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Monday, November 17, 2003
A pain in the friend 
| | I haven't seen my old friend Gil Templeton since his brother David's wedding, whenever that was. Ten years ago? Twelve? Both Gil and David worked for me — Gil as a copywriter in North Carolina and David as a PR account executive in California. Both guys were as different as two primary colors, with a few significant exceptions, especially in the humor department. Both were very funny guys. I remember how Gil (who went on to write piles of sketch comedy ... and act in some too) and I co-wrote a country music song, or part of one, anyway, when we should have been working late one night. Most of it was Gil's. All I remember is the refrain: |
| | I'm too old to fuck
and too young to die
but not too drunk to eat
So bring my baby some likker
and burn me up some meat |
| | David used to crack everybody up with a perfect imitation of... (gulp) me. Before then I never had any idea that I was imitable, or that I had a walk others called a "waddle." |
| | The Templeton Brothers were terrific company. I loved them both. Still do. However, as too often happens, geography gets in the way, and life goes on with less and less contact, until... |
| | A few minutes ago I got a email from David, who's now in Connecticut, pointing to a cover story by Gil in the Nashville Scene, the arts weekly in the Music City, where Gil moved after he left North Carolina in the early 80s. It's The Pain Chronicles: One man's life-changing, body-aching, drug-addictive struggles with a devastating injury — a shorter version of Gil's forthcoming book by the same title, from Coldtreepress. It's a harrowing tale, and told, as always, with sharp humor. |
| | I had no idea. Seeing the picture above brought tears to my eyes. There's My Man, with a cane. Same glasses. Same hair. Same strong chin. Same wise-ass smile. I had forgotten how much I miss him. |
| | We're so lucky, most of us. Life is a death sentence, but most of our time on death row is a cakewalk. The journey is the reward, right? Except for those of us whose ships are caught on the rocks. |
| | Right now I'm feeling lucky to have these two good brothers as friends. Even after all these years apart. |
Life in the ghetto
| | Sitting at Apachecon next to Doug Kaye while Mark Pilgrim gives a talk on Atom that I almost understand. Before last night, I had never met Mark in person. I didn't realize until a bunch of us were sitting around talking trash, that Mark, Sam, Ken and Joe all live a few minutes apart in my old home state of North Carolina. |
Can we stand for candidates who won't stand for the Net?
| | Over the weekend I sent a simple idea to Cameron Barrett, who works for the Clark campaign, and to Jim Moore who works for Dean. The message: I would love to see their candidates make an impassioned plea to keep the Internet free of interference from the entertainment industry. I would welcome this for two reasons. |
| | 1. First, I'm part of a constituency, like many others, who are looking for a candidate to vote for who supports our primary issue. Nothing unusual about that, easy to understand. |
| | 2. But as important, it would signal that the candidate is not beholden to the media companies. I would happily give money to candidates for ads that warn that the media industry is trying to rob us of our future, and explains how important it is to protect the independence of the Internet. Use the media industry channels to undermine their efforts to the control channels they don't own, yet. |
| | Think about it. It's a poison pill that a candidate we can trust would happily take. Both Clark and Dean have raised prodigious amounts of money on the Internet. Now, how about using that money to keep the Internet free. |
| | Here's how that one concluded: |
| | I think we need a galvanizing issue. I suggest Saving the Net. To do that, we need to treat the Net as two things: |
| | - a public domain, and therefore
- a natural habitat for markets
|
| | In other words, we need to see the Net as a marketplace that has done enormous good, is under extreme threat and needs to be saved. |
| | The Internet has proven to be a fine marketplace for all kinds of stuff. Look up any product on a search engine, and you'll see free markets at work all over the place, with power growing on both the supply and the demand sides o every category you can name. |
| | Markets flourish on the Net or with the help of the Net because the Net is free. That's free as in beer, speech, liberty and enterprise. That freedom is guaranteed by the end-to-end nature of the Net, and the NEA principles it engenders: "Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it and Anybody can improve it." |
| | This may sound a bit like communism to conservative sensibilities, unless it is made clear that the Net belongs to that class of things (gravity, the core of the Earth, the stars, atmosphere, ideas) that cannot be owned and even thinking about owning it is ludicrous. |
| | Now, to the elections. Look at the two big political parties; both have existed largely as funding mechanisms. For proof, ask yourself, "When was the last time I went to a party meeting?" Whatever other functions they serve, the parties are fundamentally about The Money. |
| | At least until the Net came along. |
