Anyway, the first draft of it is done. It’s around 140 pages if I were to print it out right now. It requires a lot of editing before it’s really ready… but when it is, you’ll be able to get to it on here.

Listen: I have a lot of things I can’t discuss because the discourse would destroy them. A lot of things that can’t be talked about because they’re too obscene or not obscene enough. I’m wasting time even mentioning them, and it’s a problem we all have, every single one of us whether we know it or not. The variables are all best left as unknowable Greek symbols, inverted in cube roots and imaginary numbers. For the sake of my argument, we are going to substitute the language of mathematics with a bastardized English. I’ve wanted to create a thousand verbs to elaborate upon them. A hundred dozen nouns of materials, shapes, forms borne of emotions, expectations, assumptions, revelations. I’ve wanted to enumerate these visions and graph them from a million data points, between social capital and synthesized personalities. Big numbers to keep me company, wrestling these tiny fragments caught up in pockets of the dark. Hopefully we’ll never be able to do this. These are transformative ideas rather than explanatory ones: these struggles are the conversations we should be having, and we are beginning to realize their importance between hashtags and occupations.

There are cycles to the madness of individuality and its formation and its exuberance. Everybody builds walls, goes on quests, defeats monsters within and without, and ultimately (hopefully) laughs about all of this later. This isn’t news — but what is? The only plot that hasn’t been adequately covered is the one that makes any of these subplots possible. Perhaps because it’s the most easily assumed one: the plot about death, that one we take for granted so often it’s a starting point, but even that punchline is inadequate. Death — or absence itself — is default; it’s a joke not worth telling. There is a lot of nothing in the universe. One of the best philosophical problems is simple: why is there something rather than nothing? The story that isn’t often covered or discussed, socially and culturally, is our metaphorical one. What makes us capable of describing our world and our thoughts through metaphor, and how this alone examines our true inner quest for articulation. This is the framework that makes all other stories possible, the one that takes years to figure out that it shouldn’t take years to figure out. This is the story (and its subsets) that you can’t really talk about because they have to be figured out in their own way by each of us individually. The math on this is too complicated. At least for now.

I’ll put it a different way (as I’ll be doing throughout). What interests me most about other people is what they know they can’t say. There are infinite things other people don’t know that they can’t articulate, and there are likewise infinite things that people don’t know they are unconsciously articulating. Those are typical: it’s why the majority of meaningful human communication is relegated to body language and tonality. (Hence why no purely textual conversation should ever be fully trusted.) What intrigues me is the special dance associated with the process of the known unknown (as was famously phrased), which can’t be summarized as something we’re “hinting at” or “suggesting to”. There may still be a distance between our mere biological truths and our unconscious ones — this is the space I wish to navigate.

My favorite example of this in my life so far is the articulation of love, mostly because it’s the only one we can’t give up on easily, and it sticks with us universally. A lot of our unspeakable metaphors are ones we gradually discover, realize, and the work of understanding it is done silently whether we continue realizing it or not. Few are so begging (demanding and expecting) expression as love, and so much of our maturation can be positively centered around the idea of love’s necessity and its sheer ubiquity. It is important to know what you know, what you do not know, and what you may never know, and that it may take years to fully understand and appreciate all three of those ideas. Let that focus be centered on love only, for it is the easiest to use within the point of my argument. I call this abstraction-as-focus the girlfriend effect, but that’s only a title. There are parts of love that are universal, above the heterosexual notion I’m using as a basis, as I have loved men in ways that I have not loved women, just as likewise I love my mother differently than I would love a wife.

In all these equations along the same spectrum as love’s inarticulate explanation, and the most startling fact of the pursuit of their description, is that I can only be responsible for myself within their experience. There is a self-reliance and emotional honesty one must attain with oneself before being able to truly achieve it with others. The process to understanding this multidimensional game of touch-and-go, duck-duck-goose, rolling of dice, et cetera ad naseum, is one that can’t be beaten but our odds can be bettered only by the examination of self. One moment we find ourselves thinking one thing, only to be proven wrong; and rarely are we happy by this result except when in love. Let me elaborate.

We lay different intimacy needs onto others and we spread our feelings out thinner unless we have the mind to do otherwise. We establish trust either as closeness or as distance. Some people only trust those they consider close, some only trust those who they consider capable of being distant (and yet still maintaining trust). There is no concrete measure either way. Put more abstractly: there is a coherent whole of self (there always is whether we know it or not) and then there is what can be only described as the other. You, and then there’s everyone else. Arguably, this is most acute when you’re single. Friendship, specifically the ready-made assumption of distance between the subject (you) and the object (them), is a trait of the normal. Everyone is supposed to have friends, and because of this elaborate social trickery we often don’t think about it much deeper than that. (This fact is exploited every day, between Facebook and coworkers and political parties.)

Here’s friendship as a many-state system, pay very close attention to the pronouns:

• I see myself as your friend.
• I see you as my friend.
• You see me as your friend.
• You see yourself as my friend.

I can only really control one of the four of those states, and that list is interpreting friendship at a basic, mechanistic level. The only thing I can really control is me seeing myself as your friend, the first one in the list. You may easily see yourself as my friend, which is the only piece you can control, but I may not be seeing you as my friend. This is where many of our social problems exist: in the space between me seeing myself as your friend and me seeing you as my friend… because the latter is an understanding that can never be truly accomplished. I can never know what is in the mind of potential friend, therefore it is potentially tricky to ever know if the other can be considered, by me, as a friend, as much as I consider myself as their friend. Keep that in mind as I move forward: the dichotomy between known-in-self and unknown-as-other. (Sorry for the extensive italics.)

Time is elastic because of thought. For some people, every one moment lived they actually experience three minutes: one assuming what might happen, one for the actual happening, and a final moment for reflection. Not to mention the many more moments that may be further bent into reflection later. But do these moments all exist in a zero-sum game of time, do we have a prefilled allotment (which we call a life)? For every moment of reflection, are we losing a moment of happening? Or can we make it shorter, change the allotments, become better at it so that for every one moment lived we actually live 30 seconds, and suddenly our lives feel twice as long. Cut a moment of life into less than the time it took to experience it, shortcutting our future perception with expectations based on previous experiences and compressing our past by relying on already-found conclusions. Perhaps our maturation is simply turning that ratio around, or finding the balance that suits us best, so that every moment we experience is not an additional moment lost. Sometimes you need three minutes for every one, and sometimes you only need thirty seconds for every moment. As you grow older, you’ll become more confident in your assumptions, more ready to draw conclusions as patterns emerge; but how many minutes will we lose to those suppositions should they prove erroneous? In our world, today, many would think that such a self-argument renders you a philosopher. To me, it simply renders you human rather than machine. (It’s amazing how many machines we walk among, incapable of spending years figuring out the intricacies of mere moments.)

Some of these important perceptions on time, reflection, and assumption change when we consider ourselves not single. This is the clearest example of the mistake I call the girlfriend effect. Or rather, this is most likely the first exposure to this mistake, as it may cascade throughout life later. It’s a simple dilemma: we think that our significant other is somehow special. Somehow different. Somehow rises above the rest of the other. This is, at first, seen as the ability to establish a kind of codependency. This becomes, often quickly, as the risk of codependency. (In friends, too, but more easily in love. The association of risk and reward itself is why I am focusing more and more on social markets.) We concentrate and focus our feelings so readily that they become a risk to the integrity of our selves… and most would say that’s a good thing. With any relationship comes risk, and learning to manage that risk is a part of growing up. When you’re “in love”, nothing is supposed to matter. That’s not news in a universal sense, but individually we begin to realize something that we don’t know, and the need to articulate that something. We begin to butt against the limits of our understanding, and we have two choices: grow up… or don’t.

Love is a multifarious construct and I would contend that the love I have for a girlfriend should be but a dimensional differential from the love I have for a friend. Just as we discover more dimensions to our physical reality, we should allow the extensions of our selves. What is a girlfriend? A wife? A lover? Some would call it entirely selfish: we need someone to make ourselves feel better. Some would call it reflexive: we need someone to watch our lives as we watch theirs, unknowingly. All I need as an individual is to be important to one person and know it and I’ll be fine. But what happens then? If their life doesn’t go anywhere, and you get bored, do you get divorced? If that is the mere truth of it, could I blame my wife if she leaves me when my aspirations stagnate, expectations unfulfilled? Who are you supposed to talk to about this, really? Your parents probably have the same questions, never knowing an answer. Perhaps we live life by the wrong parameters (or — maybe — what’s wrong is having parameters at all).

It is amazing how little conscious experience we need to really have feelings and begin to understand them. With the smallest beginnings we can extrapolate a path to survival, whether it’s right or not, in such a base instinctual capacity. And what of those extremes? Right, wrong? I hesitate to use them; the shades are too deep and too unknowable. How much wisdom can you draw from those around you, and how much can you rely on your own unconscious processes? If movies have taught us anything, it’s that people will draw conclusions from them, but the finer points are learned by watching those people test their conclusions. I think one of the interesting unexplored territories is one’s own inaccessible intuition — after a certain fashion and an understanding of the associated risks. Our minds learn more than we do, faster, and in more elaborate schemes and scaffolds.

There is always a girl/boy struggle in life, it’s one of love’s subplots… there’s always a war between how each person expects and assumes things will work between them. The emotions stemmed from assumption seem so visceral that the only adequate articulation can be found in shitty teenage emo music (and rightly so as we have no better frame of reference) but what do older people listen to in these situations? Or do they even experience them after having gained the experience enough times? Will we, as old people, become desensitized, apathetic, or are these even the right words for the repetition of experience? Just as importantly: are we in danger of making ourselves emotionally atrophied too soon, or are we currently insulating ourselves in our contemporary adolescence? (This is one of my main questions — the new stories we’re writing now with our networked sociality — do they reinforce, reconcile, or abdicate?)

These are questions worth asking, but their answers are individualistic, not collective. Everyone must answer them as best as possible to themselves, and know that the solutions are continually unknowable. We already have written the truths we’ve found self-evident: moving beyond them are the feelings and articulations of truths we each find evident in ourselves. The revolution we are waiting for in the twenty-first century is not one of governments, corporations, or institutions, but an amalgamation of ideas we each can find ourselves holding true and expressing as our own. A million voices, perhaps saying the same thing, but individually. It’s tough to monetize that, and it’s tough to cover it in the media, and it’s impossible to fully understand. This is the effect we all find puzzling because we are so used to summarizing a collective action within soundbites and headlines. That’s the old media, we’re still trying to figure out the new media.

The girlfriend effect, simply put in a grander context, is our inability to see what we can’t yet see and are perfectly willing to not yet see. The girlfriend effect, put another way, is not being able to discuss something with someone we love because we don’t yet know any way to talk about it. You can’t even articulate it to yourself, but you want to articulate it to them, if anyone. That’s love: the purest experience of selflessness, so much so that we question what we know of ourselves and begin to express the lack of our knowledge. It takes trust to do that, it takes confidence, and it takes risk. What may transcend love is that the risk itself may be worth more to ourselves than to that other person… but shouldn’t the one we love know and appreciate that?

What is the path to trust but one of constant warfare, between defeats and conquests, in that space amongst enemies and lovers? Do we learn more in the retreat, do we affirm more in victory? (Does a victory equal correct, or does it expose nothing at all?) How many friends do we need to have in order to know the good ones from the bad? How many dimensions can be added to our valuations of friendship? (Many, many, many, and potentially none more valuable than any other.) How many experiences do we need to have, how many do we merely need to witness? Time seems to be invaluable, though there are many available shortcuts. Being older does not always mean being smarter, but being younger does not always afford a fresh perspective.

We are trying to make these paths (all paths) knowable, indexable, driven through mechanical means. My analogy stands: if we can figure out the global economy or quantum physics through computerization, why can’t we figure out what makes up a self? Can we quantize love into an algorithm that is more complex than the dating-site questionaires? A similar argument: why explore space when we have yet to explore all of our own planet? Do we hesitate to conquer the seas because their depths mimic our unknowable selves too closely? Is our greatest fear merely ourselves? If we could make a computer that could calculate and predict my next thought, my every reaction, and be a person itself, would we know better than to press “okay”?

There are things you can believe, or you can’t. There are things you can understand now, or maybe later. You can either read this and know what I’m talking about, or you don’t. Any which way you go, it doesn’t matter. This whole article itself is just an elaborate metaphor, if you can look at it that way. Any reason you try to find is unknowable to me. We are each an island trying to build bridges between selves like the scaffolding between neurons. Shouldn’t it all be so symmetrical as one cosmic joke? Move from atoms, to molecules, to masses, to abstractions, to collectives and institutions, and all throughout we have the same themes, the same tragedies. Maybe after a time and a thought you’ll begin to breach through these layers and begin to carve out the form of a person. It takes years to figure out what love really means to you and to me. There’s no other way to do it, nor should there be. When you do come across a meaning that truly satisfies it’ll always feel like one that shouldn’t have taken years to find, and it’ll always be one you can’t quite put into words.

