Paying for the Times

Of course you knew it was coming. While all news organizations have been carefully calibrating their strategies to deal with the burgeoning Internet, no organization has been more deliberate and thorough than the New York Times. They have enough cash and clout to have nurtured their "brand" across these long and scary years of freebie access, and now seem confident that they will be able to charge top dollar for web access without losing their spot.

The news comes at the very moment that public broadcasting is being nixed. So recently after the fortunes of public radio were boosted by the need for all of us commuters to be in some kind of reliable touch after the events of 9/11.

Crises have a way of ratcheting up the power of the powerful, while winnowing out the small fry. How many local news outlets will be able to charge a fee for online access now that the news-reading public might have to make budget decisions about how much news they can afford? And who can afford to be without access to reliable and vetted sources of information?

It is possible that the Times has miscalculated, and that their move will boost the power of blogger aggregaters like HuffPo, on the Google model of keyterm auctions to game your profile and free or slave-wage content provision. It's also possible that everything will go the way of Rupert Murdoch, where no holds are ever barred to gain audience share. What you mock on the entertainment side, where the apparently liberal politics of the Simpsons or Glee merge with that strange libertarian Howard Stern schlock humor, is balanced by what makes you angry on the NewsCorp side if you digest the news at all.

As quickly as we have all forgotten how essential the reliable reporting of NPR was during our national disaster, we have also forgotten pandemic fears from SARS or H5N1 (or was it H1N1, or was it avian or was it swine flu)? It all has something to do with China and their horrid public health standards, right? Or is it the fact that they have dismantled their social health network in the same kind of thoughtless imitation of our wild capitalism which has them buying more Buicks now than we do?

It could be that public health requires society-wide approaches to healthcare now more than ever. It could be that flood and earthquake insurance should not be allowed brokerage on the open market, since those companies drag their feet or declare bankruptcy anyhow when the disaster is broad enough. Government political swings almost guarantee moral hazard, even as they insure that only those too big to fail will be protected against failure because the only safe bet is to go as big as you can as fast as you can.

* * *

Microsoft rolls out IE9. At first blush it hangs for me and so I'm back to Chrome. But their Windows Live services start to look and feel and behave with a little bit more slick compared to the hacker feel of Google. Bing has fit and finish, as the Internet turns away again from wildness. I'm having Bigness Blues.

Let's hope the Times will also flesh back out its news rooms and its international bureaus and that it will act in the public interest because that's what the lettered elite who form its main readership will demand. There are distinct advantages to not pandering to the unwashed masses the way that Fox does, albeit in the interests of the same economic ranks those Times elites belong to.

I for one would love for actual leadership to replace the purely moneyed definitions which now seem to have the monopoly on determination of who's elite and who's the hoi polloi. But leadership depends on trust and a servant mentality from the top. Our market structures presume that we should mistrust our leadership, especially now that our leadership is marketed too.

I'll pay for the Times sure, just like I'll pay for PBS. But I do have to say that I'd prefer that we all share the costs. For reasons of our public safety and our public health and our public rhetoric and the relative safety and peacefulness of our public squares, I certainly prefer that we work to decrease rather than to exacerbate the divide in means between the have-it-alls and the have-almost-nothings.

And it doesn't help that we export so much of our grey to China. I look forward to technologies which really do green the entire globe. Which instead of nuclear power-plants, make it attractive for us to mine our extravagant wattage waste in favor of less bloated bodies and homes. But that also will depend on public moneys being drawn away from subsidies to Big Oil and Big Corn and Soy.

It's a worrisome time right now. We're all going to end up paying for these times. That's the only certainty.

A China Primer

I once published a Chinese Primer for my students - I came across it the other day while cleaning stuff out. It was a simple student-friendly compilation of all the Chinese written characters we would come across during the first year course. It was a useful gift to them. It went along with flash cards. I wondered why the textbook publisher hadn't provided something similar, or maybe they had and I was just too cheap. Or having fun with computers.

I generally find metaphor to be more literally useful than analysis, and I finally came across one today which might be more near-to-hand for many Westerners in your struggle to understand China. More near-to-hand than the abstruse arguments out there. As I do, I was reading Information Week on my not-even-in-the-game Windows Mobile smartphone while getting ready to leave the house. This time I'm leaving for good, but otherwise, same old same old.

It reminded me of a famous essay by Umberto Eco, which used to circulate back in the early days of the PC vs. Mac wars. Eco, a seriously brilliant fellow who also writes fun novels, compared the Mac to Catholic and the PC to Protestant. Well, I want to update the metaphor now. Mac is China, and Google is the West. Simple!

China seems increasingly on peoples' minds these days. They make us nervous. The economy is the first thing on peoples' minds this election season, and the first thing people think of regarding the economy is China. We know they hold lots of our debt. Some might also know that Google and China have been involved in a long-standing conflict about censorship of the Internet. Some may be upset about China bowling over Tibetan culture and damming up the Yangtze River, and some may get downright self-righteous about how the Chinese complain that the West, via the Nobel committee as our proxy, awards its Peace Prize to a jailed dissident within China.

No real coincidence that the Church also has a complaint about the prize awarded to the guy who developed and enabled in-vitro fertilization of embryos. These are deep and ingrained cultural conflicts. Some days the evangelicals seem to agree with the Church about things like abortion, and other days they are at odds. Some days Israel lines up with them too, and sometimes they seem like enemies. Sometimes a fellow like Steve Jobs, whose instincts are almost entirely on the side of single party rule, excites the counter-culturalists among us. It's a strange strange mixed up world.

The Mac world is a tightly controlled world. They promise the user a fluid and nearly flawless experience, and neatly hide away all the guts beneath a smooth exterior. Just about half the world is angered by this, since they also hide away lots of flaws and contradictions. They do really arrogant things like taking away the reset button (and then they put it back, and take it away and put it back). They replace transparent menu choices with arcane keystroke combinations, which helps to distinguish the normal users from the elite afficionadi-literati and to sidestep their absence of a command line.

The price wars always favor the Protestants. So naturally the counter-culture types find a friend in Mac. But the irony is just delicious. Opening up the guts to developers - hardware and software - just naturally pushes the pricing down, and businesses require a more rapid and innovative development cycle than can be had inside of some proprietary sandbox. So the PC side of things feels a lot like the establishment, since it gets used by globocorp. Naturally.

Well, now there's open source, which is neither fish nor fowl yet. China embraces it just to tweak the monopolistic masters of technology in the West. It suits their once and only party line against imperialism. Google is an open-source wanna-be, except that they don't seem to be able to help themselves regarding that whole monopoly thing. And then there's the blatant fact that no-one - not a single soul - inside a patriarchal command and control political environment like the one at Apple or the one we think of when we think of China, or lots of those politically explosive places in South America - no one, or maybe only a fool, would search on anything sensitive using the Googles, since we all know the Googles stores everything they possibly can about our behaviors.

We know Google is a bit inhibited about taking full advantage of this, as well they should be. Backlash these days is pretty easily calculable as a risk, and it's a big one. But most of us have absolutely no question that they'll kowtow instantly to whatever government authority tells them that they must. And there's the rub, folks, there's the rub.

Well, so this is a placeholder as I head out the door. I'm going to share it instead of parking it among my drafts, since I won't be able to get back to it for a few more days. Let me know what you think, hey?

Automatic Self-driving Cars

Not so incredibly, Google has been working to wed its incredible database of roadways and GPS points to some kind of camera feedback loop to make cars which drive themselves. There are a zillion ways in which this is a good idea.

Driving along the highway myself these days, I can already feel the murderous rage around me as we all fail to sync our cruise controls. You pass a car just at what you have decided is your own personal safe margin over the speed limit - no question now that the highly automated highway cops are out in fullest force - and inevitably someone creeps up behind you, angry seeming from the look on their grille, and you fear their headlight flashes, and surely won't make eye contact. But you absolutely don't want that ticket which might await you over the next hill, already knowing perfectly well that the officer will not be interested in your perfectly reasonable story about your diligent efforts for the greater good.

You sense the road rage when the saturated flow naturally bunches up to read those automagic digital roadsigns. Or to rubberneck some tragedy. Cops now seem to have license tag scanners, just like at border crossings, and their control panels must flash or beep at them when they spot a live one. Any excuse, right? Just not on my side.

The main thing with these Google self-driving cars will be that we can sync our cruise controls and optimize the intervals and never bunch and hardly ever brake. Plus, if we all drive Priuses, like the Google test car, then we can regenerate at those rare intervals when we need to slow.

You do wonder at what will inevitably be the rage of families when the entire system does crash as by the laws of mathematics it inevitably must. I mean, consider the mass hysteria and anger toward Toyota for its boneheaded equation of ignition with digital power. It must have seemed like good idea at the time, that universal power symbol. Costly in retrospect.

Turning on now is so much identical to being real turned off and defenestration prone and frustrated to the point of busting an artery. As with airplane disasters, it seems so much more extreme when it isn't anybody's fault. Plus then, as with the miners or with New Orleans vs. Buffalo, say, or with the trade towers or even with bus crashes, there's so much more room for people already in power to posture as heroes. To slather on some real money, based, one can only guess, on the PR returns on the dollar. Heaven help the person pegged with fault.

I mean, would it matter to you if the overall rate of mayhem is that much lower if you are the one caught in the system crash? By that time, the new ways would be normalized and the old ways would look gruesome and troglodyte, like Chinese or jihadi beheadings. We will have progressed that much in our outrage. Imagine accepting that much risk that willingly. Taking responsibility for the wheel of so much hurtling metal. With only the vaguest promise of exploding airbags which you surely never hope to experience. Such ringing in the ears.

