Scrawled in Wax

Well folks, this should have happened about a month ago, but… Scrawled in Wax will stop updating for a while. I know, I know - you can barely read this for the tears suddenly streaming down your face. You wonder: What shall I do? How will I survive? Be strong, dear reader, be strong. But I can just see it now: as you reach the end of this post, you shall fall on all fours, gnashing your teeth in anguish, screaming up at the sky while striking the ground, demanding to know “why God, why?”, the hollow pit of despair building in your gut like a black hole…

Ahem. Sorry. Got a bit carried away there. Anyway - there is a good reason for what will likely be a five or six week absence. I say ‘likely’ because part of doing a PhD is one’s comprehensive exams and I have one coming up on May 1st and 2nd. If all goes well, the blog will be back with its verbose, poorly thought-out analysis of tech, pop culture and gaming in early May. If I fail, this blog will never update again because, having received final confirmation that I’m not cut out for this academic thing, I will have left to travel the world with a special troupe of circus acrobats who care more about describing somersaults than actually doing them.

If for some reason you care, my upcoming exam is on Literary Theory and Criticism - it involves lots of the major western theory on literature from Plato and Aristotle, through the Enlightenment and 18th century (Locke, Kant, Hegel etc.) onto Marxism and then a slew of 20th century schools like formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and, as if that weren’t enough, also feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory. Oh, for fun, there’s stuff like Heidegger and the Frankfurt school thrown in there as well. Naturally, if you know me personally or read this blog at all regularly, you know the point of this third paragraph was to elongate the phrase “I am fucked”.

If you feel like contributing something while I’m gone, then… I’ll be very very surprised. But when I get back, hopefully I can dust off this blog and make good on the modest growth it’s seen over the past few months (thanks mainly to a couple of links from Fimoculous). In the meantime, I’ll be probably be obsessively updating my Twitter and, if all gets too much for you, then remember: it’s navalang [at] gmail [dot] com.

We here at Scrawled in Wax appreciate your custom and look forward to serving you in the future… Heh. Seriously though, thanks for reading.

-Nav

As I walked home this evening, the winter sun disappearing behind rows of identical houses, I found myself listening to LCD Soundsystem’s “All of My Friends”. It is that rare, dying breed of a song that sometimes feels as if speaks directly to a generation, to a moment in history. What is most stark about the song - indeed, the reason it felt like a revelation to me when I heard it - is that it describes the thing that postmodernity was supposed to have rendered impossible: shared experience. But when LCD’s James Murphy sings of the drunken late-night adventures of twenty- and thirty-somethings, there was an instant connection for me. The bittersweet tale of finding peace in a future one never envisioned is something that I and many others have found themselves ruefully mulling as, at three in the morning, we realise our buzz is wearing off.

I was thinking all this, walking down a suburban street just north of Toronto. What is the shared experience of pop culture now that everything has become so fragmented, shattered into a million pieces? Even if one considers oneself ‘a media person’, simply checking out random Muxtapes will remind you that millions of people - people just like you - are listening to music you have never even heard of, let alone heard. When pushed, I have to admit: the common experience of “All of My Friends” is a chimera, a localised example, privy to a scattered set of disillusioned, educated child-adults like, well, me and ‘all of my friends’. The ‘meaning’ of the song (as if one could ever speak of such a thing) reveals itself in the random subjectivity of one’s reaction. Like the specificity at the core of “Stuff White People Like“, ‘common experience’ in the postmodern reveals itself to be only a comforting fiction, a way of feeling connected with something that, as it turns out, isn’t as ‘larger than us’ as we hoped.

It all seemed a rather fitting line of thought for the evening. As I returned home, a family member had lit candles in the kitchen. Through the windows that were, for once, naked and uncovered, we could see all the houses around stay dark as the sky became darker. And, like those who lived near us, we sat in the gloom, chatting, inevitably remembering the great blackout of 2003, quietly happy in the thought that we were part of something that millions of others were participating in too.

I was wary of the symbolic core of Earth Hour. I wondered whether it wouldn’t simply speak to those already concerned with sustainability, while it might simply pass by those who consider the problem an issue of marketing or hype rather than science or policy. But, to put the environmental issues aside for a moment, let me consider: what does it mean to feel connected in 2008? If the postmodern fracturing of popular culture has left commonality tattered and torn, then where is the immense power of the shared experience to be found? After all, there’s something in this feeling, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Whatever it is though, I can’t help but feel it’s important. But where it will come from next?

