Two Ideas

Now that The New York Times has weighed in on the Boing Boing versus Violet Blue imbroglio, a topic where I didn’t realize I had much to say, I realized that I did have a couple of words.

I think it’s really very good when people reconsider the things they’ve said in conversation. My goodness, you can still find things I wrote on the Internet ten or fifteen years ago, and I certainly don’t think all of the same things now. I think that the evolution of personal viewpoints is normal, and healthy, and should be welcome.

However, I think it’s really bad when you pretend not to have said the things that you previously did. To enforce this kind of ex post facto internal consistency is dishonest. Maybe not to-the-core dishonest, but certainly untrustworthy, and in general not the kind of conversational partner I want to have.

I think that de-publishing is much closer to (but not the same as) pretending you never said something than it is to reconsidering previous viewpoints. It does strike me as uncomfortably Orwellian, even if it is a private group doing it, rather than the government. I mean, how would people feel if the New York Times decided to remove every mention of Monica Lewinsky from their archive due to poor behavior on her part? If Warren Ellis is right, and Cory and Xeni are the “cut and paste editors of the Internet,” then it matters, regardless of whether that job was thrust upon them or one that they willingly embraced.

Finally, wading through blog comments on this whole issue reminds me why it’s a good thing to keep your conversations small in the first place.

Warren Ellis very nearly gets at something I’ve tried to get my head around for some time.To butcher his argument, the Web is, or should be, moving beyond the era of linkblogs like Boing Boing “curating” the net. He thinks it’s easy enough getting linked, and that “half the web” shouldn’t just be links to the other half.

But I think Mr. Ellis, who I hold in the highest esteem, misses something: link curation is a type of collage, which comes from the French word coller, meaning “to paste.” So when he writes, “Cory and Xeni [of Boing Boing] are the copy/paste editors for the internet,” he’s actually describing what they do as collage.

Linkblogging is only one kind of collage, or more broadly assemblage, which some people have begun to think of as art. We all know, or have been, that guy who thinks that his mix tapes are art, or his DJing is art, or that his mashups and submissions to I can has cheezburger? are art.

And maybe they are. I don’t want to be in the business of telling people what is or isn’t art. But then, if all collage, all “remix culture” is art, so is wearing the right combination of designer clothes (wardrobe design, not fashion design), stuffing your house full of the right stuff (interior furnishing, not interior design), and listening to the right bands are art. Because you’re assembling them, transforming them into something new through combination and personalization. And I don’t want to go down that road, myself: consumption and self-selection through purchasing aren’t art, at least not to me.

So if these things aren’t art, or are art only incidentally, what is their primary function?

The astute reader will guess my assertion by checking my post title: I think these things are a conversation, an ongoing conversation.

Now, conversation absolutely can be cultural production in the Warren Ellis-approved sense: good book reviews, or film reviews, are part of a conversation between the author or filmmaker, the critic, other critics, and the reader or viewer. Mixtapes achieve their power through comparison and contrast, reinforcement and juxtaposition. The best LOLcats, as Anil Dash has argued, achieve their power through a consistent grammar of repetition and variation changing through time. Isn’t that just a fancy way of describing a conversation?

This is one reason that blogs with comments seemed to be the thing just a little while ago. I remember, at the one Seattle Bloggers meetup I can recall attending, that Robert Scoble criticized my metablog design for not making comments obvious. I felt, and still feel, that the best response to a blog post isn’t a comment but another blog post. Now Scoble says that blog comments are dead. I can’t figure out if I’m on the bleeding edge, or so far back that I only look like I’m in the race. (Or maybe the universe wraps around on itself, and I am so far back that I’m in first place. Or vice-versa.)

In the end, it might be nice to separate the web into content and remixed indices to that content, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think we’re going to keep surfing the wave of remix culture for some time to come, and that the waves will be made of old and new alike. Sorry Warren, the linkblog is probably here to stay, at least for a while.

