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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way.-opening sentences of Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities”

When I first started talking about the notion that we were in an Interregnum–Gramsci’s notion that “The old is dying and the new cannot be born.  In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms”–I didn’t really suspect that it would get quite so morbid. A couple of days ago, a reporter, having read my Brave New World Redux post, called me up to ask about the reference to “Flash Robs” in the context of the London Riots. I made what I thought was a fairly uncontroversial remark about two facts. First, that in a world of increasing inequality, there is a group of unemployed young people who are totally untethered to the social norms. Second, those young people use social media for everything, including organizing vandalism and looting. Even though the reporter took a long discussion and boiled it down to one line, I still feel my comment was true. What I have seen since then is an onslaught of hate mail, much of it overtly racist, probably brought on by this blog post revealing me to be “an undisclosed new media leftist”. And here I thought I could return to my community and have a decent, civil conversation. Jeesh! Here’s an example of the kind of shit I read every morning. This one from one Dan Anthony.

Let’s tell it how it is.. These Mobs are Black Ghetto Welfare Slaves. Their parents and grandparents were also Welfare Slaves. A bunch of people caught in a cycle of no education, no ambition, and no morals. Stupid People breed Stupid People. If this was the best Economy in the history of the country , these people would still be doing this. The Economy up and downs do not effect Welfare Slaves. Maybe if people in this country told the truth without worrying about who’s feelings get hurt, we can move on and become a better society. Stay out in Cali with the rest of the elitest, leftwing nuts. You assholes out there are phooney, full of shit, Limo Liberals GO FUCK YOURSELF AND FUCK YOU JERK OFF.

I’m trying to figure out why my comments about the haves and the have nots has struck such a cord. Read more…

Our correspondent, T-Bone Burnett, added that comment to the New Yorker cartoon I posted which has generated so much traffic in the last couple of days. This comment is echoed in a magnificent essay in this morning’s New York Times by Michiko Kakutani, entitled Texts Without Context.

Other challenges to the autonomy of the artist come from new interactive media and from constant polls on television and the Web, which ask audience members for feedback on television shows, movies and music; and from fan bulletin boards, which often function like giant focus groups…As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,” Mr. Carr writes in “The Shallows,” authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.”

From the day I started this blog, I have tried to resist this urge to write what the search engines tell me would be popular. For reasons that are lost on me, posts with the word “Torture” in them are very popular on Google. This 19 month old post is still regularly on of the most searched out ones on this site. And of course there is always this favorite, which must be an immense disappointment to the thousands of web surfers who have landed there searching for porn. If I wanted to really get a lot of hits, I’d combine these two “focus group” hints and just call the site “Torture Porn”. I’m sure it would be very popular. Read more…

When I started promulgating this notion of The Interregnum–”The old is dying and the new cannot be born;in this interregnum morbid symptoms abound”(Gramsci)–two years ago, I had no idea how morbid the symptoms would get.

The last week has been as depressing culturally and politically as any in my recent memory. On the political front, the whole Washington edifice seems so terminally broken that I can neither summon the energy to believe that passing this health care legislation which will force every American to pay 15% of their earnings to a private health insurer  is worth the kind of energy I and my friends brought to the 2008 election campaign. Nor can I summon the vitriol to denounce the charlatans like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck–the Private Jet Populists–the new Lonesome Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd–for their cynical manipulation of the paranoid conspiracy theorists that we call Teabaggers. The whole scene seems like some ancient Roman tragedy where King Pyrrhus upon defeating the Romans at such cost to his own followers turns to his general and says, “Another such victory and I am undone.”

And then I venture out in to the culture– the Hollywood Oscar parties–the reality TV–the Facebook posts–the TMZ front page–and I think that so little of it passes the “who cares” test. I met Guy Trebay a couple of years ago when we did a conference called Ready to Share. He writes about fashion with the acid vision of a 21st Century Trollope. This rung true.

And that was when someone else mentioned that fame is so cheap these days, that paparazzi fodder is so interchangeable, that celebrities are so dime-a-dozen, that often one has no idea whom the photographers are making a fuss about.

Perhaps, this person added, someone ought to invent celebrity Shazam, a fame app based on the music identification service available on cellphones.

That way, in a landscape prophesied with cold accuracy by Andy Warhol, one could point a camera phone at a given person and immediately learn which minor Italian soccer player or which trophy wife of which French intellectual or which former actor on a Jerry Bruckheimer crime-scene juggernaut one was gawping at.