The answers are, I think, too long - and too complex - for even very clever individuals to answer. The common will be found in the collective, in, to deliberately take up a Web phrase, the wisdom of crowds. Earth Hour is only one example of this, and a tiny one at that too: when there are 6.5 billion people in the world, 30 million is only a spark - but perhaps it will be one that will lead to a larger flame. I think the internet will have something to do with it. I, despite my curmudgeonly ramblings, still believe this thing I spend so much time connected to will bear fruit that, to the current world, will seem gloriously utopian. I also think it’s possible that it is only catastrophe that now has the capacity to bring people together on the macro level. I guess I don’t know. All I’m really saying at the end of this is, in 2008, it’s hard to find what you and your neighbour have in common, as what we used to call culture has fragmented into innumerable pieces that cannot be put back together.

But tonight, as we sat in the pale yellow flicker of candelight, a simple idea pushed its way through the murky, postmodern mass. I think it would be regressive and dangerous to talk of a common humanity, of some universal core that we all share. We’ve heard those phrases before and we’ve seen how they went wrong. Still, something was there. Something besides the glow flickered. I suppose I don’t really have a name for it. But, if you’re reading this, then I will take on faith that you too have some sense of what I am gesturing towards. And that right there - that ineffable, nameless thing that we both point to - is, one hopes, a place to start.

Clearly then, I am obsessed with Muxtape. But sometimes obsessions are good things - or, perhaps more accurately, recognising obsessions as such is a good thing. The recognition reveals something, it peels back the layers to get at the desire at its root. So, I am obviously returning to think about Muxtape. But why? Well, I am curious about two things: 1) First, why did Muxtape explode so quickly? 2) And secondly, why did Muxtape seem to fill a void, as if people had just been waiting for it before they knew it was something they wanted? So, some thoughts.

1) Let’s skip the usual “breakneck speed of information on the internet” bit to explain Muxtape’s ‘meteoric rise’ (that’s a totally fresh phrase right?). More interesting is the potentially circular, enclosed logic of Muxtape’s instant popularity: tech/web types spend an awful lot of time in front of their computers, and are, perhaps tautologically, more likely to use the Web as a social tool. So, an application comes along that lets you: a) express who you are; b) do so using the the contemporary cultural marker for the the overlap of culture and technology, digital music; c) share and compare, boast and roast (yes, that second one is totally my phrase). It spreads and is instantly popular among people (like me) who spend their time sitting in front of computers, listening to music and using those two things to connect with other people and mark out their position within contemporary culture. Positive spin: we are the bleeding-edge, on the cusp of the lightning-quick exchange of units of culture as we blur and destroy lines of separation in both physical space and consciousness, engaging with culture on a profound level. Negative spin: geek-hipster circle jerk.

2) In the transition between analogue and digital, what happens when the change is not about media but a cultural artefact? This, to me, is worth thinking about. A given object in culture (like the mixtape) gains importance because of its exchange value - when I give you a mixtape, I hand over a piece of my identity, marked out by certain cultural signifiers that individually have a value that works in relation to the broader social context; you receive it as such, giving it value for those same reasons. So, in the digitization of the mixtape - and here I mean digitization of the form (the online mixtape) and not the content (the music) - what happens to the ‘value of the exchange’? Is it reduced? Or morphed in some fashion? Is sending someone a link to your Muxtape the same as handing them an object? What does this have to with the fetish of the cultural object? And how is the system of exchange disturbed/changed/ruptured by the change in - well? - spatial relations, aesthetics, speed that come with digitization?

3) How are we to think of a piece of technology simply ‘making sense’? Or, as I said, why did Muxtape seem to fill a need that it itself created? There would be two views on this: the positive one would be that new media technologies reveal new forms of connection and expression that work in symbiotic relation to the cultural shifts that they themselves engender. New media changes how people relate to art, each other and themselves. As those avenues of connection and culture change, new forms and modes of expression and interaction arise. Thus, to deliberately be a bit circular, Muxtape works because it is part of the systemic, social changes that create a need for things like Muxtape. The negative spin would be the Adorno/Jameson take - that this is a system that fragments culture and turns cultural expression into a mode of distraction and sublimation. For once though, I think I buy the positive spin here.

Yesterday, new mixtape app “Muxtape” spread through the tech set like wildfire. The site is brilliant in its simplicity and, like Dropbox and Instapaper before it, Muxtape works because it does one thing in an uncluttered, intuitive fashion. To my mind, this is how web applications should work: take a cultural form like the mixtape, with all its (flirtatious?) connotations, and translate it to the web in a way that just ‘makes sense’. The mixtape especially seems to work well because of its twofold nature: on the one hand, it is a sort of gift that you give to someone you like; and on the other, it is a creative thing says something about its maker. And aren’t creating and sharing what this whole Web 2.0 schtick is supposed to be about? This, I imagine, was the reason Muxtape exploded the way it did.

