emptyage

On Rejoicing Death

I was glad to see John Stewart  revel in the death of Osama Bin Laden. I’d begun to feel like the only liberal in America happy to see that dogfucking monster go to his grave. 

After it was news—not just rumors on Twitter but heard-it-from-the-President’s-own-two-lips-news—Americans thronged in the streets, waving flags and chanting. That made a lot of people uncomfortable. And it made a lot of people angry. And people who know better than me began condemning or at least questioning those revelers. If not in the streets, at least virtually on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

I wasn’t about to take a flag out in the streets. But I understood. And I’ll be honest with you: I’m glad he’s dead. I’m glad he was shot down like a common fucking thug. If I have one regret about the way it went down, it’s that he didn’t coke to death on a gorilla cock. He was a monster who made the world worse. His actions not only permanently altered our way of life, but helped polarize America in a way it never previously before had been during my lifetime. Fuck him.

He made us question each other’s patriotism. He took away our civil liberties, and raised the specters of religious and cultural intolerance. He led us away from the rule of law and drew us into two bloody, costly wars. Fuck him. 

We did those things to ourselves, of course, but we did them for him.

Fuck him. 

And while many of my friends passed around apocryphal MLK quotes, or chastised those out in the streets, I had a different take.

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Do you remember where you were on September 11? Of course you do. I do, too. We all have a story. Here is mine:

My grandmother was dying of cancer. My mother had taken her out of the hospital and brought her home to die.

It was a new home. My parents were recently divorced, and my mom had purchased a small, featureless home on a busy street in Montgomery Alabama. One with too few windows and dark paneling that made every room feel like a basement.

My grandmother and I were very close, as close as I was to anyone in my family. I could talk to her about things that I could not with my own parents. She could be a mean bitch, but never was to me. I think we respected each other. We were very close friends. And now she was dying.

A day came when my mom called and said “it’s time.” And the next morning I was walking down the steps of the Civic Center BART station, on my way to the Oakland airport and my mother’s home in Alabama. It was September 10, 2001.

I barely made it. I arrived that night, and my grandmother seemed to recognize me. She smiled and held my hand from the hospital bed that shared my mother’s bedroom. And I think she knew me. She was small and frail and bald and bony, and reminded me of a certain Shins song that had not yet been in a certain coming of age movie, or certain McDonald’s french fries commercial. I listened to it over and over.

That next morning, I stood by her bed while my mother and Victorene (a woman my mother had hired to help with my grandmother) and a hospice nurse gave my grandmother medications and washed her off. Together, we pulled on her arms and legs to straighten her out in the bed, as she drew her limbs in at night. Despite the massive amount of opiates flowing through her bloodstream, my grandmother screamed and screamed and screamed in pain as we moved her.

I thought of all the weeks my mother had been doing this without me.

And then it was time to get her unimpacted. Which meant that while Victorene held onto her from one side, and the hospice nurse another, my mother would reach up inside my granmother’s anus to make her bowels move. That is cancer.

My mother, mercifully, asked me to step out of the room. And because I am not a very strong person, I did.

And I walked down the hallway into the living room, where the phone was ringing, and I answered it. And it was a friend of my mothers, who told me to turn on the TV. And then I stood there and watched the towers burn and fall while my grandmother’s screams and wails and cries of pain filled the house.

My wife, my new bride, was in San Francisco. Every flight in the nation was grounded and there was no way she could get to me, or I to her. Rumors built on rumors, and I was terrified for her. I was terrified for us all. What would happen? Where would we go? Obviously, we would go to war. But with who? How? Why?

Yet, mostly, I was focused on what was happening in that small, dark little house. Every hour was more gruesome than the last. I adored my grandmother. And every single day I prayed, and prayed, and prayed that she would die.

“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” -- Jessica Dovey

When she finally did pass, it was a relief. I remember going for a run through muggy Montgomery suburbs, past yards filled with chemicals and over sidewalks strewn with dead worms. And I remember smiling.

I was horribly sad. And I would miss my grandmother immensely. I still do. But I was also happy and filled with an odd kind of melancholy joy. I was happy for my grandmother, and my mother and my aunt and uncle, whose recent lives had been little more than marathons of pain.

Death is often cathartic, whether it is the death of a person you deeply love, or an utter monster.

