It's 9:00 on friday night and I just put away my work and I'm feeling a little bit like a looser. My friend Shannon is having a birthday party up on the coast near Cannon Beach, lots of the peeps from PDX rolling out, but I'm too pooped to make a three hour drive, and I've got a 10am phone call tomorrow so...

Ah Eugene. I never really hit it here socially. Never had a girlfriend (save for one summer which was extended off an existing relationship). Never really made much of myself here at all, and most of my native friends have moved on, so being back to stay a while I'm kind of at a loss. Playing basketball in the rain for a half hour with the guys from Grass Commons and getting drunk with Jesse are the most significant social contacts I've had all week. I realize now that all this time I've been here I never called my grandma -- for shame.

So it's the Friday night blues for me. Well, I have a DVD to watch (Brazil!), and I need to go look for clothes tomorrow, and clean the house before my Mother returns. And there's always work, so it's not as though I don't have things to do. It's just that I wish I had people to see too.

Next Friday will be my friend Cian's birthday party here, and next Saturday I'll be going to Portland to see Todd Snider which should be a hell of a good time. And shortly after that I'll be on the road and headed for the next thing. This too shall pass.

I'm just about ready to get down into it, just about ready to get back in the game. I've been rambling for the better part of the year and it's just about time to get a drop on the next thing.

Here's a question for you. Drupal powers The Onion. Why doesn't someone make a Newspaper distribution?

And here, to close it out, is most of an email I sent to Frank the other day, explaining my situation.

-----------------------------

From: xxxxxx@outlandishjosh.com
Subject: Fraaaank
Date: September 24, 2005 4:21:45 PM PDT
To: xxxxxxx@gmail.com

What's up? I've been busy. It's a strange place, my old hometown. I've sort of piggybacked off my sister's social network, friends of hers that I have come to know and like and the company they keep now... Last night I went out to a party at some punk kid house. Teenagers with mowhawks, people "off their medication" and the whole deal; it was allright. This girl invited me, a friend of friends who I'd met before and gotten high with on a couple of occasions. No sexual angle (at least not from my end), just good times and comradre.

There's a rock'n'roll mom there, three of her kids at the party, and this makes me feel less out of place even through she's probably pushing 50 and I'm at most a decade ahead of the youngest people there. Also, there was an astounding preponderance of tall girls. What do you say to a 20-year old who's 6'2"? Well, not much really... So it was the armchair anthropology thing but it was really something to see, and in Eugene no less. There's so much potential everywhere, you know?

I'm doing the best that I can to back myself into writing a book. Basically I think if I tell enough people that I'm doing this, I'll be peer-pressured into actually making it happen. That's now Nitewerk got done... What I think I can do is make about a third of a book and outline the rest and get some contributors who are smarter than me to fill in the blanks. Wrap it in an editorial throughline and get it done with some cool pictures and graphs and typography. Then I can use the text as script to go out and perform the ideas. It would also all go online to live and evolve.

Looking for places to start, I've been thinking about trying to do some really simple things with audio. It worked out ok on the road trip and I think it could be kind of bad ass. Put together some essay-type content that's written to be read aloud, a little music, kind of like the stuff I used to try and do at the beginning of every Axiom... mixtapes for the revolution. Work from that to chapters and riffs for the book.

Taking that idea a little further into the theatrical realm, I've been thinking of trying to write (or get others to write) radio plays we can distribute over the internet. It could be fun.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do; this perennial question of what does one want to be when one grows up. The Peter Pan rhetoric is a glib way to talk about it, but I generally find a lack of direction to be crippling. One thought that keeps resurfacing is that I aught to spend more time pursuing my own happiness.

I've never been particularly good at this, partly because I'm wired not to get off on openly selfish things. What that means though is that I'll often engage in seemingly altruistic pursuits for selfish reasons. My first girlfriend/lover Amanda used to call me out on that all the time. "If you do nice things because it makes you feel good. It's not any less selfish." Her point was that I should find more direct ways of making myself happy, that this might lead to greater overall... happiness. Philosophically it sounded a little tautological, but on a personal level it always rang true.

I'm plotting and scheming as per usual. When I get back you'll have to turn me on to a good yoga class. I need to break out the blocked-up chi.

peace
-josh

-----------------------------

Finally, you can now find me on MySpace, because I will follow the lead of Dan Droller.

I'm just about ready to get down into it, just about ready to get back in the game. I've been rambling for the better part of the year and it's just about time to get a drop on the next thing.

Here's a question for you. Drupal powers The Onion. Why doesn't someone make a Newspaper distribution?

And here, to close it out, is most of an email I sent to Frank the other day, explaining my situation.

-----------------------------

From: xxxxxx@outlandishjosh.com
Subject: Fraaaank
Date: September 24, 2005 4:21:45 PM PDT
To: xxxxxxx@gmail.com

What's up? I've been busy. It's a strange place, my old hometown. I've sort of piggybacked off my sister's social network, friends of hers that I have come to know and like and the company they keep now... Last night I went out to a party at some punk kid house. Teenagers with mowhawks, people "off their medication" and the whole deal; it was allright. This girl invited me, a friend of friends who I'd met before and gotten high with on a couple of occasions. No sexual angle (at least not from my end), just good times and comradre.