Trains might work, or are they just too low tech? Is physical connection just that much less exciting than the virtual kind? Is fantasy sex the only good kind, Lust, Caution, even face to facebook? Is it only cool if the cars of the train magically adjust to our individual pods, no mechanical anything, and we become as fish in a pond or birds in the sky, or leaves floating down the bluster as I was so pleased to witness yesterday on the impossible to navigate back-roads of Pennsylvania?

Because there is no data service to power my Google maps in them thar hills. Because there is no sense to PA route numbers. Because a map looks like hungover eyeball capillaries, and there's no getting there from here apart from the Interstates, and no wonder those intersections are what defines the addresses of the Big Boxes, since everyone in PA seems to crave a life of seeming wilderness. The real money is in the outback.

Is that really where we still want to go? Back to that future, built upon a long-lost bankrupt mined out past?

I mean really now, if we are going to act and behave and insist that we must each of us control our own high-tech wombspaces - hurtling, stationary wombs-with-views (r) -  Wouldn't it be enough (Hoover Blanket subliminal messaging) to program in the relationships and do away with the centralized repository of data? Is there really a need for a central brain analog?

I know Google's really really on the side of the angels, but still there is too much concentration there. And too much concentration leads inevitably as the sun follows the night to absolute corruption, right? Something like that. And it's so utterly unnecessary! There is only the most marginal advantage to having your self-driving car wired in that tightly to some central database. There would have to be so much temptation for the Big Brother. The limit beyond which you wouldn't even dare to think . . . . .

Well, think about it, since pretty soon it will be already way too late.

Californification (sic)

I hate that term - Californication - I feel dirty just to type it, as if the only purpose of California were illicit pleasure. The first time I heard it was as used by the more authentic seeming (to themselves) folks up north on the West Coast; Oregon maybe, in the late '80s.

They used it to describe the process of invasion by the moneyed boorish interlopers from their south. Just now, I was continuing my read of Melville's The Confidence Man on the way down here from Seattle (here is SoCal), which ought to be required reading for every American of whatever state. It puts the lie to anyone's notion of authenticity.

Californians are often envisioned by others to have an absence where culture belongs  - whatever it is that has lead to the big box anti-culture of sprawl which has now gripped us all. They used to make their way up north to stay a step ahead of the California real-estate boom, surfing the economic boom which accompanied it. They brought with them a kind of culture deadening. Some extreme case of the "ugly American" which so embarrassed our brand in Europe. Wiping out any vestige of local roots.

Even though the boom is bust, and Californians can no longer find so many bargains up north of them, it may be that the momentum from those days has shifted our leading edge northward. I'm not in any position to tell, but so far Seattle still seems the cooler spot.

I remember back in about 1975 or so, when I was a bicycle mechanic in New Haven Connecticut during one of my periods AWOL from higher education. There were these Jamaican cyclists showing up around town. They rode track bikes just like they did at home in Jamaica. I get the sense that their motivation was mostly economic, although there might have been a cool factor associated with that economizing drive. You make do with what you have and then you take it to some sort of limit; in this case speed and weight and stark simplicity.

There is something close to joy in tweaking things to their limits, or making something appreciably cool from what might otherwise have been trash. I spent much of my time in Seattle recently struggling for the umpteenth time beyond the point of logical death with "Bob" the 1988 VW rustbucket which my duaghter deploys as "wheels" to get around Seattle. And in the spaces, I was helping her boyfriend with his 1979 Dasher, which, annoyingly for me, had almost no rust at all, although the paint was mostly weathered away.

With my brother-in-law one morning we remarked on the new phenomena of gearless and brakeless bicycles among the avant-garde hipsters of Seattle. Unlike their Jamaican forebears, these bikes have things like yellow tires and radial spokes and radical minimal handlebars. Or maybe that is the authentic style. I can't quite remember. Beyond the edge of too much gear, these bikes make a kind of fashion sense.

These bikes make a kind of common sense on an indoor wooden track, or among Jamaicans without the wherewithal for powered wheels. (The boss at the bike shop used to tell us to watch them closely in case they might sport off with a few stray parts, which I think they often did.)

In Seattle, with all its steep hills, to be without gears or brakes is rather more like spitting into the face of reality. This is the kind of Seattle cool - that striving for authenticity I always make fun of - which is hard not to feel contemptuous toward. Do these guys even have a clue about the Jamaican roots of their strivings? And what is it with Seattle anyhow? Is there no limit so extreme that beyond it you can't find a new one?

I speculated that Seattle is the new West Coast terminus - the jump off point - for the American Protestant work-ethic, where to buckle down to hard work and to deny pleasure was a way to earn God's grace, which would be displayed ostentatiously by your outward signs of demure style. This is the New England recititude displayed by striving after Talbots style, which is so utterly non-Seattle. It descends, at worst, into a kind of peri-dinner drunkenness, even while it might still appreciate the true decadence of its artists.

On the Left coast, up North, this America falls off the cliff. There's a kind of confusion of escape from Protestant rectitude and Catholic guilt both, to where there is pride in grunge and shame about all that money. This inverts the core American value structure, even while it has defined the new economy, You know, the one just now so recently past.

But Seattle feels familiar to a Buffalo boy. Most people there are escaping something like Buffalo, where lots of people, if they can survive economically at all, are carrying on the family business, or shepherding the family legacy, abstracted to whatever it is that wealth can still accomplish in a city like Buffalo; something which would require actual talent elsewhere in the country. (This is not meant to be a slam at the Buffalo successful, although the city is pretty well sewn up among the people already in power. Buffalonians blame the political class, but that, I believe, is merely a synechodocal error, if I can be allowed to coin a term. They mistake the part as separate and distinct from the whole.)

California, on the other hand, feels almost entirely alien. This is where, I think, all those disruptive powers against culture, civilization, classic syle, and certainly rectitude, found their origins. There is familiarity in that, but only of a negative sort. Folks here found their success and then turned it back on the country just a half-beat earlier than did Seattle. This was back when authenticity meant riding a wave, literally, and style was breakthrough, not break-away. Hollywood decadence has morphed into web grease monkeys.

So here I sit, in Claremont, smelling the orange and eucalyptus trees and other unknown spring blossoms, and hardly even bothered by ubiquitous automobiles. Having wandered these pristine streets as their only stroller, nodding to the Mexicans perfecting lawns and ornamental plantings, I'm fatigued now.

I write on a new and very little laptop. It cost a small enough fraction of my travel expenses, and the trash-picked one I normally use finally got too wonky with it's display. Plus it weighs enough to equal all the rest of my luggage. In my laziness, and to my surprise, I've left the Windows this new one came with entirely alone. Linux had become too intrusive to my life. Too many updates, too much research to accomplish simple tweaks.

This is not a betrayal of the Open Source ethos, just a recognition that the Operating System needs to recede farther into the background already. I don't care for it and I don't care about it. Fact is that Windows is what most of the stuff you can download runs best on, simply because that's what most people still run.

Google's ethos is all Open Source, but they must be pretty confident that the developers on their payroll will be the ones to carry the momentum forward. The difference between Open Source and proprietary is just a small matter of where the line gets drawn between the ones inside the tent and the ones on the outside.

What is it that allowed Windows to thrive when Apple languished in a ghetto of too-cool for business? There are lots of stories and theories out there, but the one which sticks with me is that windows drew the line at hardware. All sorts of garage artists could tweak their machines, and all sorts of tweaks got incorporated into the business products. There was no barrier at all to developing apps, the way that Apple still insists on.

The Linux guys are still too fascinated by the operating system and what it might facilitate. They've forgotten their own trivial core. Google gets this with their Chrome OS and its presumption that all the interesting apps will be developed for and delivered on the Internet. Things you do via computers will rely on a browser in almost precisely the same fashion that Windows apps once relied on an operating system.

Around here in Claremont where no-one walks, there are quite a few moving shrines to the automobile. How much easier must it be to preserve these cars in absence of road salt!! Just as the sidewalks are only heaved by tree roots and can look new forever. Just as the Mexicans feel privileged to be working on these lawns, small enough to hardly break a sweat. Just as the paint stays on forever.

Apple and Microsoft both must leave behind their fetishes just as these old cars are no longer any good for the newer sprawling lifestyles. The device will itself disappear, beneath an expectation that it will simply work, by touch and voice and intuitive feel, delivering whatever becomes available in ways to defy designer limitations.

But there is one prognostication I must differ with entirely. The word is that television is what will become ubiquitous. Projected images and perhaps voice, because we are too constrained by the lethargic written word. It's not fast enough, not rich enough, not somehow fully enough exploitative of the power of digital reality.

But images all require their contexts in order to remain meaningful. They are as fleeting as a friend's face to a stranger. While the written word is the permanent embodiment of that which makes us human. It informs. It translates over time.

So, I'm happy with my little laptop with full sized and responsive keyboard. Everything's moving in the right direction. Not there yet. But moving, surely, pleasantly, with aroma of spring blossoms mixed with car exhaust.

Starting Up in Buffalo

There's this nutso notion out there that you can still make a killing with what is commonly called a "startup" on the Internet. The number of outfits attempting this on a daily basis now is rather astounding. There are even startups which serve other startups. In general it's a game of who has the most viewers/readers and then that person gets to be the market maker, in a food chain from top to bottom. They choose which startups to highlight and which to ignore. And seemingly everyone wants to "go viral."

I work here in Buffalo for a little non-startup called Hoover Blanket, Inc. It's a non-startup because, first of all, we've been at this for quite a long time. And second of all, we don't really believe in making a killing on or off or from the Internet. We actually believe in changing the world, pretty much in the way that people working on the so-called "smart grid" believe in changing the world.

We're like the people working on renewable energy sources. We know where the future has to be, and we know it's only a matter of time before we get there. Investments in oil are only sensible if you desperately want to get yours now, and could give a damn for what's coming down the pike. We think that's pretty sort sighted.

