Those Who Say “No” to Web 2.0

On May 10, Google shareholders rejected a proposal that would censor the Chinese edition of their search engine. This was heralded as a great triumph for freedom of speech, particularly by Patrick Doherty, a representative of the New York City Pension Fund, which submitted the resolution.¹ Doherty was greeted with applause by several hundred shareholders when he made the case for standing up to authoritarian regimes like China. Afterwards he called it “a moral victory.”²

And why shouldn’t he have? Why should one of America’s most successful and innovative corporate giants be allowed to facilitate China’s Orwellian control over information, such as the Golden Shield Project (note: China actually calls the people they hire to censor information Big mamas). This isn’t your typical brute-force censorship either, like those videos of book burnings in Stalinist Russia. This is something wholly different:

Old style censorship is being replaced with a massive, ubiquitous architecture of surveillance: the Golden Shield. Ultimately, the aim is to integrate a gigantic online database with an all-encompassing surveillance network – incorporating speech and face recognition, closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit records, and Internet surveillance technologies.³

So yes, I suppose Google should be applauded for being such audacious mavericks in deciding to not censor their search engine in China. Probably just as much as Teddy Roosevelt deserved to be the inspiration for the Teddy Bear, after deciding to not shoot a confined bear at a “photo opportunity” hunt.

In spite of the celebrations and ballyhoo over Google’s supposed championing of civil liberties, their decision to ban YouTube videos that allegedly insulted the Thai King three days later went virtually unnoticed. Perhaps the irony was lost on them or, more likely, Google simply doesn’t give a shit about free speech. Though, to be fair, they did decide to not take down two other videos that had angered Thailand’s military government. Google is evidently big fans of Montesquieu.

So where is Americuh in all of this? You might say that journalistic freedom was but a mere illusion after the media ever so willingly became the Colmes to the military’s Hannity during the 2003 Iraq invasion or when the media was complicit in supporting the Bush administration’s claims of WMDs in Iraq—and you’d mostly be right.

Today, though, I read an article in The New York Times’ The Lede titled Pentagon Blocks MySpace and YouTube. In R. L. Stine fashion, if your reaction to this was, “They hadn’t already?,” you can stop reading this article since there probably won’t be any new revelations for you. If, however, you’re filled with a creeping sense of suspicion and outright indignation (as I was), then continue!

Apparently, the Defense Department has decided to block thirteen websites from its network, which it dubs NIPRNet, because use of those sites “impacts [their] official DoD network and bandwidth ability, while posing a significant operational security challenge.” The pdf copy of this celebrates the blandly titled “Restricted Access to Internet Entertainment Sites Across DoD Networks” with a beautiful purple arrow labeled “FREEDOM’S FRONTIER!”

The full list of banned websites includes these web addresses: youtube.com, 1.fm, pandora.com, photobucket.com, myspace.com, live365.com, hi5.com, metacafe.com, mtv.com, ifilm.com, blackplanet.com, stupidvideos.com and filecabi.com.

This isn’t the first time the DoD has targetted soldiers’ Internet rights, though. Last month they initiated a new policy, Regulation 530-1, that requires soldiers to consult with a commanding officer before posting information in a public forum. Now, in addition to censoring soldiers’ rights to freely blog and post on forums as they choose, the DoD is also focusing on Web 2.0-oriented websites—websites built on community-based content creation. Instead of letting soldiers post about, oh, I don’t know, what’s actually hapenning, since our own news media refuses to do so, the US military is building up its own channel on YouTube to release “official” videos of the Iraq war.

The US military has continued to justify all its decisions based on “operational security concerns.” From a far-right standpoint, I can understand what the argument is: “If you let soldiers post videos and blog freely, it can potentially threaten their security if confidential information happens to be revealed.” This argument is also ludicrous. For some reason, I have a suspicion that if the insurgency had Internet, they probably wouldn’t be browsing YouTube or Blogger, but I have been wrong on occasion.