There's a rock'n'roll mom there, three of her kids at the party, and this makes me feel less out of place even through she's probably pushing 50 and I'm at most a decade ahead of the youngest people there. Also, there was an astounding preponderance of tall girls. What do you say to a 20-year old who's 6'2"? Well, not much really... So it was the armchair anthropology thing but it was really something to see, and in Eugene no less. There's so much potential everywhere, you know?

I'm doing the best that I can to back myself into writing a book. Basically I think if I tell enough people that I'm doing this, I'll be peer-pressured into actually making it happen. That's now Nitewerk got done... What I think I can do is make about a third of a book and outline the rest and get some contributors who are smarter than me to fill in the blanks. Wrap it in an editorial throughline and get it done with some cool pictures and graphs and typography. Then I can use the text as script to go out and perform the ideas. It would also all go online to live and evolve.

Looking for places to start, I've been thinking about trying to do some really simple things with audio. It worked out ok on the road trip and I think it could be kind of bad ass. Put together some essay-type content that's written to be read aloud, a little music, kind of like the stuff I used to try and do at the beginning of every Axiom... mixtapes for the revolution. Work from that to chapters and riffs for the book.

Taking that idea a little further into the theatrical realm, I've been thinking of trying to write (or get others to write) radio plays we can distribute over the internet. It could be fun.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do; this perennial question of what does one want to be when one grows up. The Peter Pan rhetoric is a glib way to talk about it, but I generally find a lack of direction to be crippling. One thought that keeps resurfacing is that I aught to spend more time pursuing my own happiness.

I've never been particularly good at this, partly because I'm wired not to get off on openly selfish things. What that means though is that I'll often engage in seemingly altruistic pursuits for selfish reasons. My first girlfriend/lover Amanda used to call me out on that all the time. "If you do nice things because it makes you feel good. It's not any less selfish." Her point was that I should find more direct ways of making myself happy, that this might lead to greater overall... happiness. Philosophically it sounded a little tautological, but on a personal level it always rang true.

I'm plotting and scheming as per usual. When I get back you'll have to turn me on to a good yoga class. I need to break out the blocked-up chi.

peace
-josh

-----------------------------

Finally, you can now find me on MySpace, because I will follow the lead of Dan Droller.

And not just at the Circle-K...

I just got the strangest comment-spam yet. What usually happens is some bot crawls through your site and puts up a bunch of links to online poker, pharmaceutacles or (rarely, actually) porn. Sometimes they contain some weird randomly-generated text that can be oddly intelligent.

But this one was little droplets of floridly phrased philosophy. It wasn't randomly generated, more like randomly chosen from a deck. They all point back to this site, which as far as I can ascertain is some kind of art. This page leads (via a clever url-based hack on Sony's website) to this bit of fun, which is also art or prank and is of further interest.

Diving into WHOIS records for the latter I stumble on a name (there was no name on the first site) and uncover this post from my friend Sam Tressler is the first result on google. Which is weird. I owe him a phone call.

What's going on here? "Dickgenthechev's web-templates gambling advice," is clearly art, but the owner of the domain seems to have been a serious gambling operator. Is this spam alerting us to art-hacking? I don't know. Strange things are afoot on these here internets.

I've been feeling interestingly fluid in the past week I've been here. Decompression I think they call it. I'm enjoying the room to spread out, to live spaciously, to masturbate when I feel like it. It's an important American freedom, and one we'll surrender shortly after our right to bare arms. First they come for your sleeveless shirts, then they want you to quit jerking off. Two openings on the supreme court, people! It could happen.

Actually my evening was deeply thrown off course earlier when I caught some of the Hollywood shows that are on in the same timeslot as the Simpsons in syndication. That network dead zone between the news and prime time where the televised equivalents of People, US, In-Touch and the like do their trade.

Oh my god who watches those shows! Sycophantic emptyheaded worshipping of B-list celebrities combined with a kind of spectacular moralizing. There was one bit about how a current contestant on The Apprentice was formerly a stripper who's #1 client had been comitting murder to pay for the exotic dancing. It was covered on "Inside Edition" at the time, with a trashy yet by modern standards quite earnest effort to actually capture the strange moral dimensions of the situation. The contemporary piece tried to play this with an air of scandal, that a person with such a checkered past would be allowed on The Apprentice. The producers said, quote, that they "felt she had paid her debt." Whether that's for trying to transcend her social position as a stripper or for having a murderer as a client is unclear.

After that there was a bit about nominated Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts' son, who's 4, and apparently misbehaved on live TV during Bush's announcement of his nomination. The story is he's back, but he's been on much better behavior at this week's Senate hearings -- now apparently rascally cute, which you didn't quite get before. Roberts being a conservative darling and staunch Catholic, I imagine this caused some embarassment 'specially for the missus.

Finally there was a raft of random teasers about Donny Osmond's near death experience, the baby Angelina saved, a look inside the life of some grey-haired good-looking rich guy (mogul of some sort I'll assume) with younger/blonder special lady... it all gave me the fear, quite frankly. So I took a bike ride to clear my head. It sort of worked.