The name, Hoover Blanket, descends from the general derision Americans once felt toward our leader Herbert Hoover. During the great depression, President Hoover would habitually announce how well off we really were, and even make proclamations, all at such odds with reality that people started calling the hobo camps "Hoovervilles." A Hoover Blanket was how you kept warm in those Hoovervilles; you wrapped yourself in discarded newsprint! You go Herbie, rah rah us, and pass the revolution.

These days, lots of people fret the disappearance of bona-fide newspapers; the so-called "fourth estate" of our civilization, without which government might oppress and overwhelm us. So cognizant of this danger were our founding fathers that they enshrined the freedom of the press in our Constitution. No one is certain whether the more recent forms taken by the new "fifth estate" - which must include the blogosphere - are up to the task of replacing what gets lost as newspapers increasingly get shuttered.

The hand wringers do tend to forget how often the professional press has served as a shill to government power and preference. The press has as often endorsed such insanity as the Japanese American Internment, the War in Iraq, the Red Scare and on and on, as they have exposed the lies of government. Newspapers have arguably had too much wealth and power, but there doesn't seem to be anything in line to replace them.

As with the culture of startups, the supposition that the blogosphere can provide a check to power also needs to be examined.

Hoover Blanket, Inc., your local hometown hero, was almost selected as a finalist for the great big Tech Crunch 50 back in September. Tech Crunch is one of the gatekeeper websites. One of the market makers. Getting covered by Tech Crunch pretty much guarantees viewership to your site. You get attention. You get the critical-mass seeding needed to go viral.

We can easily guess the many reasons Hoover Blanket just missed the cut (we know we weren't higher than number 60 out of thousands). We didn't have millions in backing for one. Plus, we are working out of Buffalo, which pretty much guarantees a derisive guffaw from the startup community.  We were invited to travel to San Francisco to join the competition in "the pit;" a consolation prize for the second 50.  We somehow thought that would be beneath our dignity. Imagine that! Dignity in Buffalo. What a concept!

We chose our corporate name pretty deliberately, if you can consider flashes in the middle of the night deliberate. But if fits these times. Lots of people are out of work again, and even though our government this time has taken steps to prevent calamity, it doesn't really feel like we're quite out of the woods. And then there's that pesky worry about the disappearing newspapers. How will we keep warm?

Later on, still trying to get noticed by Tech Crunch, we made the mistake of going by way of a young blogger on their site who had a track record of being sympathetic to new businesses like ours. Just our luck, he was later let go when it was discovered that he had been taking quiet bribes from folks like us. The temptation must be very difficult to resist when you have the power of make or break over so many hopeful entrepreneurs. Our gullibility still stings.

It really isn't clear that what goes viral is really the best of the information or the resources that are out there. Often it's the trainwreck stuff, or the stuff with clandestine funding, just like Lonely Girl who made such a splash in the early days of blogging. And then there are the elephants in the room, like Google, which seems able to print money now with their (proprietary and private) control of keyterm auctions. When the whole world is searching on Google, they pretty much own the territory of how much you won't be able to make without them.

So, what does Hoover Blanket, Inc. set out to do? And why are we in Buffalo? The second part is simple; it's where we live. But it also doesn't and shouldn't matter, unless you really want and need to do your networking face-to-face in the coffee shops of Silicon Valley or, marginally, Seattle. (I'm shortly off to Seattle, and San Francisco for both personal and business reasons, if you really want to know). The first part is a little bit trickier to explain.

Let's start with Google's business model. As you might know, they now spend far more for electrical power than they do for the equipment it powers. They index and cache the entire "content" of the live Internet quite a few times over, far more quickly than any other company could possibly afford to do. And this includes some really really big ones like Microsoft and Yahoo! just to name a couple. Google even caches the content of the Internet as it changes, so you just go ahead and try to expunge that blog post you later wish you hadn't made!

In addition, without your necessarily really knowing that you could have "opted out," they are probably storing lots of things about what you search for, each time you use their services. Those of us who use their "free" email know how spooky it can be when they target ads depending on what we're writing about, and it seems like they might be reading our minds, or our secret love notes. Especially when those ads actually alert us to something we're really interested in but didn't know about beforehand.

Now, we trust Google not to expose this information, even to themselves. They seem nice enough, and their corporate motto - a side-wise jab in a grudge match against arch-rival Microsoft - is "don't be evil." Which pretty much begs the question, but still, they seem nice enough. Until you do something wrong, at which point they've cheerfully announced that they will turn you over immediately upon presentation of official bona-fides, to whatever authority might be asking.

Which pretty much comes right back to that free speech freedom-of-the-press thing about our Constitution. Just in case what you're searching on has something to do with what the government might be doing wrong. Folks in South America or in China aren't always that happy to have their searches stored and cataloged. And at this particular moment, it's not at all clear where Google stands. The Chinese government is blaming over-eager students for the targeted hacking of Google's sites. And Google is claiming a foothold in China in the name of the forces of freedom of information.

Do you really think information is free? If it were, then where is Google getting all its income? Just an innocent question.

Google might have located their data center right around here, just because of the Falls. Maybe all that cheap electrical power's already spoken for? Well, never mind, because we have seen the future and it's not about caching all your search behaviors, nor about storing all the "content" from the entire World Wide Web. It's not about reading your mind either.

Credit scoring companies and market research companies already know more about you than you might know about yourself. Buy a house and you can get that spooky feeling that they even knew about that place where you were hiding your mail from you wife before you divorced. They make mistakes, like sending me a solicitation from the NRA, but not often enough to have an impact on their bottom line. Of course, their mistakes can have a huge impact on your bottom line, but that's another story.

In general, what Google - and this is true for most Internet startups - what Google is all about falls into the overall category of artificial intelligence. In general, the economics of the Internet work by targeting information as accurately as possible, and then somehow getting your attention. The very best way to do this is by harnessing your friends and family, via something like Facebook, now one of the largest membership communities on the planet. Ever.

Somehow, it's become too expensive to do this sort of thing in person, so the holy grail is to get the machines to do it faster, more accurately and more efficiently than people ever could. Which might make you wonder why they all want in to Facebook, where there intrusion would clearly collapse that community in an instant. Well, except for the games. And those little annoying dating ads as if every old guy wanted someone looking younger targeted at the "mature set."

Sometimes we're willing and happy participants in these charades, and sometimes we get the sense that they're pretty skeezy. There are a few laws about it all, but in general Internet business makers move a lot more quickly than our government does. And, unless they're selling porn, Internet geeks just don't tend to look and feel all that scary.

Sometimes, like navigating the auto-attendants now de-rigeur for all the big companies, these automated processes do seem to beg some question themselves. Like maybe they really don't want you to be able to get through, while thinking that there's something wrong with the way you're paying attention.

At Hoover Blanket, Inc., pretty much as in the black community, pretty much as in the GLBT community, pretty much as in any community on the fringes of "mainstream," which is pretty much a definition of what it means to live in Buffalo compared to almost anywhere else in the nation, we think people should be able to be whatever they want to be, even if they're faking it, without worry that whatever they once were might become some kind of indelible stigma for all time. We don't think your searches, your deletions, or anything else for that matter, should be stored for examination either on your behalf or against you.

You might think that we are really "not evil," and we'd love for you to think that because we're not. But that's not even close to why we believe what we believe. We actually have enough sense to understand that "artificial intelligence" cannot, by definition (I love to say that - I'll try to explain in a minute) ever even come close to "real" intelligence. That's because intelligence is a human quality, and therefore includes the whole battery of emotive responses.

OK, so now in addition to thinking we'd like to be considered "not evil" you think we want to be loved too, right? Well, sure, but no, the point here is that while a sophisticated robot might be more "hot" than your wife, you're not about to make an emotional commitment to a robot, right? (I know you love your '65 mustang convertible, but let's not get distracted here) But even more than feelings, the point is that actual humans can distinguish what they want and what they don't far more trivially, quickly, accurately, and - most important - satisfactorily than any machine will ever duplicate. Try getting a machine to identify a friend at a hundred paces from the behind in Beijing, just for a quick example.

Half your searches on Google are really frustrating right now because you really don't want what everyone else is looking for by that name. You know what I'm talking about if you simply try to search on "avatar" say, or "beck" or "bolt" just after the Olympics, or "cronic" when they think you misspelled "chronic." Humans are metaphorical and subtle. Machines just aren't.

The reason that we know this stuff is that my business partner, Kevin Chugh, Ph.D. (yeah, I give him the business for that set of letters too) is pretty advanced in his understanding of these matters. Kevin has a bit of local fame for his invention of the V-Frog, which is a computer-based virtual dissection lab. Behind that is his Ph.D. research into ways for modelling complex structures like living tissues, so that a machine can return a tactile response just like the "real thing." It's pretty exciting stuff. I'm sure the pornographers are all over it!

In order to model structures more complex than a bridge or a skyscraper, engineers have to give up deterministic modelling in favor of something which works more at the level of cellular automata. That's the way, not incidentally, that the terrorists can provide actual real-life challenges to all of our military's technical sophistication. But it's also the way that complex structures can be accurately modeled by machines. You program the interactions among the pieces, depending on their relative properties, and you program their location. You can get something pretty lifelike.

Now you don't have to be too clever to notice that this same technique can be used to power Internet searching. It's actually analogous to the technique by which the micro packets which compose all the information on the internet get routed to their destination. Each host along the way only needs to know the next closer-to-the-destination host to send each packet on its way. It doesn't need the entire route. Designed for the military, it doesn't even want to know the whole route; in case a part of that pathway gets blown up, there will be a virtually infinite number of alternate routes.

A doctor palpating a virtual body can sense an occult tumor. A searcher can sense the right direction for what she's looking for in the same sense, if only we can get the machines out of our way and be presented with some human discernible clues. You get the idea.