I’ll leave it to my smarter friends like Alexis Madrigal and Tim Carmody to write pieces with more nuance about what it all means. Yet while I wasn’t joining those throngs in the street, and did not completely share that sentiment, I understood. A man who has long plotted and schemed to hurt us and our nation and our families and to destroy the lives of our innocents is no more. A veil has been lifted. The world has changed, again. 

The wars in Afghanistan and (especially) Iraq are unquestionably deeply sad. They have taken so many very young lives away, maimed and destroyed so many healthy bodies, left so many people with physical and psychological scars. No matter your feelings on either, the man who tempted us into both is gone. 

And as President Obama wrapped up his remarks, my wife and I lifted our glasses to each other and nodded silently in a grim toast. Our baby daughter lay between us on the couch, sleeping in uncomprehending slumber. She’ll never live in fear of that less-than-a-man. She’ll never know that enemy. And for that, I’m deeply, deeply happy. For that, I feel like rejoicing.

Please Be More Specific

My friend Mike Monteiro is one of the more active Flickr users I know. He's always doing something interesting there, and has been a big promoter of it for as long as I can recall. Yet yesterday, he received a threatening letter from Flickr based on unspecified actions on his part:

I got an email from Flickr today telling me they’ve marked my account as ‘unsafe.’ There’s vague allusions to “bad things” I’ve done, but they didn’t bother to tell me what they were; therefore I can’t fix them. They also said if I do them again they’ll boot me. Again, I don’t know what those things are. I could guess, of course, but what if I guess wrong? It feels very much like I’m fighting with a FIFA ref.

Look, let's not be fucking stupid. It was almost certainly Mike's recent photo of three dudes walking naked through the streets of San Francisco that got his account flagged. I could mount a defense of his right to post that photo unflagged (it's not porn, he was documenting legal activity within his community, etc., etc.) but then we're just arguing about what is and isn't decent, and that misses the point.

The point is that Flickr doesn't spell out which photo was flagged, or what he could do to have his account deleted. Instead it uses vague but frightening language that says "if we receive another report about your content or conduct, it's very likely we'll terminate your account."

Here's the thing about Flickr: many people now use it as a storage vault for their photo archives. Mike, like myself, has been a Flickr pro user for a very long time. He posts pictures of his family and other important events from his life on Flickr. I do the same. What's more, I don't tend to keep locally stored versions anymore. This may be stupid, to trust the cloud as much as I do, but I do it.

Moreoever, I even tend to suggest to people that they use Flickr as a storage medium. For $25 a year, I typically explain, not only can you share your pictures online, you can also have a secure storage site that will be there when you pour coffee on your hard drive. But I'm starting to think I may be wrong about that.

In fact, that attitude has screwed me once before. After I raced Escape from Alcatraz in 2008, I downloaded my finishing video. Because the race wasn't going to keep the videos stored online indefinitely, racers only had a limited time to download and archive their videos. After downloading it, I then uploaded it to Flickr (which the video's permissions gave me the right to do) so I could keep it forever, and deleted it from my hard drive. But here's the thing: Escape from Alcatraz is sponsored by Accenture. The video had an Accenture tag on it. A few weeks after uploading it, this email suddenly landed in my inbox:

Dear Mat Honan,

In joining Flickr, you agreed to abide by the Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. Flickr accounts are intended for individual use, for our members to share photos or video that they've created, and not to sell stuff:

"Don't Use Flickr for Commercial Purposes Flickr is for personal use only. If you sell products, services or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account. Any other commercial use of Flickr, Flickr technologies (including APIs, Flickrmail, etc), or Flickr accounts must be approved by Flickr."

http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne

We have removed the video that was commercial in nature from your account. If you continue to upload videos that contain commercial content, we may take further action on your account.

Regards,

Terrence

My finish video--the only one I had--was gone. I had worked so very hard for months to achieve that moment, and now my record of it was gone. Worse, when I wrote Flickr back to appeal, I could not even get a response. Nothing. The company completely ignored me. Of course, I wasn't using Flickr in any of the ways described above. My video simply had a corporate logo on it. But Flickr still fucked me, and destroyed my data. I was steamed that they deleted my video without warning (rather than, say, simply marking it as private where only I could view or download it.) Worse, I had a sense that Flickr hadn't really examined my content before deleting it. It felt arbitrary and capricious. And that's the problem.