It's strange. I feel more uncomfortability and fear biking the quiet streets of Eugene than I do cruising through supposedly "bad" neighborhoods in Brooklyn. I think it's a matter of not really knowing the lay of the land. Even though I grew up here, the topography is somewhat unfamiliar. I don't quite know what the deal is.

And that pretty much sums up my general state. The guy I told you to vote for in New York got trounced. Scored under 20,000 votes. Hopefully a learning experience for those involved. In the mean time, I'm hosting a meeting in a chat room called #revolution. What the fuck. The internet's a weird place. Today I met this guy, who just decided to go there from SF and be the media. I gather he does this thing kind of often. Hell, it works out all right.

The human power people are there now when the need is greatest, and that's cool, but they'll be run off when the rezoning orders grind on through just like the remaining population. Ain't gonna be the Big Easy like before. They'll save the tourist parts, but the rest of it gon' change. It was going that way anyhow, you know. But now it's drastic. Bloody. The Diaspora of New Orleans has begun. Hallelujah.

With a little help from Aaron, I scored the new Hip Hop Album "You Can't See Me" from WWE (that's professional wrestling, one of the great forms of popular entertainment in America) Champion John Cena, mainly as a gag to give to Wes. But then I listened to it and there are a couple good tracks. It reminds me of the good old days of kid-friendly jams, like LL Cool J. I think it might actually work, oddly enough.

If that's too lowbrow for you, there's always third-wave porn, which is developing at a fantastic clip. Check out this content:

"You can't fight city hall." "Death and taxes." "Don't talk about politics or religion." This is all the equivalent of enemy propaganda rolling across the picket line. Lay down GI, lay down GI. We saw it all through the 20th century. And now in the 21st century, it's time to stand up and realize that we should not allow ourselves to be crammed into this rat maze. We should not submit to dehumanization.

I don't know about you, but I'm concerned about what's happening in this world. I'm concerned with the structure. I'm concerned with the systems of control, those that control my life and those that seek to control it even more. I want freedom. That's what I want. And that's what you should want.

It's up to each and every one of us to turn loose and show them the greed, the hatred, the envy, and yes, the insecurities, because that's the central mode of control. Make us feel pathetic, small, so we'll willingly give up our sovereignty, our liberty, our destiny. We have got to realize that we're being conditioned on a mass scale. Start challenging this corporate slave state.

The 21st century is going to be a new century. Not the century of slavery, not the century of lies and issues of no significance, of classism, of sadism, and all the rest of the modes of control. It's going to be the age of human kind standing up for something pure and something right.

What a bunch of garbage: liberal, democrats, conservative, republican, it's all there to control us, it's two sides of the same coin. Two management teams bidding for control, the CEO job of Slavery, Incorporated! The truth is out there in front of you, but they lay out this buffet of lies. I'm sick of it! And I'm not going to take a bite of it. Do you got me?

Our existence is not futile. We're going to win this thing. Humankind is too, good. We're not a bunch of underachievers. We're going to stand up, and we're going to be human beings. We're going to get fired up about the real things, the things that matter, creativity and the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit. Well that's it. That's all I got to say.

That's from a porn site, son. The revolution will not be televised.

With a little help from Aaron, I scored the new Hip Hop Album "You Can't See Me" from WWE (that's professional wrestling, one of the great forms of popular entertainment in America) Champion John Cena, mainly as a gag to give to Wes. But then I listened to it and there are a couple good tracks. It reminds me of the good old days of kid-friendly jams, like LL Cool J. I think it might actually work, oddly enough.

If that's too lowbrow for you, there's always third-wave porn, which is developing at a fantastic clip. Check out this content:

"You can't fight city hall." "Death and taxes." "Don't talk about politics or religion." This is all the equivalent of enemy propaganda rolling across the picket line. Lay down GI, lay down GI. We saw it all through the 20th century. And now in the 21st century, it's time to stand up and realize that we should not allow ourselves to be crammed into this rat maze. We should not submit to dehumanization.

I don't know about you, but I'm concerned about what's happening in this world. I'm concerned with the structure. I'm concerned with the systems of control, those that control my life and those that seek to control it even more. I want freedom. That's what I want. And that's what you should want.

It's up to each and every one of us to turn loose and show them the greed, the hatred, the envy, and yes, the insecurities, because that's the central mode of control. Make us feel pathetic, small, so we'll willingly give up our sovereignty, our liberty, our destiny. We have got to realize that we're being conditioned on a mass scale. Start challenging this corporate slave state.

The 21st century is going to be a new century. Not the century of slavery, not the century of lies and issues of no significance, of classism, of sadism, and all the rest of the modes of control. It's going to be the age of human kind standing up for something pure and something right.

What a bunch of garbage: liberal, democrats, conservative, republican, it's all there to control us, it's two sides of the same coin. Two management teams bidding for control, the CEO job of Slavery, Incorporated! The truth is out there in front of you, but they lay out this buffet of lies. I'm sick of it! And I'm not going to take a bite of it. Do you got me?

Our existence is not futile. We're going to win this thing. Humankind is too, good. We're not a bunch of underachievers. We're going to stand up, and we're going to be human beings. We're going to get fired up about the real things, the things that matter, creativity and the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit. Well that's it. That's all I got to say.

