I've been busy on Open Republic, which is going well, and also a bitch of a
cold. Hence my silence, which must be a relief to both my readers, but I feel
obligated to put something up here. I'm also putting together a Viet Nam war
story to illustrate one reason wars are unpredictable – the FUD of war
exacerbates the fog of war.
So here are some BloggerCon notes.
Emotiblogs
At Bloggercon Saturday, John Perry
Barlow led a session that explored the place of emotion in blogging. It
was generally agreed that one's true nature emerges when you blog regularly
and that people respect the trajectory of your thoughts even if they disagree
with some of your posts.
It seems to me that we're developing our own character in the blogosphere.
Just as an author's characters stray from the original intent, so do our own
voices find their true calling, and we reveal ourselves. I've been meaning to
hook up with Barlow for about 18 years, so it was good to meet him finally.
John entered Wesleyan University in the fall of 1965, just after I graduated.
Clearly our experiences diverged widely in the next four years, but oddly enough,
our values really didn't. I first heard of John in 1986 when I hired David Duggin's
ad agency to handle promotion of the Dynamac
computer, which I had funded in a moment of tech enthusiasm inspired by
Steven Levy's seminal book, Hackers.
(When I sat next to Steven at ETech, I told him he'd cost me three years and
a lot of money, but it was a fun ride.) David is also a Wesleyan graduate
and said that I should connect with this Wyoming rancher who also thought computers
and connectivity would be important to us all.
Later, about 1994, John appeared on the cover of a Wesleyan University Alum
magazine, posed with a rifle, a wooden fence and a Mac sitting on a fence post.
The theme of the article was, of course, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation that John founded with Mitch
Kapor. Since John still owned his Wyoming
ranch at that time, the image was spot on–the frontiersman protecting
his homestead from meddlers.
His session on emotions in blogging was set up about eight minutes before it
started, but it was the most engaging at Bloggercon. John has had more than
his share of life, including tragedies, but I doubt he regrets the price of
living large. John described the reaction to blogs he posted when his friend
Spalding Gray disappeared from the Staten Island Ferry. He knew Spalding's mood
and understood that he'd probably jumped from the ferry. He conjectured that
Spalding was swimming
to Cambodia for real, reprising his best known work.
John described how he'd been attacked
by a few commenters for blogging
the likelihood of the suicide before it became official. It struck him then
that our culture has put death off limits for discussion because it's now considered
a failure, and he repeated it yesterday. Here's what he said on his blog:
"Merely to speak of death in plain terms is considered by many to
be disrespectful and offensive. This is a peculiarly American sickness which
is, among other things, wrecking our health care system - over 70% of America's
total medical expenditures are devoted to extending the last few miserable
weeks of life. Our pathology about death abstracts us from it and renders
us far too capable of inflicting it on others without remorse. And, worst,
it allows us to dwell in a kind of numbness to life that we would not permit
ourselves if we did not make ourselves numb to death. To be in denial about
death is to be in denial about life.
His point about bankrupting our health care to extend pain for a few weeks
reveals the curious perversity of managerial capitalism. We deny our humanity
and our spirit based on data from the fundamentalist school of superstition.
(With death off limits, now our righteous
nannies are going after fucking)
There was a lively discussion including, of course, the rudeness of commenters,
which seems to bother some more than others. However, John has noticed that
blog com mentors are far less rude than com mentors on bulletin boards or discussion
groups like the old WELL. Dave Winer feels that the form discourages rudeness,
because identities are better known.
What occurred to me is that we have safety in candor – When we speak
from the heart in our authentic voice, there simply are fewer handles for small
minds to grab. It's useful to remember that mean means small, or petty;
which also means small. It's a great language.
Depression Repression
The conversation visited depression, another verboten malady never
to be acknowledged or confessed by real guys. Spalding Gray suffered from it
and I sensed that many of those present had dealt with it. I've felt slightly
melancholic all my life, though I don't come across that way – perhaps
I compare my insides to others' outsides. I wonder if people self-reflective
enough to blog are self-reflective enough to feel the pull of their inner tides.
However I see the diagnosis of depression to be a little too quick and convenient,
like ADD diagnosed in spunky kids. I've often wondered if what really gets people
down is the stark contrast between the glowing possibilities and heightened
state promised by our virtual world – video – juxtaposed to the
mechanical responses we're expected to carry out in dealing with the, well,
mechanics of life. There's depression, which is like a low spot in the road,
and Depression, like the injury-based abyss that Spalding Gray fell into. Should
doctors reach for the script pad whenever the patient's hope muscle is out of
shape? I'm not sure. Maybe s/he just needs more hope.
Our Animatronic Age
John also invited comment on the cultural ennui that he senses. Things
that once got our collective goat go by with hardly a comment, emboldening those
who want to fix
things which most of us don't think need fixing. Performance is the obsession
of our time: we're flooded with images of performers creating nonexistent realities
and it's become part of the zeitgeist. So we've become performers ourselves,
putting on a persona at parties and at church and the workplace. Performance
is so routine that politicians are expected to be presidential in the way that
news anchors are to be anchor-like. Understanding the issues and dealing with
them is out of favor.
We appreciate performances around us, the more perfect the better. We like
people to satisfy our expectations and not be themselves, like theme park animatrons.
At work we're smart to appear professional rather than be effective. As family
members we're expected to play our role well rather than finding the bright
path of personal possibilities that most of us can't see in front of us. It's
more convenient this way.
It's all pretty exhausting, and that's part of the ennui. It also
seems to me that we're missing the hope thing. America has rarely gone this
long without a hope matrix. Even during the depression, we had FDR, who was
doing something for us. Then we had WWII which quickly became a shared hope
that, in about three years, we'd be done with this and move into a bright future.
After the war we had the 1946-1974 prosperity wave, with each new crop of kids
knowing their life would be better than their parents'. The late seventies and
eighties were a new wave of stock market run-ups and novel ways of capitalizing
growth. The nineties, of course, were so wild that we had those crazy E-Trade
ads, promising that everyone was a lottery winner.
A Hope Chest
It's like hope was canceled in mid 2000 after a 5-decade run. I'm not sure
either party recognizes how dismal it's been for four years, and that most Americans
are looking for something better. We need some hope to puff us up and let us
look up from the ground and stick our chests out.
Yeah. That's what we need. A hope chest.
10:38:00 PM 
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