Of course, many were quick to point out that putting up music online to stream for free is rife with legal issues, and more than a few bloggers and twitterers suggested that Muxtape, as great as it is, will be taken down before it has a chance to take off or ‘monetize’. This seems like a reasonable, if unfortunate, prediction. With a culture currently obsessed with the enforcement of intellectual property laws, it seems unlikely that Muxtape will be able to continue without some major changes and/or licensing deals. Either way, the transparent nature of Muxtape - that it is an agnostic tool - seems to be both its blessing and its curse.

This question - of how copyright either enables or restricts cultural expression - is both ubiquitous and tricky. After all, in some sense ‘copyright versus culture’ is a false dichotomy: the ideas that underpin copyright law - ownership, private property, accreditation and individualism - are cultural linchpins as much as they are legal ones. But Muxtape’s intuitiveness, the simple fact that it ‘just works’ in both a technical and a cultural sense, renders the question in a somewhat different light. Though the disjunct between content providers and users is clear to anyone who has ever heard of DRM, to what extent does Muxtape highlight the contradictory, even antagonistic relationship between intellectual property laws and what people actually want to do with media and art?

Yes of course, people need to make money and anti-DRM, anti-IP-law arguments often focus on this economic aspect - that in order to re-grow the music biz and recapture customers, companies need to start opening up. But what if, rather than only hampering growth, the current approach to media is one that stifles both the expression of culture and its capacity to affect the current political-economic model? Using Muxtape, one immediately gets a sense of how it might disseminate - of blog badges that read “Listen to my Muxtape” or the creativity that will ensue from a sort of playlist mashup (like Rex’s mix of Madonna, M.I.A. and Scarlett Johansson) - and the way in which it will become a mode of cultural expression. And to me, creativity lies in refashioning existing art and media to produce something new and yet not-new, its significance stemming from its ability to simultaneously speak to both the past and the future. Muxtape and other mixtapes apps seem to do this on the level of both technology and culture, the analogue tape now scattering through cyberspace. That the fervour for copyright may crush yet another new cultural mode, a new way of relating to one another - even if it is microscopic and, taken in isolation, insignificant -  seems far sadder than the legal and economic hand-wringing.

Oh btw, my Muxtape is over there on the right hand side of the page.

Alternate Title: Why Sony have made Baudrillard the Go-To Philosopher for the ‘Net.

There are moments on the Web in which the speed at which information disseminates raises some very interesting questions about truth and power. Case in point… A couple of days ago, Sony announced that they were about to release new firmware for the Playstation 3 that would include some new features. This is a pretty regular occurrence and PC World, as they do, reported on the news. However, Peter Cohen, the writer of the article, made a mistake: he claimed that a particular feature - the ability to copy from a Blu-Ray disc to a portable device - was included in this update when it was in fact not. It was an easy error to make - Sony had mentioned something about copying media to a Playstation Portable and they themselves have said that the ability to make little portable copies of movies was a feature that was coming sometime in the future - so it’s not as if Cohen committed a cardinal sin. It was poor fact-checking and unfortunately it happens. (The article has since been updated and no trace of the original mistake remains).

What was fascinating though was the way in which this filtered and spread very quickly through the web. At its end point, when mainstream CNET blog Crave posted about the new firmware, they stated the following: “despite widespread rumors to the contrary, the update did not include the ability to copy portable versions of Blu-ray movies to the PSP”. There is, I think, a palpable sense of disappointment in both this and many other posts and comments. It isn’t at all new that a rumour flew around the web at breakneck speed; this happens all the time. What did strike me though was the way in which the dissemination of the rumour, the way in which was reproduced a thousand times, added to the weight behind it such that, when it was proved false, it was as if Sony were at fault for not including the feature.

When I first read the story on PC World, I knew it was a misunderstanding. When it had shown up twenty times in my RSS feeds, I started to wonder if they hadn’t gotten the inside scoop. The point - besides the now obvious fact that Baudrillard is the philosopher for the Web - is that the linear movement of a rumour sets up a situation in which falsity comes ‘before’ truth. Here, many are disappointed that something that was never promised did not materialise. What has happened is that the pace of the movement of information produces an expectation that, once not met, is read as an example of failure. While this has existed in the past in the form of rumour-mongering, the situation seems to be made exponentially worse by the pace of the ‘net, specifically in two ways: first, a mistake such as Cohen’s needs to only exist for a moment for it to spread like wildfire; and secondly, that this same speed may in part be a cause for the sort of poor fact-checking that was at the root of this minor misunderstanding. It’s a very specific, localised example, but it does make one wonder about how the multiplication and reproduction of a ‘fact’ can add weight to its ’sense of truth’ even when it is totally false. And while it makes little difference whether Sony included this feature or not, it is very hard not to think of ‘Swiftboating‘ or other political uses for this ’speed’.