Because it has very many paying users who have invested years of data in its service, Flickr needs to very clearly spell out what is and isn't acceptable use. And when a problem arises, Flickr ought to give users an easy way to remove our data from its servers before it deletes that data (especially when that data is not in any way violating laws or community norms, but that's another issue) or terminates accounts.

Flickr has a vested interest in making it hard for its users to get photos off of it once online. If it were easier to remove photos, you'd be more likely to leave its service for another. That policy, however, is in conflict with its arbitrary account termination policy.

If Flickr is threatening to terminate people's accounts, it really needs to do one of two things (or even better, both). The first is to be more specific. That should be obvious. It's a bullshit move to say "if you do this again you're out of here" without spelling out what "this" is. Second, it needs to make it easy for people to remove their photos, all of them, in a process that's clearly spelled out and easily accessible.

To be clear: I'm not defending Mike's content. But I am defending his right to know exactly what he did, and his right to easily and completely back up all his data. Right now, Flickr gives him neither of those options.

The iPad is not a CD-ROM

In 1996, my first year in the working world, I used to bring CD-ROM magazines into work to watch them on my computer. These new media magazines would choke the antidiluvean machine in my apartment that I'd cobbled together from spare parts, and so I kept a stack of them on my desk at the office, mingled with my music CDs. I know I had quite a few titles, none of which other than Blender I can readily remember. What I do recall is that my favorite of these were all music magazines with live performances. There was a Radiohead issue in particular that stands out. I remember having hours of fun, scraping the live performances from the CDs and ever-so-slowly uploading to a then vibrant Usenet community.

It was the uploading that took hours, not the scraping.

Nonetheless, I have fond, if dim, memories of those CD-ROM "magazines." Yet I did not notice when they died out.  I could not tell you when they ceased publication. They were a flash in time for me.

Today, when a media pundit wants to dismiss publishing on the tablet, and the iPad specifically, the CD-ROM magazine is often the first, and ultimate, line of attack.

To wit:

Apple’s new device may well prove an interesting market for a new generation of full-length creative works — books, movies, music, mashups of all of the above — works that people are likely to want to consume more than once. But for anything with a shelf-life half-life — news and information and commentary — the iPad is unlikely to serve as a savior. For anyone who thinks otherwise, can I interest you in a carton of unopened CD-ROM magazines? -- Scott Rosenberg.

I don't wish to single Scott out, but it's a nice summation of the typical argument being bandied about over the past several weeks and months. But now, after this weekend, we've finally gotten to see the so-called future of digital magazines. They are in almost every way quite distinct from the digital magazines of the past.

To read a CD-ROM magazine, first you had to obtain it. ( I'd argue that most people with computers in the mid-90s never even tried one because this was often such a huge hurdle. I could well be wrong.) But certainly, they weren't exactly easy to come by. Distribution took place exactly as it did with a print magazine: via the United States Postal Service. It arrived in a mailbox, or at a newsstand.

But in every case, you could not obtain the magazine and then immediately access it. You then had to take it back to your machine, insert it in a disc drive, and frequently install some horrible software. If you were on a Mac you might have to worry about compatibly issues. An older machine might choke on it--mine certainly did. Remove it from the drive, and you no longer had access to its content.

For the most part (this was before laptops were commonplace) you could not take it with you on a train, on a plane, on a boat, or in the backseat of a taxicab. You could not read it in bed at night, outside on a park bench, or in the loo. It would not fit easily into your bag, and yet conversely it was easily lost.

Tablet magazines--especially on the iPad--remove all of these inconveniences. The point of sale is wherever you are.  Installation is a certainty, but it is also certainly easy, and certainly compatible. Once you have it, you can take it and read it anywhere and everywhere. It is every bit as convenient to carry as an actual printed magazine, and is much easier to obtain. You will not unintentionally misplace it.

Furthermore, the iPad allows a degree of interaction with pages and content that the CD-ROM did not. The experience of browsing a magazine in inherently tactile. Removing the content from the hands and placing it on a remote screen (to be navigated by mouse!) did not let one dive into the art, or flip through the pages as with a traditional magazine. Forget skimming. And diving in was nearly impossible too; processing power simply did not allow an immersive experience that moved as quickly as the brain. In other words: you had to wait a lot while shit loaded.

