevance to anyone, even tekkies anymore, Technorati:

[Y]ou could, in theory, write software to examine the source code of a few hundred thousand weblogs, and create a database of the links between these weblogs. If your software was clever enough, it could refresh its information every few hours, adding new links to the database nearly in real time. This is, in fact, exactly what Dave Sifry has created with his amazing Technorati. At this writing, Technorati is watching over 375,000 weblogs, and has tracked over 38 million links. If you haven’t played with Technorati, you’re missing out.

I was first introduced to Technorati by Second Life geeks. I went there and linked my blog and blogged directly occasionally. In fact, I rapidly acquired a high score. In its heyday, my Second Thoughts blog devoted to critical discussion about Second Life had high traffic and was among the top blogs (all blogs about SL have crashed in their traffic now because there isn't the usage and concurrency there once was in this virtual world seemingly abandoned by its makers, who have gone on to new products for the tablets.)

It was interesting to me to see that I even got this high score on this Technorati site for nerds, but part of the reason was because this very blogging platform automatically enabled you to insert Technorati key words, and linked to Technorati. So I did.

Then what happened was very interesting. I criticized Joi Ito, who rules the Internet and was a founder of Technorati. I was even more critical of his "spimes," which were the early versions of the RFIDs and QR codes that today are going to make up the ominous "Internet of Things". I said this geeky intrusion into the world to scrape data, including personal and proximity data in the name of "tracking pollution" or "health" or whatever Better-World fakery they coated on top of it, was insipient totalitarianism.

Joi Ito reacted with incredible spleen. He simply blocked my blog from showing up on search. He didn't delete it or cancel my account. He just made sure I didn't show up at all on search. It was astounding. It was one of my early exposures to the nastiness of thin-skinned geeks. I kept protesting this vigorously and openly on Twitter. After weeks and weeks, finally it went away.

But then some time later, Technorati went through various reforms. They wanted to figure out how to reformat search and display of blogs, and along the way, make sure that blogs that didn't ideologically "fit" would get very much lowered in their scores. So naturally mine did. But it still climbed up again anyway because I have a lot of readers, even if they don't like me. But eventually, it just wasn't worth it. Why bother with a site where no reader will discover you, and where you can't play the game? I stopped playing because it was gamed; I stopped playing because I couldn't see anybody anywhere even referencing Technorati anymore -- I think it's irrelevant now in a world where people go to TechMeme, TechCrunch, PandoDaily, etc. I think none of the oldbie geeks will admit this; I think it's probably fairly easy to establish.

Well this and a thousand other stories of the horrors of the open source cult led me to my positions today. Here they are in a nutshell on Anil's comments page below.

But when you read the stuff he's pining for, you realize the problem:

When you see interesting data mash-ups today, they are often still using Flickr photos because Instagram's meager metadata sucks, and the app is only reluctantly on the web at all. We get excuses about why we can't search for old tweets or our own relevant Facebook content, though we got more comprehensive results from a Technorati search that was cobbled together on the feeble software platforms of its era. We get bullshit turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.

Anil, nobody but the geek squad CARES that they can't see Instagram on Twitter. Truly. They don't use Twitter! They use Facebook or Tumblr! If they do (like me), they don't care. Instagram lost all my photos when its app stopped working on my, um, perfect Android phone *snort* and I downloaded and reinstalled the app. Thanks, guys! That's the only thing consumers care about, whether you lose the stuff, not whether you have the only apps for it or possess it. Copyright is inherent and I claim it. No, you don't need me or my pictures to monetarize your Twitter.

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state Too bad, so sad. The socialist utopia that you guys dreamed up with Web 2.0, which grew directly out of your frenzied hatred of walled gardens in Web 1.0, was a failure. Nobody needed to take part in collectives with liberated property except those who already got paid somewhere else, like

Too bad, so sad. The socialist utopia that you guys dreamed up with Web 2.0, which grew directly out of your frenzied hatred of walled gardens in Web 1.0, was a failure. Nobody needed to take part in collectives with liberated property except those who already got paid somewhere else, like Big IT, or Big University, or government, or their geek consulting, or Mom's Basement. You were in a narrow, finite class of people and you served yourself, not the rest of us. You invented and nurted and Internet that suited your cult of open source software, but it had three main flaws in it: a) everything was copyable and nothing was protected by engineering in good faith b) privacy was eliminated and sharing coerced; c) commerce was scorned and Creative Communism was promulgated.