But how is that argument any different from China’s? Obviously, China’s censorship is far more egregious—no one is saying it isn’t—but China’s Communist Party needs its Great Firewall to ensure its own “operational security” (ironically, Marxist websites are banned from their Internet)—or so they claim. Before the firewall was put in place, Chinese protesters were using instant messaging and forums to coordinate plans for future protests. Imagine if a big enough protest threatened the stability of the government? The Chinese economy would collapse overnight and it would be sheer pandemonium.

Some will try and make the case that the big difference is military, rather than civil, censorship. But when military censorship inherently promotes civil censorship, especially given that the US media has already been co-opted by the military (and aside from just anti-Bush examples, NATO did this as well during the Serbian and Kosovo wars). The only other reliable source for first-hand news in Iraq are the soldiers and what better way to promote their journalistic power (and the journalistic power of civilians, too) than through Web 2.0? It’s no wonder then that the US military is focusing specifically on Web 2.0-esque sites as their censorship target—they’re the ones that carry the greatest potential to threaten a codified “message” to send back home about the war, which is why the US military is now taking over the task via YouTube.

The fact of the matter is, our military was designed to be a civilian military. Now, I don’t mean this to suggest that our military should be like the Minute Men (the ones during the Revolution or the psychopaths now a days), what I mean is that, at the top of the military system is not a General, but a civilian, our Commander in Chief (albeit a retarded one). When the President forgets that he’s not a soldier—and we can all recall that from the hilariously disastrous Mission Accomplished photo op—the danger of military censorship poses an even greater threat: the threat that it will creep up into civil censorship (as it already has with US media self-censorship). Moreover, what kind of message does it send to the rest of the world, and particularly the people whose freedom we’re allegedly fighting for, when we’re actively censoring our own soldiers’ right to free speech?

An ironic one, not unlike Google’s, but I think it’s lost on both.

1. Google shareholders vote down proposal on censorship, New York Times, May 10, 2007 ↩
2. Out of Chaos, Order. Or So Google Says., New York Times, May 11, 2007 ↩
3. China’s Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People’s Republic of China, Oct 2001 ↩

—Bryan Klausmeyer 1 Comment

Jobs and Prosperity on the E-Frontier

I’m finally graduating from college this August. Problem is, I’ve only managed to acquire a BA in Arts and Letters over the last five years. Well, that and an amazing ability to write seven pages on anything three hours before the due date with little to no prep work. I occasionally watch Dirty Jobs and find myself sufficiently lacking in my ability to chainsaw dead horses for French cuisine or to wallow in the town’s collective fecal mater for twelve hours at a time. (As a quick aside, why doesn’t Dirty Jobs do porn episodes? Have they and I missed it? Are they saving it for sweeps? Can you imagine Mike Rowe trying to be a bottom for a day?)

I’m remarkably unemployable. I’ve tried getting real jobs on those few occasions where I decided I wanted to try and grow up, but nothing has really panned out. But now that I’m graduating, I’m going to need to find something else to do with my day, so I’m looking for jobs that I’m actually suited for. Thankfully, a lifelong revulsion of athleticism and the constant refusal of girls to touch me in my special place has made me adept at videogames. From handheld to console to PC, I can probably beat the dang thing in a few hours. And that means I have job opportunities now.
Awesome.

Job Possibility #1 – Member of the MLG

These are the guys trying to make Halo the next national pastime. Can you imagine that? Shooting the Covenant and space zombies may one day be a sport where everyone leaves at the seventh inning to beat the traffic! Dare to dream.

The MLG road tour offers tournaments from 4v4 Halo to Halo Free-for-all to 4v4 Rainbow Six: Vegas (they really need to offer a Sam & Max round to get me to play). They’re offering million dollar jackpots to winning teams and players. This actually might be something I could get into if some friends and relatives didn’t think they were too cool to play videogames anymore. It would be just like going to Tobis’ house!