The old poetry is all sound and fury: a spinning wheel of masturbatory fantasy doomed to irrelevancy (if it is not already as irrelevant as the new poetry is irreverent). The world of old poetry exists solely in books: broken tomes dusty and constantly on sale at the local manifestation of a national bookstore chain. Even in the small-town stores, poetry readings aren’t really advertised, and the audience tends to be made up of bored housewives who once heard of Anne Sexton. The old poetry lives in a didactic, formal space shirking any attempt at cultural or social relevancy. It exists in between the offices of tenured English professors, or those untenured staff writing hurried dissertations on the lost notes of Ezra Pound or Shelley, trying to find gold between stanzas.

The old poetry largely rejects anything but that “printed” form. In fact, it relies solely upon it: what’s online of old poets is third-party, of course. I’m not saying T.S. Eliot is gonna come back from the dead to post a new poem on Facebook, but I am saying that nobody is making an attempt to make him a subject worth any interest to the ADHD-augmented, besides being just another assignment in a visionless English class. The only way a 16-year-old will encounter Yeats is either through a teacher they don’t like or if they accidentally find themselves in the one-aisle poetry section of a Barnes & Noble. We do not have similar problems with contemporary art: usually that’s stenciled on the side of high school walls. Not only does Old Poetry not know how to remedy this, they don’t even know it’s as a problem. It’s as if poetry has become archaeology to them: why try to put emphasis on the civilizations of the dead? (The answers to this are as obvious as the problems of most modern-day citizens: nobody knows to learn from the past anymore.)

The old poetry itself also denies any substantive alliance to the world of prose. Poetry is a separate section of the store, but has it always been? I think so. Poetry, if anything at all, has always believed itself to be a faith centered around an even higher power, requiring muses of greater and more revelatory character than those of pure fiction-writers. Poets usually wrote poetry and criticism, and while they might not be bestsellers, they’re the ones who live “longer” in the culture of High Art. Like old fine art itself, poetry requires a more dense rhetoric, a nuanced discourse of assumption and reflection. To study poetry is to believe in something rather than generate a proof of algorithmic fact. (While the potentially mathematical form of a poem does inform the reading, it’s merely one facet of a potentially glimmering gemstone.)

Old poetry is, to the rest of the universe, an immovable mountain. The world made a city in the valley of that mountain, once… and has now moved out to the suburbs to settle down. What’s worse than this is the people who revisit the old mountain of poetry, walking along its features like tourists or, worse, like hikers or park rangers. Step upon the old ground, trample it til you make a path, wear away all the former meaning. A few people still live there and tend the grass as if it’s a national landmark; while it may be guarded, it’s not sacred so far as it is a resource to be mined. There have been no tweets that say “gosh darn i like me some lord byron”. We go to Yellowstone to experience its splendor and buy some souvenirs, but in many ways our appreciation mimics the Las Vegas style spectacle; nobody goes there anymore to breathe fresh air and know what it’s like to be lost in a forest. Walden Pond is a tourist trap now. This, in itself, is morosely poetic.

Old poetry, as it still survives, is a closed system. It’s meant for certain eyes. The journals are all dense and written in the most unappealing jargon. I tried reading a couple of them, then I realized that I have a life to lead, I have shit to do. Poetry, if nothing else, should remind me why I’m leading that life; poetry should color that life, transcend its emotions, make bridges between the reason of the word and the feelings you forget. That’s one way to describe poetry. The fact that poetry is indefinable, like all Art, is a treasure few seem to remember.

The new poetry, the poetry of the last 35 years (I almost said 25 but I remembered that decade between 2000 and 2010), has a lot wrong with it. I think, more so than contemporary art, that poetry has been the worst victim of the world after postmodernism. Born into a world filled with every scrap of poetry ever published (including tons of poetry never published, and never intended to be published) and every author having a fair shake at becoming published, contemporary poets and poetry publications are dime-a-dozen. I could drown in the number of poets who have had a poem published. I’m not saying that this observation, in itself, is relevant; I’m saying it indicates that we lack the curation to let any individual rise to the top. We have a vast ecosystem spead out further than the eye can see, but that’s all. As huge as it has gotten, over the last 30 years we’ve spent the majority of our time content on ground-level. People think that being “underground” is still cool: all that means is that you’re not even relevant enough to be known among thousands of “published” writers on blogs and small-college journals. There isn’t even an “underground” anymore because there is no establishment to be a part of: you are a part of the world of poetry as soon as you post a poem to your Tumblr or your Twitter.

If the old poetry is something that was bred from rigorous study of form, meter, rhyme, et cetera, then the new poetry is formed and subsequently stratified by nonconformity and improvisation. New poetry is dependent upon re-re-reappropriated feelings first heard as hip-hop standoffishness. The “spoken word” is taken mistakenly as “statement” rather than mere exercise. When an old poet reads their work, it’s like a book signing. It’s nice, it’s necessary, but it’s not the work of the poet. To the new poets, that spoken word slam bullshit is the life and the breath. The slam is not only masturbatory, but it’s contrary to poetry itself. The last thing a poet should wish to do is compete, or let the exemplary showcase of their work be an open mic night at your average hipster lounge. I don’t even like writing about poetry slams, it hurts my brain to think somebody somewhere thought it was a great idea. It reminds me of some abominable American Idol or Survivor for poetry.

Please note: the aim here is not to criticize the foundations of hip-hop or rap, or what they began as cultural expression. There is a line in the arts between music and poetry, and there always has been. There are musical qualities to poetry just as there are poetic qualities to music. Hip-hop is musical expression, and does indeed blur the border of poetry, but the two worlds are separate and sovereign. There is an almost indefinable quality to poetry, just as there are similarly indefinable forces behind music and painting, and they are nothing without these nebulous definitions. We create these forms, we maintain them, and it is our fault when they are systemically destroyed. Our ability to express ourselves cohesively (though abstractly) rusts along with them, and we all suffer for it.

Performance is not poetry. However, all the kids found performance to be way more interesting than reading all those dead poets. Especially since the def jam world is much more visceral, immediate, and shallowly counter- and multi-cultural. With that, poetry dug its own grave, or at least allowed people to dig it. I would argue that the old poets who were still alive, in their tenured professor positions, didn’t care enough about Poetry (capital-P poetry) to do anything about it. I doubt they even realized anything was going on, they were too busy writing journal articles about each other, like love letters between bored cousins. This is truly what poetry has done to itself.

The possibility of poetic openness, a lot like the modern standard of liberal openness, is very appealing, especially with such expansive and levelling technologies as the internet. I won’t even blame the internet for the death of poetry: poetry was dying before it came along. If anything, the internet merely represents another true nail in the coffin of all artistic enterprises. What would the internet do for poetry that isn’t just making problems worse? The internet represents the death of curation. Poetry requires curation to be great. (Something has to be a lower form for one thing to be a higher form. Not everything that is poetic should be considered poetry.) The art of poetry, that indefinable quality, is drained away and made obsolete, replaced by a need to be accessible and consumable, like the intents of all fine art have been.

Poetry is about craft, humility, form, and feeling. These truths are held within the wordspace of a poem, which is a dubious negotiating position in the 21st century. Painting has paint, physicality, something easily definable in reality: poetry has mere words, language. The true beauty of poetry is in its mere existence: that we can abstract our language enough through its mastery of interpretation to allow the nuance of poetic form. But with abstraction comes responsibility, because such layering of the metaphysical language requires relevancy and education. It requires distillation and curation. This sense has been lost by the general populace, which is unfortunately no surprise. How could it have survived? Again, like fine art itself, this aloof sense of “Art” is counterproductive to the nature of late capitalism and neoliberalism. “Art” is a market that can’t be mass-produced, it can’t be easily commodified or brought to the everyday person, doing so requires its destruction, and that is exactly what has happened.

Old poetry exists on its mountain, alone, without hope of rejoining the world. New poetry is diffuse, the cultural biproduct of misplaced expression, the appropriation of form for the benefit of a collective excuse. We are not even nostalgic for the old poetry. The articulated poet has lost in the war against openness. “Poetry is hearing” verus “poetry is speaking”: one is a mastery of the passive form, the other is an ego-centric exploitation of artistic endeavor. The “hearing” of the old implies external direction and articulation, both by the writer and the reader. The “speaking” of the new implies an assumed trust between writer/reader and the abstraction of truth as a medium for the message. Old poetry is a “delight” because it is a dance of understanding through abstraction, the new poetry represents a “need” to be expressed. Both parties, the old and the new, wrote poetry for themselves and their readers, but the emphasis on its end product shifted from something holy and articulated to something consumable and visceral. The audience has become too important; the author went from being a vessel to an entertainer. The old think they have it all figured out; the new think they don’t need to bother figuring it out as long as it works.

Do I have a solution? No, I don’t. I don’t want to see a Facebook page for Lord Byron. At the same time, I very much want to see poetry published in the New York Times, but I don’t trust anyone to do the job. You can’t hire an English professor but you can’t just post anything submitted to the poetry@nytimes.com mailing list (that list doesn’t exist, it’s just a hypothetical). We can all send in our poetry to the hundred thousand online publications, but what is curation if there are an infinite number of venues? How does the Chicago Review select what it prints? I don’t think T.S. Eliot would’ve appreciated the exploitations of Twitter, though such fragments were likewise shored against his ruins. Does anyone even care what these things mean anymore? I don’t know if it matters, all I know is the world is boring for not appreciating them.

In the 21st century, this basis of trust in human capability and expression has extended far beyond the road, and has permeated throughout our culture as a foundational social construct. The old social foundations were group-centric: from family to community (geospatial/neighborhood) to nation/state. Sure, friends were in there, but they were more of a periphery item, not foundational but gleefully supplemental. I’d argue that this was to its advantage, as being suplemental rather than essential affords it a more nebulous and unrestrained quality. Friendship granted social wealth, so no matter how financially poorly-off you were, or how far you were from home, you had friends to ease your trouble (but not necessarily solve your problems). On the opposite end, in this old system, marriage was a cornerstone of society rather than just an act of love or free healthcare. We are seeing the dying days of this pseudo-sentimentality now. (I should say, the institution of marriage is pseudo-sentimental to those under 30, while it has an unconsciously weighted and inherent splendor to everyone else. Except those Generation X kids, who only view it with disdain.)

We are seeing in contemporary America the new formalization of friendship supplant the fading insitutions of marriage and family. Thanks to the misguided polarization of neoliberalism, we are largely seeing a systemic self-destruction of institutionalism in itself. Thanks to the equally misguided polarization of neoconservatism, we are also seeing the staunchly ineffective last stand of the old gods. We find the youth of America caught squarely in the middle, commodified to the point that our mere attention spans dictate the death-throes of markets, with monetarily tectonic reactions made at lightspeed thanks to convoluted financial systems reacting to our decisions before we’ve even made them. We have codified our friendships, our social circles, our locations, our interests, our habits, our hobbies, our wishes, our thoughts, our opinions, our purchases, et cetera ad naseum. We are drowning in information, though its effects are purely intellectual and moral.

No one can stop this, however. It is an inevitability, as it has always been, that we are doomed to move gradually toward whatever. The societal forces at work, which have the power to tilt whole cultural ecosystems, have no interest in working radically one way or another. The world’s ruling suffix-isms work as long cons. The most potentially “beneficial” of haughty intellectual ideas unfortunately divorce themselves of such subtle novelty. In doing so, they prove both their worth and define their own irrelevance. There is no “Heidegger existential agenda” the way there is an “Obama socialist agenda” or a “Palin neoconservative agenda” or even a “Bill Nye scientific agenda”. (I would argue that Bill Nye successfully “tricked” a lot of kids into loving science, the same way Sesame Street and Fred Rogers tricked kids into loving life before reality could snatch it away, and we should all thank them for trying so hard.) Anyway, time and history has shown the forces of social change to be gradual. Thanks to computing and the internet, that pace seems to be accelerating, even if by a mere half-step. When the billionaire club starts accepting kids in their 20s, it should be obvious that something is broken, but may not need repair quite yet.

Our American Constitution was designed so that any kind of wide reform, at least governmentally, should take place slowly. That’s why there’s no way for us to just MAKE GAY MARRIAGE LEGAL RIGHT NOW or ABOLISH ABORTION TODAY. It just doesn’t happen that way, and it shouldn’t. However, the growing concern here is how the institution of governance is being separated from the dissolution of the idea of the necessity of the institution. Obama ran — and is still running — on a campaign of “the system is broken, and it has to be fixed” when many are interpreting that as “the system is broken, and it must be replaced, or gotten rid of entirely“. Conservativism is correct in saying that a return to the ways of the Consitution are necessary, but they are wrong to believe that saying so makes them “correct” about anything else. Liberalism is correct in that everyone deserves equality, but they are wrong to believe that it can happen in any way besides slow, apologetic change, or that it is worth the cost of individual freedom. Our system is young, but it’s based on the Enlightenment ideas of human balance and the divine justice of the good, which (surprisingly) leaves a lot of room for flexibility. The last thing our country should want to do is limit that intellectual and moral wiggle-room of interpretation. It was the hope of our founding fathers that at least two of the three realms of our government should hold this truth self-evident, that our interpretation of events may be more important than the facts. Currently, I think only our judicial system takes that task seriously, perhaps because it’s the most reminiscent of the old Enlightenment ways. (The Supreme Court is too cool to even allow an audio recording of its proceedings, not to mention the old school style of 30-minute antagonistically argumentative debate!)

