It seems that time again when there's a willingness to look at the horrid elitism of Silicon Valley.
Usually Silicon Valley's rich and famous are never targeted by mass culture because they are too hipster and too secretive and too interwoven with the social media platforms. Even to make a collage with Sergei Brin's face inside Mr. Moneybags from the Monopoly Game is to commit a blasphemy (maybe I can't find the old one I made of Larry Page on a blog because it has been Google-bombed to get rid of any footprint...)
So now there's this -- Silicon Valley's Dysfunctional Fetish -- but that's a really misleading headline because it's not just that SV likes to laugh at other's misfortune, they really do think they are a superior breed.
And surprise, surprise, there's Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook biggie who now invests in every single thing you use on the Internet, who I remember tweeting about from TechCrunch last spring when he gave an interview on the stage, and talked about how everyone should learn to code and if they didn't, they were chumps. No way! (I tweeted with the hashtag and Arrington instantly started following me, and I figured I might be blocked or something. Evidently not.)
Palihapitiya: We're in this really interesting shift.
The center of power is here, make no mistake. I think we've known it now
for probably four or five years. But it's becoming
excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is
created is no longer in New York, it's no longer in Washington, it's no
longer in LA. It's in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And when
you look at sort of, like, how markets react to things like that, and
when there's no reaction, it should be taken as a very subtle signal
that the power dynamics have changed. Because markets value meaningful
events, markets discount meaningless events. And so the functional value
of the government is effectively discounted to zero
Of course, this speaks not only to the idea, long held by the geek overlords that the finance industry and the old dying manufacturing industries of the East Coast "don't add value" -- and their apps to send pictures of your cat do - but it's more about the Shutdown, which fulfilled their notions of the "broken Congress" that has to be "circumvented" -- as they said during the anti-SOPA crusade.
As we know, technocollectivist Beth Noveck, who for a time served as a deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology (!) openly said she wanted to "blow up Congress".
Geeks always go around saying Congress people are stupid, they don't get tech, blah blah. Long ago when Scoble went to visit Congress and get them all using Twitter, the invasion started. Not a theory I buy.
In part, the elitists can think as they do because they've hidden all their manufacturing and back end overseas, in China, India, Russia so they don't have to think about their working conditions and standards of living. Occasionally, someone will be seized with guilt over suicides at an Apple factory, but not really. The really don't have to think about "how the other half lives" in their industry because it's all invisible. They seldom have to think about the working stiffs in their own country because they take company buses to work, they have company masseurs and company chefs and never have to come out of the bubble.
Some might call this technolibertarianism, and even Randianism, but I think it's more complex -- it's "communism for thee, capitalism for thee". (Note Stowe Boyd below whining about "neo-liberalism" in Silicon Valley. For every technolibertarian, there is indeed a technocommunist to bait him.)
I'm not surprised that this story involved Jason Calicanis. I remember when Jason blamed people whose houses were foreclosed on as being in over their heads -- it was all their fault. I distinctly remember when he said that; I distinctly remember when we all argued about this on 2008 in Twitter.
At the time, my brother and I were dealing with my mother's foreclosed home -- and the case didn't fit his prejudice. All that happened to her was that she died before being able to make her latest mortgage payment. Before that, she had paid for the payments out of a teacher's pension and my father's insurance money after he died. The condo she lived in was one that my parents had saved up for their entire life for their retirement. But Wells Fargo seized it rapidly after her death for some reason, not being willing to accept my brother's check for the mortgage. There was a long drawn out case with lawyers and fees and finally a re-mortgaging -- but then oops, it couldn't be rented out, even at half the price of the mortgage, because in the recession housing collapse, there were still developers building new condos and letting them go for less. It was impossible to sell this white elephant for any amount. My brother lived in it and commuted 90 miles every day and then finally gave up. In the end, the bank took it again. Sad. But not anyone's fault for "living beyond their means". Oh, yeah, none of us had an extra $2000 a month to spend on a house we hadn't planned on paying for, that's all.
Sure, there were people who lived beyond their means. But that took bankers giving them the NINJA loans (no income, no job applicants) -- and part of this was a desire to lift the poor and particularly minorities to a better place, which was encouraged by programs under Clinton and encouraged by Fanny Mae and other lenders. It was supposed to be a good idea.
When I re-argued all this with Calacanis again the other day, he insisted that he said both at the time -- yes, people lived beyond their means and yes, there were greedy and predatory lenders. Except I don' recall him saying the second things at the time and the fact that he still blames the victims lets us know that is his mindset.
Today there's yet another story like this, some good reporting by Alexia Tsotsis, who lives the life of the rich and famous herself (her boyfriend is the Instagram billionaire) but who is always stumping for the little guy (because they all, even when they do it well, want socialism for the masses and capitalism/riches for themselves.) A Better World!
A Twitter exec is shown banging on BART workers on strike.
See, this is also about hate-on-Twitter month because instead of staying with the socialist collectivist plan of always just making everything for free and having coders live on Ramen and entrepreneurs renew VC cash or be passed around to Big IT buyers, they decided to go IPO. That took them out of the technocommunist realm into the technolibertarian round.
So this suit is complaining about strikers and wishing a Doberman to attack them....er no, not them, whoever is "causing" the strike. Hmm, that was some fancy footwork...
So do the Silicon Valley overlords rule our world? In some ways they rule the mindshare with things like Twitter or Facebook. But their lobbying so far has only been about things directly related to their California Business Model (anti-SOPA) and then only about immigration, since they want more Indian and other programmers to be able to come to the US and be paid less than Americans already here...or something. They don't seem to have a grander vision than that.
There's also this -- remember when we were counting how many jobs all these new Big IT things make up -- Google, Facebook etc? It was like half a million. A ridiculously small amount. SV is not a job generator; only very highly skilled people for the most part get jobs there and there aren't that many anyway. I bet fracking in North Dakota or health car ein New York have higher rate of job generation now than the app factories. Most people employed in the USA have jobs outside this sector, not in it, even if they rely on it or are tangentially involved. Yes, everything is coded. But not everybody codes.
A video made by a student named Jake Hammon for his history class, at BucsFan2276· While he and his teacher may have hoped to create a video inspiring a new generation to revolution for "peace," they can't help telling a story of a violent, chaotic, and sectarian movement.
Well, it was all there to be seen, as I pointed out. A disturbing gas-lighting, as I call it -- moving the memes just ever-so-slightly. Taking in fact the collectivist approach, by trying to sneak into folksy Americana notions of "collective action" the planks of the hard left -- and doing a switcheroo between those "we the people" notions in long-established cultural monuments like the Constitution, and socialist memes.
I thought it was particularly atrocious that Obama said that "the most self-evident truth" (as if there is a hierarchy -- there isn't!) was that "all men are created equal". But the next sentence is just as self-evident and arguably needs to be "most self-evident" because it explains how you get there: "they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalieable rights". Therefore, when you *do* find inequality -- between men and women, between whites and blacks, between hetereosexuals and homosexuals -- you don't just impose uravnilovka (levelling out); you invoke *rights*.
That, BTW, is the essential difference between the socialist revolutionary and the liberal human rights advocate so I think it's really important.
Those rights -- "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are all things that the state has to *get out of the way of*, and not supply. They are inherent. That's why the First Amendment goes "Congress shall make no law..."
Of course, as Mitt Romney discovered, and David Corn confirmed in Mother Jones, 47% of the people rely on the government in some way and tend to think of the government's job as redistributive, rather than to get out of the way of the generative capacity of the private economy. There just isn't that faith in the private sector that there once was after the banking scandals and the recession, and more and more of both the immigrant population and the first and second generations of new Americans are leaning to the socialist explanation for society. The New York Times published a Pew poll that showed, for example, Hispanics in their 20s more favourable to socialism and Hispanics in their 40s less favourable. I think this will change over time as the populations grow older and more established and have investments in small and medium business.
In any event, Obama has been waiting for the day, after spending decades in the socialist trenches hiding behind single issues (the strategy of the Democratic Socialists of America and other socialist organizations of the 1980s during his college days), when he can spout these memes and have them resonate.