The iPad offers a different experience. It's very easy to immese oneself in pages, flipping through a book until the art or words catch ones eyes. Like print magazines, the iPad frees you from having to choose. You do not have to select a story from the table of content. You do not have to click on a link based on a 50-100 word summary. You can simply browse, and stop where you'd like. Even Men's Health, which is arguably the worst of the magazines I downloaded over the weekend (see below) feels far more akin to the traditional magazine experience than a CD-ROM ever did.

Does this mean the iPad is going to save magazines, in a way the CD-ROM did not? No. If you pretend to know what the future of magazines or media in general holds, only one thing is certain and it is that you are incorrect. Only magazines can save magazines. The iPad is nothing more than a platform that allows them to make a case for relevance, and ultimately survival.

But I can tell you that the iPad is not a CD-ROM. The comparison doesn't work. Quit making it. 



And as a bonus, here are the magazines I downloaded and read over the weekend. The summaries are short and, probably, not completely fair. They are not the fruit of hours spent testing and contemplating. They are quick judgments. But in all reality, if an app doesn't pass a user's quick trial, there is no appeal to a higher court. 

Men's Health: This appears to be little more than a PDF. I can't believe I paid $5 for a poorly-executed scan of the magazine. It isn't even completely legible. Magazines should provide an experience; my experience with this title rhymes with feels-like-I-got-butt-fucked.

Outside: I had some trouble with this. The app takes forever to launch and even longer to download the content. Once downloaded, it simply crashed, again and again, until I force-restarted my iPad. But then success! I found navigation excellent. The photos let you zoom in, as do the (initially small) videos. Page navigation was smooth and natural--and allows you to either flip through scanned pages or dive in via a TOC. I didn't need a tutorial to get how to do everything. On the downside, it remains glacially slow to launch.

Time: Time's magazine app has quite a few bugs. (And I was not the only one to notice this.) But once it gets the kinks worked out, the tech should be fantastic. Aside from the layout issues previously linked, I found it easy to navigate and browse. The help guide at the beginning shouldn't be necessary, but it's nice that it is there.  I think the best thing about it is the Newsfeed feature--which pulls daily news updates from Time's website into the app. But at $5 per issue, it's horrifyingly, exceptionally overpriced for a newsweekly.

Popular Science: PopSci hit a homerun. The app really delivers on helping you dive into and explore the content. PopSci was also most innovative in terms of really taking advantage of the iPad's touchscreen. For example, a single tap on the left side removes all the text so you can focus on the images. Tapping once on the right side brings your words back again. My chief complaint is that it can, if anything, be a little too gee-whiz. Sometimes it feels like too much going on in a story, when I just want to get the information. It also plops all the text into a vertical column along the right-side of the page. That's not going to work for longer-form pieces.

GQ: This was my favorite. I read the entire issue, something I don't ever previously recall doing with GQ. It allows both page-to-page, or TOC navigation. A bar along the bottom helps you quickly access any point in the magazine. When you re-launch the magazine, it remembers where you left off, and starts you back again in the same place. (I think it is the lone title I tested to do so.) Better yet, GQ offers multiple ways to view the text and images: Images can be up top and accessed via thumbnails, or you can switch to a slideshow view and see them full size, or even zoom in larger. You can set aside some or none screen real estate for captions. Or you can let the text totally take over. In short, it gives you options for viewing and interacting with a story or stories. If you are in a browsing mood, you can do that. Want to just look at the pretty pictures? Done. Want to really dive into a story? Go for it. GQ did a fantastic job.

Meet The New Median

San Francisco Chronicle, May 21 2002:

The median price of homes in the nine-county Bay Area rocketed to a record $402,000 in April, and the number of homes sold jumped 50 percent -- surprising gains in the region's still-lumbering economy. Home buying continues to be driven by low interest rates and a new sensibility that surfaced after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to residential real estate experts. A few industry insiders even suggest the market activity could incite a replay of the home-sales frenzy during the height of the dot-com boom two years ago.

(snipped)

"I'm surprised by the fact that (the median home price) didn't hit the $390, 000s before hitting the $400,000 mark," said John Karevoll, researcher at DataQuick. "But if you look at the rate of increase, it's nothing near the 15 or 20 or 25 percent we saw two or three years ago. This is 6 percent, a normal, sustainable kind of increase."

