Holiday Themes

Time was I would post here nearly every day. Not so much anymore, now that I have a place in polite society again, gainfully employed doing something better than supporting the absurdly displaced lust for gadgetry to accelerate our lives.

It is true, though, that chasing after tail the way that IT guys do is good preparation for the insanely busy business of providing meaningful programming for export to Chinese educational tourists, which is what I do now. 24/7/365

It's my birthday though, and I feel positively hung over and wrecked from decompression on this my first day in many weeks with nothing on my schedule. I'm not going to clean the house, and I'm not going shopping unless I let loose some latent desire for new gadgetry. I sure don't want to blog! What a chore . . .

You know, I started my day with the LA Times, which is a new and healthy habit I have along with failing to each much meat and walking the dog for exercise. But there I was, distracted and working against that sense of guilt that I really should flip through the whole thing to find what's happening in the world.

Something about Harvey Milk in there, and I think I really should know if he's dead or alive - I saw the movie - and then glancing at the story there in the Times, I popped my forehead, duh! Of course, remember he was shot dead right there in the movie.

So I lay down the paper, but you know when you've had too much to do and suddenly you find yourself with nothing in particular that must be done right now, the entire mind, body and spirit continuum just lets loose or something and I feel like a really really old man. Or maybe it's just because it's my birthday? And I suddenly am a really old man?

Yesterday on their last day some very sweet Chinese students I'm hosting presented for their final project a look at Bill Gates as one among many "leaders" they could choose to analyze for the leadership qualities they'd come here to burnish. Since we in America now so evidently know so much about leadership the way that the Pied Piper leads little lemmings over the brink, maybe? Leadership! We'll sacrifice the globe for some idea, for chrissakes.

Bill Gates was quoted up on the screen. Stupid stuff like "find yourself on your own time, since no-one's going to pay you to do it." Or "there isn't any summer vacation in real life." He seemed to have a thing against school, you know, as though to listen to music or smell some roses were somehow a sin. And so maybe I sublimated that presentation from those sweet students and watched some music videos as represented by Time online as the best in history.

And you know, I watched a few and realized that everyone else was probably aware of these documents in their time, and I was just a dullard, like Bill Gates, assigning such stuff and nonsense no value. Certainly not enough to watch them through, either the first time or just now. But I think they were worth the investment, to those who invested in them just as Bonaroo might be or so my little-one tells me, though she herself was bored eventually, and hot and sticky and wanting a break.

But still I think I will do nothing. I don't know that Bill Gates has done anything worthwhile for the world, any more than Rupert Murdoch. I don't know why I feel somehow obligated to know the basic facts about what's going on in the world. There's no way to know that much detail and my brain deteriorates, which leaves not all that much for my mind to ride on. There's so much I can't remember, or at least can't call to mind with sufficient alacrity for it to matter if I could.

It must be that my mind does extend into all these little facts which my various smart devices allow me to check. Yes I know the date of Harvey Milk's death as soon as I can type or say the name and pause for facts' return to that little screen.

No doubt now, that Microsoft will soon re-dominate since they have their arsenal of patents and those patents' attorneys to force protection money from the competition, notoriously to the tune of $15 for each Android device. Which is more than Google makes. Which is zilch.

I wonder who's kidding whom? The Grand Narrative of the non-leadership classes would have us believe that government money spent goes down a rat-hole, though it buys us roads and clean water and safety regs. While the money spent on extortion rackets in the name of intellectual property law or real-estate bubble blowing for the sake of even further concentrations of wealth somehow gets to be thought productive!!!???

Yeah, so why bother, right? Why even pay attention at all? Certainly, why pick up the paper with any desire other than to flip to page 3, or where was that sexy music video among the brainy ones?

I know what I need to know, which oughta be enough. But I'm taking a break anyhow, and I don't really feel like going back to edit. So there. Peace out!

Resurrection

Resurrection is the hardest part of the Christ story to get one's head around. Why so extravagant? Why so inconceivable? It's paired, quite magically, with the virgin birth as those things which are at once perfectly beyond the reach of science to touch, and which present such great taboos when science does approach.

There's cloning on the one end. Frankenstein monstering. And at the other a kind of fever dream of robots or zombies or uploaded souls. Still with the full knowledge that these could never approach the absurdity of Christ's resurrection, and before that His virgin birth. 