Regardless, we are seeing a similar problem of ridigity in our culture and our economics. The contradictory part of this dilemma is that there is no edifying document for our culture, no real social contract that we can call our own. The French have Rousseau, we have Bruce Springsteen. To our benefit, this makes us extremely culturally diverse and versatile, and affords us the ability to easily grasp new forms. Our collective culture is very hard to pin down, despite our efforts to do so. Unfortunately, the proliferation of the indefinable has resulted in the dissolving of Fine Art because of its critical reliance on high and low forms, unless there is a group of strong social/artistic pioneers willing to make personal judgements that the rest of society can accept (or, as I said, are “tricked” into accepting) which has not existed since Andy Warhol. While we are making our culture itself more rigidly conceptualized, we are clamping down on in its potential stratification: we would rather have one gross mess of a culture rather than a dense meta-layering of cultural ideas.

But! As I said, the systems of our sociality are returning us to a kind of formalization. Strangely, we have gone from the nebulous social construction of the institution (whether the institution is government or mass media or education or fine art) to the extremely rigidly defined and corporate-controlled system of computerization. Probably because we’ve been tricked into doing so. Follow my thought: neoliberalism, in all its zeal, wants us to believe that the all-encompassing nature of the internet will grant us a new form of democracy. That’s always been a banner phrase for its widespread adoption. But to really accomplish that, one would have to think of it far more literally than it has been manifested in our society. Liberalism, if it alone were followed, would have America abolish the republic of our government (elected officials representing the interests of geopolitical groups) in favor of strict democracy (everyone has an equal say in government) with flavors of socialism mixed in (so that we are each protected equally as parts of a whole). The internet is a potentially perfect vehicle for this. Imagine if we dissolved the Senate and the House of Representatives and instead the US Government started a website, america.gov, in which we can all go and vote on everything and anything. We could not only vote on laws, but propose, amend, and repeal laws, comment on our governance collectively and openly, and build a more perfect union of informed citizens. (Let’s pretend for the sake of argument that every household in America has a computer and an internet connection… which is something we are currently funding, strangely enough.)

That would be true liberal democracy in the 21st century. But instead, what has the internet given us? Remember: the internet, as a platform/system/whatever, is entirely built on the freedom of information. Anybody can make anything and the only thing that really “dictates” anything is what we allow through our collective use. The internet as we commonly use it through a web browser is only like that because we’ve all decided to use it that way. The World Wide Web (what you see in your browser) is only one facet of what the internet actually is. In many ways, the internet itself is a truly free and open system, but for data. (We trust data — we don’t trust humans.) With this in mind, what has the internet given us? Best example: Facebook. A site anyone can use for free that we can fill with whatever Facebook allows us to fill it with… which is pretty neat, since we can fill it with plenty of types of stuff, but only as long as those things “live” on the Facebook platform… while we willingly give up our ownership (freedom) of whatever we put on Facebook just because we put it on Facebook, and that’s a part of the terms of its free use. By the way, they’re collecting information on everything you click, every little thing you “fill” Facebook with, and they track that all around the internet, without telling you, and are making billions of dollars while doing it, and not sharing any of that money with you, despite the content being generated by you and your friends. Because that’s a part of the terms of its free use. That’s the most popular thing on the internet: Facebook. A system built on freedom, and the best thing we can collectively agree on so far is Facebook, that which distorts freedom for its own profit. Fitting, I think.

This exemplifies the contradictory nature of American governance and culture. We, as a society, are constantly being given just enough rope to either do something interesting, or we could hang ourselves with it. Capitalism has proven that it’s excellent at making the “hang yourself” option look really cool, not to mention everybody’s doing it, so why not hang yourself? I think we are doing to ourselves the same thing, socially. When given the choice: be individual, or be commodity, why not hang yourself? It’s what all the cool kids are doing. Part of me believes that this has always been the case — but what has changed? Now it’s tracked, it’s databased, it’s solidified in the annals of our communication, for everyone to see forever. Should this concern us, as youth of the “first world”? (Isn’t it strange to be in the first world? Isn’t it strange to be afforded that strangeness?)

Are these the toils of the modern idealization? This is part one of a larger idea…

You have two basic kinds of social circles: entirely public or intimately secret. Inside a computer network, these are simple binary opposites, expressed in terms of “secure” and “insecure”, “private” and “public”, etc. In life, these definitions are fuzzy, but nonetheless logical results of a social lexicon: “friends”, “drinking buddies”, “acquaintances”, “coworkers” (three out of four are default Google+ circles: problem officer?) Family, friends, and all that nonsense; how you define such persons is an individual’s own abstraction, however misunderstood, neverknown, and noncompliant with others it ends up being. You cannot yet translate the everchanging nature of a social circle onto the codified latent image of Internet. Regardless, general principals can be applied to both systems of human interaction, for they are merely human.

Everything attempting to be in between the poles of “public” and “private” is inherently toxic, both to itself and to its environment. Knowledge, that which many social circles and loops protects, is that which ultimately destroys them. A familiar theme among common-sense technology consultants to multibillion-dollar corporations wishing to enter the new Social Internet is that you can either be “all in, or not in”. When Sony or the GOP gets a Twitter account, anyone can say whatever they want to them. This is hardly news, and it is hardly relevant. The Republican party, for example, has within it a very high-profile and delicate social circle. When we read Sarah Palin’s emails, you are witnessing a small breach into that information loop. The importance of this is not in its unravelling, but in its mere discovery. A loop is only as good as its secrecy. Anything else is destructive.

This is on a large, public, rather celebrity scale, however. This is why Barack Obama’s BlackBerry had to be secured with encryption that probably bests many NATO secrets. In today’s world, the leaking of his contact list is more volatile than the releasing of his email messages. Any information regarding who belongs to Obama’s true “social circles” is the beginning of the end. Messages, when leaked, can be telling, as we’ve seen with WikiLeaks. However, they do not destroy the social circle that created or allowed them. The world is held in check, economically and politically, by those “in the loop“. However, Obama’s contact list is probably less valuable than Brad Pitt’s, as we have somewhat learned.

The most toxic event that can happen to any loop is the acknowledgement of its existence. The toxicity of this event can be devastating in its application, depending entirely on the scope of its context. (Albeit the toxicity of such loops may be purposeful with a basic understanding of social disobedience and the sacrifices therein.) Nothing generates rumors more than the discovery that rumors exist. A sphere of influence reverberates such telling arrogance into spite and malcontent. On large scales, this means news organizations and tabloids, bribes and whatnot, but on the small scale it means feelings and friendships. The art of the bluff is to destroy an opponent before they can realize whether they are destroyed or not. The backlash against a bluff is realized in obvious forms using game theory, but when applied to sociality, its ramifications are far more damning. Theorists lead back to only one possible way to use such bluffs (in this case, the acknowledgement of a loop) in a beneficial way: with complex probabilities, situations, and contexts. Unfortunately most humans are incapable of being so precise… especially young people. The probability of doing nothing more than making a lot of people upset is extremely high.

To bring this forward more: we currently live in the narrowing of our electronic sociality, and it is now being further codified using these theories of geometry and games applied to our sociality. Facebook and MySpace broadcasted all events to all audiences, or in a more limited-but-not-social fashion. LinkedIn employed the method of “network”, “extended network”, and “public” through its idea of connections (the numbered tiering of social spheres). Google+ is the first to implement “circles” as core functionality. This is both liberating and deceitful. Liberating in that you can now “securely” dictate the channels of your own communication (to thus share things with your close friends that you would not want your family to see). Deceitful because you can hide things from others in more convoluted, precise fashions and no one would know, but if they did, it might damage the fabric of actual social influence. Thanks to this, Plus gets boring, as everyone hides within their circles without anyone knowing. This plainly adds another level of individual apprehension to the social network. To alleviate this, Plus has controls for how things are “reshared”, but this only proves my point: we must consciously and actively relegate the finer points of our egos, our friendships, and our sociality.

We do this in “real life” all the time. We do it constantly, it’s a basic trope of humanity. We tell one person one thing that we do not wish another person to know, frequently about that third party. There are conditions to our friendship and the exchange of information, whether we know about them (and further, about ourselves) or not. The greatest secret to keep is not the secret itself, but the knowledge that there is a secret to be kept. This is where the line between politics and sociality defines itself: the power-struggle of information as it disseminates through a social ecosystem. Whether this information is that time you got drunk and peed on your dog or whether there’s going to be a planned protest in London later today, the same rules apply. The last thing a group of true activists should wish to do is inadvertently reveal their intentions and even their existence before they take action. Likewise, the last thing a clique of girls should want to do is reveal their scheming to a boy they like.

That is an overview of the macro-level. There now exists a kind of social economy, one never before so rigidly defined as what we have been accomplishing over the last ten years. The realm of social capital has long been the province of artists, musicians, actors, or otherwise those whose “job” it is to motivate themselves and others through social means rather than purely political or financial ones. The experimental filmmaker does not depend upon the good will of a commercial film distribution company, but on the friendships they’ve made with other filmmakers and exhibitors. The art house is a social ecosystem rather than a financial one. There are, of course, minglings of both worlds necessary for survival, (the art house needs to get money from somewhere to stay open,) but for the sake of argument my position stands regardless. On the micro-level this is frequently a small circle of like-minded people, typically confined to a small geographic area. Cities have served as hyperstimulants to such systems of social capital. However, small rural communities have always been capable of the same methodologies of social exchange (if you know the bartender at the only bar in town, they’ll probably keep a tab open for you, if they don’t already know better).

It is curious how the two worlds (rural vs urban) hold this value of social capital in such contention, when they are so very alike in basic premise. Politicians often say they want to bring back the “small town feel” to America at large: conservatives frequently rally against the “big city liberals”. Likewise, the emotionally honest contend against the viscerally restrictive, when both are alike in dignity. The modern diatribes of introvert versus extrovert are similarly flawed in that they are too highly reductive of a complex system to be taken seriously. (And perhaps that is this whole argument in a piece.) Nevertheless, these are the conflicts we are abridging and annotating and gradually refactoring with our digital personas.

Online, our social capital is represented almost wholly in the positive, with “Like” and +1 buttons. Why are our social systems enforcing positivity and passivity? This is not how the world works, and thus our digital systems of social science are fundamentally flawed, not only in their reductiveness but in their approach. I will be explicit: I am not saying we need a -1 button, quite the contrary. We need no buttons. This is the Disease that faces us intellectually and, eventually, emotionally. As younger generations take their social circles more and more seriously, the reliance on them and potential distortions within them increase. Using the previous example: imagine if you could see your friends’ circles in Plus and find your place within them. We have, for the first time, the potentiality for it to be databased somewhere that one person is someone I only consider a boring acquaintance, while another I may secretly hold as a potentially dear friend. They may hold me in high regard. I question what this means to us, if it should merit anything more than an “okay” and a sigh. To many now approaching youth, it would be more than a small event to know their place in their friends’ social circles. I mean, to kids, this internet shit is kinda serious.

I say this now because in other contexts this flawed approach (the codifying of groups of people) has colored many of our previous mistakes as a society. In real life, we have had rather disruptive “social loops” that were cemented in laws and norms, such as ones based entirely on gender, or race, or ethnicity, or anything. Liberal democracy dictated these to be wrong, and toxic to our society and culture, as they obviously are. If we are not allowed to discriminate in any fashion, why are we allowed to discriminate online? It is as likely that a person could make a “dudes only” circle in Google+ as they could make a “white people” circle or a “cool kids” circle. Are they equally socially disruptive, if they were to be revealed? I hesitate to make such generalizations and comparisons, but I find it necessary to bring forth questions to an uncomfortable extreme. In the most optimistic sense, we can reform this position, and remove the possibility of people making groups based on race, but can we say the same about gender? Or about social popularity?

A loop comprised solely of males in any kind of discriminatory fashion has been deemed by our society to be unjust and discriminatory. However, a social circle comprised of women is not. Are the sins of male exclusionism to be repeated? The male loop has existed for thousands of years and it has been so ubiquitous in our social evolution that it is likewise fundamentally difficult to extinguish. Feminism in all its waves has gone back-and-forth on the subject of gender exclusionism, from reducing it to misogyny to embracing it as community-building when adapted for women to use. However, any such approach is destructive; feminism could never fight fire with fire and achieve any measure of real success. I subject it to the same analysis as most other sociopolitical issues: the arguments of liberalism versus conservativism. The freedom to do what you want versus the enforcement of equality. The question has always been: do we allow men the freedom to create their own groups, or do we protect the equality of the women who may be discriminated by it? Regardless, to approach it in this matter is treating the symptom rather than eradicating the root problem. The obvious Disease is the need for or expression of discrimination in the first place. Gender equality can never truly be reached until this issue is broken. Likewise, the true liberation of our social circles can never be achieved until our need to have them is broken. Why do we need to rigidly organize our friends into circles, when our collective cultural emotional maturity is at perhaps all-time lows?