The only real con I can say about the MLG is how the games and tournaments will undoubtedly change every few years. Those game companies like to make sequels, and they like to get people to play those sequels, so why not make the forefront video game players play those games? Sports greatness comes from repetition of training. Do you think A-Rod would be having such a great season if Steinbrenner decided the Yankees would play soccer in 2007? Well maybe soccer is a bit much. It’d be more like Cricket I think. Cricket that is played for 9 innings. Whatever.

Job Possibility #2 – MMO Gold Farmer

This is apparently a big thing in China already. Basically you have a nerd who sits in an Internet café and farms gold and xp on some dumb Massively Multiplayer Online game all day long. You then sell this junk for exorbitant prices. It makes sense, I mean, these people have lives, they don’t have the time or dedication of the crazy gold farmer to spend 80 hours in a row killing some stupid monsters. In fact, neither do I. Screw gold farming. If I’m ever that desperate for cash I’ll just become a prostitute.

Job Possibility #3 – Second Life Real Estate Mogul

You may have heard that Second Life is the next big thing according to some news source or whatever. But if you listen to Warren Ellis or Petey from Something Awful, you might be aware that this utopian alternative to reality is overrun with bestiality enthusiasts and pedophiles.

It’s really dumb how someone has made money with this. It’s the same as that Beanie Baby economy from the mid 1990s. People were shelling out $1500 for a cloth bat. It was an “investment.” But then one day, someone asked “Hey, why the HELL are we paying so much money for CLOTH BATS!?!?!?” and the economy collapsed overnight. Guess what happened to all those poor schmucks who hadn’t managed to resell their cloth bats yet? That’s right, they were stuck with a bunch of CLOTH BATS!

My point being, that this is an economy with an execution date. Eventually someone will realize that shelling this much money out for virtual land is really stupid. If you haven’t made your money by then, well, I guess you’re just out of luck. You’ll be stuck as landlord to a bunch of dog raping miscreants.

Which is a real shame, because if it weren’t for all the people, Second Life would be pretty cool. But I guess they serve a purpose of some sort, like making the Burger King job seem all that more reasonable. Watch the tube while I become a corporate shill.

You want fries with that? Sorry, sir, we’re closing and we just shut off the fryer.

—Zach Cullen

Why Does the Internet Love Ron Paul?

So there’s been a lot of Internet buzz about 2008 Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul. U.S. News recently published an article titled Ron Paul’s Online Rise, which mentions his status as the #1 searched term on popular blog syndication website, Technorati. I’ve read a lot of other news stories about this phenomenon, but none of them have asked a rather interesting (at least to me) question: why does the Internet love Ron Paul?

The Internet is a great conduit for transmitting memes thanks to its speed and large user base. A meme, as defined by Richard Dawkins, is a unit of cultural information that can be spread from person to person much like a gene, which it’s essentially analagous to. Sometimes memes rise without any rhyme or reason, but in some cases, upon further inspection, the underlying reasons for why they take shape and form memeplexes are actually somewhat obvious.

Libertarianism is a good example of an Internet memeplex with an obvious explanation. Tech-savvy people seem to be inexplicably drawn to its superrational model of absolute, decentralized personal freedom. This is because the Internet rewards introverted thought and behavior, which is a central pillar of Libertarianism and its evil, Down syndrome-affected spawn, Objectivism. Internet Libertarians are generally the only type of people who have the will and endurance to engage in lengthy and inane online debates (see: any YouTube video or Digg post) and their hope for victory is sustained by their unrelenting e-hubris and the army of trolls who strongly identify with their ultimately shallow, selfish logic. While these groups of people tend to be small in number, they’re vocal enough to decidedly shape the discourse on many popular social bookmarking and news/blog syndication websites, such as Digg, Technorati and Newsvine.