In what is surely the first instance of such an occurrence, today someone stated an opinion, others disagreed and, to use the parlance of our time, an online shitstorm ensued. The instigator of this particular mess was Billy Bragg and his suggestion that social networks like Bebo owe their users, many of whom who are artists and musicians, some of the hundreds of millions of dollars they make when being sold. That they don’t, Bragg argues, is a form of exploitation.

The reaction was harsh and swift (I know, can you believe it?) and generally fell into two camps: Bragg is naive and does not understand either the role of social networks or the nature of capitalism; or, Bragg is right on and big corporations and the man are all about screwing the artist, man. Mathew Ingram, my go-to writer for even-handed analysis, took the first of these two opinions and argues that since participation in social networks is voluntary, free and provides a service, one cannot seriously suggest that social networking is exploitative. While I think in a literal sense he’s correct, I’d disagree in two ways. First, I’d be wary of the idea that “exploitation is when you take advantage of someone and they are powerless to prevent it” - not so much because of the idea itself, which literally-speakig is ‘true’, but how it’s phrased - it assumes far too much about how much choice people really have. It seems akin to saying that “you have to dress appropriately to get ahead” - yes, one must ‘choose’ to do that, but that you have to choose that or poverty shows the power dynamics at work. You either work through the systems of power or you suffer.

Secondly, Bragg employs some vaguely socialist rhetoric in his piece, which is dismissed out of hand. However, I would argue that there is a form of exploitation in the business of social networks, and argued as such in one of my classic, rambling, vaguely off-topic comments on Ingram’s blog (sorry Mathew!), which I quote here:

“I think the Marxist reading [of social networks] is, on some level, still valid. One of the things the Web was,’supposed to do’ (in my mind anyway) was transfer some of the means of production to the ‘common person’ so that, rather than going to a newspaper or record label, one could for no or very little investment, take control of the mechanisms of distribution, sales, marketing etc.

A potential problem with the monetization of human activity - ostensibly the business model of social networking - is that while individuals spend time doing the things they do (messaging, posting photos etc etc), very unlike work, there is no exchange of labour for a wage. The means of production, far from being democratized, are centralised in the hands of Zuckerbergs and Thiels. I guess there’s an odd contradiction at the core of different aspects of Web 2.0 - some facets do democratise and open new opportunities for people while others, while certainly fun and even helpful, do a lot to maintain the disparities between ‘regular folk’ and those with tonnes o’ capital and influence.

I know this sounds a bit conspiratorial and it probably is - I guess I mean this more analogously than a direct statement of “Facebook is exploitative”. That said, even though I’ve probably oversimplified things it seems like there’s something here worth thinking about in relation to a possible ’set of values’ for Web 2.0.”

My point is that any ideas about Web 2.0 giving the ‘power to the people’ need to be balanced by a sense that social networks monetize communication and, while we are perfectly happy to have them do that, that economic act leaves power still centralised in the hands of what we might loosely call ‘the capitalists’ (i.e. those with capital). While it’s not quite the ’sharecropping’ that Nick Carr claims it is, it doesn’t seem quite like a crazy Marxist conspiracy theory to simply suggest that Web 2.0 carries on the democratic-capitalist tradition of making profit through ‘what people freely choose to do’. This same freedom somehow results in a social system in which a small percentage of people control the bulk of wealth. That’s a grossly oversimplified critique of capitalism, but the critique seems less important here than the link between industrial capitalism and the supposedly-different Web 2.0 sort.

This was all taken up by Mike Arrington who, in a very uncharacteristic move for a tech blogger, deliberately and controversially stated that artists should not expect any revenue from social networks because “recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist”. Nick Carr, in response, carefully and deliberately thought about what Arrington suggested and then delicately called it “the saddest, stupidest sentence [he'd] ever read”. Oh God. What’s going on is obviously a clash of world views and one that isn’t terribly healthy or useful. Carr is obviously incensed at the idea that art is a mere commodity - Carr is nothing if not a conservative humanist when it comes to Art. On the other hand I think it’s important to note, however, that Arrington said that it was recorded music that is the marketing material and not music in general - i.e. that the purpose of recorded music is to drive attention to the artist who then makes a living off playing live. But whether it’s Carr or Arrington, both employ a view of music that either prioritises economics or its cultural import but cannot seem to express how the two are intertwined.