That's from a porn site, son. The revolution will not be televised.

Starting off with nerding out...

The first social network I joined was Friendster. I think I posted a spring street personal a long time ago, and once some of us guys at the meek posted the Schwinn City Sinners as a profile on makeoutclub (which is the sort of vice/hipster place) as a gag, but friendster was the first one I actually used.

Just now I got an invite to Where Are You Now which seems to want to cater to English-speaking world-travelers. This struck me as shockingly specific, and I wasn't sure if it was a legit social network or an attempt to get detailed marketing data on a valuable demographic.

But if then I realized it's not that strange (or specific) at all, just look at what else is out there:

Rotten Eggs, A Social Network for Pranksters, which sort of caters to the proto-hacker/goofball/Anarchist cookbook crowd. But some people on it are clearly young, like high-school. It's kind of a voyeuristic thrill to read. Here's an example; here's something a little more lowbrow.

On the opposite side of the high school, and a little more, uhh, advanced in it's social nature, is the "#1 Site For The 18-30 Crowd" Face The Jury, which combined the genius of a general social network with the added bonus of hot or not. Instant skin-deep evaluations. Rankings. Kings. Damsels. The whole nine yards. Feels very Miami. Ugh.

There are probably hundreds of other networks out there this, serving much the same function as old-skool BBSs did, creating communities of maybe a few hundred people. The difference now is that you have the ability for everyone to be online at the same time, and the potential population is huge. These little enclaves exist somewhere underneath bigtime utility players like myspace, friendster and the moneymaking dating services (who are starting to realize that adding social networking boosts their popularity). What someone aught to do is start putting all these tools together with identity services -- ways to let you prove you are who you say you are online -- allow them to start intermingling, becoming authoritative webs of trust and sources of virtual persona. That would be dope.

Imagine if you could carry your identity with you as you wanted on the net. This starts off as something as simple as automatically adding a little avatar and a link back to your own neck of the internet on any comments you left anywhere. But then imagine if people could then see who you were, tell you were a real person with your own community and connections, and you could keep track of replies to your comments. Think of the social discourse that could evolve!

And why not? This is the human thing to do. I haven't had a romantic relationship that didn't include an email component, and in fact I think it played an integral role in most. I use email with my friends and my family. I use IM and IRC to facilitate my work. I post to this blog so people can check up on me and hear what I have to say. This is normal behavior, to use a communications network to, well, communicate. That means to say your piece and stay in touch, but also to find out more about the world around you, to make more connections, to engage in conversation.

When you think 10 or 20 years down the line, John Dewey's optimistic vision of America as a multitude of "communities of inquiry" seems almost possible. I think we're in a watershed era here in terms of how we organize ourselves socially. Things are going to change, but there's no guarantee they're going to change for the better. If we're not careful here, we could also end up with some kind of kind of ugly 1984 situation; propaganda, surveillance, oppression.

Slipping into politix...

While I can point to small (and even some medium-sized) ways in which we're currently drifting in those negative directions, I think the opposite momentum -- the rise of a resiliently and positively American ethic, driven by a shift in the way our society obtains and evaluates information -- is coming up faster and stronger. Bush won another term, yes, but he doesn't have an iron grip on power in this country, nor is he really a horrific villain of epic proportions. He's a very bad president, but I don't believe he is evil. And I think he and his kind are on their way out.

I watched the little press conference today. He's not doing good, the President. He performed pretty well on the personalty scale. I expect he'll pick up a few points in the polls for being nice-sounding and seemingly earnest, but he didn't give many substantive answers to the questions people are asking. That means he either doesn't have any substantive answers, or his actual answers are unpopular. In either case, his general momentum is going to continue.

Compounding that, Bush's uber-GOP coalition (62,000,000 votes can't all be fake) is beginning to splinter. One reporter asked whether he (the Prez) agreed or disagreed with the statement that Democrats were filibustering some truly reactionary judges because they were "against people of faith." Bush was forced to disagree, making some pretty weak noises about how "faith is a personal matter." The statement was made by the #1 Republican in the Senate (and a man with Presidential ambitions of his own, ho ho ho) Bill Frist, just last weekend on a live multi-network Christian telecast called "Justice Sunday."

Meanwhile, the Democrats are behaving like a party out of power should: sticking together. Congress passed a budget 214-211. NO Democrats voted for it; 6 Republicans broke party lines and voted against. The bill cuts Medicare by $10B, but contains $106B in tax cuts, mostly for the already wealthy. Hooyeah.

Under pressure, Bush talks about bipartisanship, but if he wants to be taken seriously he'll have to distance himself from Frist, Delay, the Fundamentalists, and the Party Hatchet Men like Grover Norquest, who famously proclaimed that "Bi-Partisanship is like Date Rape."

