It’s ready, and I’m delighted to announce it here first: my first book on interactive media, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, is now heading to the printer and available for pre-order.

This is an indie book in every sense of the word. It can only be ordered directly from the publisher, OR Books which cuts out a whole lot of corporate middlemen while getting the book out a lot sooner and less expensively.

I’m also glad to be able offer anyone who pre-orders a 15% discount off the book or e-book.

There’s a whole lot more about the book on its brand new page at www.orbooks.com/our-books/program/ Excerpts, sample illustrations from Leland Purvis, and more, coming soon.

Almost forgot: 10% of proceeds will be going to the WikiMedia Foundation and Archive.org.

It was definitely the wrong week to have switched everything over, as voicemails were falling into the ether precisely when people who needed to express their feelings most wanted to reach me. And although my Gmail ended up being a great backstop for the gobs of misdirected email, a lot of telephony and sms ended up in the abyss. For this, I’m truly sorry. And thanks, everyone for all the support.

Now that I’m wading through the thousands of emails I missed over the month of July, I’m also coming upon a few from the Truly Angry – those who felt so ignored and neglected that they’ve decided to cut off all ties. A couple went through the process over the course two or three emails in the same week – starting out inquisitive, then getting concerned, and finally becoming angry at not getting a response.

And while it saddens me, it also reminds me of the peculiar biases of the media we are using to be with each other these days, and how easily the deletion of a voicemail message or two can decide one’s fate – much in the way those messages passed each other in Romeo and Juliet, leading to both their deaths.

There’s a leverage to electronic media – an increased leverage, I should say. Little things up close can become big things out on the periphery. These are very fragile cords we are using to orchestrate very intense relationships. (Just listen to one of Mel Gibson or Alec Baldwin’s phone messages, or read any of Tiger Woods’ txts.) But the sheer volume of exchanges makes impossible the kind of meticulous attention to detail we used to pay to written exchanges. We cannot sit at our writing desks, slowly hand-drafting our responses and slipping them into light blue airmail envelopes.

On the other hand, there’s a tremendous relief – even elation – at the sudden loss of ballast now that I’m down three or four friends. I’ve spent so much energy over the years making sure I never insulted anyone (answering every email I’ve ever received from a human, as long as it doesn’t have a physical threat) that I’m a bit relieved to have done so inadvertently. The world did not stop turning, and a few people who wanted some attention when I wasn’t prepared to offer it will find it somewhere else.

But I can’t help but feel it has more to do with the biases of these media, and the as-yet-undeclared manner in which we are all supposed to use them. If I’m on Facebook, am I supposed to respond to those messages? If I respond to one, does that mean I have to respond to them all? What about friend requests? Do my emails in response to others’ have to be as long? If they’re too short, is it too dismissive?

What is the appropriate protocol for having had a voicemail box that got filled with messages and then accidentally emptied? Does one call his entire world, to let everyone know their missive was not received? Or does that create more of a nuisance for the rest of the world? If there’s nothing I particularly *need* to hear right now, must I go out and solicit “resends” of everything I didn’t hear about?

These are questions to which we’ll either come to collective answers, or – better – learn to live without. As in life, simply give everyone else the benefit of the doubt.

The recession officially started in December 2007. From the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009, real aggregate output in the U.S., as measured by the gross domestic product, fell by about 2.5 percent. But employers cut their payrolls by 6 percent.

In many cases, bosses told panicked workers who were still on the job that they had to take pay cuts or cuts in hours, or both. And raises were out of the question. The staggering job losses and stagnant wages are central reasons why any real recovery has been so difficult.

“They threw out far more workers and hours than they lost output,” said Professor Sum. “Here’s what happened: At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.”

That kind of disconnect, said Mr. Sum, had never been seen before in all the decades since World War II.

In short, the corporations are making out like bandits. Now they’re sitting on mountains of cash and they still are not interested in hiring to any significant degree, or strengthening workers’ paychecks.

Combine this with the fact that corporate profits over their net worth has been going down for thirty years, and you get an even more nuanced understanding of the problem: not even the corporations will be able to turn a profit for very much longer. They have collected all the money, but don’t know how to make more out of the money they have. All they can do is sell major assets to the Chinese (like Ford selling Volvo today). So even corporate shareholders are losing in this scenario.

It’s all quite simple, even if it took me close to 300 pages to explain how we got here in Life Inc. I was thinking that book came out too late (after the beginning of the economic crash) but now I’m thinking it may have come out too soon! At least there’s the paperback coming early next year, along with resources for people who need to earn a living in the current economic environment.

Or take a look at Alan Greenspan’s latest comments to Meet the Press. When I say something like this, they call me socialist:

“Our problem, basically, is that we have a very distorted economy, in the sense that there has been a significant recovery in a limited area of the economy amongst high-income individuals who have just had $800 billion added to their 401(k)s and are spending it and are carrying what consumption there is.

“Small business, small banks, and a very significant amount of the labor force” — is caught in “tragic unemployment” that is pulling down the country.

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.