While I am as likely to defend Arrington’s perspective as I am the idea that Art is a pure, untouched thing that needs to be celebrated, the whole kerfuffle does show what’s at stake here as culture becomes a commodity and the ‘net the distribution method: the dominant ideas of what capitalism and art are and should be are, yet again, butting heads. It would be nice if someone paid attention to their interdependence - on the necessity of art to perpetuate and deal with the ideology of capitalism and the necessity of capitalist distribution systems and infrastructure to perpetuate music - but I’m not about to hold my breath. At present, people seem far too ensconced in understanding a cultural-economic phenomenon through only one of those terms, insisting on ignoring the overarching liberal-humanist ideology that can valorize both capitalism as a social form and art as ‘the quintessentially human’. To me, both are bound up together and products of the same thing. Still, all in all, interesting stuff and simply one of many arguments yet to come. What is a shame is that both Arrington and Carr (Carr especially) are very smart - this sort of inflammatory rhetoric, while understandable, doesn’t seem to be conducive to healthy discussion.

Because of a tendency to shoot my mouth off without thinking, I have stayed away from writing on Stuff White People Like, the wildly popular blog written by comedian Christian Lander. There has been a lot written on the topic from a variety of perspectives so I expected that everything that could be said on the topic already had. But there was an interesting piece written by Adam Sternbergh [via] a couple of days ago that, rather than singing its praises or calling it racist, criticised the site as a sort of vapid and weak satire. And, going back to look at the blog, Sternbergh certainly has a point. He suggests that that when a ‘white yuppie’ reads about white people liking coffee and Toyota Priuses, s/he slaps his knee, saying ‘it’s funny because it’s true’, and then moves on. The site works by having white people “[pretend] to poke fun at themselves while actually being allowed to feel superior”. To Sternbergh, SWPL comforts, rather than challenges its audience and as a result, actually pats people on the back for their behaviour instead of questioning them or forcing them to question themselves. Ergo… weak sauce.

While I agree with some of Sternbergh’s arguments, my response would be that there is still an interesting something going on in a couple of potential misreadings by the blog’s audience that is, besides being funny, actually good satire. First, as soon as the blog hit, you just knew that there would be a slew of comments that said something along the lines of “this wouldn’t be funny if it were about Black or Asian people” - and , sure enough, the site is littered with them. One response to such a criticism might be that the blog works because there is no real threat behind it. It is difficult to imagine the sudden disenfranchisement of thousands of white people because of a blog full of stereotypes, or even that that a white person might suddenly feel unwelcome in a store or bar because someone there has read the blog. What SWPL lays bare is white privilege: that the reason that it’s ‘okay’ to make fun of ‘white people’ is because of their dominant position in society, one that is not being challenged any time soon. Of course, there are a slew of necessary disclaimers to that statement involving class and sex among other things, but there’s also something quite true about it as well.

Another fun (mis)reading may be that Sternbergh’s inverse response - that the blog is kinda’ dumb because there’s no real critique in it - might actually obscure the fact that the blog is doing something challenging: it actually names whiteness as something other than a norm - that it instead, like all identities, is a thing constructed and performed. Furthermore, it introduces the idea of a ‘normative’ whiteness that one can or cannot adhere to, which injects the idea of power into the mix. All white people are ‘white’ but, as so often also happens to minorities, a particular version of ‘whiteness’ is conceived of and positioned as normal. In a sense, the blog does not describe whiteness but an ideal of it, the vague sense amongst white progressives that, ‘if only all white people were ironic hipsters like us’, the world would be a better place. Think about the Southern accent as a marker of backwardness or the liberal dismissal of conservatives as religious kooks and you get an idea of what I mean.

And Gregory Rodriguez’s LA Times op-ed on the blog hit onto something when he argued that “Lander is doing to whites what scores of journalists and politicians do to non-white minorities every day, “essentializing” complex identities — that is, stripping away all variety and reducing them to their presumed authentic essences”. But where Rodriguez goes wrong in his suggestion that SWPL is effective because now ‘everyone is a minority’. Statistically in some cities (like Lander’s hometown Toronto), sure. But we are long way from arguing that a particular cultural perspective isn’t still privileged in the public space. So while Sternbergh makes a valid critique, what I believe he misses is that the misreading of the blog by its intended, white yuppie audience, in addition to making me chuckle, is actually pretty smart satire. You have a bunch of yuppies patting themselves on the back from a position of comfort while not recognising it’s the very position that is part of the problem i.e. that the prioritisation of white, liberal values as normal is a form of ethnocentrism with very real material effects, a concept itself central to the blog’s otherwise shaky satire. And that possible misreading - at the sort of obliviousness at the core of the knee-slapping - is why I like Stuff White People Like. (And yes, I am fully aware that I like it because it makes me feel superior - why exactly do you think I’m a grad student… )