So at Hoover Blanket, Inc., we not only don't want to store any of the content of the Internet, we don't need to. Hell, we're from Buffalo, we could never afford it even if we did want to. We certainly have no interest in storing anything about your behavior. It would only get in the way of what you're trying to find today, which might have very little to do with what you were looking for yesterday, when your wife was watching, say.

Our catalog of the Internet looks more like a multidimensional map. We don't care what you call it or what you want to do with it. We just show you where to find it, based on the discoveries of others looking for the same thing. Works every time. Of course we have to believe that most people are genuinely looking and that what they find is genuinely meant to be found.

Right now the Internet works pretty much as if most of us were skeezy sociopaths trying to get you to believe something you never would believe if you knew the truth about what they were really trying to do, or to get you to do. And that's because, right now, the Internet actually favors the gamers of your enthusiasms. Sometimes these same folks even make it into highest office, but that would be another story too, you know the old one about George and the Constitution.

Anyhow, we don't care who you are or what your motives are. We only care that you are human and not a machine, and so, naturally, among our products are sophisticated means to tell the difference. Like CAPTCHAS if you've seen those hard-to-read squiggled-up text boxes that you have to get past. Ours are way more fun, and trivially easy for humans to get past. Impossible for machines. That's because, unlike CAPTCHAS, ours are human-generated. We call them Bafflebots, and if anybody else tries for that name we will sue them with all the firepower of Buffalo's underpaid attorney class (well, not the ones on billboards, the ones used by the stars, you know who I'm talking about).

Where does free speech and the fourth estate - the newspapers - come back in? Simple. By its location in our multidimensional geography of Internet "location" you can see immediately the context for anything and everything. So, if some teapartier, angry at the government because there's no one else ready to hand to be angry at, makes some outrageous claim about, say, black welfare moms, you can see right where they're coming from based on where people go to find such things. Local news can be re-localized, even when it's coming from the New York Times, and speakers out against authority can establish their credentials on the spot, so to speak.

OK, that's enough about our company. Obviously the underpinnings are a little more complicated than what I'm letting on. Just as obviously, Google  knows all this stuff too. They have whole armies of engineers working on these problems. But, as you might be able to see, they would have an awful lot to lose if the obvious got out. Pretty much the way that lots of people don't want you to know where they're really coming from (hint: money is a pretty good way to get a clue).

What about Buffalo? At the SuperBowl, the Stanley Cup, even the Olympics now, we're always almost there. Just missed. Wide right. No Goal! Heck, I've always been almost there myself. I was in a bar near the stadium when the audience started filing out from the game that made the history books; Frank Reich's record-breaking comeback. I wasn't nearly so disappointed as they all were - heck the game was going exactly the way I continued to hope it would.

I very nearly scored prime seats for the Ryan Miller homecoming the other day. I was down at Niagara Square for the Scotty Norwood homecoming, even though I didn't see the game. Well, those tickets were already getting beyond the reach of the normal folks from Buffalo anyhow. But how many times are we doomed to almost, but not quite, win the championship? Hoover Blanket's right there with you.

When New Orleans won this season's SuperBowl, how many in Buffalo wondered if catastrophes have to be considered acts of God before the country will pay attention and root for you? Our states of emergency are the cause for late-night jokes by those stellar wife-cheating hot-car driving multimillionaire hosts (At least we don't get the "act of God" exclusion from our insurance coverages).

Everyone knows the story of the frog who passes the point of no return as he basks in the kettle while it's heating. New Orleans got hit hard and fast, which upped the probability for outpourings of sympathy. They hopped right out of their kettle (there might have been gatekeepers for the way back in). In Buffalo, we're like the v-frog (tm) in the kettle, who stayed just a bit beyond the point where we should have thought about doing something different. Our catastrophes are slow and deliberate, and seem very much as though they're our own darned fault.

And we regret all those things we could have done differently, like where we built our University, where the highways went, where the subway doesn't go to or come from, leaving us a ghost town where there used to be a downtown.


I remember getting a new red winter cap with ear-flaps back when I was a little kid, back when
Naugahyde was cool. We used to stick our heads out the car windows in those days, riding over the
Skyway. I looked like a dork with the earflaps turned down.

Regret for me is watching my new red hat float down and away from the skyway bridge; my caught
heart plummeting with it. It didn't soar like a red balloon let go.

But hey, maybe it's really not our fault. Maybe we're not the dorks they all think we are.

I wonder where our hearts are tending, here at home in Buffalo. We have had some superstars around here lately, and they seem to like us well enough. The famous home makeover folks were impressed enough by our stone soup magic that they've changed the way they do business all over the country. They seem interested in manufacturing hope to almost the same extent as other more powerful forces seem interested in manufacturing fear.

Who knows? Maybe we have the real thing here, in our city of no illusions. Reality City. We ain't got no artificial nothing. No artificial hope. No artificial fear.  And certainly no artificial intelligence, as I learned the other other night listening to our Canadian false friend Margaret Atwood. I call her a false friend because, while she made a point to let us know that there is a real Buffalo in her past, passing through from Toronto, she also spent most of her "talk" giving us examples of questions she gets a bit exasperated with from admirers.

So, naturally, we provided a few more reasons for her to roll her eyeballs. It's what we do, well, especially when the talk we paid for turns out to be more of a definition of the distance between us and her exalted heights. It came off like an attempt to get us on her side; to commiserate with her about silly folks who couldn't, could they?, be anything like this audience.

Atwood makes her living extrapolating the thinking and behaviors of those who are like our American teapartiers. You can just imagine what those Bully Canadian Hockey Moms think of those folks. Oh, I think I'm getting mixed up again.  As if there's not a thinking soul in Buffalo who would accept her challenges if offered them dead on. As if we're not all wishing we were Canadian right about now.

Atwood remembered Buffalo from back when we were "sin city." When the drinking age was lower here, when the bars were open later and the girlie joints were more explicit than the ones now over there. I know, it's hard to imagine now, but we had our glory days.

How about let's overlook the Buffalo that everyone else thinks of. How about we look either farther back or farther forward, skipping over the embarrassing stuff.

I have no illusions. Starting up in Buffalo is really really hard compared to starting up almost anywhere else. But we do have plenty of real people here. We have real intelligence. We have products which are not premised only on being cool. And that's not even to mention the art, the music, the theater, the dance, the ethnic identities, and the food, the glorious food. Even the New York Times gives us credit now for that!

Spiritualist Commentary

I once visited Lily Dale, a spiritualist enclave nearby Buffalo, where I now live for the moment (I absolutely adore the English ambiguation machine; do I "live for the moment?" Am I in Buffalo temporarily? Or do I live at Lily Dale?). I had high hopes that something might be triggered there. I was looking for some even slightest sense that there were insights beyond the ones I find through reading and a bit of academic study. I even got myself a "reading."

In the event, it was clearly something to be gotten over with for each of us. The "reader" must have seen that I am opaque and impenetrable. I knew that he wasn't seeing anything. It would be pretty much like some poor doctor trying to diagnose a hypochondriac. Better to go through the motions and get him out of there as quickly as possible.

I was disappointed. Or more likely I mean "I wasn't disappointed." The experience was and remains hardly surprising; pretty much what I'd expected. I'm as proof as they come against spiritualist anything. Like I wear condoms on my gullibility.

Maybe I'd wanted to see if someone would see something in me; something to pull me away from my prideful deficiencies. Or maybe there's just not that much which would surprise me about me; there's not that much that I would be looking for them to tell me, and so it all felt like being a tourist in one's home town. I think I was actually open minded, though. I wasn't looking for negative affirmation.

Around here, in Buffalo where I live again now, temporarily, we often get the chance to take visitors to Niagara Falls, and each time, we also get to see the falls anew. Lately, trying to steer my body in a new direction, I take long walks and see the city in a way which I never could while driving a car. In general, I am the only walker.

Sometimes one is most blinded to the familiar.

I've lately started participating in a local spiritualist writers group, a bunch of people who sense that there are realities which have not been let in to our common discourse; for whom the evidence is too strong that there is more to reality than can be told. But who try to tell it nonetheless.

I have met a Native American medicine man there; I re-met an astrologer I already knew; there are poets, and ordinary folk for whom things have happened which don't fit in to the ordinary narratives of life. Hell, my whole life looks like a bizarre improbability to me, so - apart from the never seeing ghosts part - I should fit right in.

The narratives of these writers would all be extraordinary - hard to believe - except that lots and lots of people follow astrology, even in the highest places. Lots of people believe in and see ghosts. But not everyone wants to tame what they know with words. Almost everyone is secretly skeptical, unless they've seen something themselves. Which I haven't. But I'm not really skeptical, except in ways that I'm perfectly open about. Like, I'm skeptical about the skepticism which powers scientific inquiry, for example.

I never will either see ghosts nor guide my life by the stars, but lots and lots of people will. Still, I am a writer, if I am a writer at all, who writes at that very same edge of sense. Words from others have driven away the mysteries for me. Ghosts have been rationalized to my satisfaction as the reification of what's only "in the mind." But words also take me over the edge, to where only metaphorical is real. Except, well, metaphor is far too limiting a figure.

For me, what's "out there" (fun ambiguating machine again) really is starting to look more and more as though it came from inside my mind. Hard reality is collapsing beneath something else that much more powerful. And reality is pretty darned powerful if you ask me. How strange would it be if the stars did not have any influence on our lives. It only depends how large your frame is allowed to become.

I resist any and all certainties. I therefore risk insanity of the most basic sort, of course. My personal and written narrative often goes off the rails. But, in precisely the manner of this author I recently heard on NPR, the frame within which the various authorities would box me not only doesn't seem to fit, but would seem positively to keep me from myself, as if there could be a me divided from myself by prison bars.

I land in the hospital, but no cause can be found. Or rather, no cause for the cause. (Do accidents always require causes? Or is that just an escape clause the insurance policy writers use) The most important connections in my life are the ones which have been made far beyond my control. Random. Easy to miss.