Now along comes John Judis in the newly-revamped New Republic, now owned by the Facebook billionaire Chris Huges who also made himself editor, something publishers generally don't do, unless they really, really need to turn an East Coast liberal establishment institution into a beach-head for Silicon Valley's technocommunist revolution.
Interestingly, Judis speaks, as I do, of a sleight of hand in this Inaugural Address.
But Judis is a self-avowed socialist -- even the hard-core Port Huron sort from the early days of the Students for a Democratic Society (Tom Hayden's radical organization). To be sure, he acknowledged the SDS "excesses" and became an In These Times socialist, even an editor of that paper, which is more critical of the Soviet style of communism.
A single dissenting voice risked "derision," in his words, by insisting that "once the sordid memory of Soviet communism is laid to rest and the fervor of anti-government hysteria abates, politicians and intellectuals of the next century will once again draw openly upon the legacy of socialism."
I was that lone dissenter. In the 1960s, I had been a member of the radical antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and even after that organization descended into violence and chaos, I kept the faith alive and edited a Marxist theoretical journal that advocated democratic socialism. Subsequently, I suffered my share of disillusionment with Marx and socialism, but I never bought into the facile view that the collapse of Soviet communism had altogether relegated these ideas to the dustbin of history.
Um, okay. For most people, even in Russia, where there is still a very hardy communist contingent, these ideas *are* in the dustbin. They aren't for people who had to live under "really existing socialism".
So...what's the sleight of hand that bothers Judis?
Well, he doesn't mention the "s-word" in this TNR piece -- Judis isn't that stupid to reveal his hand to that extent or use a discredited word whose taint will likely never be removed in America. Here's what he says:
Much of Obama’s speech can be read as a justification for a strong
national government—to provide Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security,
to meet “the threat of climate change,” to ensure and promote economic
and social equality, to build roads, and to devise rules to ensure
“competition and fair play.” But Obama doesn’t talk straightforwardly
about the need for a strong national government. He praises instead “our
skepticism of central authority.”
He could have said "socialism" instead of the misleading "strong national government"; he didn't because he is still playing the 1980s game of stealth socialism.
Ah, so you would never know that he isn't banging on Obama for not being socialist enough; what's happening here is that he is chastising Obama for doing the socialist meme switcheroo, but not coming clean with it, and still ambiguously giving the nod to traditional American politics that are anti-communist -- and with good reason. He wants Obama not to duck and cover -- he wants him to come out for "strong nationalist government" so he can slip in the content -- socialism.
To sort of justify what Obama is doing, but just not doing enough of, Judis then gives a tendentious view of American history to suit his socialist belief system:
This rhetorical sleight of hand goes back to the debates between the
Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the Constitution. (I borrow here
liberally from Gordon Wood’s fine book The Creation of the American
Republic, 1776-1787). In arguing for a strong national government (with
aristocratic components) as opposed to the weak state-based government
laid out in the Articles of Confederation, the Federalists invoked the
idea of popular sovereignty and “we the people.”
Popular sovereignty had a strong democratic, egalitarian ring to it
that was borrowed from the rhetoric of the anti-Federalists, but its
real purpose was to discredit the anti-Federalists’ idea of state
sovereignty.
This revisionism makes it seem like "we the people" was never really a core, authentic principle, but only wielded by Federalists. Boo, hiss!
Judis has caught on to the Obama shill -- he realizes that Obama is coming just up to the edge of creepy socialism (not creepy for Judis) but not really delivering. I'm castigating Obama for even going that far, as he is deliberately mangling language and meaning by trying to convert "We the People" into a collective farm when they aren't.
Says Judis:
Obama uses the phrase “we the people” and the promise of collective
action to avoid a direct justification of what government can or should
do. It’s familiar and pleasing rhetoric, and, in Obama’s case, is in the
service of a democratic rather than an aristocratic conception of
government. But it ultimately avoids the central question of government
that has plagued American politics since 1787 and created nothing but
grief for Obama himself during his first term when Tea Party activists
invoked the phrase to justify their individualist or states-rights
interpretation of democracy.
Well, patience, John, he's going to get to your socialism and is already almost there. He's gaslighting with language. First, 45 degrees movement to the left, then he can go 90 another time. First establish that "we the people" means "collective action" (which it doesn't; it means individuals with rights who come together as free people -- different). Then later, he can swap out "collective action" for "collectivism" or simply "the government" in a socialist vision. "We're hear to help."
The comments don't bring clarity or relief -- you have to be a paying subscriber to leave them, and I won't support this Silicon Valley hustle at TNR now. They are the usual sectarians squabbling with each other about Tea Party stuff or history and not confronting the real problem of the import of this Marxism to our shores and Judis' long, long history of writing and speaking to try to bring a kinder, gentler version of the Soviet variant into reality.
Yes, you can keep portraying the political struggle in America as about "more government" or "less government" but it's really more about whether you have *a socialist government* or *a capitalist government*. I'm not kidding. Either you have a theory of socialism that eventually kills the golden egg you are redistributing, or you have a theory of capitalism that is democratic and liberal, not Randian (as "the Internet" always hysterically imagines it is), that may have social services, but that does not cripple the private sector with the burden of the 47% such that it can't regenerate. You don't have to be a Randian or even a Friedmanite to appreciate that business can't be too heavily taxed or it closes.
Enter Bobby Jindal and his recent speech. As governor of Louisiana, he is one of the Republican leaders now stumping for the GOP to reform and get away from that obsessiveness about social issues like abortion and rape and gay rights, where they've all made fools of themselves, and focus on what he thinks the GOP does best: preach small government and entrepreneurialism.
James Taranto has nothing but a sneer, oddly -- but I think this is cultural: I think not only does this wealthy Wall Street Journal columnist in the urban hipster setting of New York City loathe Bobby Jindal from the fly-over state; I think it's about white guys versus brown guys, too -- I'm not sure all the white guys are comfortable with the brown guys who turn out not to be socialists, but capitalists. We see how this works on the frantic and furious left, where the lone black conservative who joined Congress recently got nearly lynch-mobbed by the politically correct people of colour on the hill for not being "representative" in the way they thought he should be (96% of blacks voted for Obama). But I think it works on the right, too.
I began to think about all this when I began to ask myself: why do the business people from Silicon Valley, all of whom are entrepreneurs, side with Obama, the redistributionist and collectivist, instead of with the businessman Romney or with the Republican Party emphasizing the entrepreneurial over government?
Ponder it, if you will. It's not like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't want capitalism for themselves, even if they preach that "Better World" socialist stuff for everyone else.
Oh.
I think I have it now -- if the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are to keep having that capitalism-for-me-socialism-for-thee with all those free platforms and aps and freemiums and expensive gadgets to watch all of it, they need somebody to pay for their customers.
They don't think of how their products fit into an American world of small business and large business in other sectors that they serve -- say, machine tools or trucks or Xerox toner, or on the consumer side, say, like car, or vacuum cleaner or cereal manufacturers thought of the consumer, "the customer who is always right".
No, the things that Silicon Valley makes are invisible and ephemeral, and when you help yourself to them, you aren't richer, but often poorer. They try very hard to make a hustle around "innovation" coming from things like "crowd-sourced" business -- where you do the work for free and they pretend to pay you at least with a free platform. But then the platform gets eaten by a bigger thing and your work evaporates.
In any event, it struck me that in ways that the titans of the past never had to, the current entrepreneurs need to have the government keep their customers alive for another day. And their ideology of a Better World in any event is more about remaking everything to be free, shareable, takeable without penalty, etc. and not about interlocking with other viable business. There's also this: all of these new software-based social media companies and Big IT like Google, soaking wet, don't even make up as much staff hires as one big hardware-based sort of company like GM that still makes cars and still hires a lot of people. But the reason they call it the Rust Belt is that these jobs are shipped overseas -- yes, in fact the jeeps are to be manufactured in China, when they could have been manufactured in the US, and to serve not just China, but the growing Asian market, when they could have served it from here. Romney didn't lie, he just told the truth a little earlier and a little more long-term than anyone wanted to admit. Japan makes their cars in their own country, you know? They don't have Uzbeks make them to serve the region (like GM does in Uzbekistan).
Taranto, who is awfully smart and very good, and who I find to be right almost all the time, was sure flat-footed on Jindal. He didn't seem to quote him right. Here's one section on this issue:
We believe in creating abundance, not redistributing scarcity.