Ever wonder how all this newfangled technology is going to do anything to inspire hope or change? This talk on Alterative Reality Gaming by Jane McGonigal is nothing short of breathtaking. ARG works through the blending of “play” and fiction to, as Wikipedia states, create an interactive narrative that uses the real world as its arena. There’s so much to talk about here, but for now, focus on the way in which the game becomes a virtual space from which to re-imagine the present and also the need for the ‘text’ of the internet to bind the narrative together. [via] (And here’s a CNET piece on the new game itself)

So imagine that someone like Billy Holiday was reincarnated as a scruffy white guy, who then spent years living solo in the Arctic, the cold and loneliness pressing in from all sides… That sorta’ gives you a sense of the haunting, melancholy and soulful nature of Bon Iver. (Thanks to @rhh and my pal Kat for this…)

While I am often sceptical of many internet naysayers, when Toronto “poet with a PhD” Lynn Crosbie speaks, I listen. Here, she wonders if the unfiltered nature of the internet is, after centuries of censorship, providing a playground for the prurience of things like 2 Girls 1 Cup. The point is not that the internet is evil but, rather, that the uneasy relationship between UGC and ‘the id’ is going to force us to re-engage questions of art and censhorship from an entirely new perspective. It’s smart stuff, which is unsurprising as her work on pop culture in general tends to be so.

Kottke has already rounded up the analysis of prostitution that came as a result of the Spitzer fallout, but in case you haven’t seen it, here’s an intriguing Slate piece on the ‘tiers’ of high-class sex workers.

Even though I am, in some sense, ‘Indian’, I too find Bollywood a bit baffling and this Current video on smash hit Om Shanti Om (which I’ve actually seen) is actually quite funny. Still, the presenter just doesn’t seem to understand the idea that different cultures have different approaches to aesthetics and narrative, which are themselves rooted in history and differing world views. You just can’t help but think of Homer Simpson saying “it’s funny because their clothes are different from my clothes”. [also via Snarkmarket]

Some amazing photography. Why? ‘Cause it’s simple and beautiful.

This is of course doomed to fail. If this electronic network of information and people is, as I say, emblematic of the postmodern, then all attempts to define it - to find its philosophy or its guiding principles, its unchanging rules with which to make sense - will be like trying to pin down a constantly moving, ethereal, amorphous nothing. But such is the postmodern situation, and so, it is this ultimate impossibility that necessitates the provisional attempt - that in the absence of objective laws, all we can do is put forward an opinion to watch it shift and settle in the mass. If we are lucky, the mass stretches, accommodates, challenges and responds. So, in the overlap between the web and modern philosophy, perhaps we will find something to hold on to…

1) Ideas are not fixed objects but processes. First, we suggest an idea. We shape it, craft it, think through it and then, of course, we hit ‘post’. A day later, we return to it, realising that we missed one obvious thing, and using some form of “[Update]“, we add to, adjust and augment our thoughts. The concept or the idea online is not an object that one picks up or ‘communicates’, but a process, a thing always in flux. It is constantly morphing and metamorphosing, changed not just by its author, but by the responses to it, to the way in which it is disseminated, filtered and ultimately transformed as it moves through the network. An idea is not something to grasp - it is the thing that never sits still.

2) Truth is an abstract concept that exists in the virtual centre of all opinions on a topic, even those that are contradictory. These opinions are not all equal but are, rather, organised according to hierarchies of power. What is ‘reasonable’, what ’seems true’ is what speaks the language of power, what accords with the ideological and economic strands that run through and weave the text-ile of the network. Opinions that exist at opposite ends of the spectrum all work to define the truth of an idea; it is precisely the contradiction that enables the concept of truth, the organisation of knowledge into the true and the false, the good and bad. Obviously then, truth is always in flux, but it is not freely floating and it is not easily changed. Behind each statement of truth are the echoes and traces of millennia of ideas, and they weigh heavily on each statement, pushing it, shaping it, distorting it through the lens of a given paradigm.

3) On the screen, there are always words behind words and ideas behind ideas. An allusion to hyperlinks? What is this, 1997? No, but on the screen, everything is temporary and all words and all ideas are linked in a chain to other words and other ideas. Like a dictionary - in which all words are defined through other words, the chain of meaning never ending - the network’s reliance on language means that words and ideas are both sustained and defined by the existence of other words and other ideas. What do terms like ‘blog’ and ‘Web 2.0′ mean except for the plurality of connected ideas, the echoed refractions of meaning that circle like a cloud around them? The internet is inter-text and exists only by and for other words and other ideas.