As a meme spreads, it can often propogate itself like a virus, acting as an independent life-form which continues to get passed on, even at the expense of its host. The so-called “selfish meme” is evident in how Libertarianism spreads through the Internet. The appeal of viewing society as a logic puzzle rather than a complex system, reducing even the most complicated, abstract ideas into mundane modal statements, is a fairly compelling one, especially for people who spend a large amount of their time arguing on Internet forums and reading Slashdot.

The world would be a much happier and safer place if all problems could be solved by “debugging” them, so to speak, or by simply answering any perplexing moral, ethical, political or philosophical quandry that has no easy answer with pre-packaged Libertarian rhetoric (which typically places them as heirs of the American Revolution by using phrases like “original intent” and “freedom-loving”). This eliminates the need for actual understanding and replaces it with evangelized, Pavlovian response mechanisms that turn groups of individuals into cogs in a machine, operating like the very code some of them write (typically the slightly more educated ones). They then flood the Internet in droves, endorsing candidates like Ron Paul (the meme within the memeplex of ideology) who preach to the choir of free-market, free-state ideologues, and reap the virtual rewards, like this retarded YouTube video below:

Thankfully, as Wonkette reminds:

We probably gave him one of the coveted Wonkette presidential endorsements, too, but Internet buzz rarely translates into anything in real life, as the nation learned from the tragic failures of Ned Lamont and Snakes On a Plane.

—Bryan Klausmeyer 2 Comments

Germany: “WE GIVE BACK NOTHING!”

Queen Nefertiti: retarded and one-eyed.

So I just read in Der Spiegel that there’s now a diplomatic row between Germany and Egypt over a 2,400 year old bust of Queen Nefertiti. Evidently, it was discovered by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt in 1912. This was before antiquities laws were really, uh, extant, so the Ottomon government just let them take it. Obviously, Egypt (formerly part of the Ottoman Empire) now regrets that decision.

Queen Nefertiti’s bust isn’t just any ordinary bust though, it’s been the jewel of the Berlin museum system since 1923 and was also one of Hitler’s personal favorites, ostensibly because it contains the headpiece to the Staff of Ra. And, of course, it just so happens to be at the top of Zahi Hawass’ wish list for repatriated archaeological artifacts. Zahi Hawass (left), the Overlord of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Antiquities, has retalliated against Germany’s impudence by issuing a fatwa of sorts—a “scientific jihad”—against them. “It will be a scientific war,” says Hawass.

So the question is, if the artifact was taken from Egypt and Egypt now wants it back, why won’t Germany give it to them? Dietrich Wildung, curator of the Altes Museum where Nefertiti is housed, has put forth the argument that it’s simply “too precious to risk.” Wildung claims that the plaster layer around the artifact rules out foreign travel. “It’s much too delicate for a 3,000 kilometer journey.” But, in 2003, two Hungarian artists were allowed to use the sculpture for a video installation (which was eventually called off because Egypt threatened to ban Wildung’s work).

Bruno’s rampage, depicted with Legos.This isn’t the first time within the past few months that Germany has done this, though. In late March of this year, another diplomatic row cropped up between Germany and Italy over the corpse of Bruno the Bear. Bruno had gone on a “sheep-eating rampage” in the Bavarian Alps before being shot dead by hunters at the behest of Bavarian authorities. This was after the Finns were unable to successfully locate and capture the bear alive, which prompted the Swedes to add a few more Finnish jokes to their repertoire. After Bruno’s death, it received not only a full obituary from Der Spiegel, but members of the Social Democratic party in Bavaria even called for the resignation of the state’s Minister of the Environment, Werner Schappauf.