We should let the other side try to sell Washington’s ability to help
the economy, while we promote the entrepreneur, the risk-taker, the
self-employed woman who is one sale away from hiring her first employee.
Let the Democrats sell the stale power of more federal programs, while we promote the rejuvenating power of new businesses.
I have a suggestion for Bobbie Jindal, however -- he's going to have to get hard and mean about this just like the Democrats were, and he's going to have to take on Silicon Valley frontally and with full force to point out how much they are the problem and the engineers of the socialism we have now.
It isn't just just that Google and their people coded up the GOTV stuff and concocted the narratives and got the demographics. They were all there to be had given the Republican's bad story-telling. It's that Google and Facebook and all have a concept of America that really does mean oligarchy for them and socialism for the rest of us, that really does need a strong central government to do things to "help innovation" *cough* like lay out broadband in rural areas to help Google Ad Agency have more clickers.
Jindal sounds almost like a Gov 2.0 evangelist when he says this in his speech:
If any rational human being were to create our government anew,
today, from a blank piece of paper – we would have about one fourth of
the buildings we have in Washington and about half of the government
workers.
We would replace most of its bureaucracy with a handful of good websites.
The reality is that he will not befriend Silicon Valley by coming up with an idea like this that would involve firing, oh, 50,000 government clerks in Washington, DC, many of them blacks and Hispanics, and leaving them jobless with no place to go (Google or Twitter don't have a place for them). What the left of the Michael Moore or Katrina Vanden Heuval or John Judis type have absorbed is that big government=jobs for ordinary people that might not have anywhere else to go, i.e. at the Post Office or the Motor Vehicles Department or Health and Human Services. So you're not going to touch that, because the old style socialist left will explain it all to Mitch Kapor and he will never go for replacing bureaucrats and buildings with web sites and Second Life.
Instead, Jindal needs to craft a more complex message that calls out Silicon Valley for never creating jobs despite all their "innovation" and the government in their pocket -- they aren't really generative capitalism at the end of the day and that has to be said out loud. Are they degenerative capitalists who can't keep their customers alive? They're merely a higher-level redistributive system among big players like the venture capitalists. He should challenge them to bring their taxes home and invest more in communities - because the Democrats don't do that, and he could do it as a solution to not creating bigger government and draining people and businesses of more taxes here. Jindal is going in the right direction when he blasts the fake green business/professorial nexus that just pockets grants and then fails -- he should just add the social media crash to this narrative.
For extra credit, you can study more of the sectarian fight here where Rod Radosh, and old socialist, points out that Judis' mentar, Martin Sklar, in fact would advocate Bush as a leftist liberal (imagine):
Bush’s in contrast, was based on a lower-tax, low-cost energy,
“high-growth/job stimulus” program, and was not “ensnared in the green
business/academia lobby agenda of high-cost energy,” which would work to
both restrict economic growth and workers’ incomes.
Ron Radosh wrote this before the fracking explosion and the changes in the natural gas market, and it would be interesting to see if the lower costs of energy would make this possible.
While this may be overheated, it has the elements of the Obama problem of 'we the people" and "civil society" conceived as government-funded front groups that are "community organizers," the field he knows best; "fascist" is used here in the sense of "corporativists" i.e. assigning sectors in society with different roles in service of the state:
Moreover, Sklar is concerned, as he writes, that Obama will make
“central to his presidency” what he calls “proto-statist structures
characteristic of fascist politics- that is, ‘social service’ political
organizations operating extra-electorally and also capable of electoral
engagement,” that will lead to “party-state systems…in which the party
is the state.” Thus, he notes that during the campaign, Obama favored
armed public service groups that could be used for homeland security,
that would tie leadership bureaucracies to him through the unions and
groups like ACORN.
Once, at a TechCrunch Disrupt conference, I confronted venture capitalist (venture communist?) Fred Wilson, and asked him why Silicon Valley was so destructive in the name of its cherished "disruption," why so many start-ups were burned through and passed around from VC to VC like baubles on expensive chains -- companies never seem to go public and reach the state of self-sufficiency (this was before the Groupon and Facebook IPOs, but look how they turned out...).
And Fred Wilson, who is a very thoughtful and philosophical man, conceded this problem. "The revolution eats his children," he said matter-of-factly. He meant in the larger sense, Web 2.0 and its discontents in general, but I've often taken it literally about the burn-out cult of open source software.
Because there's the obvious fact of the entire open-source cult and shill -- how idealistic and enthusiastic young men -- it's mainly young men -- are persuaded to burn themselves out like shooting stars trying to "create value." And how their efforts are sucked up for free by Big IT, which is able to incorporate their free labour and free products into larger consulting businesses or more complex proprietary IT systems from which they make billions. The start-ups generally create only free web sites or services or aps -- and everyone voraciously consumes them. The selfless hero-coders surviving on Red Bull and chips and living in crowded walk-up squats to fulfill their dream are somehow supported with life's needs -- friends, parents, university, maybe even the occasional big infusion from a VC, or a contest win. Yet the wreckage is big and the product is slim. Few start-ups succeed; even those that do are consumed and disappear into bigger companies (that revolution eating again) and then even those big companies falter (Zynga).
Few people will discuss the suicide of Ilya Zhitomirsky, one of the founders of Diaspora, which was to be the free and open-source alternative to Facebook, that hated "walled garden" based on proprietary code which still nevertheless enables "hooks" into its service for app engineers. There was just aA brief discussion on Y-combinator -- one of the VC companies that fuels the revolution that eats its children so heartily -- and then that founder, a Russian man, fell into obscurity with no questions asked about what happened, whether related to personal or public matters. Everybody who donated money or time to Diaspora -- and they were considerable -- lost, because Diaspora was "returned to the community" by which the cultists mean they stop working on a failed project and let it die unless somebody else feels like picking up its carcass.
WARNING: I'M NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT
Warning: I don't believe that you are required not to criticize the dead and that you must abide by some ancient mourning period of 7 days or 14 days or 30 days before you can speak critically of public figures. I also don't believe -- as with Benghazi -- that you are bound by some ancient notion of blasphemy, that you can't question the policies of the dead or their supporters. I don't believe that you somehow can't debate the ideas and life of a figure merely because he just died or that this is "politicizing" his death -- the insane hagiography and the exploitation of this young man to advance the big guys' technocommunist agenda is far more of a politicization. And yes, this means I will even argue with his mom, who obviously doted on him and supported his cause -- because he's a public figure and public policies are shaped by his life and death.
Aaron Swartz has committed suicide. Just as did Guy Debord, the French philosopher of the 1960s generation whose quote graces the top of this blog. Just as people in extreme ideologies tend to do -- which is why such ideologies based on destruction of the old and glorification of the unreal new aren't so recommended for the young by their wiser elders.
DIGITAL THEFT IS STILL STEALING; HACKING IS CRIME
I was a big critic of Aaron Swartz because I find hacking to be common vandalism, theft and -- when it's large-scale and driven by leftist political ambitions -- a form of terrorism.
Right now, with the geeks ruling the earth, and especially Twitter and the tech media and blogosphere, we're likely to see a huge outpouring of self-righteous and self-justifying bunkum around the death of this young man, and I think it's important to try to counter the lies.
What Aaron Swartz did *was* wrong and *was* theft -- breaking and entering into a university with false ID and using tools to pry open doors and stealing 4 million JSTOR articles -- therefore undermining the JSTOR business. (I don't listen to silly arguments about how stealing a copy of something where the original remains "isn't stealing" because of course it is -- it's about stealing the bundled, inherent commodification feature of content that is perfectly fine for digital content to have. Hacking is all about deliberately breaking and destroying that commercial inherency.)
I BLAME LESSIG, NOT THE DOJ FOR SWARTZ'S DEATH
Whenever someone commits suicide, they themselves are the first ones to blame. Sometimes suicide is murder -- it is anger and settling scores and trying to make survivors feel guilty; it's the ultimate temper tantrum to get your way, you know? Even so, people tend to feel sorry for suicides and find someone else in the larger picture to blame. In this case, the geeks making Aaron Swartz into an instant overnight saint because he offed himself consistent with his nihilist belief (like Debord) are blaming The Man or the Department of Justice for continuing to bring suit against him.