And people do aspire to believe these things, quite "literally," or so that term does get abused. These, of course, are people who by definition can't read, and so you're left to wonder what literal could possibly mean here. You can find it in the Left Behind series, which does earnestly and without apparent effort that which Saturday Night Live can only accomplish with heroic labor. You find it in Ray Kurzweil's absurd celebrations of man's dominion; a scientist overcome with himself and the manic dream of creating the one thing nature never will endure - a geometric expansion which sustains rather than destroys life. 

I say, imperiously, that they can't read, so we'll have to wonder just what reading is along the way toward resurrection and creation out of nothing. Let's just say, for now, that to read is reliably to place a set of words in their proper context. A joke occurs along with the jarring of words quite out of context. A joke on oneself when words are misread and contexts traded. People lounging on chaise, say, or when liberal education is thought to relate to books and liberaries (sic). We all do this, and manage to endure, despite the ridicule of our betters. 

But when you extrapolate full out, you gain a sense of just how difficult reading really is, and how absurd such phrases are as "absolute truth" or "faith".  And how unlikely, at the fringes, that anyone really can read another soul. Or in my case, that I can even read myself. 

So "Left Behind" and the "Singularity is Near" are cosmic pratfalls among people who simply don't know how to read. They are those roobs who fall for the magic trick and then want to buy it for use at home. "Disappear your wife" in five simple steps. 

But I guess the Jesus story endures because it does provide, somehow, that limit. That end beyond which there must and can only be God. A cosmic joke for sure, but also a true endpoint to what we can and should and will ever read and true against what can only be very personal and limited experience.

Science provides a trueing along the way, of readings we must share. I mean this ever so simply, as to describe those things, like knowing that the ground underneath our feet will support us, on which we must agree. By abstractions to the max in our mathematical descriptions, and reductions to the very most economical structures, we seem able to arrive at many many understandings (English is so punny - but not, I assure you, as much as is Chinese) which have that wondrous quality to be universal.

These understandings describe the same reality in any cultural setting, and presumably across the cosmos, though we may not be quite ever finally confident in our ability to translate these to technological controls. There's so much confusion between these two pursuits, especially now that we have become so overcome by our own technological prowess, that we have almost forgotten the science. Scientifically now, our wonder at ourselves will ecologically if not by geometric release of nuclear fissions or fusions (same thing monkey boy) only destroy us.

There can be no question now that the scientific enterprise not only did not but could not have developed in some other culture from that of the Christian European West. Post modernists can and do go fuck themselves, but this trivial observation (that science is culturally grounded) takes nothing from the universality of scientific conclusions, properly made. (It's the "properly made" part which makes those post modernists right almost all the time, but their language is just so damned annoying, and itself always a parody of what they rail against).

So faith starts there, with feet on ground, and finally gets rendered up to what it is we confront in contact with another human being. How much can or do we know that person? Or a book. Or perhaps an entire ideology (what a word, that one!). God?  I think not! (therefore I am)

It's never so trivial to trust that to which we're attracted in another soul. They might turn out robotic, like that sociopath next door. Or we might discover that we're turned off by their feet when we do finally get in bed together, and then the thrall is done for. There's divorce and much worse utter foolishness to pay for these mistakings.

But hanging back from ultimates, many many friends if not lovers do prove true. I guess because the expectation is so much less. The navigations and negotiations so intermittent; the in and out from other's lives so much less quickened. And friendship is capped by that fine taboo at end of day that you never ever will or would get in bed with one another.  Sure, in a pinch, you might for survival, or even intimately resuscitate, mouth to mouth. But if there were a quickening there in bed, I think the friendship must end, don't you? Or blossom. 

But it is that impossibility in principle which defines friendship at its limits, and enables a kind of constancy. Don't worry chum, I'll never stop at your home for more than a few weeks at a time, along the road to somewhere else. But we'll share better times than you will ever have with your wife - that much is certain. And our souls will come much closer and merge more fully simply because there is that boundary to define, contain, and shape our perfect pairing. Nothing lost, but geometric expansions and progressions gained in that most true conspiring. There need never be any subordination at all. There is perfect parity, and no struggle between and among, say justice and relating, the male and female roles, however sexed.

But the ultimate faith, of love, of marriage, in God, just for a few examples. That one is a leap so long that only fools attempt it. The rest of us find ourselves pinnacled and without place to go but down down down, and still along the way there has never been worse terror than to lose oneself that way. It would be so utterly foolish. So like the man who would dive right through the ground. Buckaroo Bonzai!!!! And away. . . . 