4) There are no beginnings. Origins are fictions. There is no Original Post. You think that’s air you’re breathing? Let us not confuse chronological origins with philosophical ones. Of course, the internet began and of course posts are written in time. But the original post, the one that we all first link to, did not generate itself. It too is formed of other links, of other strands. It is only written because things before it were written and those origins are also themselves chimeras, false beginnings that deny the possibility of pure, untouched starting points. The network operates - and is indeed sustained - through circular logic. And so…

5) On the ‘net, the copy precedes the original. What is original is lost the moment it is created, the hierarchy of time inverted by the hierarchy of meaning. You can never return to the original just as you can never return home. The proliferation of copies renders the authentic beginning impossible, unreachable, incomprehensible. The mass of copies comes to dominate so that, in consciousness, it is the copy that comes before the thing it is a copy of. The reproductive, link-based nature of the internet means that copy effaces the real and, indeed, effaces the possibility of the real. To quote Baudrillard, “illusion is no longer possible because the real is no longer possible”.

6) The internet is always-already plural. All expression is a singular subtraction from this plurality. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call the n-1 state of mind: that the norm is the infinitude of possibility and the work - the blog post, the website - is, rather than the starting point from which multiplicity begins, a singular subtraction from the always-already plural, but one instance derived from the anarchic multiplicity. Dualism is not the model of the web, where one leads to two and two leads to many. One enters the overdetermined infinite and merely finds a finite moment in which to temporarily breathe - then you return to the norm of the infinite mass that you will never know.

7) It is words that control the author, not the author who controls words. Counter-intuitive? Sure. The point is that, more than in any other arena, on the internet the author disappears behind words. As they are replicated a thousand times, reblogged in an infinite chain in which there is no real origin and no beginning, the author becomes a mere abstract organising principle. We try hard to attach a name, but the name itself becomes a ghost, but a label for the ideas not the person behind them. There is no author online; the network writes authors into being.

Have something to add? Want to challenge me? Want to yell at me for wasting your time? Hit the comments and rant away…

[Update]: I just don’t have time for a full-fledged response right now, but Kevin Kelly engages some of these ideas in a new post called “Humanity’s Identity Crises“.

If you’re reading this post, then there’s no need to encapsulate. So let’s get down to it, with two disclaimers: 1) I wasn’t there, but have watched the interview, and refuse to believe that this negates the validity of my opinion; 2) I am an academic, not an employee at a startup and thus, am not immersed in the ultra-competitive world of social media and new web app creation. I still feel, however, that my outsider status gives me some perspective others have lost.

So - the discussion seems to have revolved around whether or not the interview was bad, a debate which seems rather futile. Of course it was bad - that much I think is obvious. Lacy attempts to behave like Zuckerberg’s friend, rather than interviewer, and throws softball non-questions that the interviewee, muzzled as he is, can barely answer. To make matters worse, Lacy’s pandering to hecklers is an obvious no-no - once you acknowledge they have power, you’re done; an elementary school teacher knows that. All of which is to say, of course… that these concerns are completely irrelevant. The question is ‘what is the appropriate response when an interview goes bad or does not address the interests of the audience?’

The answer is that being a dick is not the proper one. Was heckling here some sort of resistance against oppression? A youthful rebellion against a tyrannical, corporate giant? No. It was against a half-assed interviewer (update: I now wish I had said ‘interview’ rather than ‘interviewer’) who didn’t ask two crucial questions: 1) “how can my audience make money from Facebook?”, or; 2) or “how can my audience’s startups follow where you’re going?”. There is a time and a place for rebellion, and a room full of privileged, affluent web 2.0 types was not it. This was not a rebellion but a petulant sense of entitlement gone bad, a group of content creators and commentators doing their best to prove every stereotype about bloggers/new media folks being juvenile idiots (thanks for that, by the way - ‘ppreciate it). A commenter on Mathew Ingram’s post says that it was “it was 80% poor interview, 20% mob”, which sounds rather like a child who, after being prodded, admits “well, I guess it was a little my fault the table lamp got broked”. Indeed, when Mashable’s Kristen Nicole suggested ” it turned into a real-life manifestation of a Digg revolt”, she inadvertently hit on what was so damn wrong and childish about the whole mess.