I'm almost certain the same is true of you, unless you're filthy rich, in which case you're likely to credit your own intelligence and cleverness. It's only human. As if these also weren't matters of good fortune. So, you'll credit yourself with intelligent and clever deployment of your intelligence and cleverness. You see where this is going.

Among the authorities I simply must resist, I would have to include the astrologers, the ones who already know all about ghosts, as well as the usual suspects; the scientists, the doctors, the academics - all the ones who have worked so much harder than I ever will for answers.

These conventional frames are all fully fleshed out now, and so there's nothing left there for me. Which doesn't mean, in any of those and many other cases, that I'm feeling superior to the sense that folks inside them can make. I'm not. There's just no sense there for me. My body's healthy, my mind is strong, the only thing I have to fear is fear, and I'm working on that one too.

* * *

I have a headache today well beyond the power of doctors to diagnose. But it's origin is trivial. Nothing to be alarmed about. I had to get a new "smartphone" because the old one would no longer connect to the Internet. Verizon had sent me five, count 'em, five new ones in fulfillment of the warranty I pay for. I asked them, please, to look a little more deeply into the issue before sending me another one. Each time I set a new one up, costing my precious time and attention, I am a little less confident that my work will last. I told the guy I didn't want to feel like I was driving a Toyota. I think he took my point.
.
They obliged me, they brought in their big guns, but in the end offered no other resolution than to send me yet another refurbished identical phone. It seems merest coincidence that the timing of this series of escalating failure rates coincides with the termination of my contract, and the ability, therefore for me to claim a new phone free. Honest - I think it's random. Well, OK, as much as anything is random.

Naturally, I had wanted to hold out until the newer cooler ones come out. The Verizon folks helpfully advised me that there's never a good time to commit with these things. There's always a newer cooler one just around the corner. And it's no real surprise that among the diminishing number of people who ever bought this particular defunct phone in the first place, there should be some kind of crescendo of trouble. Verizon's cost in PR and technical expenditures for a remedy would be impossible to justify.

I caved. They offered me an extra fifty bucks off. (Just now I got a coupon in the mail for a hundred bucks off - I guess the guy was really stretching himself out for me!!) I miss my old phone, though. It was a kludge, a terrible compromise between touch and buttons and Windows' seemingly pathological design-by-massive-terrified-of-the-boss-committee-consensus approach about including the kitchen sink. The very antithesis of the iPhone. But I'd learned to make it work, and especially liked its slide-out keyboard.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering how and why I can afford an Internet-connected smartphone, being out of work, and dissing technology the way I do. Well, I pretend to.

But as you can see, I practically live up here in the ether. It's how I present myself. I have no fixed geographic address, and so I require cellular technology just in order to be findable by friends and family. I swear I don't really want to be reachable at any moment. I extol the virtues of staying put, even of going back to the old ways. But just like Al Gore, I make some kind of exception of myself. I guess.

Well, not just like him. He's rich and growing and I'm poor and shrinking. Divesting myself of fat and other accumulated stuff. But I do find extravagant hope in certain of the new technologies. I watched that Afghani reporter embedded with the Taliban, and like lots of others, I awoke to the evident truth that they could not coordinate their activities, plant their bombs, nor even detonate them were it not for the cellular network. One wonders why "they" don't just turn it off. You know, the other "they."

Clearly, as with credit card companies who would rather we not know precisely how much money they lose to fraud and identity theft, there is far more to lose by shutting down the cellular networks, than there would be for "them" to gain. A few hundred or a few thousand soldiers a year is a perfectly acceptable price. It's commensurate with lots of other costs, like the cost of mayhem on our highways, for instance, or in our hospitals where "preventable" is the single biggest cause of death (OK, I think it's third, but I know it's up there).

The true cost for public admissions about what's really going on would be our lost confidence in the structures which sustain us.

I don't like these Taliban any better than you do. I might like them a lot less, since I also see them as very similar to our own teapartiers. Angry at everything and nothing in particular, so target the biggest thing around. The American government. The US government is acting very big so far.

But I find lots of hope in the terrorist cells' ability to use the technology of wealth to frustrate its power. Poverty stricken people around the globe can now have phones where once the cost to get on the grid was prohibitive for all but the privileged classes.

There is very nearly no limit to what a company as large as Citibank, say, will do to protect your confidence in them. How much of your fees pay for the invisibility of rampant fraud? Do you ever wonder? And still they want to put a tax on top of what they aren't telling you, against your fear, by selling you identity theft insurance. Fear and greed make a charming couple, don't you think?

"Mission Accomplished" was precisely what got done by the shock and awe campaign against Saddam Hussein. We shouldn't have made so much fun of Georgie Porgie in his jump suit. The whole point of our going in there was to cement the fear we all must have of ignorant people willing to fly planes into buildings. No cost is too high to validate the fear in a kind of super high stakes triumphalism. A massive cheer for the winners. It's like a heroin hit to the collective psyche.

There was and remains quite literally no limit to what must be spent to own and to control our enthusiasms. (And you thought the "war on drugs" was about your kids??? Well, in a way, of course, it is. They must be kept in training!) Even though the cost to the lives of "our own" (not "us" but, you know, the ones too poor or ignorant to understand how their enthusiasms are gamed) now far exceeds the harm "they" ever did or could do to us.

Never mind the collateral damage, or the meltdown to our economy, which was the only thing which could, even conceivably, trump the cost of war. The War. The perpetual war of one name or another.

Oh, but what might have could have probably would have - depending on who you listen to - happened had we done nothing? I guess about the same things that happen every day over in Iraq and Afghanistan, or those parts of town where your family would never let you live, but people still live there nonetheless. They do. Are they not afraid? Is terror only reserved for those whose daily life contrasts enough?

I caved against Verizon, and my new phone - which I chose because it had the largest brightest most apparently durable and readable screen, plus the promise of a better way to input text - is an even bigger kludge than the last one. I miss the buttons; no keyboard anymore, it's all swipe and gesture, in the direction of, and with a silent bow toward, Apple.

But Apple, I learn today, is suing Google now for ripping off certain of Apple's patented intellectual property. These people have got to be kidding! They're protecting their right to profit from ideas which quickly become something anybody could do a hundred different ways. Should something like a wheel really be patentable? Is there no commons left??!!!

I have, apparently, purchased the least popular of the smartphones; certainly the least cool. It's running Microsoft's latest Mobile OS, which not a single tech guru praises. And to top it off, the manufacturer, Samsung, has hobbled plenty of the design aspects built-in by Microsoft, all in the direction of a better "consumer experience" I'm sure.

And on top of that Verizon has famously pushed the whole thing way over into the direction of an entertainment device, all for a fee, and all also in the direction of keeping you from putting your own hands on the device's locked away "features."

In the end, I'm happy enough. The browser beats Apple's in most ways. Text can actually be entered more rapidly than by either Apple's or anyone else's methods, or especially by a tiny keyboard with my thumbs. After a headache-inducing learning curve, in the end I think I got what I wanted. I won't be able to type so fast as I'm doing now with keyboard, but that might not be such a bad thing. Hell, I could give a damn for cool, and even hobbled, this beats the alternatives for me. Bizarre how Microsoft now is in the middle, stodgy, between the battling titans of cool.

So, I will deploy my technology precisely as does the Taliban. But I hope I'm a bit more enlightened than they are. I don't feel any anger toward those who screw me in the name of my own good. I'm sure not about to blow up myself or anybody else. I feel no need to be trimmed for Allah. But I do think that there's important work to do.

I sure can see how we have earned the Taliban's anger against us. As certain as I can be of anything, I'm certain that the way to win has nothing to do with guns or money (when the money's not in the form of relief aid). Just as the way to good health has little to do with the powers of medical technology, except when one is truly ill. The technology we need for good health is good information, good sanitation, public safety and housing, and an absence of fear and food insecurity and guilt; as though we cause all of our problems ourselves.

The large corporations now are all doomed to go the way of Toyota. There's not a single one of them which doesn't have the same sort of secret they'll spend any amount to keep from transforming into a generalized loss of faith.

The healthcare industry, collectively, is terrified that we won't be terrified anymore of dying. They act as though they too find the escalating costs out of touch with reality. This is a ploy folks. The more money goes through their hands, the more profit they can make. (Along with my Verizon coupon, I just got another denial of coverage for a blood test. You'd almost think they are trying to alienate me)

And if we stop being terrified, the evident magic will be that, collectively, we'll be that much healthier and better off than we ever could be on their drugs and surgical and genetic interventions when these get deployed as if every deviation from some norm were a cause for emergency response.

There is no massive turning which is necessary. There is no massive evil being perpetrated in our  name. There's just a lot of fear, being rendered up into a fairly insane collective behavior pattern.

* * * 

Last night, because my life is just that bizarre, I had a chance to attend the hockey event of the century. I nearly witnessed the Buffalo Sabres' own top goalie at his homecoming from center stage in the final event of the Winter Olympics. Canada won, but Buffalo would welcome home the next in a long line of superstar just-misses. We let him know how much we love and value him.

In the event, the son of the friend who'd offered me the last minute seat which he'd gotten last minute - absolute primo seats - the son invited a friend and so I got bumped.

Now, I'm sure you understand completely that this was no tragedy for me. I'm not the world's biggest sports fan, although I do seem magically to be in attendance at some great Buffalo sports happenings. Or just miss them. But the consolation prize was pretty good - I got to use their pre-empted tickets to hear Margaret Atwood in person.

Last minute, I couldn't get anyone to accompany me, so I dropped off two free tickets at the box office, which were then snapped up by some grateful students. So, in addition to feeling lucky, I got to feel generous. Which is a better thing to do than to feel pre-empted.

Atwood, poor woman, devoted her "talk" to answering publicly some frequently asked questions that she, as prominent author, often gets. It was pretty transparent to me that she was warning off those questions in the Q&A session which the format of this "distinguished speaker series" has established for itself.

