Jan 25
Posted: under New Media Strategery, Online (Multi)Media, Politix, Weblogs.
This story has been developing for some time, and has provided the usual lefty suspects with quite a delicious schadenfreude chortle or two. But now the New York Times has weighed in, and the article makes it clear that something extraordinary is happening in the blogosphere. If nothing else, the sheer viciousness & paranoia that [...] [...more]
This story has been developing for some time, and has provided the usual lefty suspects with quite a delicious schadenfreude chortle or two. But now the New York Times has weighed in, and the article makes it clear that something extraordinary is happening in the blogosphere. If nothing else, the sheer viciousness & paranoia that it’s engendered amongst the former supporters of the (formerly?) right-wing anti-jihadist blog Little Green Footballs.
To recap: Charles Johnson, the founder of the influential blog, announced last fall that he was “leaving” the right/Republican movement. His reasons were that basically he could no longer swallow the lockstep doctrinaire cant that demanded unswerving hatred of Obama, support for Sarah Palin, denigration of minorities and anti-intellectualism. Man, just writing that sentence sounds so wrong – but perhaps it’s emblematic of how polarized our political dialogue has become, that anyone not defining themselves by what they are against more than they are “for” by necessity straddles the lines of division drawn by the most extreme in the political wings.
Anyway – the point of this post is to call attention to a nice example of the somewhat rare MSM-created snark. Johnathan Dee, the NYT writer, mocks the inevitable screeching sure to result from the confluence of an article about Charles Johnson (“race traitor! burn him!”) done by the bete noire of the right, the New York Times:
But perhaps I am, as many suggested to me, just another liberal dupe. Perhaps I even fell for the pretense that Johnson lives in the modest home where I visited him, which bore none of the trappings his supposed sellout would suggest. The U.P.S. man who delivered packages to his door while I was there, and his truck, may have been hired for the day just to snow me; the decidedly un-Mata-Hari-like woman he introduced to me as his fiancée, who brought us water and fruit as we talked in his small home office, may have been a member of the Trilateral Commission. It would be just like a representative of the Mainstream Media to get caught believing his eyes like that.
Damn, that’s some fine stuff.
The deeper message in the article though, is starting to touch on something interesting to New Media types like myself – that the “Link Economy” has grown to a size & strength that it’s benefits and drawbacks are starting to become known & predictable. Which is about the time that a workable business model starts to really emerge – when you can posit Action A will lead to Result B, then you have a predictable model. Which big advertisers can start using to attach those nice little wads of cash to.
The larger effects of Johnson’s break with his former political cohorts (about which more than enough has been written elsewhere, on both sides of the issue) may be that this is a starting point for independent journalists/content producers to start defining a monetization model for the blogosphere and social media sites.
Little Green Footballs, New York Times, Malkin, Atlas Shrugs, traitor, screed, rightwing, blog, blogger, blogging, sellout, paranoia
Jan 23
Posted: under E-ink devices, Mobile advertising technology, monetizing mobile content, Multimedia, new media, Platform obsession, Web Tech.
Tags: barnes & noble, e-reader, nook
Setting a couple of bookworms loose to play with the next generation e-readers is like setting Augustus Gloop loose in the Wonka Chocolate factory. The first thing that strikes you about the Nook is how much *faster* it is than the Kindle. And Janine loved the touchscreen. More video to come on Digital Family. [...more]
Setting a couple of bookworms loose to play with the next generation e-readers is like setting Augustus Gloop loose in the Wonka Chocolate factory.
The first thing that strikes you about the Nook is how much *faster* it is than the Kindle. And Janine loved the touchscreen. More video to come on Digital Family.
Jan 22
Posted: under Amusing Nonsense.
Tags: dummy, dumpster, movie, prop house, Thor
Living next to a prop house, every once in a while you glance over and do a spit-take. They had just chucked what looked like a limp woman’s body out of the back of a semi. Wondering if the frustrated Evil Elves in the fabrication shop had finally snapped and gone Jeffrey Dahmer, I cautiously [...] [...more]
Living next to a prop house, every once in a while you glance over and do a spit-take. They had just chucked what looked like a limp woman’s body out of the back of a semi.
Wondering if the frustrated Evil Elves in the fabrication shop had finally snapped and gone Jeffrey Dahmer, I cautiously wandered over to see what the hell was going on.
This thing is a lot heavier than you would think. It's pretty much the same weight as a real human. Which is more than a little creepy.
Turns out that some of the more enthusiastic sword-swinging extras on the set of “Thor” accidentally connected with some of the helpless “peasants” they were wading through. The prop guys said that they had already charged the production company $1900 for damaging this dummy. The damn things are meant to stand up to being thrown off buildings, overpasses, crashed in cars, etc.