These pig-eyed Goldwater geeks and grown-up Reagan Youth are the backbone of the Bush machine. They're king-hell organizers, they've been in and out of power for 30 years, but they've never really been in control before. It's been a rampage ever since they squeaked through the door in an unquestionably fucked-with election, and then got the greatest political gift imaginable with 9/11. They looted the economy, launched an ill-advised and poorly-planned war, and formed the uber-GOP coalition with the good ol' boys, the corporate wing, and a community of post-dispensationalist evangelical Christians which continues to increase its right-wing political clout. All that is coming to an end, because when the chips are down their ideas are bullshit, the electorate is turning against them, and their coalition is spending its precious time in control bickering amongst itself.

I'm a partisan for Utopia, so I'm glad to see the breakup. I think it's going to contine, and I think it's going to set up a better situation for everyone. In the future, it's going to be increasingly difficult to lie to people. Leaders in business, politics and society are going to find it's easier (read: more profitable) to be transparent and good than to be two-faced and clandestine.

Anyway, I'm turning in to get some rest. I get my stitches out tomorrow, and my leg and arm improve by the day.

Starting off with nerding out...

The first social network I joined was Friendster. I think I posted a spring street personal a long time ago, and once some of us guys at the meek posted the Schwinn City Sinners as a profile on makeoutclub (which is the sort of vice/hipster place) as a gag, but friendster was the first one I actually used.

Just now I got an invite to Where Are You Now which seems to want to cater to English-speaking world-travelers. This struck me as shockingly specific, and I wasn't sure if it was a legit social network or an attempt to get detailed marketing data on a valuable demographic.

But if then I realized it's not that strange (or specific) at all, just look at what else is out there:

Rotten Eggs, A Social Network for Pranksters, which sort of caters to the proto-hacker/goofball/Anarchist cookbook crowd. But some people on it are clearly young, like high-school. It's kind of a voyeuristic thrill to read. Here's an example; here's something a little more lowbrow.

On the opposite side of the high school, and a little more, uhh, advanced in it's social nature, is the "#1 Site For The 18-30 Crowd" Face The Jury, which combined the genius of a general social network with the added bonus of hot or not. Instant skin-deep evaluations. Rankings. Kings. Damsels. The whole nine yards. Feels very Miami. Ugh.

There are probably hundreds of other networks out there this, serving much the same function as old-skool BBSs did, creating communities of maybe a few hundred people. The difference now is that you have the ability for everyone to be online at the same time, and the potential population is huge. These little enclaves exist somewhere underneath bigtime utility players like myspace, friendster and the moneymaking dating services (who are starting to realize that adding social networking boosts their popularity). What someone aught to do is start putting all these tools together with identity services -- ways to let you prove you are who you say you are online -- allow them to start intermingling, becoming authoritative webs of trust and sources of virtual persona. That would be dope.

Imagine if you could carry your identity with you as you wanted on the net. This starts off as something as simple as automatically adding a little avatar and a link back to your own neck of the internet on any comments you left anywhere. But then imagine if people could then see who you were, tell you were a real person with your own community and connections, and you could keep track of replies to your comments. Think of the social discourse that could evolve!

And why not? This is the human thing to do. I haven't had a romantic relationship that didn't include an email component, and in fact I think it played an integral role in most. I use email with my friends and my family. I use IM and IRC to facilitate my work. I post to this blog so people can check up on me and hear what I have to say. This is normal behavior, to use a communications network to, well, communicate. That means to say your piece and stay in touch, but also to find out more about the world around you, to make more connections, to engage in conversation.

When you think 10 or 20 years down the line, John Dewey's optimistic vision of America as a multitude of "communities of inquiry" seems almost possible. I think we're in a watershed era here in terms of how we organize ourselves socially. Things are going to change, but there's no guarantee they're going to change for the better. If we're not careful here, we could also end up with some kind of kind of ugly 1984 situation; propaganda, surveillance, oppression.

Slipping into politix...

While I can point to small (and even some medium-sized) ways in which we're currently drifting in those negative directions, I think the opposite momentum -- the rise of a resiliently and positively American ethic, driven by a shift in the way our society obtains and evaluates information -- is coming up faster and stronger. Bush won another term, yes, but he doesn't have an iron grip on power in this country, nor is he really a horrific villain of epic proportions. He's a very bad president, but I don't believe he is evil. And I think he and his kind are on their way out.

I watched the little press conference today. He's not doing good, the President. He performed pretty well on the personalty scale. I expect he'll pick up a few points in the polls for being nice-sounding and seemingly earnest, but he didn't give many substantive answers to the questions people are asking. That means he either doesn't have any substantive answers, or his actual answers are unpopular. In either case, his general momentum is going to continue.

Compounding that, Bush's uber-GOP coalition (62,000,000 votes can't all be fake) is beginning to splinter. One reporter asked whether he (the Prez) agreed or disagreed with the statement that Democrats were filibustering some truly reactionary judges because they were "against people of faith." Bush was forced to disagree, making some pretty weak noises about how "faith is a personal matter." The statement was made by the #1 Republican in the Senate (and a man with Presidential ambitions of his own, ho ho ho) Bill Frist, just last weekend on a live multi-network Christian telecast called "Justice Sunday."

Meanwhile, the Democrats are behaving like a party out of power should: sticking together. Congress passed a budget 214-211. NO Democrats voted for it; 6 Republicans broke party lines and voted against. The bill cuts Medicare by $10B, but contains $106B in tax cuts, mostly for the already wealthy. Hooyeah.