I blame not the Department of Justice for Aaron Swartz's death in that sense, but Lawrence Lessig. He's the one who, like Pan, lured this young men into his extremist and delusional cult of Creative Communism as I called it, with the shill that somehow human nature and the earth can be re-made merely by being digitalized and moved online.
It's can't be. Not only is human nature not reformable in the way these delusional ideologues imagine; human society with its institutions, values and the rule of law so arduously established do not need to be remade in order to have progress, freedom, and human rights for all. Revolution destroys institutions that it believes need to be refashioned, but usually along the way the extremists justify the utopian end with criminal means -- and thus bring about a society very different from the freedom and equality they promised. (Of course, there's the mass crimes of humanity of the Bolsheviks, but fresher in the memory: like the 1960-iers in Paris, drunk and covered with lice, finally removed from the university bastions who eventually flamed out after spending years in the cafes drunk and publishing little magazines on the dime of exploitative rich publishers. Or like our own beatniks and hippies like Jack Kerouac or Richard Brautigan, the wonder children of the former Beatnik and Hippie ages, the former who died of alcoholism and the latter who committed suicide by shooting himself with a rifle alone in a cabin).
THE MEGABUS TO INTERNET FREEDOM FALLACY
Once I saw Swartz in the Megabus line to Boston. Like me, he was having to Megabus it because he was evidently poor, despite all his selling of companies and such. Even so, I was so furious at thinking about how nevertheless, Daddy or some rich person who was able to pay for his lawyer was able to spring him from serious felony charges that I almost went up to him to tell him a piece of my mind. What stopped me was that I could see that he was just a skinny young kid and wouldn't be able to fight. Like so many Internet freaks, he would just see me as a crazy cat lady telling him to get off of my e-lawn, and wouldn't be able to muster the intellectual strength and historical context to have any kind of informed debate. He was a cult victim. The Internet Revolution has produced lots of them. Many more than we are told come to no good end.
Comrade Larry's utopian notion that you can get millions of people to give up the inherent commodity value of their own creations, the inherent value of commerce, by prodding and even brow-beating them into putting Creative Commons "licenses" on the content, is at the heart of this sickness.
As I've often pointed out, there's no license that says "copy this but pay me something". That's deliberate. That's because Lessig wants digital communism, no matter what he says about his own personal beliefs or whatever silly counter-arguments people pull out about him (such as the fact that he once clerked for a Republican judge). Collectivizing content and then making it available as the loss-leader for giant platformistas to make their millions lets us know how the communism actually turns out. It's supposed to enable creators to "get the word out" (as if sales wouldn't achieve the same thing!); it's supposed to create commuuuunity; but in fact what it leads to is Facebook and Twitter and Google slurping up all the value from ad clicks and related revenue streams of data-drilling as people make and consume largely free content.
This could have all been different with the addition of a single license that enabled people easily to get paid on line and to tip and buy from others for their blogs; the payments system could be easily engineered as is for PayPal or Amazon.
All that stood in the way was ideology -- the kind of ideology that furiously drove Aaron Swartz and ultimately led to his death in despair.
YES, BREAKING AND ENTRY IS A CRIME
Violet Blue forgets to tell us that Aaron Swartz deliberately shielded his face with a bike helmut and broke into a computer closet physically -- it's amazing how that detail of physical breaking and entry gets left out in all the digital hagiographies. He used false ID. And he took something of value that JSTOR required to keep its operation afloat. It's ok to charge money for a product EVEN IF you already got paid for it in a research grant, because the system itself of storage and sorting and cataloging and management needs to have a revenue stream. In fact, students get most of JSTOR for free! In fact, most people find students to fetch things behind the JSTOR pay-wall all the time (Evgeny Morozov is famous for doing this on twitter).
And then, ultimately, JSTOR undid the communists and their delusions by releasing 4 million articles -- about as many as Swartz stole. It did so without breaking its business model of charging for content. Did that plunge the technocommunist into despair further?
The accounts of his last days in the tech press are filled with self-righteous, furious accounts of his legal struggles. If Daddy couldn't pay for the lawyer, then Larry Lessig's wife did, and was busy raising money for him. Swartz had no shortage of Big IT supporters, as he was the poster boy for the technocommunist approach -- but maybe they let him down (that would be no surprise and not news).
Violet Blue writes the annoying nonsense that we'll see on a zillion blogs:
Demand Progress
- itself an organization focused on online campaigns dedicated to
fighting for civil liberties, civil rights, and progressive government
reform - compared The Justice Department's indictment of Swartz to
"trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out
of the library."
But, um, you can't take "too many books" out of the library, dears. The library doesn't let you. There's a limit. It might be 5 or 8 or whatever depending on the library and whether you owe in fines. There is a limit on hard copies; there's no reason not to have a limit on digital copies to preserve a business model that is okay to have if you're not a communist.
And that isn't what this destructive young anarchist was doing. It wasn't like he was studying ancient medieval history and needed a lot of articles for his term papers. He deliberately smashed the system and swiped an enormous amount from it randomly (just like Bradley Manning) to make a point and openly bragged about his anarchist "propaganda of the deed" -- he liked smashing gates.
THE OPEN SOURCE CULT VS. THE RULE OF LAW IN CYBERSPACE
Redditt, often described as having been founded by Swartz although the story is complicated, is now called "the front page of the Internet" and far more important than the dying Digg to shape traffic on the web as well as news and views. But Redditt is a horrid, bullying cess-pool run by anonymous assholes much of the time and no proud achievement. And Swartz was forced to sell out of Redditt to make a living, but also because there is no viable business plan for any of these entities, ever, and even those who sell them regret it.
See, people like Lessig evidently love to take young idealistic men whose enthusiasm is fueled by the fact that they suffer from various disorders -- whether autism spectrum or bipolar or whatever -- and whip them into frenzies. That they are of age and willingly go along with the cult doesn't make it somehow "better".
Why? Because like all older men, they need company. Their own flawed utopian ideals are more visibly flawed if they can't attract the children to them...
If the DOJ sought to "make an example" of Aaron Swartz, there is also one thing to blame for that: the entire Google-fueled and Electronic Frontier Foundation-fueled frenzy against any form of legislation whatsoever that would regulate the Internet -- like SOPA or PIPA.
One of the key reasons I supported SOPA was because I believe real-life law applies online, and that the Internet is not a special, holy, exempt place (which is how Lessig and his cult followers viewed it). It needs to be under the rule of law, and that means something like SOPA that in fact legitimately criminalizes and penalizes piracy on a mass scale for commercial reasons, and therefore defines what is not to be prosecuted but merely technically thwarted or discouraged with removals, i.e. a video on a teenager's Tumblr blog. In the outrageous noise around SOPA, it's hard to get across the simple notion that case law -- precedent under the Supreme Court and lower courts -- will build up the rule of law that will both prevent abuses by police or ICE in over-reach, will not place a chill on speech, but which will enable content creators and IP owners to have livelihoods and businesses on the Internet -- which shouldn't be some zone exempt from human law and human enterprise in the organic world. That's all.
You would think it was advocating the massacre of innocent babies, but my support for SOPA is based on that simple premise: definitions in law, definitions backed up by court rulings, establishment the rule of law over the Internet and in fact work to prevent the need for frustrated officials to "make examples". We will never know now how Swartz's case could have been tried but there's no question in my mind that if SOPA had passed and provided definitions, anyone who didn't make a commercial benefit from their theft would not be facing the kind of heavy sentences that the tech press hysterically claimed Swartz would suffer (and which I don't at all believe he would suffer, given his massive cult backing, and the capacity for the liberal and leftist tech media to make a circus).
And it's irresponsible for bloggers to keep screaming that Swartz would "face 50 years" (as Declan McCullagh is outrageously insisting) when there were mitigating circumstances, among which was the fact that JSTOR itself was not pressing charges and he did not monetarize the content he stole. It is right and just that he would have gotten some kind of punishment that most likely would have amounted to community service or at most a year in jail; this would hardly have been 35 years.