But as always happens when the Internet does something agai

nst living human beings, people routed around. First there was Amazon and ebay flying in the face of your hatred of commerce and your turning of everything into a big freebie colony. Then there was Apple's i-tunes and DRM which still persists, imagine that, only now in the form of Google Play (hah!) or Spotify. Then, to make it most humiliating for you, three really huge walled gardens were created with proprietary software which was not opened to the public, for communities that were managed with data protection: Facebook, Twitter, and even G+ (there might be "data liberation," but you can't so easily download your pictures and posts swiftly). To be sure, these services were opened to engineers to make apps, but they couldn't just slurp everything they wanted to monetarize only for themselves.

So all this nostalgia for Dave Winer's RSS feed and all the other technocommunism is getting very dated, Anil. The rest of the world want to move on from the share-bear and the collective hugs with group-think geeks. We don't care if Instagram doesn't show on Twitter; we care that we can't sell our Instagram photos easily or tip others or buy their photos for our blogs easily with one click of the mouse and a micropayments system with microcurrency. All of this is eminently able to be engineered these days. But none of you are doing this because you're still clinging to you Better World myths and ideologies that always come back to socialism and selective libertarianism.

Give it up, Anil! People flocked to these big commercial companies like Facebook because they had easy features instead of wonky geeky ideology. Because they could have some kind of management of governance, something that the geeks often leave out and even these companies don't do very well.

Now you simply have to get out of the way while the world moves to Web 3.0 that pays people livelihoods because we are all moving online. That means you have to give up your communist ideology about deliberately enabling copying as a business model enriching a few at the expense of the many; that means you have to give up your data-mining and ad solutions as a ubiquitous substitute for viable and secure payment systems for paid content on line; that means you have to give up all this Better World bunk and let people create what they want with these tools without you hovering over their shoulder with your obvious political agenda you keep trying to weld into the tools.

Reply · Like · Unfollow Post · 33 minutes ago

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state

And yes it is a stupid polemic about "those stupid walled gardens". You lack a fundamental grasp of non-geek reality here: nobody cares whether you "can't find your Facebook or Twitter friends on Tumbl". Good Lord, the overwhelmingly huge use case for Tumblr are teenagers trying precisely to ESCAPE their Facebook or Twitter friends (they use Twitter left). The user complexity isn't as great as you imagine -- what you are trying to say once again is the greedy geek's lament: why can't I get my hooks into these services and slurp out all their lists of names and gestures attached to those names so I can personally market to them or purvey my political theories for more power. That's all. And the world remains unimpressed by your naked ambitions.

 Tristan Louis · Subscribe · CEO and Founder at Keepskor

I think missing from the commentary is the push/pull of business vs. openness. While an open web is great, from a democratic (the concept, not the party) standpoint, businesses tend to prefer more closed out system. Let's be honest, even Flickr was a closed system as it aggregated all content on the Flickr site.

By contrast, the openness of the web, with domains, blogs, and RSS is inherently open and distributed, and thus more unruly.

I guess from a different lens, the old web is New York City and the new social world is Disney world: one is messy, a little crazy, and a little scary while being totally free, while the other is bound by certain rules that ensures most people have a good experience.

Reply · 7 · Like · Follow Post · 15 hours ago

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state

But it's not unruly or free or really open, Tristan because the ideology constantly mitigates against privacy and commerce. That's why real openness and commerce are what are produced by your hated walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter and even Anil's home platform, Typepad, which makes it easy to put in Ad Sense and PayPal tip jars.

Um, no, the commercial web with openness for normal people isn't Disney World or Wal-mart. It's just not your cramped geeky cult. You're the one who is a little scared that normal people use the Web freely the way they want without your control.

The Scapegoating of Susan Rice

The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910)

Ambassador Susan Rice has withdrawn from consideration of the post of Secretary of State.

There's still the post of National Security Adviser, which doesn't require confirmation, and that might be Obama's vindication of this whole affair, to appoint Rice to that position. And after all, especially in his Administration, the White House and the National Security Council really run foreign policy more than the State Department anyway. (Or at least there is more of a tug of war than I recall in other Administrations -- the hunt-for-the-Benghazi-redactors was emblematic of that).

It was always my operating assumption that Susan Rice was thrown under the bus by people in IO at State who didn't like her, or by DASes or regional desks or something. I felt they set her up with a Benghazi narrative that in fact the President himself perpetuated in his General Assembly speech, and then just let her hang out to dry while all the frenzy went on.

