To David Simon

Dear David Simon,

You have gone from the penetrating world of The Wire to the impermeably inelastic world of Build the Wall.

Instead of talking supplicatingly to two publishers as you do in your piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, consider what you, we, and they are dealing with.

The money is in the pipes. The pipes are sucking it all into their nether regions. The money for content is there, but it's been abducted.

The quandary of viable content on the Net is not unlike the quandary of viable healthcare in a world of corporate greed. Consider the parallels; they are legion.

There's much more to be said on this. For now, what I'm saying to you - whose work I have deeply admired - is this: where's your imagination? Where are your investigative instincts? Where is your ability to follow the almighty $ from the streets to the vultures to their insect lords?

Dude. No fucking walls.

More to come.

==

Some of the More: {still in progress}

The hegemonic control over the finite, "hard assets" of the Internet has displaced the power of an infinity of content providers from making anything like real money from end users, who have already paid their fair share to access the Internet - where "Internet" takes the pipes and all the content as one unified entity. Even though it's not literally (as in, legally incorporated as a single entity) unified, it obeys the logic of a single system for the end user. We pay for the Internet and we get the dialtone and we get the content. Only, the dialtone providers keep all the money - not for any logical or legitimate reason, solely because they occupy a certain gatekeeping position on the "superhighway."

Just as corporate control of news organizations has eviscerated the very idea of what news is, as Greenwald so eloquently notes here, so the health insurance industry has so polluted our notion of sociality that it does not seem self-evident to many US citizens, including Max Baucis and roughly 40 Republican Senators, that healthcare is a right that must be available to all.

So too Adam Arvidsson in The Ethical Economy is making the case that branding has changed the nature of the economy, from one of production to one of finance. The moment you move from the product to the financing of the product, you have the desire for HUGE BRAND. Only, hugebrandness, like Lehman Brothers' credibility, is mere rumor of value, distinct from all use. If you have Huge Brand as a journalist, say Greenwald and Lewis Lapham, you are probably as corrupt as the day is long.

The point is, it is our health, and our Internet, that should be at the center - not the financing of healthcare, or the financing of content. The corporate infrastructure makes miching mallecho of the argument's inherent logic before it can begin, because the corporate structure of media and the corporate structure of healthcare are entirely alike (indistinguishable plasmids?). Both are wealth creation centers that, like Ron Suskind's famously anonymous worldbeater, create their own reality -- which the reality-based rest of us are permitted to report on, consume, and bewail.

Study for Raft of the Medusa*

*h/t for image to Juke aka Informant38 aka dirty beloved.

do the math

all his visage wann'd,

Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,

A broken voice

George Benckenstein on the math of the diffusion of ideas, with special reference to Susan Boyle and Swine Flu.

So,

Crespi

recursive publics and free software

From an interesting review of an interesting-sounding book by Christopher Kelty:

Kelty’s main argument is that Free Software communities are a recursive public. He defines a recursive public as a public “whose existence (which consists solely in address through discourse) is possible only through discursive and technical reference to the means of creating this public.”

and

Free Software is a continuing praxis of “figuring out” - giving up an understanding of finality in order to continually adapt and redesign the system.

I recently wrote a piece for a multiply-authored book due out next year (more on this later) that sought to look at the "development" of the Internet very much along these lines. I hadn't seen these lines when I wrote it, but yes this, and the notion of “adaptability over planning” seem to me germane to the open system of the Net.

I do suspect "open system" is often oxymoronal. Maybe not always?

And, slantwise, this:

The Pirate Party has won a huge victory in the Swedish elections and is marching on to Brussels.