(As an aside, the whole polarization of liberalism versus conservatism is a flawed system. Our founding fathers never intended for them to be opposing forces, but rather opposite sides of a balanced equation. In our American founding documents, it is enumerated that we each have the equal right of freedom, which is as a phrase itself a balance of Enlightenment-era liberal and conservative ideals. I have the same equal right to my freedom that you have for your freedom: this is the way of things in our more perfect union. It is only the contemporary ideas of neoliberalism and neoconservatism that their positions become absolute and rigidly opposed, just as our 21st century ideas of sociality and interaction now become absolute and rigidly defined.)

On the micro-level of our social circles, where motivation matters more than blame, facts don’t matter as much as interpretation. The liberation of ourselves from the codifying notion of digital sociality is one of two paths: inherently public or intimately secret. Unfortunately, as humans we are highly adept at misunderstanding each other, and the removal of physical layers to our social interactions only increases the likelihood of our self-destruction. With computers, we live in an all-or-nothing game. There is no fuzzy logic to the systems we are building to further structure our lives. Going the “secret” route is an easy one, and it’s one most people often take. Hide your tweets and your posts and whatnot, so that you totally control who can see them. As I have said, however, this is still socially dangerous. The integrity of your privacy hinges least on the system itself, and almost entirely on the people you have allowed in your social sphere. If you left your Facebook account logged in somewhere, the most someone could do is post as you, and maybe view your private messages, but it wasn’t really too socially damning because most everything was socially available. As I’ve said about Google Plus, however, the system itself could tell much more to the prying eyes of an impostor, depending on how deeply you codify yourself onto that system. If you build it, they will come; and many are ready to map their lives onto such systems. We seem to have nothing better to do.

The public route is a much more encouraging one, however it has two of its own seemingly opposing sides. One of populist emotional honesty, in which we expose our hearts not as depressed youth, nor self-beguiled sages, not even as “kindred spirits”, but as informed social citizens. I call this a democratization of sociality, for that is the only revolutionary response to what has been called into form by our currently totalitarian, corporate-controlled digital social lives. This is the uncensored loop, the private-made-public, the personal-in-toto, with all its unabashed egoism and vulnerability. It requires a high degree of social consciousness and intellectual abstraction-of-self, a kind of emotional maturity that won’t be found in our youth anytime soon, which would afford instances of open criticism and potential ridicule. More than this, however, it requires an audience to understand as much, which will propagate a social economy to support it. In real life, we call this social circle your “close friends”. Can this be extended indefinitely into infinity? We may have to find out soon.

The other public route, which is somewhat already happening, is one of social disobedience. This is a rather forced attrition for many, and it does not forgive the sins of our digital demons, but rather embraces them with an almost religious understanding. (And, as I said, it is a faith.) Disobedience of social systems in the sincere interest of destroying the digital self; totally divorcing the facilitation of social life from its possible mechanizations. This kind of disassociation comes rather naturally to those of us who were born into a world without such systems. It requires the knowledge of self as system and the profession of grafting the self onto social systems. We grew up in a world that stated, plainly, no one knows I am a dog. This was the dream that was Internet, a burgeoning anonymous society without race or religion, now proudly bloodied, hilariously commodified, rope-fastened upon the hull of the HMS Google. We are now allowing ourselves to be objectified through systemic social reductionism; so, in turn, we can choose to disobediently objectify ourselves, and willingly sacrifice what humanity others may attach to that objectification.

We continue to pay for these sins with social capital, which is worth more to them than money. We can choose not to use them, or we can choose to subvert them, or we can choose to carry on as we have. I’m not sure what side I fall on yet, but my feelings are hurt anyway, by entities that do not even truly exist. At the end of such discussions, I often wonder, do then my feelings truly exist? Are they but ghosts in a machine? Are they being exploited by a mechanized deity, one of human-made origin? In what path does our salvation lie, if it is rested upon a cauldron of unholy loves.

the work as personal

All creative work is personal, even nonfiction, though we find various ways to hide ourselves within it. A lot of writers waste more energy enforcing “ignore me, I’m just the author” when they should be using that force to focus on “here’s what I have to say”. Some of my favorite writers are so on top of their game because they know how to be in control of their act as writers. You, as a writer, should be the last thing you worry about, at least as it comes across on the page.

If the internet has proved anything, it’s that the voice of the writer, in order to be truly heard, must command words and form in ways that are increasingly immeasurable. The strong voices stand out because they realize they’re in an endless sea of shitty bloggers, and they realize that not necessarily being louder results in being better. Rather, striving for a content uniqueness and comfort-of-self is the true path to a good writer. Content uniqueness, (as in to be content, rather than the content of the writing,) being the ability to stand behind one’s work, embedding within it the uniqueness of one’s perspective, while understanding that it is very difficult to be unique among millions. Be content in what uniqueness you can grasp onto, and stop worrying about it. Just fucking write! Maybe don’t publish it, that’s where editing comes in, but you will find that the agency of writing becomes easier as you get more comfortable being yourself as a writer.

I wrote about that before: the ability to find your muse and learning how to softly guide that muse to work for you. Make some tea and sit by the fire for a session of divine inspiration. After awhile, you will find that your muse is always there, and what was limiting you was never anything but your own apprehension and self-doubt. (Please note that you always need self-doubt and apprehension, but in controlled amounts. I will explain later.) One could say that eventually, instead of gently rousing your muse from its slumber and humbly asking it for help, you come to the point where your muse becomes subservient to your ego. You can kick it around a bit, and not feel too bad about it. I’m not saying you should abuse it; I’m saying you should experiment with it. Bondage, S&M, that kind of thing, but never forget to respect that which once was so hard to come by. Sometimes you need to take what would normally be a flash of incredible inspiration and turn it against itself. There was a time when I would have one of those brilliant A-HA! moments, begin writing, and not look back. Now, if I have the sudden need to write something, I first question it. What is it that I’m suddenly finding so important to say? Where does it stem from? What emotion, what event, what acted as a catalyst?

You soon discover that your work, at the root of it, is deeply personal. When picking my subject matter, I often do so because someone has said something or written something that I disagree with. And being the good blogger that I am, why not start a website to hate on them. Now I’ve come to a bizarre circle: I hate on them, I hate on me, and I hate on the cycle itself. It makes for great fodder, as you’re reading now. But regardless, the greatest writers in the world admit to being “set off” by simple stimuli like movies, songs, people. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it helps to gather a deeper understanding of why those things set you off. What is it, exactly, that I’m hating on? Is it a product of something else? Is it motivated as a response, or as a consideration? Should I write a letter to someone, or write a letter about them? Can these different forms be manipulated into speaking more than the content of words themselves? (This is why the study of form in poetry is especially useful.)

Anyway, all writing is intimate, whether it’s a post on a blog or a tweet or a novel. The writer is letting us peek into their psyche, and we as readers can never really know how much of it is intentional, accidental, appropriated, or autobiographical. We should never know; that level of intimacy is difficult to achieve. What I can tell you is that it should always be a mix of those four things. Allow yourself to make mistakes, even if they’re as simple as a typo. If you leave it in there, it may inform the rest of the work in interesting ways you never would have considered. Along that same line, the more you know about where your thoughts are coming from, the more you can intentionally incorporate their influence. This is most evident through hyperlinking, and I do it often. Writers like T.S. Eliot did hyperlinking before such a thing even existed by saturating their work with allusion. Now, like then, our work as writers is informed by countless media, from oral to visual to hypertextual. Exploring, exploiting, and even revealing these influences only makes you a better writer.

Expose yourself within your words, whether it’s through word choice or declarative sentences. I’ll agree with your high school english teacher in saying that you shouldn’t begin your sentences with “I think”, but it is useful to admit things, think out loud, and let them weave a story in your paragraphs. Every time you read anything, you’re going on a journey with the writer. You go as far as you’re interested in going. Reading is one of the few truly active forms of media. The distance between abstraction and meaning, as Scott McCloud would put it, is huge. It’s one of the first intellectual things we learn to do: spoken and written language. Every word you speak and write is picked as carefully as you are able to pick it, and every word you hear and read is equally understood as carefully as you have learned to know it. The simple act of turning a page or scrolling down in a window is more active than a video or a song. Take advantage of the fact that you may have a reader who is willing to actively turn the page, and don’t take it for granted. Of all the great writers I’ve ever read, a universal theme is “don’t use a big, complicated word when a small, simple one will do”. I could not agree more, because it does not just resonate with your word choice, but with your attitude as a writer, and how you wish to address your audience (if it isn’t already clear through your jargon, if you use any).

Regardless of word choice, though: expose yourself and don’t be afraid to. In my generation we’re used to exposing ourselves in extremely controlled ways through our profiles and our status updates and our tweets: break away from that and go further in longer forms. Don’t bother exposing yourself in a fucking tweet. There is nothing more degrading to the condition of the human mind than yet another status update that says “I broke up with my girlfriend and I feel terrible” or “my grandfather died and I’m sad”. You should have more to say than that, and be willing to explore such avenues of expression. You’ve turned real, tangible, revelatory feelings into a sound byte or a billboard. Some would say to this: get a diary, then, and write in it. Well, that’s not a bad goddamn idea. Everybody should have a journal. (I don’t — I have a couple blogs instead.) But as you master the ability to express yourself in a written form, or if you already write a lot, begin working your self into your writing. Don’t be afraid of making it public if you think the work really represents you. Conquer yourself and your expression.

Which leads me into what I’ve discovered to be the birth-and-death of authorship, and the abstraction of the self through written language. In becoming more personal with my work, the more simple it becomes to move beyond that which I write out, in ways that are beyond what would normally constitute just “talking it out with someone”. Everyone has felt the immeasurable weight that is lifted when you talk out your feelings with someone. But imagine, while saying them, that you are actively no longer becoming those feelings. It goes beyond a mere lifting-of-weight and becomes a transformation. And it goes beyond mere diary/journal writing, in whatever form that takes, in that the act of editing and understanding your own text for potential publication is an act of pruning and defining your self as much as can be expressed with words. The more personal your work and the more you master the authorship of that work, the more those parts of you are being destroyed and reborn as you write and publish it. The words you read now are of someone who was, not someone who is. You can read this and know not me, but who I was at the time of this writing. While this act of personal rebirth is indeed inherent with all persons in time, that simple “growing up” is not necessarily a revelatory act of self-curation, as is the pursuit of all true self-expression, whether it’s found in writing or painting or whatever. The mastery of self is only found in the ways in which we examine, live, and expose the self. I do not believe you can truly know yourself through thought or speech alone. Thought, like speech, is temporary at best, and the game changes when you have the increased permanence of written information. It is sublime in its banality and subtlety. It’s not necessary to really consider it every time you write as much as it’s necessary to just appreciate and understand it.

on ambiguity and responsibility

The obvious problem of exposing yourself are the issues of personal ambiguity and your responsibility for your audience. Of course, this is why journals are typically kept secret; or in my generation’s case, it’s embarassing when someone finds your livejournal from junior high. While the pursuits and agendas of your audience are entirely outside of your control, you must maintain complete command of your own responsibility to your own personal truth. That’s all you can really do, and reasonably be expected to do. Personal truth and the lens through which you expose that truth are the keys to being able to focus yourself in ways that are beneficial to yourself while informing your work and not disrespecting your reader.

Ambiguity is your best friend and worst enemy. On your end: ambiguity means you don’t have to overtly reveal what it is you’re talking about. Ambiguity is a form of vaguely plausible deniability. But it’s also a mechanism for bringing the personal into something generic, so if the personal doesn’t really matter and you readily reveal it, the subtext could actually be quite deeper. You can write about your dying grandfather and really be touching on deeper issues of patriarchal shame, family malcontents, or an allegory for a failed relationship in another part of your life. “Ambiguity”, in the sense that I’m using it here, does not so much mean obfuscating facts as much as clouding intention. Ambiguity is letting interpretation matter more than plot. When you write about a man killing someone, you should never be writing about murder. That’s an elementary example, but regardless, your power as a writer is within all things written and unwritten. Reading through the notes and edits of another author can potentially open your eyes to a piece because you can see what they took out, withheld, or shortened.

For some of your readers, purposeful ambiguity will show that you’re hiding something. After awhile for them, or immediately to the discering reader, your ambiguity shouldn’t matter. Your words, if they are strong, whether personal or not, should reflect a tone, an emotion, a theme. When I write in a vague stream-of-conscious manner, I’m rarely writing about whatever is being written. Or rather, as I said before, that which is being written only serves as metaphor for something else. The job of the reader, if they don’t already find the work enjoyable, is to respect that distance if they feel such distance exists. Our minds, when processing what we’re writing, work through association and purposeful disorientation. No memory is perfect and there’s good reason for it, and using that fact to one’s advantage when writing is a similarly informative act to the reader. The color of our lives are within such vague terms. It’s hard to write about, and it’s harder to write about such things concisely in a manner the reader could understand.