San Francisco Chronicle, March 19 2010:

A total of 3,582 existing single-family homes changed hands in the nine-county region in February, down 8.5 percent from the same time last year, according to the DataQuick report. Their median price was $370,000, a 24.8 percent increase from February 2009.

"The increase in the median reflects just how odd things were a year ago," said Andrew LePage, an analyst with MDA DataQuick, a San Diego research firm. "Over half of the resales (then) were foreclosures, and the less expensive inland counties had an unusually high portion of the sales. With the more expensive counties now contributing more sales, it's easy to post a double-digit increase in the median price. It does not reflect a 20 percent appreciation in the typical home."

One of my all-time favorite exchanges on Twitter (starring @fmanjoo & @theatavist)

The back story. What you should know:
1. Farhad is a technology columnist with Slate.
2. Evan and I are both contributing editors with Wired.
3. I have met neither of them in person, but assume both to be great guys.
4. URL shorteners are the mischief-maker's friend.

(click the pretty pictures to follow the links in the tweets)

(click the pretty pictures to follow the links in the tweets)

 

(click the pretty pictures to follow the links in the tweets)

 

Google is the one on the left

Photo by Tod Seelie

I just read that Google bought Vark for $50 million. That's great news for the Vark folks. Pass the Patron!!!

I love Vark, and I use it at least weekly. But when I think about Google's track record, I wonder if it's really a win. Google has a history of buying small, cool startups and then either ignoring them or letting them die on the vine. Take your pick of examples, but it tends to kill much of what it embraces.

Vark seems like it's just getting rolling, and it gets better week-by-week. It's flat-out useful. I hope Google doesn't turn it into another squandered opportunity.

Oh, and the one on the right? I'm pretty sure that's MSFT. 

Update: Like John Battelle says:

To me the critical question around this move is this: Will the Aardvark acquisition be a Dodgeball, or will it be a Applied Semantics? With Dodgeball, Google bought a promising startup in a strategically important space, but instead of integrating the technology and committing, it let it languish (the founders left and started Foursquare). Google later determined it must play in the space, and rolled out any number of features inside its mobile, map, and even Gmail products that mimic Dodgeball's early features.

Sasquatch Poopship Avocado Ultramarine

I wanted to see how Tweets and Buzzes stacked up in Google's realtime search results. So I posted messages to both using uncommon terms. The first time around, I tried "Sasquatch Poopship Avocado Ultramarine." The Buzz showed up almost immediately. Nearly instantly. But it took longer for the Tweet to show up.

I'm not sure exactly how long, because since the text was identical, it was omitted. It took me a while to realize this. But once I did, I tried again with "gasoline kumquat basaltic antenna." This time, I kept checking the omitted results, and it took the better part of a minute for the Tweet to catch up. There was also a three second delay from the time it took me to post to Twitter, to the time I posted to Buzz. So, even though I posted the Tweet first, the Buzz showed up first in realtime search results.

Interestingly, however, because Andre Torrez favorited the Sasquatch Poopship tweet, it's the only thing that (currently) shows up in Google's mail search results--where it appears in Tweetorites under Mike Monteiro's friends' favorites. Which is so recursive it makes my head feel funny and floaty.

Speaking of recursive, Kevin Fox made an interesting point across all his inputs. the social media ripple effect just got bigger. There's so much cross-chatter now already, it's hard to know where to start.

Finally, I have no idea what all this means. But I do like the word poopship. Holla, Ween fans.

This Buzz is Killing Me

I woke up this morning to discover that Google Buzz really wanted my attention. As always happens early with The New Hottness, everybody's hammering it, trying to figure out what (or if) they'll use it for. Buzz then assumes, incorrectly, that I want to know about all this. It's in my inbox. It's below my inbox in a special Buzzbox. I'm getting notifications about comments people I don't know left in places I don't care about. All of them where my email lives. Or, as Cameron Walters put it:

I only have a handful of reciprocal relationships on Google Buzz. 69 79¹, to be exact. But that's on a product that's been live less than 24 hours and that very few people even have access to yet. Looking at all those Buzz alerts in my Gmail, my initial reaction was a long, drawn out, "fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck." Because, while very few people have access to Buzz so far, if Google can successfully convert (or force) even a minor subset of Gmail users into Buzz users, it's going to have a huge user base.  All of those updates show up right below my inbox. (Or in some puzzling cases, in my inbox.)