| | As I write this, Democratic candidate Howard Dean just gathered his party's largest campaign fund for the most recent quarter. The mainstream press has acknowledged that most of this money came from fund-raising on the Internet. But they avoid visiting a fact that should be deeply troubling to every candidate running (and then governing) for money rather than for voters: Dean's lead is owed to a huge number of small donations, not to a small number of large special interests. If he's being bought, it's by his voters. This is a New Thing. It's also been made possible by the Net. |
| | I am not endorsing Howard Dean here (for the record, I'm a registered independent who mostly has voted Libertarian in recent state and federal elections). But I am endorsing a new kind of politics based on the presence in the world of a free marketplace for ideas as well as for products and services. We get to protect that free marketplace by exercising our freedom to use it. |
| | Saving the Net and the NEA goods that thrive on the Net should be a paramount concern for technologists everywhere. Those goods include Linux and every idea that's good enough to grow when it passes from one brain to another, gaining value along the way. |
| | Our work is cut out for us. Let's do it. |
| | By the way, I believe that Saving the Net will be done mostly by preventing and repealing laws, rather than by making any new laws. That's the libertarian in me talking. (The Libertarian Party site appears to have been hacked, by the way, since going there currently brings browsers to the "Satanic Alliance." Jeez. |
Conditional Celebrity Celebration, cont'd
| | But why is my picture wedged between the title "Celebrating Conditional Celebrity" and the line, "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people"? |
| | Three reasons: 1) It was the right size (not too big); 2) I was in a hurry; and 3) I liked it. See, I was experimenting yesterday with putting pictures with each of my posts. Natalie's was the last in a trial run. |
| | What I love about the rest of her response is that 1) she read my whole post closely, and 2) she didn't take any of it personally. Instead, she asked good questions and moved thinking forward, which is what makes blogversation a lot more useful than the point/counterpoint yelling-at conventions of traditional journalism and the televised infotainment that travels by the same noun. See here: |
| | Like I said, though, that's not the main point of Doc's post. Going through his arguments: |
| | -He writes, "I have the same problem with Jennifer's preoccupation wity celebrity as I did with Clay's preoccupation with power. Weblogs are about neither, at least not fundamentally." (My comment: I don't understand the sense in which Doc is refuting Clay; Clay doesn't seem to be discussing what weblogs are "about." Rather, he's showing why it's likely that blogs will never be linked to equally.) |
| | Note that I used the past tense in referring to Clay's essay. Natalie's right. And Clay touches on one of my points when he writes, "stars exist not because of some cliquish preference for one another, but because of the preference of hundreds of others pointing to them. Their popularity is a result of the kind of distributed approval it would be hard to fake." Still, I think Clay's essay missed something by focussing on "power," "stars" and "popularity." What makes blogs very different from other journals is power opportunities. The threshold of linkworthiness is very low here. This is a huge thing, and those (highly loaded) nouns invite measurements that are all beside that point. |
| | -Doc argues with Howard's terms: "medium," "newsworthy," etc. (I feel strange defending Howard, but what's the relevance of whether or not blogs are a medium? Also: when arguing that blogs are popular [meaning, linked to] based on the worthiness, not the "newsworthiness," of their posts, he's shifting the context of Howard's comment. Howard is probably saying that, to a blogger and the blogger's usual readers, personal anecdotes can be as worthy of a post as a new book release. Doc, however, is discussing what makes a blog popular or link-worthy. Given his negative response to Clay's emphasis on incoming links, I'm not sure how to reconcile his focus on blogs' link-worthiness. On the other hand, I admire his argument that it's insight, rather than sass, that really gets a blog noticed. It's not a fair critique of Howard's use of "newsworthiness," but it is a fair critique of why a blog's "cronyism" isn't that important to a blog's popularity or "insider status.") |
| | First, there's a critical distinction, which I make elsewhere, between a medium and a place. One implies a one-way sending of messages. The other implies a location where conversations (among many other things) can happen. Further explanation risks getting into a boring digression into cognitive linguistics. That last link does a good a job as any of explaining the distinction. |
| | Second, I wasn't responding negatively to Clay's emphasis on incoming links. If anything (as I said above) my problem was with the vocabulary he used to frame his arguments. In fact, I agree with Clay (and Google, and Phil Pearson) that incoming links are an excellent way to measure the value of a blog. Or of anything on the Web. |
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