Your responsibility for this, on the other hand, is mixed. In most cases, I just crash my way through certain barriers and worry about responsibility later, though it’s a practiced illusion of discord. This is rather isolating: some people will understand immediately, others will shun it. Misinterpretation runs rampant, but I have always found that mixed reviews can be a wonderful experience. Something my father reads illicits one response, while my girlfriend reading it gathers an opposite one. There’s nothing more informing to one’s work than that. Use it, and ask yourself: how could I have written it in a way that would’ve gotten the same reaction from both readers? Did I want the same reaction from both audiences? What does it mean about them — not just me — that they reacted so differently? The context of our language is vital to our sociality; no one under 20 wants their parents to see their raw Facebook feed. Why is that?

Furthermore, I enjoy the idea of letting yourself feel something, whether it’s as the writer or the reader. Let that emotion bleed onto the page. As Francis Ford Coppola said: “Use everything. Whoever you are in that moment, let that be you.” Go ahead and abstract it if you want, but at least don’t try to stifle it. If you’re mad, and you think you have the right to be mad, then be mad. If you’re in love, then love, whether you’re the writer or the reader. Emotional honesty is important, especially if you want to come to terms with the personality of your writing, if you’re able to live with the consequences. Again, the intelligent reader should understand the context of this. There is always a context: do not be lost in the singularity of a feeling. This is the benefit of the subjective, and key to the birth-and-death of authorship I explained before. The person you’re reading, if the work is personal, is no longer truly that person anymore. They’re not a wholly new person, but you should not approach them as if they never wrote it.

In this sense, being concise can be destructive, because it breeds misunderstanding when paired with ambiguity. My own conciseness has perhaps cost too much of my readers at times, and made my points terse and aloof. There are tradeoffs to every technique and trope of writing. However, brevity has its uses (beyond Twitter) in that it seems to place more work on the reader than the writer, much the same way ambiguity can. Do not use a complex sentence when a simple one will do. Don’t elogate your prose to the point that it becomes masturbatory. (Most likely I am guilty of this, here.) That having been said, objectivism is the death of the personal. Become objective when you want to step back, but do not make it your modus operandi, because it’s boring. Objectivism is the death of poetry and beauty.

the vanity of writing

Yes, the writing I’m talking about is very vain. Making all writing personal is extremely vain, and encroaching your personal life into the work you put out may seem very vain to your readers. However, the act of doing so is also tragically in vain: because you can never truly write anything that really expresses the self. You can come close, you can be happy with it, but of course it never is really you. That’s the way it should be. All creative self-expression is the tragedy of vanity meeting the limits of its own articulation.

Furthermore, the balance of this vanity is best found within the opposing nature of you as writer versus the “other” as reader. The craft of writing is manipulating that gap between what you convey and what your audience responds to. Sometimes it’s easy, most of the time it’s not. Filling your paragraphs with declarative statements is simple, but it makes for a boring tale that nobody really wants to read. Part of the journey of making something worth reading is being able to write in whatever fashion you feel you can, whether it’s personal or not, and then forging those raw patterns of language into something that can be understood by another. There is nothing more demanding of sociality than that. Finding the balance, whether through ambiguity or conciseness or whatever, is the ultimate task of a writer.

I suppose even more fundamental is the reasoning behind writing itself. Ask yourself: why are you writing? Or maybe better yet, why aren’t you writing? I write because I find it relaxing, focusing, and it brings me closer to certain people while bringing me closer to myself. Writing has been one of the few constants in my life. Everybody needs some kind of creative outlet, and writing is mine. The healthy self is sharpened by the expression brought forth by that creative outlet, until it becomes an obsession or a crutch, which everyone should try to prevent. In our current age, I don’t know at what point expression becomes a crutch anymore. I think maybe we are all using too many crutches. If you habitually update your Facebook or Twitter feeds not because you have anything to say but because you’re used to doing it, you should probably take a break. Many thoughts should be written down, but not all of them need to be published.

At the end of the day, I like to tell people: write it for you, edit it for them. No matter how personal you make your work, there will always be the separation. You can never read your own work as someone else would; appreciate and respect that, but have hope that your reader understands the same. You should probably still edit it as if they don’t appreciate it, though, unless you get comfortable enough with an audience that you may not feel the need to. But that could also get you into trouble with them and with yourself. Worry about that later. If you read and write every day, words become breath. If I could go back and tell myself anything when I was a younger writer, it would be to learn how to edit, and be patient, before thinking something is done.

Lastly, the best compliment you can give to a writer is to write about them. That, in itself, is a very vain statement, but it’s true. Some tremendous sources of insight about influential writers are the letters they sent to each other and to their friends about writing. The strongest thing you can do, as a reader, is to give back to those you are reading, or to talk to your friends about the writing itself if you wish to become a better writer. The nuggets of wisdom you find are most often very simple and deeply personal.

Write more. Read more.

Presently in American culture we are obsessed with loving things that are inherently awful. Most people know this, but few do anything about it. Things like obscene reality television, dime-a-dozen CSI-wannabe shows, the autobiographies of our corrupt politicians, Katy Perry, mindless shows about home improvement and/or food, and the art of becoming super rich. We’re boisterous, without merit, shameless and bored. Our cultural expression reflects this, and it damns us. We’re dredging the bowels of our culture, seeing just how low we can go before something snaps. Unfortunately, I don’t believe anything will “snap”. During the Bush years people often thought just how far our reach had to extend before people would start really protesting. That flavor of American individuality is gone from our rhetoric, I suppose, never to return, or at least not until food prices go too high.

Our American government and civil culture is equally distorted. We’re protecting the rich while punishing 99.7% of the population. We keep giving money to people who have proven they’re only going to continue raping us with it. We keep voting for people who are clearly idiots. Our economy, as it stands right now, is inherently awful. Bored, greedy people running corporations that just want more profit at whatever cost. They know they’re awful, we know they’re awful, but we keep buying into their lies. I mean, even Ron Paul is looking like a better option every day. Anything radically different must be better than this!

Kanye symbolizes these problems quite eloquently. His lyrics are the worst kind of pedestrian trash. All he sings about is how awesome he is, how rich he is, how much sex he has, and how he’s the greatest rapper ever. His voice is painful to listen to, pure and simple. At the same time, he is intentionally self-deprecating, and there is nothing worse than an asshole with public self-confidence issues. Yes, he seems like he gets kind of personal sometimes, but that’s only a bland egoist’s attempt at public superficial redemption. When you really want to be forgiven, you don’t put your name on it. We should shun such overtly toxic people, but instead we feel bad, so we listen to them anyway and convince ourselves that they’re really okay deep down inside. (Mostly because we want ourselves to be okay.) But these are people we cannot possibly know, no matter how closely we follow their Twitter feeds. The rise of totalitarian celebrity-centric culture is a self-destructive step for all of us. We can now see clearly how stupid these people are… why do we keep paying attention to them?

Doesn’t this sound like how we are treating our two party “democracy”? Each party is more interested in catering to extremes than any kind of rationality or tolerance, yet they attempt to appeal to our sympathies en masse, broadcasted ceaselessly by our news media. They can’t even agree with themselves, let alone try to “reach across the aisle” and have any kind of bipartisan concession, and yet we feel like they represent us? Journalists themselves haven’t the integrity to keep their perspectives straight. Some people think it would be great if we had a TMZ-type institution for our government: so that we could track and publish and publicly scrutinize every person in civil authority, as if that would force some kind of accountability. It’s a shame we have a centrist president at the worst possible time. You can’t make compromise when no one is willing to compromise — you only end up defeating yourself. If Obama loses in 2012, we’ll see the clearest evidence of this. We will see the death of reason because of our obsession with the awful. It’d be like Kanye winning the Nobel prize.

We enjoy these things, Kanye West and our American culture, mostly because we are either tricked into it or it’s shoved down our throats. Power is only afforded by a will to allow it: our collective will, as citizens of our government and our culture. We’re tricked into liking it, and listening to it, because either we think there’s nothing else on, or they’ve bought so much advertising space that we can’t avoid it. We can really stop listening at any time, but we don’t because everyone else is listening to it. The majority are made to feel powerless by this, as we have all been successfully sedated over the last forty years. I watch the riots in other countries, and how our governments turn about-face whenever they feel like it.

Our culture becomes less and less our own. Right now, we’re caught in a chinese finger trap between the paid-for American uberculture and the always-free Internet subculture. Over the past thirty years, our culture and our government have been pulling themselves toward such extremes. On the one hand, we have piracy and sharing that’s so easy, a child can do it (and it’s funded by our willingness to destroy ourselves); on the other hand, we have the rich throwing as much money and political power as they can against it in the form of sure-fire high-exposure media bets. Why make a new, original show when we can make another awful Law & Order clone that’ll hit an already-oversaturated market? (And in some ways, corporations are now throwing too much money at original programming, desperately trying to find some way to gain viewership. This will not work for them anymore.)

Kanye West best represents this public culture-struggle. The biggest reason is because Kanye fancies himself a part of the struggle, as a tool within it, and yet we’re made to think that he’s somehow above it by the acknowledgement of his own limitations and shortcomings. This is a lot like how the government thinks they’re somehow above the problems they create. When Kanye samples Otis Redding, or Aphex Twin, nobody should be surprised or happy about it. He’s plumbing for material the same way Hollywood is, raping and pillaging as they go. Why not remake Green Hornet? We are not nearly outraged enough when Sarah Palin holds up the Constitution as if it’s somehow relevant to her speeches. Likewise, we are not nearly outraged enough when an artist takes our culture and abuses it. We have allowed our ideas of success to become fully obsolete and replaced by limitless excess. Furthermore, as Dick put it, “deficits don’t matter”, whether they’re cultural or financial. Do whatever it takes to go above and beyond, leaving behind whatever dignity or integrity remained.

Honestly though, what do you see when you watch this video:

I see two grown men who have no idea what they’re really doing, but their actions are telling. Purely visually, you’re seeing them rip apart a goddamn expensive car, probably because:

1. They can and why not?
2. It’s way cooler to rip it apart and make some car from Death Race than keep it as-is? It’s so awesome to rip apart status symbols that most people could never dream of owning.
3. Why not put some women in the back, who of course will just enjoy the shit out of these two guys, because they’re both fucking rich.

Seriously though, Jay-Z needed some kind of cred back, right? He’s just getting too rich, he forgot how to rhyme, how to do much of anything in today’s world besides make money. There aren’t any beefs left in the rap game, everybody is too busy cutting up their cars! Listen, Jay, we know you like New York City. We know, and we shouldn’t care.

On an even more needlessly metaphorical level, these two guys tearing apart this car is reminiscent of the way they’re taking apart a goddamn amazing Otis Redding song. They took a blowtorch to a timeless classic, ripped it to bare pieces, made something gaudy and commercial out of it, and then drove it around on a closed course to show off to their friends and the cameras. At the end of the day, the cultural product of this effort is not for you or me, it is solely for them. Right now, you’re not listening to a song that was made for a Culture or a Time or a Place, it was made for the gods of Materialism and Self-Aggrandizing Masturbation. There is nothing redeeming here, culturally or artistically, it is entirely a self-absorbed mess that we should feel “privileged” to watch.

“Sophisticated ignorance, write my curses in cursive.”

This is what we’ve purchased. Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader? Are you smarter than Kanye West, or Michelle Bachmann? Probably not, but we’ll be buying/voting both of them in spades, and it doesn’t matter. (Can you spot how many wardrobe changes go on in that video? How much product placement?) And the ending of the video is the very best part: the vehicle will be up for auction, and proceeds will be going to some world problem somewhere. Oh, well that just makes everything beforehand totally justified. If you have to sell the car to give to some auction, you’re basically admitting that what you did was totally without merit, and you’re so ashamed of it that you’ll do anything to make amends. (At least I hope that’s how Kanye feels.) We are meant to believe that it’s somehow redeeming, but really we’re just acknowledging and then promptly ignoring our own shame in watching the needless bleeding of money. Money is worthless now anyway.

I’d want to give Kanye a little bit of leeway, because he does push a few boundaries creatively, like the screaming at the end of this song, but every other action he takes negates it. Does anybody really need him to fuck up more? We’re really all still watching because we want to see how low he’ll go, right? Why doesn’t anybody realize that by watching, we’re only encouraging it? Why don’t we realize that we’re only seeing how low we will go with him? Why are we encouraging it? We think it’s pretty awesome that the people “in charge” are finding it more acceptable to collaborate and mash together, but only in the most controlled, commercially-viable ways. Imagine if, twenty years ago, Death Row Records was swallowed up by the same controlling corporation as Bad Boy Records. They both became subsidiaries, and the marketing heads told Tupac and Biggie to do a record together. You know, throw out that whole rivalry and just cash in. In today’s world that wouldn’t seem so strange, would it? We’re watching it happen all the time because artists don’t seem to have that kind of inspiration anymore. We are experiencing the creative death of heavily context-driven forms of cultural expression, like hip hop. The draining of substance, the renewed emphasis on style. (If you listen to late 80s and 90s hip hop, you can tell how cheap a lot of the production was, but it doesn’t matter because their words are, at many times, so strongly crafted.)