It all seems so fucking inconsequential. Here we are stuck in two wars where our boys and girls, as young as the kids I teach at USC, are dying every day and it is as if they aren’t even real. What if the 26 year old coke sniffing Wall Street trader was in danger of being drafted? Would he then pay a bit more attention? A filmmaker like Paul Greengrass in Green Zone, puts evidence of the most treacherous deceptions by your government before you in the most wonderful style and panache and you ignore him. Read more…

The announcement that Apple is eliminating digital rights management controls from its I Tunes service is the final nail in the coffin of technology based solutions to piracy. Every time Apple or Microsoft would roll out a new DRM solution, it would take the hackers in Moscow about 20 hours to crack it and publish the hack. The belief on the part of both the RIAA and the MPAA that some technological magic bullet would be discovered was always a pipe dream.

In contrast to the parlous state of the CD business, the music publishing business is flourishing as never before, because of one simple difference–the mechanical license. Every time you go into a bar or a Gap store that is playing music, they are paying a fee to ASCAP or BMI for that privilege and the songwriter is getting paid. They do a monthly sample on a small percentage of the retail, radio, elevator, Internet and other outlets and divvy up the money. It works. Read more…

USC/Annenberg School has put a new version of my America 3.0:Rebooting After the Crash up on their You Tube Site. Watch it in the High Quality Setting. It will be up on I Tunes U next week as a free download.

It is hard to imagine now that four years ago George Bush was reelected in the midst of a climate of fear and suspicion. Democrats were on the defensive, the long term relevancy of their party being questioned by the media. Today’s election may render the Republicans a minority party, completely out of tune with the mood of the country. What happened?

The easy answer would be to say “Iraq and Lehman Bros.”. Those two tragedies expose the fallacy of the neoconservative philosophy of preemptive war and radical deregulation. But I would argue for two different phrases–”Bottom-up and Broadband”. In 2004 Democrats were overpowered by two forces: the Republican Top Down money/organizing machine and the power of right wing talk radio. There were many states that will vote Democratic today (Montana, Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana) that in 2004 had neither organization or media that reflected a Democratic message.

When after the 2004 defeat Howard Dean came to LA to campaign for the DNC Chairman spot, he said he would build a Democratic organization in all 50 states. And he did. But what Barack Obama realized from the start was that he was building a movement, not just a political campaign and he seized upon the bottom-up power of the Internet that Dean had pioneered and took it to a new level. And while the Clintons didn’t run a 50 state campaign, Obama did and it really paid off in the final month of the general campaign with the extraordinary organization And that’s where Broadband came in to the picture. Think about the effect of the will.i.am “Yes We Can” video, viewed more than 18 million times on the net. Read more…

Liddy Dole’s attack on her opponents beliefs has backfired.PPP reports,

It is pretty clear to me based on our polling this weekend that Kay Hagan will be headed to the US Senate unless something very bizarre happens in the next 72 hours. While numbers in the races for President and Governor are basically unchanged from last week there has been clear movement away from Elizabeth Dole, a sign that her ‘Godless Americans’ ad is blowing up in her face. 

Dole has run one of the worst campaigns imaginable.

And Kay Hagan’s reply ad is really good. Dole deserves to lose bigtime.

There is something monumentally metaphorical when Joe the Plumber oversleeps and doesn’t make it to the McCain rally. Up too late with Brittany Spears and his new Hollywood agent is my guess.

Obama’s 30 minute infomercial was beautifully produced, but did anyone watch?

An infomercial on behalf of Mr. Obama was a smashing ratings success on Wednesday night, proving to be more popular than even the final game of the World Series — and last season’s finale of “American Idol.” The audience for Mr. Obama’s program far exceeded the expectations of television executives — and many political pundits who questioned whether Mr. Obama was engaging in overkill in buying a half hour on so many networks.

So much for the pundits.

The Houston Chronicle just released it’s most recent poll.

 But the statewide survey of 550 registered voters has one very surprising finding: 23 percent of Texans are convinced that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Such a level of collective ignorance can only mean that these people are relying solely on Right Wing talk radio for their “news”. I have generally stayed out of the debate whether the Fairness Doctrine should be reapplied to broadcasting. Contrary to the Right Wing propaganda, “It did not require equal time for opposing views, but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented.”

Clearly, the ignorance demonstrated in this Texas poll shows that perhaps some reconsideration of the Fairness Doctrine is in order, so that our publicly owned airwaves aren’t used as a channel for lies from the Right Wing Hate Radio apparatus.