High 8 Us
It's been 5 weeks since I
blogged. Pretty dramatic hiatus for a guy
who feels compelled to right something every day.
The superficial reason is that
I've been forming a new company and
that it's all-consuming. In that effort, in addition to becoming the
self-appointed big cheese in an inconsequential little blister of
capitalism, I've even been busy doing the kinds of things I always had
others do before, at least since 1979. (It's quite a luxury to say, "I
have people who do that for me." I'll bet a lot of folks get hired just
so their boss can say they have people doing things for them, when it
would be so easy for the lazy bastard to do it himself.) Contrariwise,
I'd forgotten that it's kind of fun to go open the checking account,
work with the bookkeeper on the chart of accounts, etc.
But forming a company is,
twisting the old saying, an excuse but not
a reason for my silence. I'm just not sure that I'm improving the
silence anymore.
Improving
the silence
is a Quaker term for the obligation of an individual
in the shared meditation of a Quaker Meeting. Doc Searls was raised as
a Quaker, and he can tell you how it is a fundamentally different
experience than traditional religion. Most religion is all about the
guy who is preaching to the people-who-need-preaching-to. That those
people may not need preaching to is an unexamined question. If they
didn't need preaching to, they might not go hear the sermon. And if
they didn't do that, the preacher might have to go get a real job,
doing something palpably useful to the people whose approval he
suddenly needs.
I'm riffing off the deep end
here, but I
can't help thinking of Doc's hero, John Taylor
Gatto, as he
bared the illusion of incompetence that the blowhards have leveled on
ordinary citizens:
"The
shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in
sufficient
numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending
them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central
proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official
schooling
first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.
"With
less than thirty hours of
combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed
access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or
rifles.
Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government
make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly
unqualified
trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly
state schooling?. . .
"The
truth is that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably
natural to most of us. . ."
The same power plays dictate
the
presumption of stupidity that all our favorite hypnotists use: News
anchors, politicians, everybody's
boss, Big-Pub journalism.
Authority's house of cards has
never been
more naked.
As I said, before I went 'round
the bend there, I'm not sure how to
improve our collective silence. The blogosphere is a kind of silence,
like the echo of the big bang, resonating at the edges of our radio
telescopes' yearning. When you try to contribute to the long tail of
the blogosphere, you'd better do it in the spirit of improving the
silence, 'cause you're probably not going to be heard and surely not
attended to. In fact, it's not clear that even the Power Law guys are
being attended to, since journalists aren't, yet bloggers are
universally ecstatic when quoted in a BigPub outlet. Is it possible
that decorating tomorrow's fish wrap is the outer bound of A-list
bloggers' aspirations?
Well, it won't be for long.
Before we're done with this revolution,
it'll be one noted down the centuries as world-changing, not just an
improvement on the techniques holding sway when we happened on the
scene. We're in that archetypal interstitial period between the first
flush of possibility exhibited by every revolution–the few
years
when it's declared a failure–and when the new realities take
hold
of everything, no matter how hard everything resists.
It was true of the Silk Road,
the New World, railroads, telegraph,
phones, cars, planes, radio, TV and rock 'n roll. Now it's TCP/IP's
turn.
A Word for Love
If there were a name for the
TCP/IP difference, what would it be? We
know it's gotta be at a 7th grade level (thanks, Jerry!),
or even the people with
expensive educations won't get it. "Packet-switched communications"
won't quite cut it.
I'd
like to call it speaking
up.
Speaking Up
is what happens
when a previously unheard human can't stand it any more. You know, that
third-reel moment
when the truth needs to out, and no one else knows
the truth, so Joe Blow speaks it (so often in the pregnant pause after
the
minister asks if anyone objects to these two people legalizing their
sexuality).
Speaking Up
is what we're
all doing now, uppity unwashed though we might be. We're speaking out
about
things we either feel strongly about or know more about than almost
everyone. Right now, it's hard to know the difference, but we're close
to solving that distinction.
My silence embodies my
frustration that our collective dialogue
isn't going anywhere. We talk a lot, but we don't conclude a lot.
Inconclusiveness seems to be the cardinal virtue of the blogosphere.
"Let's all talk but, ferchrissake,
let's not bring anything to a vote!" I guess that's the nub of my
prosaic malaise. The talk goes nowhere and that's unsatisfying to me.
Progressives' talk didn't go anywhere in 2004, but that seems not to
have intruded on Progressives' collective confidence in ownership of
the vault holding all the answers. It makes me crazy that progressives
share a self-anointed confidence even though they're not even on the
radar of the American voter.
Until the voice of hundreds of
thousands of voters can be aggregated into a specific, auditable
commitment, blogs will continue to be entertaining but toothless.
Sorry, that's just the truth.
Don't mistake me. I'm more
progressive than most, but my
progressivism favors a cyber-mediated playing field, leveled by the
obviousness of fair dealing and the triumph of the commons over the
predictable and so-easily-exposed avarice of professional politicans
and their brutish henchmen.
Le Corbusier famously said that
"God is in the details." So it's the details of Speaking Out that our
new little band is working on.
11:07:50 PM 
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