But which ones?

I want people to understand the biases of media, how interactive media is social, how technology has agendas of its own, how human beings and technology co-evolved, the nature of technology and markets and, perhaps most of all, how to program. (Or how to understand what programming is, even if you don’t want to program yourself.)

So I am really open for suggestions. I’m currently looking at
Out of Control – Kevin Kelly
Hacker Ethic – Mackenzie Wark
Virtual Communities – Howard Rheingold
On the Human Use of Human Beings – Norbert Weiner
maybe “Multimedia,” the collection of essays including Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Englebart, Licklider, and most of the pioneers of computing and networking.

What would you put? What books are essential and required reading for someone to negotiate the digital realm? And what was your favorite introduction to programming? I learned it from a person, and would be interested to hear who got it from a text. Or a program, even.

Should be out by the end of September, in print and e-formats, from the absolutely independent publisher OR Books.

This is going to be very interesting.

Makes the fact that I’m currently “collaborating” with him on a comic all the more strange. We will still finish it, no matter what.

In brief: Harvey influenced my thinking about writing – and the world – as profoundly as any professor, mentor, or friend I’ve ever had. He was a genuinely good and absolutely brilliant person, who proved that success can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

We love you, Harvey Pekar.

Artist Seth Kushner’s web comic interpretation of me and Life Inc. Fascinating stuff, and the last in a series he has been working on all year for act-i-vate. See it first, here.

In an interview published today in HuffPost, billionaire and investment guru Warren Buffett assured Americans that their economy was on the rise. No depression, just recovery.

But where he revealed his true agenda was in his advice for Obama: speak with “enormous confidence” about the nation’s economic future.

Buffett is trying to take the first step, going out on a limb to speak confidently about the failing economy. He believes – and there’s some merit to this – that if everyone can be made to believe the economy is recovering, then it will recover. Businesses will hire more people and those people will earn more money and be able to buy the things made by the businesses.

Except it doesn’t work like that, anymore.

We actually have to break the false connection between having a “job” and having enough stuff. I believe we could take care of pretty much everyone’s needs – at least in America – with all of us being employed perhaps 10% of the time. There’s really not that much work to be done. In fact, it’s our excess work and production that give us more work to do.

We see that as a good thing, because we all want jobs. But we only want jobs because we need a way to evaluate who gets to have the stuff that there’s actually too much of.

We are coming back, but not the way Warren says. Or at least no the “we” that Warren is talking about.

If you own “stocks,” use these bounces to get out completely. If you have to park your money somewhere, consider yourself lucky you have money to park.

The object of the game for those who actually have capital is not how to grow it, but how to keep it. Capital has driven our economy since 1300, and the recent bull market was the end of a cycle that began in the mid-1700′s.

The fact that it is ending is not the end of the world at all. It just means that there’s a whole lot of money out there with no place to go. People can’t find a place to park their money because there’s more money looking for investment than there is stuff to invest in.

And that’s because we’re finally in a technological era where great innovations are more about reducing the need to spend time, resources, and energy than they are about increasing it. iPads aside, of course.

I’ve been working hard on a book, and I know I should be updating everyone on facts and ideas relevant to Life Inc and the end of corporatism. I will in a few weeks.

In the meantime, learn to do real things and how to create value for other people. Make friends with your neighbors or, if necessary, neighbors out of your friends.

This is not a nightmare scenario, no matter what “they” say it is. No need for apocalypse, regression, or guns. That’s all silliness.

Good times ahead.

I’ll be a little less responsive than usual for while, so please pardon that – there is a whole lot to take care, but nothing nearly as challenging as attending to her. I am already relieved, and I promise I’ll be back to a renewed pace, with significantly less worries, within a few days.

Photo forthcoming.

The first installment of a comic book featuring Harvey Pekar and me, drawn by Sean Pryor, just went up at the Pekar Project on Smithmag.net.

Check it out here.

LIFE INC:
BY DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
(Vintage, £9.99) ★★★★
ONE recent Christmas Eve, Douglas Rushkoff was mugged in his Brooklyn neighbourhood. It was an up-and-coming area. So he did something public-spirited – he logged on to his local website and posted a note warning other residents of the threat. You’d think they’d be pleased. They weren’t. They were angry. They thought it might adversely affect property prices. Money, Rushkoff realised, is distorting our values: “We look to the DowJones average as if it were the one true vital sign of our society’s health.”

This version ended up a little more about the perils of believing that everything journalistic can be handled effectively by well-meaning amateurs.

It’s for something called Neiman Reports:

First they came for the musicians, and I did not speak out—because I am not a musician. Then they came for the filmmakers, and I did not speak out—because I am not a filmmaker. Then they came for the journalists, and there was no one left to speak out for us.