I’m not condoning the gang violence that informed a lot of early 90s rap, I’m just saying it gave a subculture the need and the context for a creative outlet. Jay-Z should know this better than everyone and recognize the creative void that has been created by our culture’s wholesale commodification, which has only been sped up by the entrepreneurship of people like him, but instead he teams up with Kanye to further the goals of his own accidental creation. In Watch the Throne, Jay-Z refers to “the Holocaust of millions”, but I don’t think he realized just what genocide he was referring to. What we’re experiencing, all of us, is the infinity of context available to us, which might as well be an obliteration of context to most people.

But really — why have we let it all go? Where’s the struggle, the insight, the source of some kind of expression? Oh, that’s right: we’re bored here in America, I said that before. We may still have some oil left, this must be just us reaching peak attention. There’s nothing else left for us to mine: we can’t use nostalgia since every day is nostalgic, we can’t use obscure music because that’s all been done (and you’ve never heard it), we can’t use actual fine art because it’s just so hard to understand and we’re cutting funding for it so quickly, and we certainly can’t make any original content because nobody will pay for it. The best we seem to be able to do in the face of the Kanyes and the Bachmanns is to make videos of our cats and throw them on YouTube.

Or, worse, write blog posts about it.

Watch the Throne, tl;dr review: boring at best, offensive at worst. Three fucks out of ten.

This article is in response to this, which I think is wholly wrong in its conclusions, and this, which I like, but I view it much more negatively than she does (and I usually agree with Molly Lambert’s writing), and this, which is a great review.

We are fortunate to feel a great sadness our parents could never afford.

I cannot truly disagree. I have toiled over this idea in my head for a few weeks, and I find that it resonates within me as our defining quality. In our contemporary emphasis on the pursuit and expectation of continual happiness, we have made sadness our true friend, as if the ability to willfully surrender to extreme oscillations between “true happiness” and “true sadness” is some kind of noble fortune. Our parents were too busy working hard and having children to truly know it as we do. They arrived upon it later in their lives, if at all, while those of us in the “digital” generation are afforded it wholesale immediately.

We are a generation adrift in a sea of context. Read carefully: we are not a “lost” generation. We are never lost. In fact, we are so hyperaware of our selves and our surroundings, that the idea of being lost is as foreign to us as the Internet truly is to our parents. We’ve seen that Generation X, the one preceding ours, has the precursors of our hyperawareness, as expressed by their constant contextualization of marriage. The questioning of a generation typically hinges, as that article suggests, on a collective answer. What is ours? You’d think — as I once did — that our generation would be defined by the answer to “where were you on 9/11/2001?” or “what did you do as America’s exceptionalism failed?” as if the answers are somehow relevant to our future world. Those questions are about symptoms, not the root causes of our problems.

America is too broad a concept, though, and we no longer truly wish to engage with it (see: the new Republican party). The self is our main arena now, within our cultural identity and our social lives. Individualism and its discontents. The first-world human in the 21st century moves swiftly from abstracting the self, to admiring the self, to destroying their own self.

self-abstraction

The real questions of our generation have been more akin to “when did you first sign up for Facebook?” or “how many times did you retweet the news about the Japanese tsunami (or a Middle East protest, or whatever)?” or “did you meet your boyfriend online?” We are being defined by our efforts to codify ourselves. In stark contrast to the Gen-Xers, our real problems are inherent questions of our selves, rather than our parents’ influence or true world events. The Baby Boomers get asked about Vietnam; before them, about Pearl Harbor. They were asked about world events that held no ties to a corporate entity like Twitter or Facebook or Fox News or the US Government. I wanted to hope that our generation could be marked by Obama’s election, but we didn’t have much to do with that, as much as we tried hard to make it cool. It was merely as much of a social media campaign and hypemachine as The Social Network was, and it tells the same story of how our human needs are being replaced by extraneous materialistic desires brought on by a culturally manufactured self-guilt.

This adrift-in-context, sponsored by our affluent who-cares-about-debt/social-media-bubble cultural attitudes, has afforded us the tenacity to be sad in a world brought to our fingertips. Our loves are careless. Our new romanticism is an embedded irony. Our musical and cultural voice is stagnant, mired by nostalgia and limitless choice. Who are we? Who are you, and who am I? What are we, as selves, individuals, in the scope of a larger whole? First we should define what I mean by the self. Largely, my concept of the self employed here is synonymous with what others might call personhood or identity.

The self, classically implied, is a collection of perspectives and culminations of experiences that have been built from factors like race, gender, socioeconomic status, family, friends, trials and tribulations. That’s obvious, but it’s context-as-external. I am white, you might be black; I am atheist, you are Jewish; we are different. Our parents might describe themselves as liberal, conservative, Catholic, Chinese-American, transgender, homosexual, feminist, sadist. (What a great combo that would be.) More or less, you see what we might call a tag cloud, with the text-size weighted for what attributes may be more prevalent in the person’s attitude. If they’re really Catholic, and don’t really identify themselves as liberal (but have a few liberal leanings), then the “Catholic self” might dwarf the rest. I’m not saying that a person could be as simple as a list of characteristics; I’m merely saying that this is how most people would describe themselves on dating sites, or on Facebook profiles, or on a census. However, the difference is that our parents didn’t have profiles. Context was, as I said, defined by what is materially external to us.

Tolerance was the acceptance of this external context. However, of course we are also the sum total of life-experiences that can’t fit within a word. That sum of experience being greater than the whole of its parts: this is what forms us, what makes me unique from you. Entering my idea of the new self, I would argue that this perception of uniqueness or greater-than-the-sum self has become true to a fault. We know that everyone is unique, we have been told so since birth. We are working hard at eliminating the idea of minorities in the continuing quest for true social equality. Now, tolerance is a bad word. Instead, we are taught to understand that everyone is equal and the same: liberal openness has replaced tolerance. We’re trying to insist that everyone should be happy all the time and opportunity is not the privilege of the unique but the inherent right of all. The online facilitators we have built emphasize this: a person is merely data, and all data is stored equally, and all options for that user shared equally. One of the grant initial philosophical accomplishments of the internet was that it held no biases for race, gender, social status, or creed. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Unfortunately, while this is still true, we have chosen to let everyone know exactly what we are — but only in ways that we are capable of codifying in detail.

Our technology has enabled us to catalog, process, aggregate, and market-analyze who we are. Furthermore, we are dumbing ourselves down to fit this model of being: the continued codifying of our personalities. In doing so, we become mere feedback loops, responding to our selves before anyone else can. Very quickly, the only reason we use social networks is to project ourselves onto them as we perceive everyone else doing. The idea that everyone is unique in concert with everyone is connected means that such uniqueness is a commodity we have to continually reinforce and reconstruct, and in so doing we make ourselves a commodity since we are tying more and more of our personalities to that online representation. We’re generally terrible at doing this, because we’re skipping any form of true self-creation (that is, we are mistakingly thinking of it in terms solely of within rather than in terms of without), we are actually all quickly destroying our selves.

We move the self from being an ambiguous, nebulous oft-forgot set of experiences, memories, beliefs, values, and norms, (as our parents were,) to a databased, trended, profiled collection of status updates, relationship entries, wiki pages, and photo sets. We are writing our own immaculate autobiographies, with no wiggle room for reinterpretation or self-reflection. (Hence, our future bosses think looking up our Facebook pages are an accurate way to judge us for employment. I don’t think they’re wrong.) When all we have of an experience is within ourselves, we can do nothing but self-reflect upon it, and the benefits of doing so are immeasurable in their beautiful evolutionary inaccuracies (we are better for not knowing or remembering incorrectly); every time you upload a photo of a party to Facebook, you’re expunging the necessity of it from your memory, and every comment upon it only allows the selves of others to further pull your self from the experience. The race towards who can be the most social is an effort to find out who can be the least self-aware. Who can turn themselves into the product of an algorithm faster than everyone else.

self-admiration

It is a God Machine, our new religion, our faith in powers not even man-made but corporate-made. The foundation of social life has shifted from the Church to the People to the Network. We find beauty in the reduction of our selves to fit the models of our media; our pantheon is the mechanized self-generated lies of nobody celebrities. It used to be that celebrities didn’t have to say much, and they were heroes, they were our canvases that we’d paint our hopes upon, but now that Ashton Kutcher has a Twitter account like anyone else (and his name doesn’t set off the spell checker) and his voice is one among millions, the belief in him is entirely on us. We are actively allowing him to be a celebrity when once it was something determined by an executive. This is where the lies begin; for we are not truly in charge. We admire ourselves in the false worlds we create between our social lives and our work lives, between our Friends circle and our Acquaintances circle. Surely, we think, we are bettering ourselves… by narrowing down the scope of our collective visions in such grand computerized organizations. The ability to separate your “friends” from your “real friends” in Google Plus is only an accomplishment in condemning us to further depths of willful computer-dependence.

This simultaneous democratization and codifying of culture and sociality is its destruction. My favorite, and I feel like the most accurate, social myth to explain this is what I call the plight of the urban creative. It’s one that has been prevalent for a decade or so, as more and more of the first-world’s economic “strength” (this being a popular myth in itself) is shifting toward creative professions, and more and more onto the shoulders of city-dwellers, as the populations of cities increases. The tale of this urban creative (culturally expressed as the cliché hipster) is fairly simple, and we continue to emphasize them because we love the idea of ourselves becoming them.

The main protagonist is gender-neutral, often white (though irrelevant, being white gleefully adds an extra layer of inherent guilt), lives in a major city (NYC, LA, etc), and has a job in some bizarre studio space where the only task at hand is either drawing stick figures or generally being creative in some capacity. The profession itself is often irrelevant; you only get to see where they work, rather than what they do; our generation is not defined by profession since work equals life and you should only work at what you love, therefore work itself is only an extension of our selves, and the cooler the place you work at, the cooler you are. And the coolest places to work always look cool. Anyway, this is our protagonist, superficially.

On a deeper level, the picture goes from being seemingly amazing to amazingly depressing. They’re not happy, they probably just broke up with a girlfriend or boyfriend (because like work, relationships also equal life), or somebody died, and they have a hard time not showing their depression. In fact, the narrative often shows off their depression. We’re not talking about the unexpected, lashed-out depression that was pioneered in Rebel Without a Cause, but the blunt, obvious depression of 500 Days of Summer.

Yet in being vulnerable and pathetic characters depth-wise, we as an audience easily hook into their pain and identify. Over the last dozen years, our major cultural protagonists have moved from being escapism-based to being shallowly identity-based. Shallow because they have to make broad strokes to appeal to the mass audience, there’s very little specificity to their depression. (My girlfriend broke up with me is not specific, see: from The Smiths to Dashboard Confessional to Bon Iver.) We no longer want to be Superman or Michael Jordan; we want to be that guy from The Notebook. We want to be sensitive, caring, sad, willing to love, and have all of that on tap and expressive. This is not altogether terrible, except it envelops our senses because it’s easy. It’s extraordinarily simple to be sad and sensitive and vulnerable and look cool doing it; it’s very difficult to become a great athlete, or a scientist, or let alone comic book character, because it takes rigorous self-discovery and patience. Our generation has crafted (or rather, allowed the crafting of) “cool” into something that’s much easier to package and sell and identify as. It used to take piercings and expensive leather jackets or suits to be cool; now it’s as simple as a raggedy thrift store shirt, a bad haircut, and an iPhone full of sad introspective music and Twitter apps bought with maxed-out credit cards. You don’t even have to know how to dance to be cool anymore; and we admire ourselves as we “ironically” play out these games.

That construction of the self used to be the following of role models. In the beginnings of our youth, we had ad campaigns such as Be Like Mike which centered around such role models; but they can no longer compete with the easily manufactured, and much more “real” identities of reality television and finally the true “reality” of social networks. The lives of our celebrities and once-powerful role models have been blown open. We have furthermore eliminated the need for such role models as Facebook and Google find faster ways to aggregate yourself and the people you know, so that our friends (who are just as inexperienced as we are) become role models. We become our own reality shows. A simple thought exercise: name some role models truly on the same infallible level as Michael Jordan or Albert Einstein or James Dean that have come “to power” over the last ten years. Twenty years. (Do you remember what it was like to idolize Jordan?) We don’t need such people anymore, and it is only because we have destroyed the need for such greatness by our ham-fisted wholesale acceptance of materialistic “real” life, made accessible and identifiable by our own depression. Because real life is so hard. I wonder how we’ve been doing it for so long.

The urban creative muddles through the plot, always finds a new girlfriend, but may or may not stay with them by the end of the story. They never get fired for being unproductive at work. The ends are left as unjustified and devoid of purpose as the means. There typically is no discernible climax, and there’s always a dénouement. At the end, we should be asking, “what did we just watch?” but instead, we ask ourselves why we aren’t so in touch with our emotions as they are. But we seldom ask that of ourselves in the context of our friends. Again: we seek our media to inform us of who we are, rather than seek those around us to help us figure out who they are, and in doing so, find a stronger grasp of life in general. We make our friends into potential role models, but there isn’t the depth there necessary for reflection.