I must and do confess that I am terrorized by the act of sex. Not quite in the sense you think. I am not nerdy sexless, nor timid in the act, and would some safely aloof former partner quite allow it, there are no limits to what I wouldn't like to try (hohohaha!). None. But it's the implications terrify me. They are so much forever. Not just disease, but possibility for hurt and misunderstanding, and fallings out, no matter what the interval. That moment is sheer terror. That aloof moment where you realize that yes, it was only physical. Or chemical. Or instinctual, and in any case not forever or even a day. Or far worse, that the deal you'd meant for a moment won't ever stop. Ever. The deal does not get any simpler, young friends, as you grow older.

***

In that interval right there, gentle reader, in service to writing's worst enemy (necessity for taking a dump) and on the toilet reading the New York Times while I still can (yes, it was on my phone, OK?? So, put me in jail already! Throw away the key, I both read on the toilet, and don't pay any attention to internet ads. At all!) before its also necessary demise, I am saddened almost beyond reason to learn of the death by suicide of Sylvia Plath's son sweet Nick sweet son. I know nothing of either of them, yet enough to understand the dimensions of this tragedy. And I must apologize to you that I have been diverted from this writing in and by the act of writing species of love letters toward human contact of the sort which terrifies me more, apparently, than to be alone forever and anon. You just aren't there, you see. I have not yet, and despair I ever will, that kind of faith. That there is a reader.

But I still do make this pledge: That my writing and living and direction will never tend in that particular direction. I will never make that secret pact to end on some high note because I fear my ability to endure the lower lows. It is to life and love and light alone that I direct myself. Alone. All one.

***

Now where was I? That faith which is so hard to conjure. I do actually believe, you know? That in extremis, when finally I must leave my job because there is no more room for me there. Up against that wall where, let me now enumerate, love is not possible across the taboo of workplace, though that's the least of it. Where faith is superstructured by the only living remnant of medieval monarchy to outlast enlightenment (though I actually have no problem with that, it's just that this particular institution's perversions remind me much too much of the Sadean version). I cannot live in public any longer what I mock so hard in private. 

And I will surely never trust myself in love again, after once tripping over my own feet on the way toward what became a lifetime of indentured servitude, and another time in pursuit of what never was in the first place attainable. These twinned poles represent for me all that is possible in the falling out from sense and good friendship's underpinnings. I retreat now and again for long intervals into some sort of mild cocooning, and I'm not even sure that it's time yet to molt again and again and again. 

But I do trust - have faith even - that it's the right time now to refuse any more work or love in which I am not quite myself. Extravagant though that is, and I'm not after "authenticity." I want only to be just one me, cliched and ordinary dull though my character might prove to be.  I must strap myself to whatever mast I have (it's rotting) or can find, to resist temptations for comfort and repose and six figure rescue from the necessity to disburse a lifetime's debris of bicycles, boats, books and papers papers papers, though these I can and do and have uploaded to that proprietary cloud whose stewardship I perversely trust so much more than tangibles in my possession. 

I refuse, I do, any further servitude in maintenance of my slack body and it's sprawling messy dishevelled extensions. (The real estate lady demurred a bit when she came for a visit, that perhaps we can start showing "next week" after I manage to dispose of a few more things which make it difficult to navigate the space. Not so bad, please, as those left behind houses of demented souls having pathways through piles of newsprint and garbage to some inside nest you can't conceive.) Just the look of a house vacant all weekends because in the end, my remaining at-home daughter just cannot endure teenage occupancy alone with Dad in the wilderness. That is not a sentiment I care to contest. At all. And so I write only weekends, apartmented in the city. Wondering where and when and how I'll find either the time or energy to wash the windows and overall brighten up my latest silly womb with but dim view. My house in the country I now must leave, in preservation of what time I've left to write my way out of this ethereal paper bag.

So, that's the faith I have. That at this post-half-century turning point, I have become proof against ever taking another day job act. Against ever again so energetically pursuing love that I shave my beard and trim my hair and my rhetoric too and wear other more presentable clothes, or God help me, endure the indignity of a younger babe so easily mistaken for my daughter. These things make me just cringe anymore. I cannot but be myself. It's less the finding of my authentic self, than the drooling paunch of no more choices, but I'll take it.