Under pressure, Bush talks about bipartisanship, but if he wants to be taken seriously he'll have to distance himself from Frist, Delay, the Fundamentalists, and the Party Hatchet Men like Grover Norquest, who famously proclaimed that "Bi-Partisanship is like Date Rape."

These pig-eyed Goldwater geeks and grown-up Reagan Youth are the backbone of the Bush machine. They're king-hell organizers, they've been in and out of power for 30 years, but they've never really been in control before. It's been a rampage ever since they squeaked through the door in an unquestionably fucked-with election, and then got the greatest political gift imaginable with 9/11. They looted the economy, launched an ill-advised and poorly-planned war, and formed the uber-GOP coalition with the good ol' boys, the corporate wing, and a community of post-dispensationalist evangelical Christians which continues to increase its right-wing political clout. All that is coming to an end, because when the chips are down their ideas are bullshit, the electorate is turning against them, and their coalition is spending its precious time in control bickering amongst itself.

I'm a partisan for Utopia, so I'm glad to see the breakup. I think it's going to contine, and I think it's going to set up a better situation for everyone. In the future, it's going to be increasingly difficult to lie to people. Leaders in business, politics and society are going to find it's easier (read: more profitable) to be transparent and good than to be two-faced and clandestine.

Anyway, I'm turning in to get some rest. I get my stitches out tomorrow, and my leg and arm improve by the day.

Starting off with nerding out...

The first social network I joined was Friendster. I think I posted a spring street personal a long time ago, and once some of us guys at the meek posted the Schwinn City Sinners as a profile on makeoutclub (which is the sort of vice/hipster place) as a gag, but friendster was the first one I actually used.

Just now I got an invite to Where Are You Now which seems to want to cater to English-speaking world-travelers. This struck me as shockingly specific, and I wasn't sure if it was a legit social network or an attempt to get detailed marketing data on a valuable demographic.

But if then I realized it's not that strange (or specific) at all, just look at what else is out there:

Rotten Eggs, A Social Network for Pranksters, which sort of caters to the proto-hacker/goofball/Anarchist cookbook crowd. But some people on it are clearly young, like high-school. It's kind of a voyeuristic thrill to read. Here's an example; here's something a little more lowbrow.

On the opposite side of the high school, and a little more, uhh, advanced in it's social nature, is the "#1 Site For The 18-30 Crowd" Face The Jury, which combined the genius of a general social network with the added bonus of hot or not. Instant skin-deep evaluations. Rankings. Kings. Damsels. The whole nine yards. Feels very Miami. Ugh.

There are probably hundreds of other networks out there this, serving much the same function as old-skool BBSs did, creating communities of maybe a few hundred people. The difference now is that you have the ability for everyone to be online at the same time, and the potential population is huge. These little enclaves exist somewhere underneath bigtime utility players like myspace, friendster and the moneymaking dating services (who are starting to realize that adding social networking boosts their popularity). What someone aught to do is start putting all these tools together with identity services -- ways to let you prove you are who you say you are online -- allow them to start intermingling, becoming authoritative webs of trust and sources of virtual persona. That would be dope.

Imagine if you could carry your identity with you as you wanted on the net. This starts off as something as simple as automatically adding a little avatar and a link back to your own neck of the internet on any comments you left anywhere. But then imagine if people could then see who you were, tell you were a real person with your own community and connections, and you could keep track of replies to your comments. Think of the social discourse that could evolve!

And why not? This is the human thing to do. I haven't had a romantic relationship that didn't include an email component, and in fact I think it played an integral role in most. I use email with my friends and my family. I use IM and IRC to facilitate my work. I post to this blog so people can check up on me and hear what I have to say. This is normal behavior, to use a communications network to, well, communicate. That means to say your piece and stay in touch, but also to find out more about the world around you, to make more connections, to engage in conversation.

When you think 10 or 20 years down the line, John Dewey's optimistic vision of America as a multitude of "communities of inquiry" seems almost possible. I think we're in a watershed era here in terms of how we organize ourselves socially. Things are going to change, but there's no guarantee they're going to change for the better. If we're not careful here, we could also end up with some kind of kind of ugly 1984 situation; propaganda, surveillance, oppression.

Slipping into politix...

While I can point to small (and even some medium-sized) ways in which we're currently drifting in those negative directions, I think the opposite momentum -- the rise of a resiliently and positively American ethic, driven by a shift in the way our society obtains and evaluates information -- is coming up faster and stronger. Bush won another term, yes, but he doesn't have an iron grip on power in this country, nor is he really a horrific villain of epic proportions. He's a very bad president, but I don't believe he is evil. And I think he and his kind are on their way out.

I watched the little press conference today. He's not doing good, the President. He performed pretty well on the personalty scale. I expect he'll pick up a few points in the polls for being nice-sounding and seemingly earnest, but he didn't give many substantive answers to the questions people are asking. That means he either doesn't have any substantive answers, or his actual answers are unpopular. In either case, his general momentum is going to continue.