And in all of this, some serious questions need to be asked about the mentality behind the people leading the web revolution. One is the impossible to ignore reading of Lacy’s odd friendliness as flirtatiousness - how can one argue that this is not a retreat into sexism in which ingratiation is seen as a moral-sexual - and not professional - failing? Something no-one wants to talk about is that the technorati’s version of feminism essentially boils down to “women can be just as good men as men can”, a charming little throwback to the seventies that needs to be done away with. And perhaps all this has coloured my vision, but these sorts of blindspots also hit me as I read the usually inoffensive (and generally pretty great) Veronica Belmont talk about attending the web awards in which she indirectly claims knowledge of ‘the internet’. I know, it’s microscopic, but it’s also something Valley/Alley insiders talk about a lot - that they “know the ‘net”. If you ask me, this sounds suspiciously like other elites saying they “know culture” or “know music” or “know film” - which is to say that they know a very culturally specific slice of those areas and ignore the cultural production of the rest of the world, denying it the same status of ‘culture’. And this question of an elite being ‘the group who defines’ is crystallised by Dave McClure’s argument that things would have been better if ‘Sarah Lacy was a geek’. To wit, people need to conform to a particular, constructed identity in order to be seen as either legitimate participants or reflective of ‘other geeks’. Conformity much?

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that the interview was bad - and that the reaction was worse. Like all movements, whatever egalitarian ideals new media started with, they’re dead now.

[Update]: Now that things - and I - have cooled off a bit, here are some thoughts:

1) I like hyperbole, and my last line was just that. 2) Anyone who cares has probably seen these, but: here’s Lacy’s reaction; an interview with her on PR 2.0; a Mashable piece on the open Q&A that Zuckerberg had today. 3) The elitism that bothers me is not that someone had the temerity to criticise a crappy interview. Rather, it was that: a) yelling out at an interview because you weren’t getting what you wanted smacks of entitlement and arrogance; b) the fact that the interviewer was a woman and was accused of being flirtatious made me wonder - would the same thing have happened if Waxy or Arrington were up there? It’s hard to ignore the issue of sexism. 4) Why did I previously condone what others called Gizmodo’s juvenile behaviour and condemn it here? There, at least the prank could be read as something interesting, as an attack on the inanity and futility of corporate presentations. Here it was an attack on an individual from a bunch of people already empowered, which to my mind was immature and classless. That may seem like a trite difference, but to me, it’s a big deal. Alright, now let’s move on.

[Update 2]: Please see the comments for my apology to Veronica Belmont.

[FINAL UPDATE 3]: Okay, this is getting stupid, but when you’re really embarrassed about a post and commenters have very politely and smartly disagreed, all you can do (if I’m to believe my own philosophy) is try and refine, re-try and apologise. So.

1) What I was circulating around and not actually saying is that the reaction to the event through the blogosphere was more troubling than the actual heckling itself. As has been pointed out, something very weird was going on in that room and, taking on faith the opinions of some who I really respect, it was not healthy. So, I’m sorry my analysis was not on point or wasn’t even relevant in certain aspects.

2) While I think my analysis here was ineffective and rambling (which I have apologised for in the comments), there is still something odd and disconcerting about the reaction, as if people were really out for blood. Okay, so there was a bad, uncomfortable interview that a lot of people were looking forward to. But why the vitriol? Why are people being so harsh? Why are people still, more than a week on, writing posts asking Lacy to apologise? Doesn’t that seem pretty unprecedented - or at least little weird? Sorta’ smacks of a witch-hunt, with the emphasis on ‘witch’. It bears thinking about honestly.

3) So, someone needs to be at least willing to acknowledge the idea that there is a disproportionate sense of entitlement here. And while this certainly wouldn’t be the first time a group of affluent business people were aggressive, it does suddenly paint the once-egalitarian ideals of Web 2.0 in a new light.

4) Finally, to my mind, it is difficult - and irresponsible - to evacuate sex and gender out of this equation. And it may seem trite, but I also think it’s fair to say self-consciously interject that ‘Sarah Lacy is good looking’. Keep in mind, I don’t mean that literally. So let’s not fall into some common traps, namely: that one’s response to the dynamics of sex and gender are conscious such that one can say “oh I didn’t mean that in a sexist way” and then expect that to be taken at face value; and that it is not also sexist to expect masculine, ’sexually neutral’ behaviour from people. What is neutral is so often actually just the unnamed norm, in much the same way curry is ‘ethnic food’ but hamburgers are ‘just food’. The sheer anger and entitlement at the root of the demands for contrition are almost certainly bound up in the dynamics of sex and sexism, regardless of whether the person involved is a man or woman. Beyond the simple fact that there were unequivocally misogynistic comments on YouTube and blogs covering this, and beyond the usual ‘would this have happened if Lacy were a man’ questions, somebody needs to ask whether traditional masculinity and masculine behaviours aren’t being prioritised here. To wit, things are cool until you actually ‘act like a woman’, whatever the hell that nebulous phrase actually means.

5) I swear on whatever my version of the bible is (Derrida’s Of Grammatology, perhaps? ;)) that this is the last I will ever say of it. Until the next comment anyway…