In a media universe that for so many decades, even centuries, seemed stacked against the amateur, the Internet has made a revolutionary impact. Previously, the only law of physics that seemed to apply to the top-down, corporate-driven media space was that of gravity. King George II, William Randolph Hearst, or even Rupert Murdoch would decide what the public should believe and then print that version of reality. And inventions from the printing press to radio, which once seemed to be returning media to the people’s hands, were quickly monopolized by the powers that be. Renaissance kings burned unauthorized printing shops, and the Federal Communications Commission tilted the radio spectrum to corporate control. Our mainstream media seemed permanently biased toward those in power as well as toward whatever version of history they wished to record for posterity.

But at least at first glance the Internet seems to be different. It is a biased medium, to be sure, but biased to the amateur and to the immediate—as if to change some essential balance of power. Indeed, the Web so overwhelmingly tilts toward the immediate as to render notions of historicity and permanence obsolete. Even Google is rapidly converting to live search—a little list of not the most significant, but the most recent results for any query term. Likewise, our blog posts and tweets are increasingly biased not just toward brevity but immediacy—a constant flow, as if it is just humanity expressing itself.

And this notion of writing and thoughts just pouring out of us is also the premise for the new amateur journalism. It is nonprofessional in both intent and content—as close to what its writers believe is an unfiltered, pure gestalt of observation and self-expression. As if the time taken to actually reflect or consider is itself a drawback—or at the very least a disadvantage to whoever wants to be credited with starting a Twitter thread (as if anyone keeps track). Of course writing—whether considered or not—is most definitely never a direct feed from the heart or soul but rather the use of an abstract symbol system, highly processed by the brain and no more gestalt than solving a math equation.

The real difference between the Net and traditional writing is the barrier to entry. Before computers, journalists had to use typewriters—with no cut/copy/paste functionality. Typewritten articles and manuscripts couldn’t be corrected—they had to be rewritten from scratch. Almost no one enjoyed this process, which actively discouraged all but the truly dedicated from attempting to write professionally. Now not only is writing much easier, but distribution is automatic. Writing something in an online environment means being distributed from the moment one hits “publish.” It’s not a matter of how many people actually read the piece; it’s a matter of how many could.

Which gets to the heart of the misconception leading to the demise of professional journalism: People believe their blog posts and tweets may as well be interchangeable with those of the professional journalists with whom they are now competing for attention. Dozens of times now I have fielded these same questions after my lectures—What makes some newspaper columnist’s writing any more important than their blog? With cameras and keyboards in phones these days, why do we even need reporters? Won’t someone see and report?

What Makes a Journalist?

What these honest questions don’t take into account is that a professional journalist isn’t just someone who has access to the newswires, or at least it shouldn’t be. A professional newsperson is someone who is not only trained to pursue a story and deconstruct propaganda, but someone who has been paid to spend the time and energy required to do so effectively. Corporations and governments alike spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on their public relations and communications strategies. They hire professionals to tell or, more often, obfuscate their stories. Without a crew of equally qualified—if not equally funded—professionals to analyze and challenge these agencies’ fictions, we are defenseless against them.

And thus, we end up in the same place we were before—only worse, because now we believe we own and control the media that has actually owned and controlled us all along.

First off, our misguided media revolutionaries are mistaking access to the tools for competency with the skills. Just because a kid now enjoys the typing skill and distribution network once exclusive to a professional journalist doesn’t mean he knows how to research, report or write. It’s as if a teenager who has played Guitar Hero got his hands on a real Stratocaster—and thinks he’s ready for an arena show.

Worse than the enthusiastic amateurization of writing and journalism is that the very same kinds of companies are making the same money off this writing—simply by different means. Value is still being extracted from everyone who writes for free—whether it’s me writing this piece or a blogger writing his. It’s simply not being passed down anymore. Google still profits off the ads accompanying every search for this article. Likewise, every “free” video by an amateur requires that amateur to buy a camera, a video-capable laptop, editing software, and a broadband connection through which to upload the completed piece onto Google-owned YouTube, along with certain rights.

Value is still being extracted from the work—it’s just being taken from a different place in the production cycle and not passed down to the writers or journalists themselves. Those of us who do write for a living are told the free labor will garner us exposure necessary to get paid for something else we do—like talks or television. Of course the people hiring us to do those appearances believe they should get us for free as well since they’re publicizing our writing.

Worst of all, those of us still in a position to say something about any of this are labeled elitists or Luddites—as if we are the ones attempting to repress the natural evolution of culture. Rather, it’s the same old spectacle working its magic through a now-decentralized media space. The results—ignorance, anger, and anti-elitism—are the same.

The pen may be a mightier tool than the sword, but not when we’re using it to lobotomize ourselves.

…more