THE DEATH CULT OF TECHNOCOMMUNISM
What Swartz's suicide should prompt people like Lessig and Cory Doctorow to do is to ask themselves: why are we continuing to peddle the death cult of technocommunism? Why are we sending young men to their doom, to arrest or despair and even suicide? You cannot eradicate commerce from human beings through collectivism; people need to live. Someone is always getting paid and someone is always the product in these "free" collectives -- why is it us and why are the coders the first to be sacrified with their zeal?And it is more than fine for the state to protect private property: this *is* the system -- unlike their communism -- that ensures the best life and freedom for all.
And it's not as if their technocommunism leads to any actual socialist paradise. Why do only the Big IT companies make billions, why do only the venture capitalists get their exits, but nobody else does? Why can't people -- users -- get paid? Why can't Redditt cost $19.95 a month and why can't I tip commenters? This is a revolution largely on the backs of the coders like Swartz. Their selfless dedication to the cause of "the open Internet" is supposed to be waged even unto death, and Swartz's death will be exploited only to celebrate this death-cult of collectivization even more. Why, oh, why?
As with the Newtown massacre, much will be discussed about the role of depression, autism spectrum, mental illness in this death as therefore somehow exonerating any ideological issues. But that's nonsense; as I said before, people like Lessig are all too happy to exploit the meglomania of the bipolar and the obsessive-compulsiveness of the autism spectrum in their open source cult -- and that's morally reprehensible. They have made an entire cult and culture out of the "neurally atypical" and celebrated it as "evolution".
Lawrence Lessig and Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow and Cory Doctorow should be the ones having a dark night of the soul over this man's death and questioning their utopia, along with all their tech press celebrators. But this won't happen, in the din of thousands of tech bloggers pumping themselves up to red fury now blaming The Man for his death and doubling down on their technocommunist revolution. More young people will head off the cliff...
Y-combinators will continue the deadly cycle and feed the revolution, and keep telling themselves its about a security state fighting a dying industry. Nonsense. Technocommunism is inhuman and based on false premises -- its results are before us.
Throughout the film, we’ve seen various desperate attempts to change the
system by ignoring the usual rules: Batman originally thought he could
inspire change by being a cultural exemplar, but only ended up causing a
bunch of kids to get themselves hurt by dressing up as him. Dent
thought he could clean up the system by pushing righteously from the
inside, but ended up cutting more and more ethical corners until his own
personal obsessions ended up making him a monster. The Joker had by far
the most interesting plan: he hoped to out-corrupt the corrupters, to
take their place and give the city “a better class of criminal”.
And the crazy thing is that it works! At the end of the movie, the
Joker is alive, the gangsters and their money launderers are mostly
dead, and their money has been redistributed (albeit though the
deflationary method of setting it on fire). And, as we see from the
beginning of the third movie, this is a fairly stable equilibrium: with
politicians no longer living in fear of the gangsters, they’re free to
adopt tough anti-crime policies that keep them from rising again.3
The movie concludes by emphasizing that Batman must become the
villain, but as usual it never stops to notice that the Joker is
actually the hero. But even though his various games only have one
innocent casualty, he’s much too crazy to be a viable role model for
Batman. His inspired chaos destroys the criminals, but it also
terrorizes the population. Thanks to Batman, society doesn’t devolve
into a self-interested war of all-against-all, as he apparently expects
it to, but that doesn’t mean anyone enjoys the trials.
Thus Master Wayne is left without solutions. Out of options, it’s no wonder the series ends with his staged suicide.
Chris Huges speaking at the DNC in January 2011 about how technology will win Obama's campaign. Photo by Steve Rhodes.
A sad day, reading about how the New York Timeshas to shed 30 people in the news room, as the Internet revolution eats more of its children -- and never replaces them. All of the big IT firms like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc -- taken together! -- don't even hire as many people as GM.
I got news for you: one cool digital dude that the New Yorker is hiring to make fun clicky things is not the same thing as 10 thoughtful people who write long pieces of investigative journalism or careful reflection. Like I said on Twitter: what, now we have not only code as law but code as literature?
And then there's New York Magazine to brag that "Chris Hughes is Turning 100" -- an unabashed admission that The New Republic -- which the rich boy Chris bought to help Obama win the elections like a Russian oligarch buys up newspapers as "administrative resources" -- is now basically a vehicle for this Silicon Valley tycoon's cult of personality. (Fast Company's front page summed it up even last year in this article: The Kid Who Made Obama President.)
Despite centuries of experience that tells publishers to keep a distance from editors -- this is something that the Sulzbergers seemed to understand about the Times -- Hughes jumped in and started elbowing aside the TNR staff and penning editorials -- like the one pumping against SOPA/PIPA -- no surprise there. In a more normal situation, there might have been found editors and journalists to give a more critical take on this Google-manufactured tsunami of opposition to protecting copyright under the rule of law through the courts -- but hey, Silicon Valley is the new normal, not old East Coast guys who haven't realized that C.P. Snow is all turned upside down now.
Here's what I wrote to Chris Huges on Facebook:
The loss of the New Republic as a liberal institution is something I hold you and your Silicon Valley culture directly responsible for, and it's really among the greatest losses of my intellectual life. At least while we have to endure the Obama cult of personality and Timothy Noah on the front page, there is still Leon Wieseltier on the back page. Probably not for long. I refused to re-subscribe when I saw that none of your writers could address the geek open source cult -- one of the greatest threats of liberal democracy in our time -- sufficiently during the shift from social media to Big Data. For now, I still have to look to the WSJ to find any criticism of Obama's big data grab from all our social media pages, and any questioning of where that data will go and whether it will be entrusted to the DNC or only an Obama-approved machine. The day I see you do a critical report on that -- and something like the Mitch Kapor anti-SOPA astro-turfing -- is the day I might subscribe again because you might be upholding liberal values.
I finished with a link to Harper Reed and the Soul of the New Machine where I try to summarize years of insights about the open-source cult and how it took over the elections -- and threatens our very freedoms now.
I am so very depressed about the New Republic.... : (
But Hughes wants a single, readable magazine—with photographs!—not two stapled together, and this will entail treating Wieseltier, as one person familiar with the magazine put it, as an employee for the first time. This brewing tension was presumably why, when I was being regaled, quite pleasantly, by Wieseltier, we were interrupted twice by the magazine’s publicist, encouraging us to “wrap it up” by order of the “powers that be.”
It never occurred to me that even after Peretz left, Wieseltier could be cut short in this fashion. The thought that this Silicon Valley-turned-Silicon-Alley mogul would mess even with Wieseltier -- well, it's unthinkable.
“We have to be convening conversations," says Hughes with that brisk engineering muscularity that is a heart-beat behind the faux literary style of Silicon Valley -- even the liberal arts major version.
Christ Hughes is too young to realize that the phrase "we need to have a national conversation on X" is a quintessential socialist slogan, hammered and developed through many a cadre meeting, of the sort not only purveyed back in the days of the Socialist Scholars' Conference in the 1980s and at DSA meetings, but still pushed today on the pages of Occupy blogs and of course then replayed on lefty CNN. It's part of the Trotskyist and other socialist sects' lexicon. It is so repeated and so now distended through all kinds of networks that few would recognize its provenance, and few would admit that it's part of the socialist shill -- why, how can you claim there is a red under the bed when it's merely about *talking*?
But when the socialists earnestly wheeled out this very well-worn slogan, they pretended that they are all for "dialogue" and "discussion" only -- they pretended then, and pretend now. They act as if disparity of wealth and "the 1/99%" distinct engenders a "need to have a conversation" as if people are sheeple who need to be "awakened" and be "empowered" to "find their voice" or even if they are "all for dialogue" in a democratic sort of way.
But hey, if it were only "a conversation," there'd be no need to block traffic and try to topple institutions like the stock market with Marxist-Leninist concepts sprinkled over the twitters like holy water, you know?
So what are Chris Hughes' "conversations"? Well, here's one where the deck is TOTALLY loaded with non-critics of the Internet and the Silicon Valley "better world" team:
On November 15, the magazine convened what promises to be the first of them, moderated by Hughes and featuring Arianna Huffington and Peter Thiel, the libertarian Silicon Valley investor who helped found PayPal and funded Facebook. The panel was held in a glass-walled events room at Lincoln Center and built around the putative provocation: Has Twitter Made Democracy Impossible?