Compounding that, Bush's uber-GOP coalition (62,000,000 votes can't all be fake) is beginning to splinter. One reporter asked whether he (the Prez) agreed or disagreed with the statement that Democrats were filibustering some truly reactionary judges because they were "against people of faith." Bush was forced to disagree, making some pretty weak noises about how "faith is a personal matter." The statement was made by the #1 Republican in the Senate (and a man with Presidential ambitions of his own, ho ho ho) Bill Frist, just last weekend on a live multi-network Christian telecast called "Justice Sunday."

Meanwhile, the Democrats are behaving like a party out of power should: sticking together. Congress passed a budget 214-211. NO Democrats voted for it; 6 Republicans broke party lines and voted against. The bill cuts Medicare by $10B, but contains $106B in tax cuts, mostly for the already wealthy. Hooyeah.

Under pressure, Bush talks about bipartisanship, but if he wants to be taken seriously he'll have to distance himself from Frist, Delay, the Fundamentalists, and the Party Hatchet Men like Grover Norquest, who famously proclaimed that "Bi-Partisanship is like Date Rape."

These pig-eyed Goldwater geeks and grown-up Reagan Youth are the backbone of the Bush machine. They're king-hell organizers, they've been in and out of power for 30 years, but they've never really been in control before. It's been a rampage ever since they squeaked through the door in an unquestionably fucked-with election, and then got the greatest political gift imaginable with 9/11. They looted the economy, launched an ill-advised and poorly-planned war, and formed the uber-GOP coalition with the good ol' boys, the corporate wing, and a community of post-dispensationalist evangelical Christians which continues to increase its right-wing political clout. All that is coming to an end, because when the chips are down their ideas are bullshit, the electorate is turning against them, and their coalition is spending its precious time in control bickering amongst itself.

I'm a partisan for Utopia, so I'm glad to see the breakup. I think it's going to contine, and I think it's going to set up a better situation for everyone. In the future, it's going to be increasingly difficult to lie to people. Leaders in business, politics and society are going to find it's easier (read: more profitable) to be transparent and good than to be two-faced and clandestine.

Anyway, I'm turning in to get some rest. I get my stitches out tomorrow, and my leg and arm improve by the day.

(Big Post; I Spell-Checked It And Everything)

Question. Is it a cop-out to believe in "the children," to think that a generation yet to be born has the answers to the world's problems? Yes and no.

In one sense, that this can be a transfer of power, a way of rationalizing away personal responsibility, it's clearly bogus. You can't wait on the kids to solve your problems; believing in them is no excuse for being inactive yourself.

On the other hand, the great ends of humanity are essentially multi-generational. Justice, shared prosperity, a totality of lives well-lived, these are things that span centuries in their scope, that are in some ways infinite. So on the level that you're willing to think big and take it seriously, it's quite a heavy thing to really believe in the potential children. It is an implicit call to action. Prepare the way!

I believe in our generation. My generation. What's that? Well, I believe that I and a minority of my peers in the 24 - 34 year old age range are on the leading edge of the post-gen-X birth wave that peaked in 1990, meaning it's crest is coming due to adulthood in 2008. We are chronologically closer to gen-x, but culturally closer to what is coming next. We are the forerunners.

It's important to realize that while the push for civil rights and gender equality were resounding steps forward for our country, everything else in the 60s largely failed. Rock n' Roll was thoroughly co-opted, permanently loosing a great portion of its mojo by being associated with selling things to adolescents. None of the really radical political or cultural stuff actually took off, though some of it took root. The sexual revolution begat porn, but this is really nothing new in terms of civilization, or even American culture.

By contrast, the Right-Wing things that weathered the 60s have grown up to become Wal*Mart, Big Oil and the Modern Republican Party and $3B associated network. In real terms, this is largely why they've been winning: their boomers are by in large more powerful and connected compared to ours.

But our time will be different. We have a powerful economic and cultural token with our embracing of Open Source. We are not seeking to construct an underground fantasy world, but rather a public utopia. This is a stronger endeavor. It is more bold and yet more achievable. Lots more to say about that down the line.

Otherwise it's been tough. I'm worn out from work NYC lifestyle, kind of lonely, and there are ominous rumblings around the status of the road trip. On the plus side I've been making some Art with Frank, and my straight-up physical condition is improving week by week.

Another bright point is that I'm reading Hunter's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 and loving it of course. I never read it before, if you can believe that. Another formative piece I was missing all along. Read on for my thoughts half-way through. Another 1,200 words.

Looking back, the parallels in terms of electoral dynamics between Dean and McGovern are clear, as are those between Kerry and Muskie. The anointed frontrunner was Big Ed Muskie, the Man from Maine. George McGovern was a dark horse from South Dakota -- a political nowhere -- who was running on a staunch anti-war platform and driven by a grassroots campaign of young professionals. On the far left was Gene McCarthy, a reasonable analogue for Kucinich. In the rest of the mishmash you can see faint parallels between Hube and Gephardt/Lieberman, Andrews and Edwards.