Things would’ve probably ended there, but because Bruno happened to be born in the Italian Alps, the Italian government requested repeatedly that the bear’s corpse be sent to Italy. All of these requests went unanswered by the Bavarian Environmental Minister. The Bavarian government now wants to have Bruno stuffed, mounted and put on display in a museum, much to the chagrin of the Italian government. According to Der Spiegel—I shit you not—the bear is being kept in a freezer at an undisclosed location for security reasons. What reasons are these? Der Spiegel concludes:

It’s unclear whether this is to prevent a raid by Italian commandos or a vigil by the many Bruno fans for whom the bear remains an unforgotten tragic hero.

Why is Germany being such a douche? You’d think that placing all of continental Europe and most of North Africa under the yoke of fascism a few decades ago would make them be a tad more conciliatory towards other countries. I’m not really sure I can give an adequate explanation as to why Germany refuses to give back anything that happens to fall within their borders, especially things that obviously belong to other countries. Afterall, maybe they’re just angry at being the 20th century’s great Satan?

I think you could make the argument that economic integration between various countries of the world (aka “Globalization” insert picture of a nude Thomas Friedman riding a humpback whale) breeds a certain level of peace. If everyone is making money off of each other, what incentive is there to wage war? Well, human nature isn’t always rational or logical, and so financial matters can only account for a portion (albeit a fairly significant portion—wink wink, nudge nudge) of national considerations. There are others, of course, such as: “how could we threaten another country with minimal effort?” or “where should we display some item to offend a neighbor the most?” I think the best answer is to send a message, which is why Germany should cut off the bear’s head and send it to Egypt via FedEx with a strongly-worded letter attached. Then, put the Queen’s bust at the top of the Bavarian Alps with the rest of Bruno’s limp, lifeless body dangled over it like a tarp as a symbol of German national pride.

Let ‘em know who’s boss, because if you’re going to be a prick, you should at least not look like a sissy doing it.

—Bryan Klausmeyer

Keepin’ it Real, Keepin’ it White

Today Wonkette posted not one, but two news features relating to racists and Neo-Nazis. Tonight must be a full moon.

The first on today’s list is Republican Ted Poe who, whilst arguing for the case against withdrawing from Iraq, invoked the somber memory of the War Between the States when he decided to quote “successful Confederate general” Nathaniel Bedford Forrest. I suppose this would all be well and good had it not been for the fact that Forrest was the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Whoops. As Wonkette aptly reminds, how could a Confederate general be successful when the Confederacy lost?

And the quote? “Git thar fustest with the mostest.” I’m not totally sure what that means, but I think it might be code for, “I’m a fucking idiot.”¹

In other news, it appears that “White America” finally has their 2008 candidate in the form of John Taylor Bowles, featured on the left. Obviously dissatisfied with the current pantheon of presidential contenders, what with Barack Obama being, uh, black, Hillary Clinton trying to be black and Rudy Giuliani being himself, Mr. Bowles is aiming to create a “purer,” “whiter” America. The Radar Online writes:

If American voters agree, white people can expect free health care, lower food prices (through the elimination of the “kosher tax”), lower taxes (by cutting off aid to Israel), and the orderly deportation of all non-whites to Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. All white soldiers can expect to be recalled from overseas duty and be placed on the Southern border so they can help “stop the invasion.”

Curiously, Mr. Bowles is a former U.S. Department of Agriculture employee. That must be where he learned to pull himself up by his Dr. Martens Stormtrooper bootstraps.

1. Think Progress ↩

—Bryan Klausmeyer 1 Comment

The Politics of Transference: Sego vs Sarko

Over the past several months I’ve been closely following the French Presidential elections, which came to an end today with the victory of Nicolas Sarkozy and the conservative UMP Party against Ségolène Royal, the rival Socialist contendor (who would’ve also been the first female president of France). The results were unsurprisingly close (reflected in the booming Sego-Sarko mask business¹ ) given the various polls that came in prior to the election as well as the results of the first round of voting. Sarkozy received 53 percent of the vote, while Royal managed to gain a substantial 47 percent.²

At first my support was unwaveringly for Royal. In terms of politics, I identify more with socialist ideology (generally speaking), but I also found Royal to be far less divisive. More generally, Sarkozy’s divisiveness has significant repurcussions for the problems of the Banlieues, where rampant riots, dire poverty and de facto segregation plague the largely immigrant population residing outside of the major urban areas like Paris. This is a major demographic and social problem faced by France, and one that has, in recent years, received worldwide attention as the riots have become increasingly violent.