More to the point: I worry it's going to nag the shit out of me. 

I was thinking about that this morning as I fired up AIM. I'm more restrictive of my AIM contacts than I am any other type of social connection. I give my phone number away more liberally than I give up my AIM handle. Not that I hide it, I just don't really broadcast it. I further restrict it by only allowing people in my Buddy List (tm!) to contact me. And that's because AIM has a huge potential to bother me, or distract me.

Naturally, the more a service has an ability to interrupt me, or keep me from information that I want, the more I restrict it. I wanted to try to visualize this, so I whipped up a quick chart so I could see my "major" social network connections--the stuff I tend to check in on every day, or at least most days--compared to Buzz.

This is pretty self explanatory. But the above chart shows that the less demands something makes of me, the more I am willing to make connections on it. It's why, for example, I follow so many fewer people than follow me on Twitter. Similarly, because Twitter updates are short, to the point, and easily skipped over, I follow many more people there than I do on Tumblr. If I followed as many people on Tumblr as I did Twitter, I'd never check in on Tumblr again because I'd have serious infoglut, or it would take too much time out of my day dealing with the distraction of keeping up with it. I tend to keep Facebook relatively wide-open. If you know me; I'll friend you. But I've also turned off all email alerts from Facebook so I can check it at my leisure, and furthermore, I've got friend lists set up inside of it, so I don't see everyone's update. Without the ability to make those restrictions, it would be unmanageable. I have a lot of Flickr contacts, but not so many that I typically can't view new photos from everyone I follow every day on a single page. Thumbnails make that possible. Were Flickr to show me full-size images on my friends page, it too would be unwieldy. Foursquare sends me push notifications, it also lets people know where I am. In other words, it has the ability to distract both online and in person. So I tend to be highly selective with this group.

LinkedIn? Kind of a weird exception.

But look at my Gmail contacts. These are, essentially, just people I've corresponded with since way back when. Email is a huge distraction. But, precisely because unlike Twitter, or Facebook, or Flickr, or any of those other domains I've got blacklisted in SelfControl.app, I can't turn email off and continue working. I have to have email access. I rely on it utterly.

And so when I imagine Buzz pestering me every time I want to hit up Gmail, sending me updates from hundreds of people most of whom I don't care that much about (sorry!), well: Holy fuck.  Talk about distractions and demands. This could be the mother lode. Or, as Ben Brown put it:

It will only be a matter of time now before my mother calls me to ask why I keep emailing her to tell her all about my late night bowel movements/software releases.  ”I’m not emailing you, mom!  Google decided it was a good thing to crap everything I say into your email inbox so that you won’t miss out on the exciting world of social media.”

We are all fucking broadcasting now. We've all become a bunch of petite Viacoms. I've been bitching about this for five years, but in that time it's just gotten much, much worse. And the one place I don't need these distractions is in my email.

I wish there was I  an easy way to really filter my social graph across every network and input I have, but there's not. I want to be able to restrict every photo, blog post, status update, song list, and more based on a universal list that's in my control. I want to be able to apply that list across every service that I use, using filters that looks something like this:

1. I always want to know everything this person broadcasts immediately - push it all to me live
2. I always want to know everything this person broadcasts at my leisure - push it all to me x times daily
3. I want to know some of the things this person broadcasts - push me the popular stuff x times daily
4. I want to occasionally know the things this person broadcasts - deliver it to me on demand

Moreover, I want to be able to selectively turn networks on and off. I assume we all do. I can't do that with Google Buzz unless I want to not use Gmail. It's all or nothing. Worse it treats everyone as if they are number one in the example above. I don't think Buzz is a Twitter killer. But if this bullshit continues to accelerate it may damn well be a Gmail killer for me.

Right now--and admittedly it's early--Google Buzz is letting me know way too much, about too many people, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.  Or, as Dom Sagolla put it:

Shanti, shanti, shanti, motherfuckers. We're all so very goddamned interesting.

---

1. Buzz auto-added 10 more contacts while I was writing the above. Sigh.

Email from New York

For the last couple of days, my friend Jason and I have been talking via email about Obama. Both of us supported him in the campaign, and both of us have been more than a little disheartened in the last few days. As I mentioned in my Tumblr yesterday, I still think this election-day tweet remains the truest thing I've ever posted to Twitter:

Moreso than Jason, I feel like we did stop. Or at least I did. Quite frankly: I was exhausted.