I'll see if there is a transcript or tape of that somewhere -- I didn't follow it -- but I would have to answer: yes, it has. Because it was used to put one "progressive" candidate in power, virtually without debate, and help him issue edicts or premature announcements of vetos -- without any votes in Congress -- over issues like SOPA or CISPA.
I'll write another day what TNR meant in past years, which was most definitely the non-socialist and non-communist left -- the center-left alternative to The Nation or In These Times.
But what it has meant in our time before Hughes was factual criticism of the Republicans, but not merely with the "progressive" memes. The investigative journalism about Perry, that showed Texas under his administration not so much an economic prosperity tale so much as a tale of big government contracts to some businesses was the sort of story that sunk a total campaign -- but convincingly so, with all the real facts presented -- and not merely oppo research facts. The article on Bain, however, *might* have convinced me not to vote for Romney -- and nearly did for awhile -- if I didn't have also on my desk The Wall Street Journal, which could explain that private equity capital saved the steel factory's ass when it was failing, and merely delayed the inevitable, given world steel prices. TNR just didn't put in the context like that -- and they lost my faith.
And with Timothy Noah endlessly on the front page spouting pro-Obama catechism and all those Jonathans doing the same -- there's only Wieseltier most days. Sadly, on Russia, they've hired Julia Ioffe -- and I think I've neatly put my finger on the problem with her: light a candle under her ink, and the pro-Putin lines between the lines will turn purple...To bad we don't have candles anymore on Kindles...
Worst of all, for all that "free and open source" dreck that the Silicon Valley people push, and for all their bragging that they took down the paywall during the elections, THE COMMENTS ARE NOT FREE, i.e. you have to subscribe to comment.
Now, that's actually my proposal of long ago to try to make paid content more viable -- we should all pay to comment and that will filter out the "trolls" (not a term I like to use, but for the sake of brevity).
But TNR gives you no motivation because unlike some other magazines, the author's of the articles never, ever, ever answer even really obvious pointed questions about their work in the comments. And certain readers are allowed to pursue side vendettas they've had for years for endless pages, blocking the long view of everyone else, that moderation appears to be a joke. The editors also never pull out some readers into pull quotes as the Times does, or "picks" or "called out" as Forbes does -- to give some incentive to even bother to write comments.
There are way too many VERY LONG pieces by Evgeny Morozov with never a critique of *him* -- and never any reasoned critiques of the people he so nastily and snarkily hates on, like Jeff Jarvis.
The book reviews still seem good -- Hughes probably hasn't put his hand to them yet, and hasn't turned them into paragraphs that help sell titles on Kindle and Nook.
Will TNR push out Wieseltier -- the last of the thoughtful supporters of Israel and critics of Islamism and its supporters in the West? Will they bring back Peter Beinhart, which will signal the ultimate death of TNR and its conversion into The Fly -- part Daily Beast, part Nation, part GQ?
Will they bring back David Rieff? Will they publish Masha Gessen as an antidote to Ioffe?
Oh, who cares. They will not get my three days' of grocery money regardless. I do believe it's hopeless : (
But through the good offices of a friend, I got a look at how he had a) not deleted my comment as I had thought but was b) admonishing me in a follow-up comment -- that now I couldn't even see, let alone answer. What a douche!
Truly, that's all you can say about such people who have to swagger around on the Internet in that fashion, prevailing by using the geeks tools just like they made them deliberately, able to mute, ban, delete,disappear, throw down the memory hole, and prevail. Creepy!
So here's my comment and his, and I will reply at least here on my blog!
Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick The Boy Scouts do not accept gays. This is
freedom of association and freedom of speech, and it is protected not
only by the Constitution, but now by a Supreme Court ruling when someone
tried to challenge it. It's the same freedom you would want for any
LGBT organization. So the answer is, leave the Boy Scouts, and make new
scouts for our time. And if the scouts meet in your school or church
basement, then change your school or church if you don't like the
scouts' policies. End of story. Enough of this bullying of people to
change their views.
Michael Arrington Catherine - discriminating against someone's sexual
orientation is no different and no less harmful to society than
discriminating based on sex or race. Too many people still think gays
are monsters, the only way to fix that is to force change. This is one
of the few areas where I diverge from classical libertarian thinking. If
we had done things your way in the past there'd still be segregation in
pockets of America. That's not a country I want to live in.
Um, number one, I don't think gays are monsters, and I think they deserve equal rights, marriage rights, and freedom from discrimination.
But the legal standards for private groups versus the government or state aren't quite the same when it comes to discrimination. To be sure, some states have evolved discrimination rules that apply to gays.
It's just that they have to protect freedom of association and freedom of speech for all.
Now, if this was a case of black children being barred from the Boy Scouts meeting in their local school or church, wouldn't the law and the courts do something? Oh, they likely would. Now what if the Boy Scouts didn't allow girls? But they don't. For girls, there is Girl Scouts. No one has ever successfully claimed, in or out of court, that the Boy Scouts must take girls as members. They get to chose what kind of membership they wish. That's freedom of association.
But isn't keeping out gays like keeping out blacks?
No, because a) a group has the right to pick its members on the basis of its mission b) if it barred people only on the basis of the colour of their skin, there would be no justification for it c) and the real issue for gays, as they explain after much deliberation, is the profession of the status of being gay, not the inherency of gayness itself.
That is, the Boy Scouts do no like the fact that the gay rights movement raises -- and vocalizes within the organization -- the kind of sex they have or would like to have, or with whom.
This flies against the organization's other goals, which are to raise boys into men who are brave, trustworthy, etc. but also clean livers. They do not want sex to be part of that raising. And that seems appropriate for the raising of children. These are minors, after all. What those not backing gay rights most object to, culturally and politically, is the in-your-face nature of gays openly discussing their sexual preferences in a setting where they don't want sex and sexual preferences to be discussed or be a factor at all.
That nuance is one that goes over many debaters' heads (or is rejected flatly with the usual fuck-you hedonists' aggressiveness), but it's worth contemplating. A gay rights advocate could say that what gays strive for is to be "normal," that is, to be accepted for who and what they are without being seen as "deviants". The notion of "cleanliness" that leaves them out is offensive. The Boy Scout advocate might say it isn't that the notion leaves them out; it leaves out those who feel the necessity to express sexual issues, including their preferences.
Now, the gay rights advocate might snort and say that such Puritanism went out with the 1950s and it's old-fashioned to pretend that even teenagers aren't sexual beings or even experimenting with sex. Fine, the Boy Scouts might say, but their goal is not to assist teens in experimenting with sex, but to have them focus on other issues. And there's something to be said for this. They are minors, after all.
It's also helpful to recall that it isn't only Baptists or Catholics or Muslims who might not like sex and sexual preferences to be a topic in child-raising, especially in liberal forms of expression, but oh, any Buddhist or other spiritual practitioner who would have some notion of restraining the sex impulse and having it in its place in life, and developing other aspects of the spirit that are contemplating higher things. People might disagree what is high and low, but if it isn't appropriate to sit in math class in high school and discuss sex and one's preferences for whom to have sex with and how, why would it be in the Boy Scouts? It wouldn't. So if anything, it might be that people wish the Boy Scouts would be a setting with a "don't ask, don't tell" policy merely to be less distracting.
But there's no question, reading their mandate and positions, that the Boy Scout leadership think that it is not part of the education of a boy to allow him to manifest himself as gay -- that being a good and wholesome man means he cannot practice homosexuality. So that's when you say -- "OK, that's your idea, not mine, I'm out of here" -- and you make a different scouts. Perhaps in time this might change, but given that it *hasn't* changed in all this time despite a barrage of lawsuits for years lets me know that it won't likely -- and on principle. And I don't see anything wrong with that. The comments of those supporting the Boy Scouts are made by older people and people in more conservative communities. Eventually, it will die out or change. Our rights should not die out or be diminished on that pathway.
And Boy Scouts, after all, isn't a school or workplace. It's just a club. A club to learn word-working or how to help an old lady cross the street. These are optional activities, and they don't have to happen in Boy Scouts, they could be taught anywhere in other settings, other ways. It's precisely due to its optional notion that judges appear to rule that it can have its way. Otherwise, the state would be telling people what to do in their spare time, and how to raise their children.