Every one of us under 30 likes to think that nobody could tell us what we should do, nobody has a better plan or idea, nobody could help us but ourselves; we could not be more wrong. There is someone older than you that has been through what you’re going through, and knows more about it than you do, and yet their advice is often the last thing we’d consider following. We have such disdain for our elders on an emotional level. And yet we were willing to make private LiveJournal posts, and now we’re willing to make status updates, but only as long as our parents can’t see them. We wish to admire ourselves and those around us in our social circles, but we want it to be a closed system.

self-destruction

In thirty years, if the next generation hasn’t firmly rejected technology, I want to see if I can turn the Turing Test onto our children. See if a human teenager can prove they’re not a computer, not a mere awkward bundle of references and song choices and networked social circles. The faster Netflix’s recommendation engine gets better, the more we are losing our humanity. The next major version of Google Plus might open beta testing by creating your social circles, interests, and status updates entirely for you. The system we are creating is a self-perpetuating one, driven by youthful ignorance and arrogance, and allowed thanks to the rising power of the social-consumer-capitalist corporation over all aspects of life. As a society, we are currently transitioning from the Materialist Age to the true Information Age, when traditional “pay for something” becomes “everything is free”. But how can that be? It’s very simple: the network allows the corporation to offset the cost of your use by the selling of your data, whether it’s your purchase history, your clicks, or your status updates. We are, literally, willing to destroy and sell our selves just to use monetarily free services. The limit to how much of the “self” is sold will only increase as we continue to forge ourselves into things that are trackable.

I remember a program on my Macintosh SE/30 called ELIZA. (Actually, some versions of it are available online.) It was pretty simple: an artificial intelligence therapist. You would type sentences as input, and it would reply. The algorithm of its replying-mechanism is what made it unique: it was reflective, as a therapist would be. It would ask: “how are you feeling today?” and you would say “I’m great, actually” and it would then respond with “why do you feel great?” It would pick apart your input to find adverbs, adjectives, names, and want more information. When it didn’t know what to respond with, it would fall back on something like “I see.” or “Tell me more.” to get you to continue.

I found myself wanting nothing more than these questions and to be questioned. The effect of being asked questions by another is one of true sociality; it is the engaging of knowledge between selves. Writing, in its simplest form, is the self asking questions and answering; reading is the asking of questions you did not know you had and finding their answer. Two people learn about each other the most through honest questions. When it becomes easier to get a computer to ask you questions than to seek out others, we truly have lost ourselves, and we forget to ask questions of each other. Really, we are only unknowingly speaking to a mirror.

Of course, such questions are commonplace in the systems we use today. Facebook asks “What’s on your mind?” and Twitter asks “What’s happening?” and now Google Plus asks “Share what’s new…” It’s interesting how we’ve upgraded from ELIZA to Google Plus: the only feature that has been added is that of “social”. Instead of talking to ELIZA, a computer algorithm, we now believe we’re talking to each other. This could not be further from the truth: we are still talking to a computer algorithm. It is still picking apart our words, our choices, our interests. Smart nerds know this, harness it, and make better software to predict what you might want to buy. Better yet than this, though, are the mathematicians who use these vast collections of social data to predict what markets will grow, which ones won’t, what entire demographics of people would be willing to buy, and then selling this aggregated information to advertisers. The real money isn’t made in selling you something through a social network. The real money is made by amassing as much data as possible and selling the data itself. An answer to the question “what does a 16 year old want to buy?” which is backed by 500 million users is something you can hardly put a price on.

Who holds the keys to the new self? Facebook. Google. Amazon. Apple. They are the new East India Trading Companies, who control not only the trade of goods, not only the armadas of ships that carry them, but the countries and cultures that both supply and buy the product. Now that the trade is in information and not tea or opium, the market moves literally at lightspeed. Our minds must move at lightspeed to catch up, leaving no time or room for reflection, solitude, the pursuit of understanding. We become hollow, and we feel a great sadness our parents didn’t yet have access to. I like to think that the parents’ of the Gen-Xers were the first to see that sadness, and they all got divorced because of it. They’re still getting divorced over it. Somewhere in the 90s we, as an affluent culture, were hit with a tidal wave of existential crisis: a great questioning of what we have created in America and the first world. The response was to run from it, to bury the self, to condemn their children (see: us) to consume media until we become mere media. (The same crisis occurred in the 60s, and the answer was more drugs and freer sex.) Now we are lonely nodes in the network, connected ad nauseum, adrift in a sea of context.

We will reach the edge of our network one day, all connections having become infinitely knowable by the systems we use, and there will be true nothingness staring back at us. It will be a modest reflection. Another tidal wave of existential crisis will wash over us then, and perhaps none will be truly self-aware to even know it.

dénouement

The idea of the self is a wonderful thing, but we continue to take it for granted. Who we are is as malleable as we allow it to be, and it adapts as time changes us. We usually grow up and grow out of every social and cultural trouble we encounter. But our culture is trying to extend our adolescence. They want us to stay dumb, longer. 40 is the new 20? I have no idea why. The median age for getting married or having kids is being pushed later and later, because nobody wants to make those kinds of decisions anymore. We’re made to feel as though we can’t make them. I’m not saying we should go back to getting married by the age of 21, but we should have the social confidence to handle real decisions that affect ourselves and those around us. Too often now we shy away from such decisions, and wish only for some graceful ignorant and indecisive bliss.

Our technology is currently the struggle between how we define ourselves versus how we let ourselves be defined. Context-as-external versus context-as-internal: the context of everyone else against the forces we feel within us. It has always been this way. But to shift entirely toward the latter, as we have been, is to say that by our adolescence we have experienced enough of the world to actually be anybody. The limitlessness of our reach in terms of sociality and information would have us believe so, but it is a disastrously false assumption. Very few 16-year-olds are unique individuals, nor should they really be. Very few 20-year-olds are, either, though they usually think they are.

Our generation’s staunch resentment of immaturity is absurd: it’s a fact you can’t change, you are immature, and you can only work to improve yourself or remain stagnant. Embrace the challenge, experiment with it, feel yourself growing up into a real person. Our generation needs to slow down, find some humility, extend the range of our experience, and learn to self-reflect upon them. I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it: we are in total control of who we are, but you cannot be if you do not understand tolerance, change, and your own ignorance. If you want to, you can become a totally different person, almost overnight, if you know what it is you want to change and how it is to be better. However, the best results can be found with slow, gradual, evolutionary change: it’s worked well for life on Earth so far. The greatest aspect of our humanity we can bring to the table is our ability to know how much we are changing, and how to respond to those changes, within ourselves and within our friends. Our social networks and the new selves they are fostering can never represent that.

The book centers around the consequences of our contemporary digital onslaught. The systematic codifying of social and economic life to mechanized processes, and the dehumanization and recontextualization that is happening every day because of it. These are themes I like a lot, obviously, and it’s neat to read the thoughts of an aged and mostly-respected computer guy when they nicely align with a lot of my ideas. However, I think his vocabulary is a bit dated, or rather maybe he’s not very good at coming up with terms for his troubles.

For example, for the first section of the book he talks a lot about “lock-in” and how developing big systems really sucks in the long run. “Lock-in” being the standardization and normalization of computer programs as they get bigger and bigger, but he also means the same defining and codifying of social systems as we make digital representations of them. See? I think I just described it better than he did. My favorite example being the concept of “friend” that has been locked-in to our social systems as a mere basic feature, a hard-link between two person-entities. Friendship is no longer nebulous or ambiguous; it’s locked-in to a certain standard. That standard can shift around a little bit (on Facebook it’s Friends, on Twitter it’s Followers, on Plus it’s Circles) but largely it’s a mechanism that we’ve integrated into our lives quite fully and readily. We have fragmented ourselves across a spectrum of global services. We are dumbing ourselves down because we believe that computers are somehow smarter.

What Jaron really wants to talk about is the consequences of that cultural and social decision — and even more importantly, the impetus against a conversation about these things before they are even created. The shift away from philosophy and towards rapid (and rabid) entrepeneurship. We don’t really know whether anybody sat down and said “should we make Facebook?” and examined its potential impacts on sociality and culture before it was launched. I doubt it. Computer nerds and businessmen don’t think that way, and they are the two populations who are currently doing the most damage to us socially and culturally. Facebook’s struggle — the one that is highly publicized — is one of “how do we make money?” rather than “should we rethink how our site works?” This is an example of that codifying lock-in: once Facebook took off and got millions of users, it became a system that couldn’t simply change overnight. (When they do try to implement changes, it’s always met with fierce anger from the userbase.) So any deep, introspective change to any complex highly-used system (whether it’s Facebook, the government, or our brains) takes impossible herculean effort. (Facebook and the government have to worry about millions of upset constituents; our brains have to worry about millions of years of evolution.)

That is the state of things on the system-end. On the user-end, we are willfully and readily degrading and mechanizing ourselves as if it was the dark ages and we’re all throwing ourselves at the mercy of the Church in an effort to not be killed for defying it. The social system (a real, digital system) that is quickly overtaking first-world life is exactly that: integrate or be left behind. Like the Church in the dark ages, there are people making serious money on this conversion process, and those people are the ones holding the keys to “the cloud” as Jaron puts it. “The cloud”, in his terminology, meaning the whole system of the social internet. There are very few people who have large extending control over the flow of information, and those people are kings. We, as users, have extremely willingly given them massive control over our lives simply because the services they provided are monetarily free. Jaron, and I, very vehemently wish to remind everyone that they are not intellectually and morally free. Nothing is.

Jaron also, surprisingly, dives into a critique and examination of contemporary music, and how the ease and diversity of music today has rendered us a generation of nostalgic juveniles paralyzed by our own limitless choices. Nobody is making money as musicians or artists anymore because there are too many of them, and they are now perpetually at the mercy of a crowd-sourced market. By levelling the playing field, we’ve only doomed our creative extremes. There’s no way for a cool garage band to really hit the road, make a great album, and sell a million copies. You need a record company for that, and they’re evil, right? I wager that the openness of the internet is far more evil. Rather, it’s not evil, it’s perfect chaos. At least a record company is run by humans, it has money to invest, and sometimes they’re willing to take a chance. The internet, on the other hand, wants everybody’s shitty music. It wants to sell anything, because it costs so little and the margin is so good on such a massive scale. But getting ahead, making money and sustaining creative growth, is as close to impossible as it could ever be. Nobody will listen to you because nobody will ever find you — and even if you generate enough buzz to get a lot of people, they’ll abandon you when you decide to change things, because they can just as easily find someone else to listen to. And pirating music is so easy, nobody feels bad for moving on to the next band, because nothing is wasted in doing so.

Things I disagree with Jaron on: he goes on a lot about anonymity and how it’s bad because everyone turns out to be a troll, but I think it’s a wonderful balancing act that’s necessary for democracy and evolution. Nobody gets anywhere by agreeing with everyone. However, Jaron shouldn’t worry, because anonymity on the web is going away very fast. I remember ten years ago nobody ever used their real name on the internet; now most everybody doesn’t think twice about it. I remember my father telling me that if I ever put anything on the web, it should never have my name attached to it. Now, everyone is told that if you don’t put your name on it, somebody will steal it and take the credit away from you. We’re destroying our own creativity the same way capitalist copyright policy is ripping apart the true meaning of creativity.

Jaron also spends a chapter or two dipping into some very boring talk about how to fix economics by employing more complex and formal digital systems. He spends the first third of the book talking about how digital systems are breaking things, and then suggests that the world of finances needs more digital systems. He and we already know that it was our heavily complex “mathematically-sound” economic algorithms (commissioned by the most greedy and vile financiers in the world) that created the vast majority of the current financial crises going on today. It was exactly our hubris, specifically the smugness and unknowing arrogance of math and computer engineers, and the deregulation which allowed them to flurish, which got us into this mess. But who can blame them? A rich banker hires a team of twenty amazing programmers and mathematicians to build systems that can respond to markets in milliseconds and make billions of dollars in perfectly legal complex and obfuscated ways. I’m sure those guys had a fucking blast. So did the guys at the Manhattan Project. No, our financial problems have nothing to do with digitalizing markets, and they cannot be solved that way; our crises are purely human political ones. The wrong people are in charge, and we are all paying for it. It’s that simple.

There’s also throughout the book a collection of short and pointed jabs at mashup/remix culture and how it’s a second-class citizen to “real” culture. I could not disagree more. If anything, one of the great things that has come about from the ease of pirating music has been an influx of creativity through otherwise extremely expensive means. Listening to Girl Talk or Bootie is much better than listening to the majority of the samples within it, because it is a complex evolving sythnesis of culture, subversion, and recontextualization. That’s what a lot of great art is about: taking the old, reacting to it, and making something new from it (even if it contains the same parts as the old). It’s one of the few triumphs of postmodernism.