Despite her sharing some intimate history of Buffalo from a Torontonian's point of view, you could sense this bit of tension between her and this crowd. She's most recently written one in a literary barrage of end-of-the world novels.

The crowd wants to know if she's optimistic, what we should do to prevent a catastrophic future. The questions veer just a bit in the direction of questions she's tired of asking. Questions she rolls her eyeballs at. She kept her poise, but the gulf between herself and this audience had grown immense. We felt mildly cheated by her impromptu carelessly prepared and brief remarks. She felt at odds with ill informed and familiar questions.

As a writer, she said, she is and must be an optimist: That she will finish the book, find a publisher, find an audience. As an accomplished author, she has about as much in common with her audience as the health insurance industry does with the ill. Why would she want anything changed? It's working for her. Being darkly pessimistic makes her life perfectly sunny.

I know that sounds like sour grapes, but honestly, it's not. In a way, it was generous of Atwood to give us her time in person. In a way, with the now inevitable mega-sized image of her talking head right over her actual - but too far away to be distinct -  head, it was hard to get the sense of what "being there" really means anymore. A television would be a far more intimate way to hear her speak.

* * *

So anyhow, as you can see I have nothing at all spiritual to offer. Well, except that I have a really hard time finding almost anything at all which is not meaningful. The most random things just fit right in to what I'm thinking about. And I'd say that's just about as powerful as seeing ghosts. Just about as jarring. Not exactly terrifying, unless you lose your mind about it. I wouldn't want to go saying these things out loud, because everyone would just think I'm crazy.

But, in some new-agey spiritualist sense, all that needs to happen to change the world is for lots and lots of people to stop being so afraid. So terrorized. So subject to the narratives pandered by those already rich and famous and powerful. No, no, no, I'm not talking about Margaret Atwood (by strange co-incidence I found out where my long lost copy of The Handmaid's Tale went, but she couldn't use the tickets either). Atwood come to Buffalo, risking her reputation at the same time that our fair city was honoring a hockey player from somewhere else. Oh Canada!

She writes beautiful books full of implied cautionary tales. Stories and poetry which can reveal things about ourselves that we'd never know without the mirror of literature. But she too is asking us to be afraid. I'd say that's at odds with her audience in Buffalo. We have seen the future and it is us. We're only terrorized by what the better off might do. In Buffalo, silly sin-city of Atwood's past, we still sense a chance to turn it around. And if we can turn our city around, anything's possible, right?

Sorry. Way too long. I'm still working on the condensed version. That's a lot harder.

What Should Microsoft Do?

I haven't read it yet, but this is meant to riff off "What Would Google Do?". Which is meant to riff off "What Would Jesus Do?" I'm thinking. Which is meant to be guidance for life.

I don't mind giving Microsoft advice, because, pretty much like giving Attila the Hun advice, he's just going to look at it, maybe with a kind of curiousity and then carry on raping and pillaging, because, like the scorpion on the frog's back, it's what monopolizing corporations do.

But clearly, it's all about rugged multi-touch. It's all about holding in one hand. It's all about free access to the Internet. It's all about easy reading and easy input. In other words, there's something to be made of a combination of the Kindle, the iPad, the iPhone, the netbook. I mean, think of the opportunity. The iPad has staked out a $600 slot for a $300, max, product (judging against the netbook market). The Kindle gives you internet access for free, slanting heavily in the direction of buying their reads. The Kindle is as easy as reading a book. The multi-touch is a no-brainer, because, well, it takes not brains, and no instruction, to make the machine do what you think it should do.

And the only thing in the way of Microsoft entering this market is their greed. Obviously, they can't let go of the revenue stream from Office and Windows, and that means that they will remain wedded to the absurd notion that people still have to or want to or can be tricked into getting that kind of functionality for a price when it can be had so trivially for free.

They want to retain the software hardware divide, when there is none anymore. It's all machine vs. human, with the software/hardware on the same side of the diff-e-q. The machine is a photo-reproduced schematic, plain and simple (what, you thought they engineered these things the way that they once did railroads and spaceships??). And you need a machine to design it, because it's too damned intricate for humans to draw. Expand out the schematic so you and I could see it and it would fill football fields now.

But no machine can, any more than can a corporation, do human. It's just not possible. Any more than a scorpion can refrain from killing when it has the opportunity. Even when the killing drowns itself. I'm standing by for your call, M$, whenever you want to know how to repair your fortunes. But, you'll have to cede control, power - the greed thing - and actually want and need to compete on a level playing field in the open market which has never, so far, existed. And with all your money, I am betting you're far far too chicken. You're afraid you can't win on your merits, because you know you never have. You're like all the rich people now, afraid that they will be exposed for having won the lottery instead of earning the slot by honest work.

Best wishes, though. Really. It's not like I'm rooting for Google. They're just plain evil.

Who Owns Me? Google does!

Google owns me, and I don't really mind. Yet. Once they fully team up with the NSA, I might have something else to say on the topic. But up against Verizon gaming me, I discovered rather lately  - as a techie it's embarrassing - that the once-free tool which Verizon had provided doesn't hold a candle to what Google allows me for free now.

OK, it's not all Google. It's Microsoft ActiveSync, but Google has opened up their email in ways that used to require an enterprise Exchange server, and it works better - much better - than Verizon imitating Blackberry. Which they now charge for??!!! It makes no sense. I save $15 bucks a month for something better that Verizon never told me about, and used to charge nothing for. Right, and I guess I should expect them to lower my rate, automatically, every time they lower it on to the general public! So what am I, you loyal customer, chopped liver??!!

And looking at my Google dashboard, I see that they store more information about me than even the credit-scoring services do. Well, not more, but it would make a scary complement to what the credit scoring services have on me. They track my youtube visits. They track whose blogs I follow. They cache my searching, but that part I'm not allowed to see, and I trust that they won't identify me with it either.

Except that they've already said that they will comply with the law if requested. Just like Verizon did when they tapped into the net on the request of the government, even though the request wasn't legal???

One has to wonder now if the law and the government are at odds again. The way they were when blacks and women coudn't vote, for instance. The way they are when corporations are declared to have the inalienable right to pursue your happiness; to drown out your voice and make your freedom of speech irrelevant.

I don't really care even if the NSA already had access to my searchings, which they probably already do even without Google's help. It's all noise, right? Until you say something edgy, which will just stick right out from the noise, and provoke someone to look a little bit more closely. And Google, happy lapdog, will just hand you right over in an instant, if the request is bona-fide and legal. Or at least if it's government sponsored.

But I am not the content of what can be known about me. And if I were a too-tightly wound nutjob ready to pop, they quite manifestly now, wouldn't know that either. Even if I were a radical Muslim high-ranking in the military. Even if I seemed nice to those around me, like that shooter recently here in Buffalo.

So, the excuse to keep our searches is just that. An excuse. We'd like to think it can and will help responsible people to know who's out to get us, but in the end it can't and won't. Unless, of course, someone goes the extra step to actually get to know someone, which can't really be done, in the end, virtually. Now can it?

And it can't be done just one on one. Someone would have to get to know your whole story, from lots of points of view, not just the on-line or phone conversation one, which will always be taken out of context. Always be dangerously unfair and untrue.

But you know if Google does succeed now with their experiment to bring ultra-high-speed Internet right into your living room, so that you can have the same telepresence "enjoyed" by corporate enterprises within their pecincts, then we might almost only exist online.

Which used to be thought a pretty terrifying prospect. Minority report. The Matrix. That Max Headroom old TV show. I could go on and on. I do go on and on, but I'll stop here today.

There is a clear trend here, and we should stop it before it's too late. The issue is word for word identical to the patenting of our genes. And just as important. If we allow ourselves to be considered identical to our "content" then we have already ceased to exist, and our suicide would indeed, just like life in Buffalo, be redundant.

Audience Rules! Google Out of China

Google did it! Instead of mouthing more mealy rationalizations about engagement, Google pulls back now from the world's biggest market, in protest against the Chinese government's controls against the free flow of information. They had previously drunk the water of compromise, and now they take it back, realizing some basic collision with the company's own core values. If they aren't interested in the free flow of information, who is?

Before we debate that point, I myself now, inspired by Terry Gilliam's latest cinematic romp, must practice sleight of hand. While you are paying attention to the diversion of Google's seeming to do the right thing by you, I am going to conjur my own audience. Shazzam, and you are there.

Evangelicals do this all the time, tapping in to that proto-illness of most peoples' brains where powerful words, authoritatively spoken, excite some sort of belief-system focused on some leader at the pinnacle of some trued structure.

Schizophrenics do this to some clinically mad degree, rehearsing rosary patterns of words as if for dear life; sometimes even unsettling their interlocutors' certainties about what really counts as worthwhile. If they can even get an interlocutor, which is usually pretty unlikely. There is always madness in perfect trust in any human-generated scheme.

These edifices of trust - the churches, the schools, the corporations - are composed of the attention paid by earnest subscribers, in no position themselves, alone, to be certain of anything. Traditionally, the church in robes and gold and ceremony, could legitimize its stand in place of you and me.

Now, at one extreme, we have be-gowned and celebrated universities, whose rationalizations of the world around us must be trued by earnest peers whose own works are "published" and read by others whose readerships are also better than you or me. There is a highly elaborated system for legitimacy, which in these United States keeps our Big U. at the very top on the globe. If we don't blow it, we may yet remain, thereby, economically in power.

At some other extreme are ever-growing institutions legitimated only by the financial contributions of their adherents. To many of us, these evangelical businesslike edifices look for all the world like giant confidence games, supported only by some occult cadence, high production values to the show, and the tired jadedness of common man toward robes and institutional self-promotion.

Which is a really funny observation if you were to think about it.