I don’t know what kind of maniac was swinging the aircraft-grade aluminum “Hero Swords” the Evil Elves have come up with (and no, I can’t show them to you – the designs are super-cool, but the Marvel guys would impale me for leaking them to the Chinese toymakers, who are trying to gear up to flood the market with knock-offs of the Christmas tie-in toys), but they apparently work quite well.
We briefly considered taking the dummy into our house and giving it the poor woman (it is a woman – note the wasp waist) a decent home. But it was soaking wet. And it stunk.
Still, she had served her purpose well.
Ashes to ashes, dummy to dumpster.
She was hurled into the dumpster will full military honors.
Jan 10
Posted: under Dead Cat Bounce, Webconomics.
The New Normal: Denial Since the first utterance of the phrase “green shoots,” there have been attempts to gaze into the crystal ball, to predict what things are going to be like once we get out of the recession/depression-lite. The most recent is a long Newsweek piece on how the psychological effects of being a [...] [...more]
The New Normal: Denial
Since the first utterance of the phrase “green shoots,” there have been attempts to gaze into the crystal ball, to predict what things are going to be like once we get out of the recession/depression-lite.
The most recent is a long Newsweek piece on how the psychological effects of being a young person caught up in the throes of an economic meltdown persist for the rest of your life.
On behalf of all us Upper Midwestern kids who came of age during the early 80s, when Reaganomics was strangling the industrial sector to death, and open war was being made upon union jobs that paid livable wages, may I say the following:
No duh, Sherlock.
The behavior changes that are listed: increased saving, cynicism about institutions, depression and alienation from communities — hey, didn’t I useta know you guys by the moniker Generation X?
The Economist has a slightly more intellectual and facts-based analysis, as you might expect. Back in October, they devoted an issue to analyzing whether it’s safe to come out of the bomb shelters yet. Basically, they still rely on the predictable free-market capitalist ideas of the government handing huge sums of cash over to supposedly wise business leaders, who will then generously use said piles o’ cash to create jobs and tax revenues.
Cash-strapped companies are skimping on research and development. Emerging economies are having to rethink their reliance on exports for growth. Both rich and poor governments will be tempted to intervene. They should avoid cosseting specific industries with subsidies or protection. Allowing market signals to work will do more to boost productivity than cack-handed industrial policy.
This rather flies in the face of the behaviors (I almost stuck the veddy British “u” into that last word) of the last 20 years or so, where the whole “Greed is Good” and “Masters of the Universe” memes combined to raise a generation of bankers & industrialists who felt that no luxury was too absurd. $30,000 shower curtains? Sure, hang ‘em up! Blowing $400 million of shareholder money to fund your lavish lifestyle? Why not. Running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme that impoverishes just about every decent charity in the Western Hemisphere? Done deal.
So forgive me if I don’t buy into the notion that the same profligate, arrogant pricks that got us into this mess, and who are even now right back at their ugly, reckless behavior — are suddenly going to transform themselves into righteous, community-minded slow&steady engines of economic growth.
Barrons jumped the gun last June, with an article that tried to impose some kind of formula on what a recovery is going to look like. They figured that the biggest threats were higher oil prices, driven by a showdown between Israel and Iran over nukes (still a strong contender), and too much consumer saving driving down demand (mixed on that one). But here’s the nut graf:
What troubles me the most is that people lost faith in things that they really should believe in. This was an unprecedented financial crisis, but it has pretty much calmed down, and now we have a very severe but precedented recession. What disturbs me is the phrase, “It is different this time.”
And there we come to it.
All this analysis, to me, is an outgrowth from our desperate need to believe that what we did in the last 10 years was just a momentary blip, that things are going to go back to some sense of normalcy some time soon. Unfortunately, the things that I saw when I was traveling all over the world in 2006-8, working with some very high level bankers, proved to me that there was, indeed, something different this time around.
This wasn’t just the Thai monetary meltdown of 1997, or the oil price spikes of the 70s.
The real-estate madness was global. Everywhere I went, I heard the same thing: “You think house prices are crazy where you are. Well, HERE they’re REALLY out of whack!” Mexico. Chile. Argentina. Russia. Netherlands. Spain. England.
Everywhere I went, the same thing.
I am coming to believe that the only normalcy that we are going to have (for as long as we are able to keep our petroleum-based house of cards aloft) is that there is going to be constant chaos and upheaval. The big, buried financial instrument of Mass Destruction that Po Bronson so prophetically wrote about a decade ago in “Bombardiers” are going to keep going off, like the deep-buried IEDs that keep killing US soldiers in Afghanistan.
Commercial real-estate. Peak oil. Lack of investment in electrical or transportation infrastructure. Unwillingness to deal with absurd public employee pensions. An unbreakable military-industrial complex that insists on wasting hundreds of billions on weapons systems we don’t need and will never use.
If we are very, very lucky, what this means is that we are finally going to deal with all these problems. Because there simply is no alternative.
Technorati Tags: New Normal, economy, advertising, analysis, greed, The Economist, Newsweek, future, webconomics