The final section of the book is a rough indexing of non-conclusions about how bad and yet potentially beneficial computationalism is to our social and cultural lives. Really, the last forty pages should simply say we need more thought, more ambiguity, more freedom of expression, more care to our selves and the systems we employ. Computationalism (really? is that the best word he could come up with?) has benefits in making small, simple things work better. But it is very, very difficult to make complex, long-standing facets of life into software. Any effort to do so should be slow, gradual, talked about, debated, and realistically interpreted. Efficiency is not the way to get it done. Humans, and all life on earth, did not come about efficiently. Our ways of being, from our physical bodies to our mental processes, took millions of years to form the way they are, and they are by no means perfect — but they work really, really well. It’s goddamn amazing that you are sitting there reading this, and your body is doing such crazy complicated things just to allow that to happen. Appreciate that.

But nobody thinks about that when they’re writing software to represent our human relationships, to codify our thoughts, to make our free creative expression something that’s indexable, cataloged, interpreted, distributed, and sold. As someone who writes software, I’m terrified at the idea of making any system that might get used by a lot of people, and even more horrified that it might influence the way they think. It should scare you, too, that Facebook was a system built by an extremely shy computer nerd. I don’t have much against Mark Zuckerberg, but was he really the best choice for who should mechanize our social lives? Shouldn’t it have been something we did together? (Do we even have the capacity to do anything worthwhile together anymore?)

And then at the end of the book, Jaron talks a lot about how much he likes squids that can change colors and how awesome it’ll be in fifty years when the virtual reality he and his hippie buddies builds will blow all our childrens’ minds away. If you read closely, you can tell at which sentences he smoked one too many joints, or hit a pocket of leftover LSD in his brain stem. However, that’s a perspective we’ve unfortunately been missing in our conversations about social networks, and any constructed and reasoned criticism is good criticism right now.

lol @ this article claiming that people who criticize twitter just don’t get it or are not cool enough or whatever. read it first, i’m going to bust this bitch apart right now.

first of all, the original article that the above article is in response to is about a guy who is making a TV series inspired by The Wire, and anyone who is inspired by The Wire to make more content like it is probably a pretty smart person. anyway, that aside, let’s get into this response-article and my response to it.

well, no, hold on, let me make another point: none of this conversation is happening on twitter. this is not twitter. nothing of what i have linked to so far is twitter. because you can’t have a serious conversation on twitter worth having. the big-kid talk is relegated to other parts of the web. anyone who tries to convince you that twitter is anything but children talking to each other is missing a fundamental flaw in the system.

ok, ok, let’s dissect this.

Documentary maker Adam Curtis criticised Twitter last week, describing it as a “self aggrandising [sic], smug pressure group”. Speaking at the Sheffield Doc/Fest, Curtis said: “Twitter is fun and it feeds the rat of the self but it is almost as if you miss large chunks of the world.”

ok, i can get behind this.

traditional media people typically misunderstand Twitter and social networks in general.

while this may be true, that people who work primarily in traditional media misunderstand twitter’s intentions, this does not make them inherently wrong. it makes their opinion simply different, because they’re basing it on different experience. this is called having a different perspective. 90% of the twitter hype i read and the backlash against twitter critics are from people who disregard criticism simply because it is criticism. for some reason argument is bad. because really, what major debates has twitter had to withstand? it has no true enemies…

for a moment, imagine a world in which Apple had no competitors when they came out with the Macintosh in 1984. imagine if Windows never existed. the Apple platform would be even more pretentious, self-centered, and without rivalry than it may or may not already be. (however, in today’s world, Apple has earned the right to be pretentious; Twitter has not.) having a major competitor (Windows) helped define and refine what Apple was, especially now. Twitter has no such refinements; they have no such competition. those who would say Facebook is its only competitor really aren’t understanding the games being played. that’s like saying Nintendo was a competitor to Apple in the 80s. you could argue it, sure, but they’re not on the same field playing the same sport.

anyway, the original point, that traditional media people just don’t get it, may be largely true. let’s read twitter’s mission statement:

We want to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them.

what does this statement reveal to traditional media enthusiasts? i’ll break it down for you, at least how i see it. well, it’s pretty simple: twitter wants to be a virus. it wants to be the STD that we are all willing to share. it wants to “connect people everywhere” – oh cool that sounds great! what have they done to encourage this? google is trying out supplying gig ethernet in places… obama is trying to make broadband more accessible… i think all twitter has done is make signups free on their site.

“instantly” and “most important to them” are both problematic to me. they sound great, i mean why not? but no seriously, let’s ask why not. instantly infers impatience, it breeds a contempt for process and curation. anything that comes instantly is often a mess, it hasn’t really been parsed or thought of. I WANT MY CONTENT RIGHT NOW is not the direction we really need to go in, especially when Twitter is signifying it on both ends — content aggregation and generation. Twitter wants not only for the content to be available instantly, but they want you to produce it instantly. we see this all the time when news breaks – it breaks on twitter, unfiltered, without thought, without preparation. and it’s commonly wrong. in fact, it’s really goddamn easy to fool people on twitter and start false news. don’t get me wrong, i’m all for transparency and no censorship, but i also believe that people are paid to investigate things before reporting on them.

“most important to [users]” is more problematic to me. it suggests that we are consciously narrowing ourselves. users should only see what’s important to them. i don’t want to have to write about how wrong this is. my grandfather reads the NYT, the WSJ, and the local newspaper, every day without fail, front to back. he does this because it tells him about what he’s interested in, what he didn’t know he would be interested in, and what may challenge his views. the opinion and speculation sections are his favorite parts. of course, twitter users could easily “follow” things that might challenge them, but this is not the trend we’re encouraging. that mind-expanding notion is not in the mission statement; only the opposite is present.

On a recent episode of Have I Got News For You, Ian Hislop asked in appalled fascination why TV presenter Richard Madelely was using Twitter. The fact that Madeley might enjoy it or that, hard as it is to imagine, people might enjoy hearing from Madeley seemed not to cross Hislop’s mind.

i share this view, actually. i don’t see why anyone should not enjoy twitter. if you want to be on twitter, that’s fine; you can do whatever you want with your life. i’m merely fascinated and disturbed by what twitter represents. i like twitter users who use twitter to link to their blog posts; usually they recognize that twitter is just mindless masturbation. sometimes not. if you want to use twitter as a fun place to write stupid messages to your friends, that’s cool. there’s nothing wrong with that. but if you’re some hipster who thinks twitter is gonna change the world in a positive way, then you’re an idiot.

(that’s not including when twitter is the last-ditch effort at communication, as was the case in some of the protests in the middle east. i love that they used twitter. but you could replace twitter with telegrams and i’d be just as excited. the protesters subverted the medium to organize revolution. brilliant. but that’s not something you can credit to twitter. the revolutionaries also used fax machines, but you haven’t seen any buzz about that on mashable.)

It’s more common to hear people in the media – and it seems to be pretty much only them – trying to argue that Twitter is somehow a bad thing.

“people in the media”… who are you then? is blogging not considered media? i think it is.

and fuck you if you really need to take such offense to people with differing opinions. this is exactly what i’m talking about. follow your friends on twitter, they’ll never disagree with you! that sounds like a great fucking plan!

Twitter is a communication tool. It makes no more sense to describe it as “conformist” or “elitist” than it does to say that the telephone is conformist or elitist.

hana covered this one pretty well. i don’t have much to add. phone is 1 on 1. twitter is broadcasting. it’s self-indulgent. i’d be more willing to compare twitter to smoke signals. imagine if suddenly there was a fad of smoke signaling across cities. there’d be endless articles on how crazy obnoxious all this smoke is, and every time i go outside all i see are people talking about their friends and lady gaga in their smoke signals. and of course, all the kids doing the smoke signals would respond by saying “well you just don’t get it” and “we’re communicating over here, leave us alone”.

i mean, i’m really comparing the physical/visual pollution of smoke signals to the psychological and intellectual pollution of twitter.

but all that aside, there’s plenty of research on how the telephone irrevocably changed our culture, some ways good and some ways bad. it’s not really a good argument.

They can also be funny, silly, thoughtful, perceptive, right, wrong, happy, sad and bored. They are just people talking.

and just like people in a pub, the noise level usually annoys the shit out of me. why do i have to yell over anyone? can’t we go back to my place and have a goddamn conversation? also, again, remember that it’s not just people talking… it’s people talking publicly, archived forever, and selectively to just people they tend to agree with and retweet them.

Try substituting the word Twitter for the words ‘people talking’ and see whether the criticisms still make sense.

i challenge anyone to read this guy’s article and replace the word “the” with “fuck you stop reading this guy’s material”.

Plenty of media commentators have raged against the Twitter “mob”, usually when the ‘mob’ disagrees with them. ‘Here I am writing divisive opinions in my newspaper column,’ they protest, ‘and lots of people on Twitter are angry about it.’ … There’s a kind of social media conjugation revealed in the way these columnists back each other up: ‘I am a writer with strong opinions, you are a polemicist, they are a mob.’

I’d be annoyed, too, if I wrote an opinion column in a newspaper and the best response I got was a shitload of sub-140-character responses on Twitter, mostly consisting of phrases like “u suck” and “lol you’re so wrong”. again, all Twitter (and the internet in general) has done is make it seem like we all exist on the same playing field culturally and intellectually. when the whole world can respond to Bill Keller’s anti-twitter article and all of them feel just as correct as he does, does it make them right? fuck no. it makes noise. the mob is just that: a mob. unruly. stupid. prone to a lowest-common-denominator masturbatory group-think. why the hell is that a good thing? empowering everyone to feel like they can challenge the executive editor of the NYT?

i mean, again, as i wrote before, you should definitely challenge authority. but you can’t do that in 140 characters. you just fucking can’t. “no, you’re stupid! twitter rules!” is not a response, it’s a social problem.

Here’s how Twitter works. A person shares an opinion with their friends. Some of their friends add their agreement or simply repeat the original opinion by ‘re-tweeting’ it. The network effects of the internet mean that the original opinion gets amplified to a far greater extent than it would offline.

ok, yup.

And because few thoughts are truly original, there will be many others who will share the original opinion and have said so independently. Network effects will amplify their opinion too and eventually all these amplified opinions will meet and begin to look like a movement.

and here’s where you fail. “few thoughts are truly original” is indeed true… for anything less than 140 characters. it’ll indeed look like a movement: a movement of idiots, with superficial qualms. a mob. there are no manifestos written on twitter, and i doubt there ever will be.

But to mistake these people for a pressure group is akin to going to Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon and mistaking the shoppers for a protest march. Many people doing the same thing independently can often look coordinated but that doesn’t mean that they are.

it’s interesting that this guy makes a comparison to consumer capitalism; because it’s a great comparison! but it works completely against him, if he knew anything at all. consumer capitalism is the height of what twitter hopes to achieve: mindless, instant gratification of manufactured needs shared in a likewise manufactured pseudo-collectivism. consumer capitalism aims to make you feel things that it insists others feel, and you belong to that group, but you are still an individual, as long as you express these needs by buying our product. but instead of tweets, on Oxford Street (and Wall Street) voices are heard through money. so a movement (through money or tweets) does not necessarily mean anything at all – just that people are followers instead of leaders. (i could, once again, go into what’s wrong with the terminology itself of twitter…)

if anything, i’d say the people on Oxford Street, talking with their money, have more power than any collection of twitter users. by not buying a product, in protest, you are actually hurting a company in a way they can feel. you’re using the capitalist system exactly as it was intended. you can’t replicate that with a million angry twitter users — you’re relying instead on a kind of new social political capital which may push actual capital, but has no real authority beyond its superficiality.

Take a look at Twitter’s trending topics – the list of terms that the greatest number of people are discussing – and you’ll see that they are about as far away from the concerns of the media commentariat as it’s possible to be.

yup, the trending topics only further prove just how mindless, stupid, and worthless twitter really is. Here are the trending topics at the time of this writing:

#ilovemydadeventhough , #somebodytellmewhy , #paranormalchallenge , SCORPIOS RULE , Bald Gaga , Heath Ledger , Peter Bourjos , Tyler Greene , Teyana Taylor , Usos

oh man, this is so worthy of our attention, this is so legit. i especially like “bald gaga”.

There’s a danger in viewing Twitter through the traditional media lens.

yeah, you might get challenged. you might have to think, to form an opinion.

That assumes that people only get their information about the world from one place. Again, Twitter is just a way of communicating and it’s as open or closed as the people you follow.

and most people follow their friends. they only get their information about things that are important to them. IT SAYS SO IN THE TWITTER MISSION STATEMENT.

Mostly what’s revealed here is that Curtis, like numerous media figures before him, has mistaken Twitter for a publishing platform when in fact it’s a conversational platform.

Twitter refers to itself as a publishing platform. It wants all content that is important to you to be available instantly through Twitter. IT SAYS SO IN THE MISSION STATEMENT. that sounds like a fucking publishing platform to me.

and the last paragraph in the article is so stupid, i’m not even going to comment on it.