Google and Microsoft and proto-universities like the Singularity Institute, gain their legitimacy by your purchase of their product, or by your being subject to their advertizing, or by your belief in guru representations beyond the reach of institutions for sanction. Pick your poison, someone's always trying to take advantage of your gullibility.

When you, the public, are asked questions for your answer en masse, the way they so stupidly do in California, the very act of voting makes you complicit in a massive crime against humanity. Complex and difficult matters must be distilled into some truism which will become a proxy litmus test to determine if you prefer the blue or the red pill.

Should education be worth more than incarceration? Should real-estate taxes be capped? Can we trust our elected leaders to represent us? The serpent eats its tale. (at least pikk.com makes good sport of it, rabid fans) We must bind the hand which leads us.

No authority now is trusted; no structure can be made worthy of your belief. I'd like to be willing to die for my country "in an instant" like so many soldiers say that they are, but I really don't know what my country is. I really would like to know, once again, what it is beyond family and personal friends which has earned my full trust and loyalty.

In China, on its citizens' behalf, the government will violate the terms of service of its business partners - which is an extremely civil way to put what they are doing - conducting industrial espionage to expose its own citizens who would like some trued stories about the behavior of that self-same government to be aired in public. Very bad things will happen to these people.

Google's discovery leaves it in a position of no real choice. If it is not to be complicit in what are criminal acts on the face of them.

Other corporations, as I have written extensively elsewhere (don't you just love such vague references?), can lay back behind layers and layers of deniability and keep focus on whatever core business widgets or services they are pandering. We don't always know what might be done in our name, but we do know that we are only interested in bringing profitable wares to market.

But Google's in the business of information; trust in them depends utterly on their commitment to the freedom of information. Otherwise even rubes would understand we're entering the world of Orwell's 1984.

Chinese citizens understand that their fate is collective. Their lives are palpably better on a daily basis, thanks to their single party rule. Strong resolution at their top is never subverted by oversimplified questions asked of under-qualified deciders. While our red and blue resolve themselves into almost perfect opposition, guaranteeing, virtually, that there can be no direction other from the one which will be far too little, far too late. When true leadership is so urgently called for.

And just as we might not want to look too closely at what we are asking our young men and women to do in our name in Afghanistan or Iraq, the Chinese people are often just as adamant about what they don't want to know.

The only fact which really matters is whether the preacher is more interested in gold and glory than in God. Has self perpetuation trumped belief? Do leaders' actions defy their words? Must we hamstring them with direct propositions so that they may do their dirty deeds in trickier ways beneath our notice?

And so, dear audience of non-existent readers, I make this representation to you. There is no thing which I will write which you must take on any kind of faith. I will not make extravagant claims about the future, nor willingly make statements which cannot be substantiated against piles and piles of facts. I will not stray beyond the bounds of reason, nor fall prey to temptations for the rhythms of magical thinking, either as receiver or transmitter. You will know it when I lose my mind.

Most writers, I must imagine, would feel far too naked doing this kind of writing. Well, some have told me so. Where you have no good idea who it is you're writing to. Where you have no particular expertise which makes you the person to go to for good intel about the latest moves of this or that corporation, nor for interpretation of the latest happenings in the world around us. I have no editorial board to assure you that what I write will be this side of outlandish, nor in the vein of what you've paid for.

But, sorry to say, writing alone for just me in private fails to engender my own trust in me. Toward the one side, I might write as do those myriad bloggers now who rehearse for you daily observations about their personal lives, and seem to speak for your heart as well. You comment profusely, yeah yeah yeah, that's what I think too. Or you're a jerk.

Toward the other, there is nothing which I have so fully developed to say that I can work it out book length for your to judge in and by its completion.

I have inklings is all, of certainty, in the end, as it were, and trace the direction toward it here, each day out loud, as if a crazy person writing to myself. But the certainty I seek forms no kind of utterable nor embodiable truth; these are absurdities I just can't believe in.

I have no faith in that sort of perfection in words, nor artificially intelligent robots, nor transhuman decency beyond our belief here and now. I have no faith in even trued words' endurance in any perpetual sense, and the perpetual me falls short within a range I can be comfortable with myself.

That of which I am certain relates to you, dear audience. That there is no such thing as writing which can make sense to a single soul alone. *poof* You're there because you must be. And the power is all yours.

As in these supposedly United States, we must learn to liberate our leaders from the veto power of the least among us, whether small "frontier" states or illegitimate institutions. To do that, we must find a way to trust them. And that in turn must be liberated from the process for producing ad copy on what used to be called Madison Avenue.

This strikes me as almost inconceivably difficult to accomplish. You, dear audience, are so freaking willing to believe the most absurd things, based on some trust in the speaker engendered only on the basis that they make you feel good about yourself. You are falling down on your job. But I have faith in you.

OK, I've got an interview now, for painless suicide in public. Like everyone else, I must eventually agree to work for the Man (Not that one! You know, the one who runs the economy, stupid) or starve. I would represent the government of China, in their cultural outreach to America. Placing Chinese language teachers in our schools. Interpreting Chinese cultural history and values for your edification and enlightenment. Hopefully, leading you to fear and loathe them less, so that we may become partners, China and the U.S., in this better world abuilding.

Is my ambivalence palpable? Is there any way now that I can trust myself? My representations there in private, how will they match this public nakedness before you? Stay tuned! I might just have a legitimate job, or they might just remind me that I have yet to learn to fly a kite. I will do the right thing, of that I'm certain, whatever the hell it is. Or the deciders will do it for me.

Sheesh!

The embarrassment near excruciating . . .

I think I've said that before, but I did make a kind of pledge to myself to see it through.  And it's been an interesting journey, finding that my particular thoughts on this particular day, apparently every time, presage what it is that I'm going to dig out and post from my past. It's a peculiar thing. It's not particularly fun, and I'm not getting much of a charge out of it.  More like discharging an obligation I've been carrying around for many many years, testing my thoughts against what I learn and observe.  That journey is almost over.

I wish I could say that I've grown wiser and more mature, and have lots more detail and elaboration to add to what I knew so young. But the fact is that I've become older is all, and a lot fatter and less healthy. I've struggled and bumbled my way through life, not quite a surfer dude, but not too far removed either (except that I never had so much fun as surfer dudes know how to have). I'm mostly earnest. Some call me cynical. I have a pretty good sense of humor, but am lousy at telling jokes since I hardly ever remember them. I'm one in the crowd of the middling folk so celebrated by Franklin, and so betrayed very lately. A Flatlander, for sure, without any irony to be understood.

But there has been nothing in my vast or half-vast life's experience to lead me in any other direction than the conclusions I arrived at so long ago, at that twenty something age of canonical discovery which never will return, alas. And I have almost no confidence in my ability to say it better. I'm not even sure that words are the way to do it. But I have almost no talent, surely, for anything other than words.

Meanwhile, there are other things to preoccupy me, in this post-capitalistic awakening. I did read an interesting article in Time Magazine, by the same fellow who authored two wonderful biographies I recently finished.  The one lovingly given me on my birthday by my daughter, and which propelled me so strongly forward toward this blogging. Walter Isaacson, who is I guess the former editor of Time, was writing about how to save our dying newspapers. He reminded the reader that hyperlinks were first conceived as a kind of medium for transacting micropayments.

Cool!

Now, we somehow think that our present arrrangement is more free, since we all know how to avoid the adsense intrusions off, vaguely, to the side. But the important paid content-creative positions, argues Isaacson, are disappearing. It's cheaper to follow the sensations, and way more difficult to investigate the tricky matters, like how our government is working, or the economy, or wars. We have C-Span. We have lots of bloggers to reveal the plots. But we're losing our newspapers, as they all get replaced by the wash of too much information - what we're losing is the newspaper as an operation, not as a thing, urges Isaacson.

What is missed by the Time article is that the thing most lost is the time to read the newspaper. This might be the real reason they are disappearing.  We pay happily for cable or satellite TV, and access to the World Wide Potential for entertainment, information, and breaking news. Clearly, if we had the time and it was that much better than these others, we'd pay for an operation to get the important stuff in front of us. 

And speaking of time, and Time as well, they are about due for another in a long series of articles on the general theme of  "why, after the washing machine, don't we seem to have any more leisure?"  Well, I may be extreme, but the time I have to keep informed is behind the wheel of my car.  So, I gladly pay for NPR, but feel a kind of squandering in two dimensions  First is the waste of my limited high adrenalin attention in the act of driving.  It's still fun, but there is no question that it drains me. Second is that were I to have an actual newspaper in front of me, I could be much more efficient than the linear and precomposed presentation which is all the radio can possibly provide. Nor do I have time or interest to compose my own from podcasts among the available proliferation.  Something vicious about the cycles of rat race, post-technology. The effort of searching exceeds the returns by far.

There is a point after which the do-it-yourselfism of navigating the WalMart lots and aisles no longer feels productive. The question is plainly begged about who should be paying whom, and how much time is worth. Not to mention what is getting destroyed. I'm set scrambling because I want, and yet the margin for fulfilment is perpetually squeezed, and so, in precisely the same manner that my hours at work go up in obedient service to those who need my help, the one thing I can easily devalue is my self. Which WalMart shopping has essentially proven to be substantially value-free.

I had the endure a work colleague practically beg not to be given any "raise" (like "patriot act" is code for sacrificing what should be most precious, this is code for cost of living allowance) and to be allowed enslavement rather than to be let among the poor unwashed unemployed.  There is a crossroads here for sure, and on the one side is a losing chase after a receding goal.  There is indeed a red shift upwards in income distribution. Without a middle, there is, pun intended, no heart. 