There are no real analogues for Clark. And such a political animal as George Wallace -- a right wing populist Democrat, former governor of Alabama and recent staunch opponent of de-segregation -- has no modern day equivalent, though you can see elements of his appeal in Bush/Cheney '04. The point though is that the lines between McGovern and Dean and Kerry and Muskie are strong, and the really interesting thing here is that in '72 the dark horse broke through, and was immediately stomped by Nixon. Comparatively, in '04 the Anointed Candidate (with most of the same problems as Muskie) prevailed thanks to a stupendously superior use of media.

This says something about the evolving relationship between the media and politics 1972 vs 20004.

It also totally destroys the common observation that a Dean nomination would have been just like a McGovern nomination when he went national; a prison-block stomping. In fact, a close examination begs speculation as to what Dean might really have done against Bush.

McGovern was stomped, yes, but not because he was a grassroots/outsider who was against the war. George went up against Nixon exhausted, broke and with no-one backing him. The AFL-CIO and many regional heavyweights essentially sat the election out. For a comparison as to what this would have meant in our modern times, imagine Kerry/Edwards '04 with no ACT or DFA of Internet Millions to draw on. That would have been a slaughter too.

There are two main things which I believe would have favored a national Dean candidacy which Kerry did not capitalize on:

1) The advent of Open Source and the internet, which would have really gone into a higher-order effect if he were actually the candidate. Kerry used what Dean's style of campaign created as a beachhead, but didn't extend the territory much. Joe Trippi would have had to have been replaced as campaign manager (a fact which even he acknowledges), but if his campaign were truly allowed to flourish, it would have been much more advanced than what we eventually ended up building.

2) The lack of an existing class of political burnouts. In effect, Dean would have been able to draw on the young professionals who drove McGovern, as well as the true radicals who got "Clean For Gene" (McGovern) in 1968 and forced Lyndon Johnson out of the race before getting stomped by the Hube/Daily Axis in Chicago, and thus pretty much lost as a source of energy for the square world.

The major Dean liabilities were conventional media illiteracy and organizational issues at the HQ level. Had he weathered the primaries -- which might have come down to having CNN not replay a 30-second sound clip 600 times in a 24 hour span -- these are problems that could have been solved.

You have to realize is that if Dean had won, he would have had establishment backing just as much as Kerry. ACT was going to happen. MoveOn was going to happen. MFA was going to happen, and the Democratic Party was going to fight for its political life no matter what. Unlike McGovern, Dean was going to lead a united party.

Did you know they were planning to have 200,000 people come to the convention!? Really take over the whole city and make it a grassroots networking bazaar rather than a cold bunch of vip-list cocktail parties and meaningless pap for TV... that shit would have been tight! It's a bit of fantastic indulgence, yeah, but when I think back on what might have been, it still gets me high.

Bush is much worse than Nixon -- a fact which Hunter wryly brought up on numerous occasions -- but there are electoral parallels there as well. Both faced sagging popularity in the midst of a festering war. Both aligned with cultural conservatives and big business. Both were willing to fight dirty.

On this count, Nixon went beyond Bush/Rove to a great degree. For instance, in 1972, Nixon's hatchet men actually burglarized people to steal secret documents. First they stole private medical records which they used to reveal that McGovern's running mate had received electro-shock therapy for depression. Then they stole the Democratic strategy guide from their Watergate offices, the crime (as opposed to, say, the carpet-bombing of cambodia) for which the whole house of cards would eventually tumble.

This is the other thing to realize about '72 vs '04; not only was McGovern left out to dry by the Democratic establishment, he was hit right off the mark with leaked press reports that his VP was insane. While Bush's message guys are absolutely brutal, medical reports proving your Veep is nuts is a damn sight more damaging to a campaign than an ad campaign attacking your service in Vietnam (e.g. the Swift Boat Veterans For (un)Truth).

Bush is much worse than Nixon, and looking back I think with Dean we could have beaten him. I believe Howard was a better candidate, personal weaknesses and all. I think primary-voting Democrats (urged on by talking heads, no doubt) cared more about his willingness to commit gaffes than the voters eventually would have. Bush screws up his speeches all the time, but you know what he means. This is something that people who are honestly engaging in the political process -- a.k.a. "trying to decide who to vote for" -- respond to, often positively. Our side needs to take to hart that our malapropos-happy present hasn't suffered a whit for his lack of silver tongue. He has a strong gut-level message and (usually) appears confident and unafraid. Kerry had a wishy-washy message and often appeared rambling, desperate, or orange.

Which is not to deny Kerry his due. I pushed for the man, and I believe he did the best he could. We all did, under the circumstances. It was close, but just wasn't enough.

I don't know where the Poltix train is running. I'm keeping semi-warm with leftovers and good-guy civic engagement, waiting for the road trip to clear the decks. The future says New York in the fall. Luke will be here, and so will work and I'll be pretty near dead broke when all's said and done.

I don't know what's coming next. The kids are still coming. If we hold the previous pattern on turnout, there should be between 8 to 10 million new voters (out of just less than 20 million people turning 18 between 2004 and 2008), and if we hold the line on popularity (let alone increase our edge) they'll break our way 3 to 2. That means a 2 to 3 million vote advantage next time around. That will have an impact.

But that's only if we can get it up. All I've heard any really excited talk about lately is taking out Joe Lieberman in 2006. Still no real idea what the call to arms will be. Will keep searching and let you know.