In his review of the new production of The Bacchae, starring Alan Cumming as Dionysus, Charles Isherwood compares Cumming’s appearance to Shirley Temple and Boy George, missing (or ignoring) the obvious debt to The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Frank N Furter. So when Isherwood writes that the production’s “insistent playfulness makes the transition to the horror of the final scenes troublesome,” I wonder if he’s watching the same play that I’d be seeing. (The use of pop R&B songs written for the production increases my sense that this production owes more than a little to Rocky Horror.)

In other words, if I magically end up with a couple of extra hours one night in New York, I’d love to see this. (Aw, crap, it ends on the 13th, several days before I make it to New York.  Maybe I come down from Connecticut over the weekend? Anyone in New York want to see this next Friday night?)

I’ve discovered that William Gibson is onstage tonight, being interviewed by Nancy Pearl, for free.

I’m planning to attend.

[Edit: The official event page indicates that this will cost $10. Not sure about attending, but more inclined to go if others are going -- e-mail or call if you're planning to attend.]

The following is an e-mail I sent to one of my co-workers, heading to Japan. I’m recording it here so that I can find it if I ever need to do so, as the corporate e-mail system has eaten it before. “The Hotel” is the Royal Park Hotel, which is right next to TCAT.

(more…)

Far be it from me to say something nice about our current president, but hot-air artist is a wonderful turn of phrase to describe not just any old gasbag, but an eloquent one.

Slate discusses Don DeLillo’s new novel, Falling Man, and reminds me exactly why he may be America’s most iconic novelist: the titles of his novels become the titles of entirely unrelated movies.

Given American culture, that makes him a truer visionary than if they turned his books into movies.

While I like dogs, my wife doesn’t: she grumbles when neighbors’ dogs disturb her with their barking, and she’s a touch nervous around larger, more ferocious-looking specimens.

I wonder if some apartment buildings limit dogs to certain floors. It’s more forgiving than blanket permission, but also gives people who prefer to be dog-free some choices as well.

Lately, at the QFC near my apartment, I’ve taken to checking out in the self-checkout line, even though I despise it on principle: I prefer the modicum of human interaction in the regular checkout line — I stopped to say hello to a cashier tonight, one I’ve known since I moved to Seattle nearly three years ago — and because I don’t like the idea that automation will be a wage-supressing bargaining chip come contract negotiation time. I further object to the notion that the store is saving money but not giving me an additional discount.

Moreover, people are much slower at checking themselves out than an experienced cashier is. Oodles more slow.

So why do I stand in that line, then, with the inherent inferiority?

Because it’s one line to four registers: even if each person checking out is a third the speed, and the line is the same length as the others (it’s frequently shorter), I still save time.

One line for all of the cashier-managed registers (a la Fry’s and the Post Office) would have me back there in no time. Of course, that’s fine with QFC.

It’s like poetry slams, but for hip, with-it Silicon Valley manager types. Maybe “Jargon Watch” style slang for long conferences with back-to-back presentations, like Sales conferences or Demo-oriented conferences.

(Tip of the hat to my co-worker Ron Dubois, from whose mouth the term came.)

In an eye-opening article in Slate, Fred Kaplan writes that Condoleezza Rice “invokes her academic credentials to evade responsibility for decisions that she’s made or for policies that she’s helped devise.” More specifically, Rice argues that as a student of history, she has learned that far-future consequences are unforseeable, that the now-seemingly-negative may turn out to be positive, and vice-versa — and that, because we can’t predict how her decisions will be judged in thirty years, a hundred years, or a thousand years, we must not judge them today, either.

This may strike many people as both eminently true and eminently indefensible; after all, we still have to make decisions, and build on those decisions, even if we can’t know what our great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren will think, even if our goal is to make choices that will enable those distant descendants to exist and to thrive.

To me, the interesting aspect of her comment is that her eschatological objectivity (in The End, we can and will know) brings Rice and her fellow conservative academics to the same place as the radical subjectivity of their left-wing postmodern academic opponents in the culture wars, a position for which the postmodernists were soundly spanked by the good upstanding believers in absolute, objective reality.

Of course, the news isn’t that people engaged in politics (even academic politics) pillory their opponents for things that both sides do for opposite reasons. The news (if such an aphorism can be news) is that the poet was right: extremes meet.