But on the other hand, I never felt like Obama gave us something to truly rally around. Had he sent his 13 million-strong list after one thing--it could be just about anything as long as it was something we could accomplish and take ownership of--during those first six months in office, I think he would have had a much better position to bargain from. It would have energized his supporters, and proved that he still had political capital. Indeed, it would have given him additional capital. He could have taken that to the healthcare fight, and it would have been a better bludgeon than anything the Republicans could cook up, with or without Glenn Beck.

But I don't feel like I've seen enough of Obama during the past year. And so it was good to see him come out swinging last night. I'm not a partisan. I don't care about the Democrats, but I do think the Republicans are bad for America. It seems like, even when they were in power, their only tactic was to divide us and make us hate each other. To split people apart and drive a wedge between us. That's unsustainable. But it's working right now. I was glad to hear Obama directly confront them on being the Party of No last night, but on the other hand, being the party of no is working very well for them. Why would they stop? This is what Jason wrote in response. I thought it was dead on, and so I asked him if I could post it here.

It is just so much easier for Republicans. All they have to do is play into the public’s natural cynicism and low expectations, and convince them that government does not and cannot work. So in a perverse way, the Bush years work well for them because they’re such a stellar example of why you can’t trust government.

The Dems historically, and O now, have such a tougher job, which is to appeal to everyone’s hope and better angels and ask for the benefit of the doubt to prove that government CAN work and do things that the private market can’t.  Of course they have to do this while the other side is sewing as much distrust and bad faith as possible. It leaves like ZERO margin for error, because the slightest misstep will be seen as proof that the Repubs are right and government is terrible. At the very least, it requires constant tending to message and process so people have a constant sense that their government is working for them and doing productive things. The way healthcare was managed just totally destroyed this. On the one hand you had crazy right-wing nutjobs saying the govt wanted to kill old people, which did two things: 1) convinced some losers that they were right, but more importantly, 2) made the whole health-care discussion so distasteful and ludicrous that it made a lot of reasonable people not want to engage with it at all. We needed a strong counterbalance, a constant messaging campaign that, every step of the way, laid out the stakes and appealed to our optimism and sense of purpose and feeling that we were on the cusp of accomplishing something amazing. Instead, we got Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman.  

In other words, US politics’ default setting is with the GOP, because it’s always easy to assume that things won’t work. It’s much more daring and difficult to get people to believe that government can actually pull something off that makes citizens’ lives better. When O wants to, he can make that case better than anyone. Like you, I don’t know why he hasn’t been doing it this whole time.

Only Magazines Can Save Magazines

I’ve spent my professional career doing basically two things: making websites and making print media. It’s my hope that what Apple unleashes tomorrow is the device that finally bridges the two. Let me explain. Every content website I’ve ever worked on has proclaimed the death of print, but the truth is, they’ve all been secretly jealous of old media. Why? Consumers pay for print. Advertisers pay more for print. Print, for all its ink stains and dead trees still makes money. Meanwhile, every print organization I’ve ever worked with has been head-to-toe freaked about the web. The web is the hot, new thing that all the kids are excited about. And it really is better at moving information from one point to another (a sentence so obvious it feels stupid typing it, but believe me when I say it’s taken a decade for some print organizations to admit it). The problem for the web ventures has always been how to pay for it. And as someone who’s designed site after site hoping to get consumers to open their wallets, I can tell you: It’s not easy. Print still has a tangible, innate value. The web does not.

Derek Powazek - What I Hope Apple Unleashes Tomorrow

Derek's post is about the iPad pre-game, and we're all done with speculating about that now, right?

And yet this passage really struck me. I've spent the past twelve years jumping back and forth between print and the Web. It's amazing to me that despite all that time, this tremendous gulf still exists. I don't know what the future holds, or what the Tablet iPad means but I do know that it's getting to be a narrower divide. For the first time, it feels like both sides are really working hard on these issues. Whether or not the iPad is a smash hit, or an utter flop (and I think it will be the former) it's gotten people excited about finally figuring it out. That energy and drive is just going to keep going forward.

Even is it is just a big-ass iPhone.