I don't want to live in a country where people cannot form associations freely in their free time, do what they want within the law, and invite who they want as members. If you can't have that freedom of speech and freedom of association, you can't have democracy -- real democracy. If the state can tell you what is politically correct, what next?
And what's particularly annoying about this interchange is the sanctimoniousness of Arrington here. He doesn't convince me, he merely mutes and blocks me. "You cannot convince a man by silencing him." He does a star turn with his buds looking like he is Mr. Not-A-Libertarian On This Yet Holier-than-Thou that is willing to trample on some rights for some greater freedom (ostensibly), but there's no second round in the debate.
Complaints to the affect that this is his "living room" and he can "do what he wants" don't wash with me. He's not just some guy. He's a millionaire selling technology through his blogs and social media. Today he's hawking this lifestyle meme that he thinks is cool and gives him street cred, but it's only to hawk some California start-up he's investing in better the next day. Meh. And people like this *are* the journalists and the media now. Fox TV, which the left always fearfully hates on, has only a lousy two million viewers. Huffington Post, which is part of AOL which bought out TechCrunch, the online tech blog Arrington founded and sold, has more than 39 million people a month visiting.
Arrington thinks he is exercising "leadership" and that in order to end bigotry you have to take "unpopular" positions. Bullshit. What's unpopular in social media with its tens of millions these days are the minority of people who are pointing out that free speech and civil rights mean you cannot dictate political correctness. And again, I can only repeat that the way to equality and rights cannot be found through suppressing other people's rights.
Discrimination based on sexual orientation is different in the eyes of many people, because even if it is inherent (and not all accept that it is), unlike skin colour or gender, it is not visible unless you chose to make it so. That is a special feature of this issue that does mean that the Boy Scouts feel justified in doubling down -- it is the articulation of the issue, not the inherency that they do not want in members.
And yes, I get the counter-argument, that gay people shouldn't have to feel that they must "watch" it or "not be uppity" as was said of blacks -- we all know people can be beaten merely for looking effeminate or butch even if they aren't gay in fact. And that's all true. But the distinction still does matter. You can't get by without school or work. You can get by without the Boy Scouts, and given the purpose of the organization, you can get buy without discussing your sex preferences at the Boy Scouts.
(C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick June 2, 2012
(A longer version of this piece with more Second Life back story and gossip is here.)
I was surprised to see Mark Wallace write a piece, Facebook Killed the Virtual World on Wired. Not because a former virtual world gonzo journo and Silicon Valley start-upper wouldn't have this already-widespread opinion in his circles.
No, it's because it's only a geek-keyhole view of the problem -- in fact, Facebook killed television; Facebook killed a lot of expensively-developed MMORPgs; Facebook killed lots of other things.
CNN has hit a 20-year low in ratings and has lost half of its audience -- but it isn't that it lost it to Fox News, which has only 2 million viewers. I bet the real reason they both are losing viewers is due to Facebook -- and not even Facebook, but the mobile-phone-as-virtual-world.
The virtual world you can hold in your hand!
And did Facebook actually kill virtual worlds, or only virtual worlds, or are there much larger phenomena going on, and in fact SL's persistence and usage by a million or so people regularly a surprising statistic despite these larger phenomena?
In fact, if CNN has only 399,000 viewers at prime-time, that's hilarious, because Second Life has at least that many regular users -- it has about a million monthly unique viewers. They don't show the concurrency numbers any more, but they were around 70,000, and even if dropped to 50,000, that's still amazing, given that it is a very niche activity with a highly-demanding graphics set up and user learning curve (by contrast to just pointing your remote and watching CNN passively).
Even so, we realize that that there was a Virtual World Winter -- again -- and the caravan moved on as the dog barked.
Why weren't immersive virtual worlds online, whether downloadable or in the browser, as compelling as their makers and most enthusiastic users thought they would be?
Short answer: because the user -- while given many affordances, like being able to fly or rez out blocks of wood and build in defiance of gravity -- could not sufficiently control his environment. There were too many insurmountable problems or recurring annoyances -- graphic card demands or crashing browsers and servers, or people who built ugly shit in the view of your expensive land or crowd up your server making it unusable.
By contrast, Facebook, and especially the mobile version of Facebook and other apps, is completely in the user's control, despite everything that a certain category of tech journos and geeks keep hyping as a huge privacy problem (it is, but it is one that there are enough solutions to, including the one of simply not sharing what you don't want to be public, that it is an over-hyped issue.)
I'm not going to crank up the loyalist arguments that Second Life isn't dead, that Mark just doesn't get it -- he did in fact live very thoroughly in SL -- he had a land parcel for a time, he built things like a cool bathysphere (which unfortunately got lost out of inventory, although I still have the docking station), and he even got SL-married -- to a TV bot named Destroy TV which was a kind of stalking webcam experiment of the Sheep for a time.
But here's the problem with his thesis -- it isn't virtual worlds that Facebook killed, it's TV and much else in mainstream media and MMORPGs, too. And actually, it isn't Facebook that killed it, it's the mobile phone.
The mobile phone is the new virtual world.
Marshall McLuhan described the television 50 years ago as "the great reducer." Before it could reduce, first, it imported. In the 1950s and early 1960s, TV often seems like radio -- there's something to the truism that each new media imports intact the culture of the previously-established media and doesn't shed it easily. Walter Cronkite developed an authoritative, booming voice for radio; this was the nature of TV news narration in the early days of TV. (And people like Scoble still want to use new media like Twitter as a radio show with lots of passive listeners.)
What does McCluhan mean by reduction? In the 1960s, the TV would take the Vietnam war, an ad for cigarettes or perfume, and an Ozzie and Harriet type sit-com and put them all at the same level on the small "blue screen" for Joe Six-Pack to consume. A war, a product, a show --they were all in a mid-sized box. The world was put into that box and virtualized.
So media became a minimizer and a virtualizer of the real, but then, there were competing trends for people to become producers and not only consumers of the minimized and virtualized -- the Polaroid camera, the portable movie camera, the tape recorder. So in the 1970s and early 1980s, TV was displaced a bit by people making and sharing their own amateur media products. You still had to invite people over to your house to see your photograph album or to make instant photos during a party, or to hear your tape, or watch your home movie. I wonder if you could call this maximizing reality rather than minimizing it, however -- that is, the individual takes a picture of his kid or his cat, he tapes himself and his friends singing "Happy Birthday" or tapes a Grateful Dead concert; he makes a home movie of a football game. In this media use, reality, which in a previous era would have remained private and small and diminished in a million small stories becomes elevated and maximized -- although not really for long as soon there are a million more people doing the same thing. Perhaps more of what it does is extend time -- what used to be lived and experienced and then only written about, perhaps, now had an instant picture to prolong it forever.
Then with the advent of the Internet, the trends for minimizing and maximing met -- and competed in some respects. And one manifestation of this was the MMORPG and the virtual world. So now instead of taking reality and putting it into the blue TV box, or taking reality and exaggerating its importance beyond the immediate family or RL social circle to wider circles and the immortality of the ages, now the individual was *putting himself* into the virtuality. He was the last thing to be virtualized, but it came readily because he had already virtualized even entire wars, and minimized their significance, and then maximized his kids, who only stayed 3 years old for a fleeting time, into immortal gods, along with their pets. So now the self was the next thing to be minimized/maximized.
So in the 1990s and early 2000s, first nerds avidly played the text game of Dungeon and Dragons, and then geeks avidly played World of Warcraft and other massive multi-player games online, and then their moms came and their neighbours. Even WoW began to peak, however, and today, with numerous lay-offs in the video game industry, and the collossal failure of some like this Rhode Island debacle described by Lum Lumley, games that you have to enter -- that play you -- seem in decline.
Why is this? Because we are already in the next cycle of enabling the immortal god-individual to minimize reality again and put it in the palm of his hand.
Why go into a virtual world -- a download, a log-on, rules, constrictions -- when you can now port around your own custom virtual world right in your hand?
It does all the minimizing and maximizing you could possibly want. Absolutely any scene you encounter can not only be Polaroidized, it can be Instagramized to look like Ansel Adams or Walker Evans themselves took it. You can video anything and edit it. You can have real-time Facetime on your iphone or Skype with video and put all the people in your friend list into an ongoing real-time video drama with constant chatter and media sharing.