While these are perfectly decent justifications for supporting Royal, they’re just that—justifications. I have to say that her campaign and the policies she endorsed throughout it were too equivocating and insubstantial to be rationally supported. These underlying doubts were reverberated when the French took to the polls and voted decidedly against Royal and what she stood for.

But the problem is an even larger one, not just for France’s suburbs, or France specifically, but all of Europe. Over the past half-century, Europe’s annual GDP growth has slowed to a crawl. This has part to do with declining birth rates and inflation, but also with government intervention in the economy and overly lenient minimum weekly work hours. Thus, it seems especially difficult to support increasing state intervention in an economy that truly can’t afford it. This isn’t to suggest, however, that France is somehow in dire economic straights or that they can’t afford to open the economy to the scorned immigrants who make up the largest contingent of unemployed French citizens. In fact, it means the opposite. They need to be encouraged to participate more fully in the French market economy and, perhaps, could be the very source of revitalizing France’s dwindling GDP.³ This could solve both a social and economic problem that France has faced in recent decades (my use of the passive voice shouldn’t suggest that the majority of France isn’t responsible for the de facto segregation either, because that is simply untrue).

The Economist wrote an almost irrefutable statement of support for Sarkozy and his policies, which I, too, found entirely convincing. So I had to ask myself: why do I still feel bad by supporting him?

The problem is what I’m calling “The Politics of Transference.” It’s not so much that I dislike Sarkozy as the next French President, but that I dislike him as the next President of anything. I feel as though that in the U.S. the subjects we debate about every four years are so far behind what the rest of the Enlightened world is discussing (for instance, we’re still questioning whether or not there should be universal healthcare, how much John Edwards’ haircut is worth and if evolution and global warming are, in fact, real) that it’s embarrassing. Completely embarrassing. I want for the U.S. to have a new discourse; one that is found not here, but instead in other industrialized democratic countries throughout the world. I want Ségolène Royal to be the President of the U.S., because I feel her socialist outlook would substantially help what America is and what it stands for.

That is what is so troubling. Thinking like a political creature instead of a rational one. I support Sarkozy’s policies for France, but I don’t support him as a person. It remains to be seen whether or not he can “unite France,” as he so often claims, but his economic goals give me hope that what he promises he can achieve, which is a stronger France. Why is that a good thing? Well, if you subscribe to the liberal world order, it means more money for the rest of the world. For me, I’m not so sure, but part of it is the hope that the U.S. will realize, in startling contrast, how far behind it is in comparison to the rest of the industrialized, modern world and maybe—just maybe—will start to gets its act together. (Com’on Kucinich, yeehaw!)

1. Reuters ↩
2. New York Times ↩
3. France diplomatie ↩

—Bryan Klausmeyer

“Indiggnation” and Afterthoughts

A few months ago, a secret decryption key for HD-DVDs was leaked onto the internet. Just recently, however, numerous websites that contained the key have received takedown notices for allegedly violating “intellectual property” rights. That seems like a simple enough matter to deal with, despite the fact that copyrighting a series of random numbers and letters is seemingly inane (the sequences happens to be “09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0,” by the way).

But for Digg, a popular community-based social bookmarking/news syndication website that has become symbolic of “Web 2.0”-ness, the problem was slightly more precarious. Digg’s reaction to the C&D letter was to systematically eliminate all references to the hexadecimal key, which entailed deleting various news posts and, eventually, banning users who violated their wishes. While, journalistically, this could ostensibly be viewed as censorship, it made sense for Digg: HD-DVD was one of their sponsors. Plus, Digg isn’t in the utmost sense a “newspaper”—it’s run by its users.

