n e u f n e u f

Been sitting with my bad feelings about Blogistan and not making much headway. For all the excellence of transmission of important information, far beyond what would have been within one’s ability without this tool, it’s so wasteful and so attractive to our wish to make safe little bits of theater where nothing is at stake do in place of effective action that I find myself very angry with “innocent” people much of the time. In other words, it is the perfect venue for liars -- the worst kind: the ones who believe they are telling the truth.

Of course, you run across many truth-tellers, but they are boring and they just take up time with arts and crafts, the multifarious schemes for a better world, movie reviews, horse show gossip, their love lives, Star Trek, naked women, pictures of art, whutever. Many comb the Internet for bits of news from “real” journalism and nuke you with excerpts from various bits of reportage and the ubiquitous opinioneers of Planet Earth, stringing them all together with their own cleverisms. My hero, Davis Fleetwood, has come up with a new way to present the news: haiku, completely made of links to the news items he wishes you to see. I fancy that is a statement about the boors who vacuum up news items and spew them for us ad nauseam, and a recognition that if we can read a blog, we can also get all that news ourselves. If we were inclined to take note there is value in someone drawing attention to it, but seriously not much, and when we are not, not any amount of cleverness is going to make us pay attention, even while staring straight at it.

The monster blogs have an advantage here. Those armies of people who don’t know what to think, and can’t stand thinking anything that isn’t already demonstrably thought by large numbers of people, do take note, and those bloggers can make a living at it. Here arises a really lethal problem. These bloggers are then unable to bring up even mildly actually unique points of view. There can be nothing that smacks of the dreaded conspiracy theory lest they lose their standing on any of the gazillion services that “measure” blog stats... ergo ad revenue, or just ego revenue. So very real and seriously huge problems are not addressed where they might do the most good in terms of garnering the eyeballs and the consideration needed to solve them.

And, speaking of blog stat services, I have done a little poking around and have found that not a one of them is even close to fully accurate about who links to whom, and who clicks in from where and, largely, not even on the basic number of hits. Pfeh! I happen to know there are bloggers who obsess on this stuff, and a little time out to apply critical thinking about, say, Technorati’s authority system, or juxtaposing the known with the so-called stats, or extending the meaning of the Reddit or Digg rating systems to comprehend that the mediocre is all that can end up being upheld by them, might set these stupid ego vigilantes free. Or put them in the bin. Both options being a relief for the rest of us. If you think about it, it’s identical to the ratings systems for all other media forms, which renders this medium identical to the others, which means it’s only another place where participants can imagine saving the world in place of saving the world. The Internet is a marvelous tool and I hope civilization lasts long enough to get the full benefit of it, but if you do not use the information on it to inform your action in the world, but only your action on the Internet, you are, unequivocally, useless to the cause of freeing suffering beings, to saving the world.

I spent some time yesterday listening to some recordings of a kid netcasting from in front of both Dianne Feinstein’s and Nancy Pelosi’s mansions in San Francisco. He’s one determined 9/11 Truther, and he was there doing some outreach to the peace movement. It was brain-jarring kids’ stuff, but it was deeply satisfying to hear it. Here is someone using the Internet properly.

Then there is fluxrostrum, outfitting an old school bus to run on vegetable oil and be his carbon neutral mobile home, office, activism headquarters, and netcasting outlet. He very clearly knows the correct use for this medium.

But what about me? I started out thinking that engaging in discussion on comments threads would help widen the scope of authors, commenters and lurkers alike. To a very limited extent, and depending on the venue, I suppose there is a dram of value to that, but that much work for that little return is already in most people’s definition of futility.

Then I moved up to helping edit and monitor comments on a popular, tabloidish blog with a cause. This has doubled my usefulness to the world. Two drams. Then I moved over to helping an unpopular blogger gain popularity, increasing my work and subtracting from overall effectiveness. One dram. At least I recognized the subtraction and stopped subtracting, though. Then I started my own blog as a sort of scrapbook, diary, concentration of salient bits of information for my mob of stupefyingly busy friends. This may have upped me to five drams of helpfulness to all sentient beings. Then I did a spinoff of the music videos to their own blog... a place where anybody could come and grab a little rest for their nerves, at need or whim. Even though it is also very useful for time wasting, its value to mere mortals stretched to the breaking point by the relentless bad news is immeasurable. Still, I’m measuring here, and so, subtracting time wasting and all those whose musical tastes can’t hang with it, in a complicated calculus, the volume of my usefulness was increased to fifty drams in that fell swoop. Fully 0.048828125 of a gallon!

Except I have two years and many gallons of sweat invested in the Internet.

While I am indisputably American, my concern is with the whole world, and I can see very clearly why the whole world would be concerned with American politics and policy, so I read bloggers from other countries. The ones who pose as Americans really piss me off. There’s this sly default assumption, I guess, that they will be more influential that way. More like the United States is really the only market for people whose opinions of us obsess them. But there are others who don’t pretend to be citizens and have a great deal to add to the conversation. Unfortunately, it is almost 100% richly-deserved flogging, and not thereby adding anything, or not much, that is positive, that is useful in terms of solutions. It’s just the old right-on-bro bit that comes off as empowering while really only relieving both purveyors’ and consumers’ urges for company in how thoroughly they deplore what’s going on. This is the kind of relief from urges to act that stultifies, for instance, the entire Democratic Party. The patting each other on the back for our elevated views is less valuable to life than horseshit. Manure at least fertilizes. STOP IT!

I mean, FUCK YOU! We are actually talking about inhumanity that would be the fault of ANY citizen of ANY nation whose leaders had succeeded in pillaging the resources of the world. This isn’t a uniquely American urge. It is a uniquely PLUTOCRATIC urge, and plutocrats are everywhere! They have no nation. AND IT IS EVERYONE’S FAULT FOR NOT STOPPING THEM. Any human who knows about it, or who purposefully takes measures not to know about it, which means fully half the world population, is GUILTY, unless they have died trying to stop them already. It really is a matter of life and death and any blogger or journalist or pundit who is not staking his or her life on it actually IS a useless bag of wind, someone hoping what they only SAY will obviate ever having to DO the staking of their life on this. A poseur. A liar.

That’s the beauty of “free speech” too. Fascists actually benefit by not smacking down any free speakers -- until, of course, their populism has gotten them some real power. So 99.999% of bloggers can wail vitriol to the ends of the cosmos, and we are safe. We can truth-tell our lying heads off while the world burns down.

So. You may or may not have noticed some changes from my quadrant of Outer Blogistan, and you may or may not notice even more.

We’ll see.

[I mean, it so totally worse than doesn't matter how much smarter you are than the Average Joe, or how flashy your erudition, if you cannot communicate, act in concert with him... and your inability to go there is nakedly manifest. Your continued belief in his insufficiency is a conceit the size of Armageddon, too. No matter WHAT you bring up to be right or wrong about. At least quit kidding yourself about that much, okay?]