Facebook is only part of the story of the minimalizing of reality into the palm of your hand. It's only a platform that facilitates the mobile phone. (That's why Facebook needs to make or buy their own phone device). Facebook is perhaps the best or easiest thing on your phone, because it's where you can add friends easily, take and share photos and videos, and share anything else that they circulate around -- it's a big pool. And log on to many sites to comment.
Once you add into this virtuality the greater sophistication of apps, you have even more of a customized, delightful virtual world. In this virtual world, the user can feel as if he is on a great exercise plan just by downloading a Walking GPS app. He can fancy himself a connoisseur of fine dining and wines by downloading those types of apps. He can Storify everything.
Oh, and then there's the games. Angry Birds and tons of other easy, hand-held, riveting games. Those games on the smart phones are what took away the customers from WoW and other worlds-that-play-you.
Of course, that's something hard-core gamer geeks could never, ever admit. They pride themselves on never playing something as light-weight and pointless as Angry Birds. Except...lots and lots of people play Angry Birds, and they play it instead of other things. Instead of being played by the exigencies of the war and quest games.
Mobile phones once seemed like they only filled in the interstices between the times you were on your desktop or laptop at work or home, stationery. That's because new media, as noted, often gets played by the rules of the media before it. It seemed like the mobile phone was just the extension, the tethering, to the main show which was on the desktop or laptop.
But with the portability and all the huge selection of customization and apps -- and new addictive activities like checking in on Four Square or getting Groupon deals -- people would stop and stand on the street and play their mobile virtual world game; they would sit down on a park bench to play their mobile virtual world game -- park benches that sat idle, or were dictated by city building codes and never used by real people -- are suddenly getting a work out all over the place.
Now, people don't seem to mind if they have to sit in a meeting at work or go to a boring talk or training session -- that's because they can keep thumbing their VW i-phone while they are there. The meta-meeting they have on their i-phone in their new virtual world has in fact displaced the real meeting which is merely an old frame.
Some people just never avatarize well. The thing we all discovered with why Second Life in particular didn't take off for the masses is because a lot of people just don't like "investing their consciousness in a toy" as Will Wright brilliantly put it long ago in describing how the Sims and the Sims Online in particular worked. Some people easily said "I" or "me" about the constricted, dancing, 2-D figure on the screen that only had set routines in the Sims -- they didn't so much invest their consciousness as reduce their consciousness, but yet in doing so, still flowered out with a maximizing of their consciousness in self expression. Because even though their were hard-coded limitations in that world, people pushed them out to the max, making many creative residences and stores and games. Second Life of course took this to another level, although with its own set of restrictions. Yet just as some people can't curl their tongues or become hypnotized, for reasons of nature or nurture, some people just don't like bothering with an avatar and either can't get the puppetry down or just feel stupid.
A mobile phone never makes you feel stupid because you control the experience, minimize reality and maximize what you chose -- you're Harold with the Purple Crayon, drawing your world as you go along.
People hate feeling stupid; they hate getting killed in the first frame of the story, which is why especially women won't go for the war MMORPGs or the Second Life welcome area, and they also hate feeling like they look stupid, in ugly newbie clothes or suddenly made naked by some glitch or their own wrong click. SL has come a long way to get rid of the second problem, with ready-made outfits, but still hasn't licked the first problem of getting killed or heckled to death in the first frame of your story.
As I've always been saying, Second Life is always prototyping the future and adapting the human to that future. That is its well-kept secret. In Second Life, you became completely adapted to right-clicking and looking at the object description of many things in the world, either to find out the creator and go shop at their store, or to see how many prims it had and find out if it would fit in your house, or to see more about what it was made of. You also got used to right-clicking on every other being in that world to find out the short social-media type description they had about themselves -- their groups, their preferences, their likes, their dislikes, perhaps even their RL information (Second Life did this long before Facebook or Twitter were in massive use or even in existence).
In the same way, as you walk around in the highly-virtualizable real world now with your mobile phone in hand, you can wave your phone over a QR Code with NeoReader or some other app and get the information about that thing. Some people have already starting putting QR codes on their business cards -- both Russian and Chinese developers I met at TechCrunch had QR codes which, when read, took you to the page to download their app in the app store. The other day I walked by an apartment building that had a large QR Code sign out in front with "latest listings" in that building. My avatar hand stretches out in this new virtual (virtualized) world, and I click and see the information.
In the same way there are apps now like the afore-mentioned sonar.me but tons of others that give you that reductive social media car about the other avatars you now encounter in this new virtual world that is both controlled by you in the palm of your hand, the way you like worlds to be, but also interactive with the real world -- which is the aspect that Mark Wallace has fastened on.
The other thing discovered about Second Life -- in addition to people not liking to be avatarized -- is that many -- not all, but many people don't like being anonymous and don't like meeting anonymous strangers in experiences over which they have no control.
What Facebook does is give them an interface that lets them talk to known people in their lives -- and the friends of friends -- without being overwhelmed by them and have them interfere in their real personal lives. That old boyfriend from college, that distant boss from a former job, that relative you haven't seen in 20 years -- these people could all be potential nuisances if they showed up on your real-life doorstep or called you in person on your real phone.
But in the fantastic virtual world of Facebook, they are virtualized and minimized. Whatever could make you uncomfortable about them is whisked away. Only their stories -- the stream of news and photos -- which you can tune into selectively as you wish -- remain. You can chat in real time or asynchronously, but a lot of people use FB without ever using the real-time chat. You can consume and minimize or create and maximize, as you wish, with whom you wish.
There is only so much time in the day -- you might be willing to lose sleep over social media or virtual worlds, and many do, but even so, there isn't THAT much more time. So displacement occurs.
Long ago, after I started Second Life and my children had various MMORPGs or video games they played whether WoW or Neopets, and after the Internet began producing short TV news segments accessible directly from the news outlet's own website, or on portals like Yahoo, we ditched the TV. Who needs a TV with lame sit-coms and movies you could watch online if you really needed to see them again (and I didn't). Few shows or movies that were new were of interest. The news itself was an insipid entertainment -- weather extended into a vaudeville act, a sensationalized fire in New Jersey, a kidnapped baby, a celebrity scandal, and little or no foreign news. Real foreign news was on Twitter with a link to Youtube.
For someone like me with poor vision and a slightly crippled hand, the virtual world of the mobile phone will not be as interesting and captivating as a virtual world. You could say I avatarize, but I don't virtualize reality as successfully as others.
But most people now have a fascinating, riveting, addictive massive multiple-player online role-play game now in the palm of their hand, and they will not be logging off -- ever.
Richard Byrne hung out in the hallways dodging security guards on rounds, ate the catered food, slept on company couches and showered at the company gym -- they have all that stuff like Google for the employees.
This was so he could "live his dream" which consisted of making a web site called ClassConnect about helping teachers share lesson plans.
He wound up getting another $500,000 from investors -- I wonder who?
The problem is that while he was mooching off AOL and preparing for his "second round," he was busy undoing other people out of their livelihoods.
His site seems to stress sharing, rather than selling class plans.
And it seems no venture capitalists were harmed -- or enriched - with this business:
With most of the growth occurring in the last 18 months, it is clear TeachersPayTeachers is a prime target for funding at very favorable terms. However, Edelman made it clear that after his experiences with Scholastic, he is hesitant to accept funding. Instead, he is working on growing the site organically, unless funding becomes necessary to accelerate growth.
And other sites like this one where lesson plans are sold in PDF form. You cannot stop a market that wants to exist, where a willing seller meets a willing buyer instead of a coerced sharer meeting an indifferent slurper.
I'm all for teachers selling their lesson plans. It is their intellectual property. Many of them go to great lengths to add in their life experience and creativity to these lessons. They're working in soul-less situations in the public schools where all kinds of rewarmed Marxist drivel is thrust on them and the existency of teaching to the test. If they get something creative wedged in AND can sell it, great!
So why is somebody giving $500,000 to this squatter kid to make something that looks like yet another share-bear trying to "disrupt" good business?
Byrne wants to "crowdsource" lesson plans rather than reward the individual's innovation and hard work in a free marketplace.
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