That’s where the problem begins. One of the main aspects of the “Web 2.0” phenomenon, if such a thing could be said to tangibly exist, has been the visible transfer of editorial power from top to bottom. Websites like del.icio.us and, perhaps most famously, Wikipedia, operate based solely on this model. When the implicit agreement between the laissez-faire oligarchical administration and its community base is violated, only one thing can possibly result: rebellion.

In the wake of Digg’s administration taking a proactive role in censoring its syndicated news, users flooded the website with references to the HD-DVD key (some in rather hilarious fashion, such as a YouTube song). The maelstrom of protest was so intense that it was not only covered by the mainstream media, but it ultimately forced Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, to reverse his earlier decision¹ :

[A]fter seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on, Kevin

The Web 2.0 model of power distribution, which has resulted in a shift from top-down administration to a bottom-up community-based apparatus, inherently reduces the power of those responsible for engineering their own communities. This, in essence, is populism working at its purest.

I think that an interesting parallel can be drawn to the recent burgeoning discourse of the 2008 U.S. Presidential Elections and the issue that Digg faced. Obviously, anger regarding the MPAA and RIAA’s draconian DRM policies play a significant role in all of this brouhaha, but I’d like to keep those issues separate from this post (at least for now). The fact is, this is about bureaucratic isolation, regardless of what the issue or catalyst for rebellion is. Digg, like other institutions, has an obligation to its users — after all, they’re who generate the content. The same is true for all governments and companies. When these institutions fail to respect the implicit agreements made between themselves and those they serve/rule/etc., rebellion (in whatever form) is the only inevitable outgrowth, whether it be an authoritarian Stalinist system or a local Taco Bell. The Bush administration’s rampant cronyism, corruption and isolation has largely fed into what Barack Obama has dubbed “New Politics”: a turn largely against lobbyist support, unilateralism (be it national or political) and elitism, with a large emphasis on grassroots political support.

This isn’t just an issue of populism either. The largely rational, humanist agendas promulgated by what I’m calling the “Web 2.0 ethos” is also visible in many of Steve Jobs’ recent publications on current and upcoming Apple corporate policy. The first of these, his “Thoughts on Music,” was intially received as pandering or simply PR-propaganda. While the former may be true — how could we ever know what goes on in Steve Jobs’ mind? (though I think that he genuinely believes in what he says and does) — the latter was proven to be undeniably false, given the recent slew of non-DRM music now available on the iTunes Store. Even more recently, Mr. Jobs has published an article relating to Apple’s environmental policies, entitled “A Greener Apple.” This is largely a response to GreenPeace’s protestations that Apple has been consistently shitting on the environment, when in fact it simply had not published a plan, or even a plan for a plan, on how to discontinue this alleged behavior.

I suppose what I’m getting at is liability. People claim that we live in a world dominated by evil, cloistered institutions that lurk in the shadows of the night, plotting and scheming on how to further collectively screw the public. This may be true in some respects, but how far can they go before we react—nay—rebel? Everyone acts within certain boundaries, and no one is all-powerful. Some leaders, like George W. Bush, might react in a way that is not positively-viewed by the rest of the Enlightenment-subscribing world, while others, such as Kevin Rose, forge on by respecting the wishes of those that gave them power and voice in the first place. The “Web 2.0” phenomenon has brought the populist efforts observed in the recent 2008 Presidential Elections (and elsewhere and at differnet times in history) to the Internet; what more could we want? The avenue for humanist, rational, Enlightenment-based synergy will empower anyone with a computer to oppose the authoritarian tactics of certain unnamed corporate and bureaucratic entities. Moreover, the power to act collectively and decisively is at our fingertips, but now we have the most significant key to making those things matter: power.

1. Posted on Kevin Rose’s blog ↩

—Bryan Klausmeyer