Anyhow, when shopping is our main leisure activity, and when price is the only thing to drive us such that we prefer a systematic grinding down by the machinery of price reduction to the upstanding member of the community who made his honest living by profit from our provisioning, if not our want, and when the margins of our own lives are so thin that these stores must stay open 24/7, and when our consumption exceeds our digestion not to mention our capacity for chewing (or are those two not interrelated), and when this whole vicious cycle seems so readily relatable to what used to be called Madison Avenue's want generation, then surely the last thing we want to do is get the machine back to "normal."

I just started the latest Tom Friedman book, which rehearses the usual cutting edge metroWired post-everything thinking. Sorry Tom, but it's one of those books where reading the cover might exhaust the content. The trouble with it is (I've only just begun, so indulge my sour grapesism, hung over from Flatland) that it doesn't, and he can't seem to, challenge any of the really basic givens.  It and he is way smarter than the rest of us at putting together very enlightened summaries of what every intelligent person basically knows. I mean, you can fly through this writing the same way you can drink down a plate of pasta.  You're cheering what you already know, and just hoping a guy this smart and this well placed will have lots of influence on the people in power, who you just know in your guts are too venal or troglodyte to act in enlightened fashion.

But a piece of wisdom from the book which I should insert here is that I shouldn't be talking about post- anything, and perhaps especially post-capitalism.  Let's say instead, pre-new-age-economy. And the new age will not make prominent the classy globe trotting thinking of those who rub shoulders with the important and rich. Don't get me wrong. I like this guy, and enjoy his analysis. But it's just about one step short of what really needs to be said (I favor the tree huggers who stopped the WTO meeting in Seattle).

Micro-markets could do this.  

Here's how it could work: First you have to recognize the click as a kind of transaction, perhaps analogous to the collapse of a deBroglie wave in the understanding of quantum physics (self referential plug here, on the model of the way CBS/Katie Couric now constructs its news programs - always making news of something you can learn more about by watching their other programming).  An actual choice has been made in the click.  This choice also has a context, in that the person making the click is doing it from some particular page. 

Now what if the click had some minuscule consequence, sort of in the way that ticking minutes do on a cell phone, or used to with a landline? What if a thousand random clicks might cost what a text message does, as one of Isaacson's for instances.  Surely that would be no inhibition. Especially if it were traded for the current cost of access, which maybe should be free and ubiquitous, or maybe should be metered like electricity. We surely understand that volume of data is no measure of its value, any more than number of words can be a measure of their quality.

But clicking might make a good measure of the value taken from Internet's availability. Especially as context might reveal, ever faster upon clicking in, the increasing value of what comes up. Right until some consummate click, where price is negotiated and content purchased or things delivered or services rendered. 

Now the person putting the link on the page should be taking some responsibility for this link, by which I mean that he should pay the page owner to which the link is made, if that page owner has content to sell. I should say that the person should take some responsibility to the extent that he is getting paid in the first place for the privilege of looking at his own site.

The deal might be that the referred page would offer some multiple of the outlay back, provided that the clicker desired to see more than the particular page linked to, up to and including a purchase or a subscription, forcing a cut back to the person providing the referral.

You could easily limit your exposure, by offering links up to some limit, after which the reader would have to pony up their own micropayments, since your referrals weren't paying off to yourself.  This could easily be tied, proportionately, to the income/outgo ratios of your page, just as the link cost would be tied to the economics of that host.

Right now, we have a threshold, in effect, beyond which you have to buy the book, or get the print version, or buy a subscription.  Sometimes the threshold has to do with how far back into the archives you want to look. Sometimes it has to do with premium content. Mostly, it has to do with how well known the brand name is.  There's generic information, and then there's the really good stuff.  There's the stuff someone else wants you to know, and then there's the stuff you want to know.

And right now, the economy of the Internet is supported by companies large enough and well enough capitalised to be able to get into the game of advertising. Or to put it another way, there has to be some payoff for the expenditure of micropayments per view, which is how advertising works. Ideally, the Internet offers better targeting than other kinds of advertisement, since the context can be so narrowly defined. But in practice, this seems only possible by letting malware onto your computer to track your context - your personal browsing history - or by letting Google keep your history by accepting the lure to log onto their search page. After all they're "not evil."

That's because a single page view doesn't give nearly enough information about how likely you are to purchase what's advertised there. But there are certain things that everyone wants, even if not openly. Ringtones. Contest winnings. Love. Pretty naked pictures. The rest of the stuff engenders our mistrust for the very reason of the techniques which put it in front of our face. I'll do my own searching, thank you very much, before I "buy" the claim being thrust in front of me based on how gamely you put it in front of my face. Either you have so much money that I already know who you are, in which case putting the ad in front of me purchases just about nil in your favor. Or you have mastered the tricks of getting in my face, in which case you're probably trying to trick me. Or I'm an idiot and actually pay money for ringtones or look for dates on the Internet. Or, I'm actually looking for slime, in which case the slimier the source the better so long as I have the proper protection and wariness.

But in any case, the web has generated its own monetization Catch-22 by the counter intuitive assumption that links must be free.  What's counter-intuitive is that free links are the same as free information. And that ads, which are fundamentally embedded in the old dead economy, are the best or only way to monetize the distribution of information. The ads have lost all value as we blow past them looking for something to believe.

Let's try this again. Subscriptions were how Ben Franklin got rich. But ads instantly followed, since the disseminated information was such an obvious vehicle to get the word out about a particular product, or to slam or slander a political opponent. The attention was caught first by the information slung, and second by the riders thereon.

Now we have a medium where the information can be slung with only tiny increments expended for increased exposure (Isaacson seems unaware or declined to say that the cost for subscriptions has traditionally covered the cost of the media - when paper was a significant cost, the subscription would cover the paper, and the ads would cover the editorial production.).  At the same time as coverage has gone global for even the most local production, therefore the number of productions available per eyeball has exponentially increased.

An ecology of subscription versus link cost would generate a system of virtual boundaries around communities.  Payments per production could and should be incremented up by virtue of invitation by some more prominent host. But ownership, that trademark patent thing, could stay with the individual producer.

There is a clear direction toward this type of ecology. First is the possibilty for centralized identity caches, as opposed, say, to the need for usernames and passwords for every site on the web. Next is a virtual wallet, including detailed statements of income/outgo and a metered realtime reading of what it's costing to surf and buy. Third is a graphical interface to locate oneself in each of the many dimensions which get created. 

The obvious first dimension is geography. This helps to find information, goods, friends and services of local relevance, in the literal sense of that term. Another dimension might be affinity of interest, relative to which each of us owns multiple identities, rendering less than useful the tracking of my browsing activity in a single dimension only. I don't care to be distracted by links of relevance to cat lovers when I'm wanting to understand the territorial predations of lions and tigers. Boundaries here, in the right dimensions, are a good thing.

Now, just imagine the value of advertising real estate if the neighborhood can be precisely defined.  Imagine it, just for a moment, because my goal is utterly to transform what advertising means, at just the same moment when coinage is made obsolete. Hang on.

So, let's say that I actually want to purchase some particular thing.  Let's say, in other words, that I still live in the old capitalist universe, where I remain motivated by acquistions which somehow turn me on, and am willing to trade a little of the production of my no-longer-sweaty labor for your talent for anticipating or creating or otherwise meeting my desires. I want to go where I can see enough of all such productions, so that I can establish the going cost to meet my desires, make some comparison among the population of the field, and easily transact business.

If it's a physical thing I want, depending on its size and cost to transport, I may care about geographic locality. If I want it now, I may care about time to ship or delivery method, or I may even want to run out and pick it up. If the item is mass produced, I'll want to cost compare, or if it's not, I'll want testimonials before making the effort of a personal meeting. 

And I'll surely still enjoy the serendipity of browsing bazaars, bookshelves, and meeting actual people. But remember, as the medium is the message, the goal here is to liberate our polity from the destruction wrought by over-ripening capitalism (you can read Friedman for the details), and for the moment this once so-called new medium is as much in service to the continued destruction as it is an object for the hope of its users. 

Now the nature of this multi-dimensional webspace "map" is that things which want to be found will have to locate themselves in (however blurriedly) bounded spaces beyond which no one is looking. They will accomplish this location by transactional history, which just means clicks. "Where" business is transacted becomes the main currency, and so the domain naming system, overlayed now by a "domain mapping system," must be transparently maintained in the same was that money used to be. Transparency in this case simply means that you, the clicker, must always know where you are, and that transactions beyond this mapping are at least as impossible as touch beyond the skin.

Remember, this is no longer naming in the sense of DNS, which simply locates hosts for the purpose of making the routing infrastructure work.  That type of hierarchal ordering is at the level of fluid mechanics, and not economics. Transactional history, which arguably is what money means anymore, is what has to be vaulted, not, surely, at Google Inc, but rather at, but that it has corrupted so completely, something more like the Federal Reserve. Because a person's transactional history is identity combined with monetary values. What I am willing to spend my time on. What I am willing to spend my labor on. And what I am worth, which is the value of my labor that I am willing to place out there on the web. 

Actually, what is to be hoped for, by the likes of me, is that there may be no further need to market oneself. To sell oneself. To advertise oneself. And this in turn stems from a deep conviction that the better selves of the world have almost no voice as things are construed right now. That there is far more wisdom among those who hold themselves back, from shyness, rather than to hazard making a fool in public. This, indeed so far as I can tell after the first few pages, is what Tom Friedman sets out to delineate - the disjuncture between what is plainly to be preferred in the decisions of our government and what we are getting. 

The function of newspapers is part of what is missing. The ability to hold accountable those making the decisions for some intelligence instead of Madison Avenue gamings of the wants, fears, and desires of the media consuming public. A voice as well for those who would not sell themselves, but who would in any community properly so constituted, be called upon to lead because they would be known as the leaders and not because they have put themselves forward as such, in a system which rewards the gamers.

There is so much work to be done. I am nearly ready to start that more considered thinking, which will take the form of a book which you, gentle reader, might have to buy. Not quite. But almost.