Sure, it does help that my hormones no longer rage. Not quite so old as "brother" Cohen, I still have no real regrets for leaving that garden I never did quite enter and therefore won't have to leave. It was only ever thorny for me. (Well, OK, so invite me in and we'll just test my resolve)

It helps also that my mind is aged by cigarettes and wine and never enough time nor energy to read the things I really should. Not near so much capacity in dissipation as say, that self-same Leonard Cohen, but I feel the same dimming he talks of but does not show. The structures for mind's youthful blooming recede, and I haven't the energy, even in principle, to elaborate just what I mean when I talk about particle physics or Chinese poetry or other pursuits on whose trail I once was hot.

I doubt I will ever have that energy again, though I guess it's not impossible. I mean, if someone were to pay me for it, I surely would re-systematize my knowledge. But the university is not open to my paltry accomplishments. I don't own those degrees of freedom, and even if I did I'm just not so sure that there wouldn't be still more constraint there than on my own; with political pathways up, and narrative trueings so much more constrictive and less open to surprise than even the most extreme cases of anti-global-warming-conspiracy-of-dunces-theorizing.

I must remain unbounded. Promethean in my reach if surely not my grasp. But I am so lost with torch burning down and noplace yet to alight my spark.

You see, these folks are quite right in at least one reductive sense. (I had dinner finally just the other day for the first time after almost seven years with my good friend and ultra conservative Catholic neighbor, and had to endure, though it cost me absolutely nothing in good humor, his fulminating rhetoric about the global warming hoax) Approaches to scientists will automatically fall flat and dead at that point where you wish to implicate them in their research.

I do believe that there is one most false branch to science; cosmology. It is there alone that science cannot go, but demands to still. It is there alone that science will and does and has, would it but wake up to that fact, find that it is measuring only the mind of the observer.

Oh, I hate these personifications, as though "science" were some "them." Science does not "say" anything, and scientists, surely at the limit of cosmology, are so unlikely to have read the stuff they really need to comprehend before they peer off into the readings out from instrumentation at least 17 miles in diameter (was it circumference???) and declare any findings.

I do know from hard experience, that it is equally difficult to talk to - just for example now - a disbeliever in global warming, about science, as it is to talk to a scientist about the end(s) of science. They are simply not prepared for that particular surprise, so invested must they be in towering edifices of accumulated understandings and trued arcane verbiage and degrees of distinction from everything and everyone here below in the muck of direct experience.

So I was and remain chastened now, this Easter morning, by last night's meeting with my former student. I'd tried to teach him Chinese once so long ago (though I was and am a fraud, I did have and could teach, at least, perfect pronunciation, and build a good foundation, demonstrably, for more native ministrations), and then as headmaster, by the skin of both our teeths, to get him some degree. 

He surprised me to tell that he never did earn any single degree. Not high school. Not college, though he often teaches theater there. And I am chastened, not just because I feel so lucky proud to have pulled what degrees I own back from the temptations, always, to chuck it all (it took three rough passages through Yale before they let me out. Sanctioned my outing, is more like it). I am chastened because he has become so fully my teacher now. And because my failure was not his.

I came to him for help to stage my "Womb with a View" (working title, please) monologue. And he, upon only the very briefest hearing, shot back authors and plays and readings so erudite that I had to beg him please to email the names, since I had no hope of recall. 

I held his door last night - the house was absolutely packed with only one last seat for me. I only snoozed a moment this second time to witness his terrific play. I think I snoozed because I felt the beginnings of some relaxation to my quest. There will be those who know so much more than I do, can help to true what words I have. There will be help along the way. 

And so I think it time for me to de-cocoon once more. I don't know about spreading any wings of Icarus or surfactin-stimulated butterfly, as was the manner for my little peanut daughter to survive her own way-too-early escape from her mother's womb; butterfly wings and kisses. It must be the same substance. For my daughter, at two pounds she was very lucky that her mother's doctor missed the textbook case, and left her and mom both traumatized in the womb so that when she finally was hacked out (it was that bad - I was there), her lungs would not stick together which is what is the worst for preemies.

Lucky for me, I should properly say, since she would be her no matter what had happened, but now she provides me such bright pride and joy and even company. She listens to my words and claims they make sense to her, which is way more than a father ever could deserve, since the obligation is so much the reverse. And she never did try me that way. Always so easy to understand. Such a joy.  So perfectly articulate.

So, it must be this same substance on butterflies' wings, which must get discharged in some precise quickening before the molt. Why cocoons must never be warmed. Why term is at all costs to be allowed before the labor is begun. Why sometimes, with luck, too early de-cocoonings, like even that one for me from boat so long ago, can still be survived provided further artificial incubation. 