And of course, this entire affair is red meat to the progs on Twitter, who are now raving about the GOP, and specifically McCain and Graham and others who questioned her. Make no mistake about it: it was the right thing to question the Benghazi narrative, just not her. Ambassadors don't make up terrorism policy; they articulate it. They don't make up foreign policy; they are given instructions about it and some flexibility to negotiate, but not creativity in developing "stories". Other people develop the stories at the White House -- stories that they pervade selectively through their various wired networks...

In my view, the Susan Rice story isn't about the GOP, or only about the GOP -- the isolationists who hate the UN. Understandably, they wanted to skewer a UN ambassador, and didn't want to do the hard thinking and heavy lifting of figuring out where the real problems are in the entire philosophy of the minimizing of terrorism that we have had in this Administration -- from Obama himself, and even from the State Department's Harold Koh (who has announced his resignation and return to Yale Law School). That is, that terrorism is a development problem, and a policing matter and not a "war". When the terrorists suddenly make war on us, when we thought they were pacified or beaten and we were putting in hospital wings (as Amb. Stevens was planning to do in the hospital that he actually died in, instead), they don't have a framework to fit the events anymore. That's why they end up with the zaniness of the changing and contradictory narratives. The GOP was looking at the wrong end of the telescope on this, however; they should have looked much harder at Obama, as Romney tried to do *rightly* in the second presidential debate; they should have looked at everyone in and around the information food chain in intelligence and policy to see where the problems were and thought outside of the box of the incident of Benghazi itself, to the way in which all terrorism is being handled.

The real slaying of Susan Rice happened more from the left, in my view, and more stealthily. I was amazed as I saw Foreign Policy after Foreign Policy blog post trashing her and her record first -- from the "progressives" who run it -- and the leftist blogs trashing her for the sins of the Clinton and Obama Administrations that they refused to lay at the presidents' own door for their own policies. Then there was the Bret Stephens piece in the Wall Street Journal, which isn't the conservative paper that it once was, you know? Stephens wrote a piece that a Human Rights Watch staffer could have written about Sierra Leone and Rice's involvement there -- the kind of piece the WSJ didn't write during the war itself to my recollection. That's why I have the scapegoat painting here.

The viciousness and strength of the hatred of Susan Rice I saw everywhere felt to me like opposition research, and opposition research from Kerry. I can only speak of a hunch there, as there probably are no fingerprints.

But I was amazed as I have hung out around the UN at how people I found ordinarily on the left, ordinary hateful of the GOP, ordinarily minimizers of terrorism and "blamers of America first" were turning on Susan Rice. That made no sense to me. Why were they so enamored with John Kerry? He's not known for working on human rights.

To be sure, Susan Rice is not liked; she is seen as mean with a kind of prep school girl's meanness. I found her to be quite smart myself, although I know the meanness was documented. I guess these people had never encountered Holbrooke. See, that's what surprised me the most -- people who should have remembered better what a son-of-a-bitch Holbrooke was, but who were speaking fondly of him as a statesman by contrast with Susan Rice. Huh? Susan Rice has all of the hardness but a hell of a lot more heart. I really value her standing up to the Russians over Libya and Syria. This just isn't valued enough on the whole. Colum Lynch of Turtle Bay decided long ago that he didn't like Susan Rice like all the others in the UN "progressive" set -- he posted a link on Twitter purporting to be about "the Susan Rice channel to Iran" as if there was some big bad evil channel to Iran from Susan Rice. All it was was...the UN, where people are supposed to try to reason with Iran. In fact, he linked to a Laura Rosen article (which he confusedly talked about as a David Ignatius piece) that talked about THREE such channels, so he was quite misleading. It was a little thing. Just a little retweet, yanno? Retweet doesn't equal endorsement, yanno? But that was the sign to me that the liberals were gunning for Rice and had already picked Kerry.

John Kerry does not stand up to the Russians; he opposed the Magnitsky bill which still hasn't been signed into law by the president. To be sure, he did finally vote for it along with 91 other senators, when only 4 opposed. That was merely not to be on the wrong side of the consensus. But Kerry is likely to be even more goofy on the reset than Clinton was, and thanks to what in fact turned out to be some unknown hot-mike action at the OSCE ministerial, we know that she is pretty frankly unimpressed with the Soviet re-Union.

These conservatives like Graham and McCain simply don't realize what they are getting with Kerry...or something. I'm just not getting this! Just wait until they try to deal with him on Russia! On Sudan! On Syria!

 

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