For me, all artifice has ended (Well, lash me to some mast, we'll see). Perversely, I will endeavor to refuse all offers of comfort - at least those even where I only have to torque my soul a tiny bit (metaphorical, since I don't have faith now in the literal one) to represent someone else's brand. Not Church. Not government. Not China which does not know herself at all. Not startup internet business even, unless it wants me as I am. I'll whore for anyone, provided the deal is honest. Now there's the rub.

It is only you, gentle reader, that I can or will but also surely must have faith in. It is you must be resurrected here. Your context for some reading. Your willingness to make that effort (I do know that it is extreme, and beyond all reason what I ask) to read. To listen. To watch. To make some sense. Not of me and what I write (don't be a fool!), but of what is now so out there. You really have to be perverse, and bound to rigid stupid absolutist words - I guess simply because you're so afraid that you might be fooled? - not to read it. Right off the web, the wall, the street, the news. Just learn to read is all.

And you, gentle friends or daughters, who must trust that Howie or Dad has not now finally lost his mind for good and ever, and isn't marching off perversely into some chip-on-shoulder spiting of himself. That I will never refuse love when offered, nor to offer it to my full capacity, which might not be very much. But I'll try. I do try. I am very limited is all.

Let's hope it's true what says AARP, that there is life after 50. I sure do hope so. My younger daughter is my very best companion. And yet I want her so much to be free that I hang back criminally from enough guidance. I offer no discipline. She does far too much what she pleases.

But I do, I guess perversely, still have faith that it's the love that counts. Love expressed in seasons turning, a conspiracy of life entire, which guarantees that the moment for the peepers is just the right moment for decocooning. That there is more than just her father to mediate her growth. And that what she needs most from me is more gentle than those stern and fearsome words I got, which still did no good against my own transgressions and fallings short. Though I won't blame them for that. Nor their deliverers. The times were different, is all.

If Dad has lost his mind, he might yet be in good company. There are readings all around (I'll get them shortly by email) which move in the same direction. I guess there might be enough surfactin now that I can fly myself, alone, flittingly, for just a moment before the season turns again. 

I do believe, you see, that there is so much more to life than what can be accomplished alone. That mankind's flight is made of words, though words alone, whether those of science and its instrumental extensions, or the true distilled and very litterary great essence of our greatest minds, cannot describe the flight. For that there must be face to face and much more quickened turnings.

And as my young former student (and now my mentor) did so charmingly wonder, why is it that actual presentations must be lower on some scale than literary readings?  He had become somehow aware that in our past - and I think this is true - those who could read were regarded with suspicion. Those who could read silently to themselves were thought possessed. Out of commerce with where life actually quickened, and where profundity could be found first hand. Only priests were sanctioned to read, leaving witches, demons, perverts and other outlaws as the only other possibilties. More dangerous than revered for what they might know. 

And now this equation is so fully reversed. To where televised presentations cannot, and likely do not, even potentially possess anything near the power of the written word. But why not? Why not YouTube? Why not theater again? Why must it be contained in and by words, this truth we would approach, though never, because it would blind us and melt our wings, quite touch?

Well, because the metaphor is wrong is all. Truth is not a thing can be approached. There is no Omega endpoint to this questing. That's misplaced words. There is no absoluting truth. There is only trueing, and for that we need each other, alive and stimulating and responding and being and here. And there.  Which is neither here nor there, silly reader.

Do I leave you now, alone. Having fallen this far short? Were you expecting some great final revelation through these words? (If I did not doubt it, then I would not dare to write it, surely!) Well, if so, here it is. That punchline I never can remember, or even reconstruct. That final turn of phrase which captures, just right, that moment of apprehension you used to go to Church for. That apotheosis of the Word. Made flesh. Was God.

Well, here, then, it is. Here it is. You'll have to read it all again. And again and again and again and anon. 

There's really nothing more to say, though I will keep trying, poor gentle reader. For life. For love. For my daughters. I will make you pay me, too, since what choice do I have? What choice do you have?

Well, Happy Easter, and I do pray for your resurrection. I really do. Turn off that one-way television. Turn the projector on yourself, and YouTube it to infinite regress. But then please do go outside. It's a beautifuly day to be alive!

Happy Easter, you nonexistent fool you. Happy Easter!

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.