Ah, who am I kidding? It’s exactly the type of job I was looking for. It fits my school schedule, gives back to the world at large and uses skills that I love to use. If the money was better it would be my dream job. As it is, it is the best fit for what I need right now and that is rather nice. Honestly, I am looking forward to going in on Monday. It should be an interesting experience all around.

So, work is handled. School is pretty much settled for fall and I think Courtney and I have figured out our budget for the year. It still surprises me. I know I worked like hell to make it this way but everything is starting to fall into place. Oh, I am sure there will be surprises ahead but there is a real feeling that what we’re doing is right in all sense of the word. I like that.

My writing is the only thing that really suffered over this time period. i just haven’t had the time I wanted to sit and write and when I did, I was too tied up thinking about what had to be done. It wasn’t the best situation for a creative enterprise. It’s also something that I am going to need to figure out how to work through in the future. After all, things happen, that doesn’t mean I can stop writing.

I was able to get another poem out last night. It was a departure from my usual fare and I find that I am still questioning my voice and my genre. Amazon’s little deal with Wylie was horrifying, especially to someone who wants to believe and write in the new media and digital space. Those of us who came here first did so with a sort of egalitarian ideal. This was open space and territory was ripe for the picking. We forgot that the ideals of enclosure were never really done away with and all that was needed was for a company, like Amazon, to set itself up as the sole proprietor. In one move the works of several incredible authors has been locked away behind the walls of a plastic toy. Even then, we have been shown that, at any time, those authors can be plucked away on a whim. It’s a frightening concept to say the least and almost enough to push me solely into print.

It’s sad because we have here, in this interconnectivity, a chance to recreate the storytellers’ circle. We can share stories and poems. We can relate in ways that we couldn’t before and that is exciting. Narrative and poetry can flow, merge and can be shaped by the tellers and the circle. That should be astounding and every author in the world should be grinning at the thought of such a possibility. Instead, the best example of this is an advertising commercial for Old Spice. Really? I mean really? Doesn’t that embarrass anyone, because it sure as hell embarrasses me. Yes, there is no doubt, those guys are geniuses. What that means is that our best talents in modern storytelling work in advertising. It’s not even enclosure at that point. It’s just the marketing of another product.

There has to be a voice for storytelling. People want to tell stories. They want to hear stories. I know that much. I still run a small Improvisational Storytelling Group every other Saturday. In a lot of ways, it’s no different from the tabletop RPG’s I used to run. The difference is that the players all are storytellers. We set the scene and we let it run. It becomes a shared experience. In the best example of this there is no guide, there is only the story. I watch people come away from this experience wanting more. There is a reason for this. Stories and poems feed something deep within the human psyche and no locked gates can keep that desire at bay.

Ah well, as I said, I was questioning my voice and genre but a resolution was found. The truth is, I couldn’t stop now even if I wanted to. This is a part of me that I hid for a very long time. It’s out now and I don’t think I know how to put it back.

And if I did, I never would…

What worries me is that we are beginning to see this self-indulgent nonfiction invade the fiction space and I just don’t think I care to deal with that. I like my fiction, oh I don’t know, fictional. I don’t really want to read narratives about the average person living their average life. Nor do I want to read authors waxing sentimental about their “ordinary” lives.

I am egotist. We all know this. I have a space online, one that I pay for, where I sit and pontificate. That requires a serious bit of ego. Hell, part of my job is to convince people to read what I write. Really, though, how truly narcissistic do you have to be to think that people actually want to read about your bullshit life, especially when your bullshit life is almost exactly the same as their bullshit life.

There was a time when I considered nonfiction. Now, I just want poetry and fiction. Give me the world of allegory, of mystery, a world that exists purely in the landscapes of the craziest authors out there. Show me difference, show me something new and maybe, just maybe, let me imagine how things might be different for better or for worse.

Now, all my data will be stored – safely and securely – behind the gateways of corporations who sole goal is to make money off of me. The internet as a place dissolves into the ether and what remains are billions of devices all connected to the master server, always sharing, always updating. It’s a world where data, public and private, is available all the time – anywhere – for the right price.

I know. Privacy is a myth. The very idea of privacy on the Internet is anathema to some. For others the cat is simply out of the bag. It’s too late to stop the speeding train and if we don’t get on, we’re liable to get squashed.

I worry sometimes that privacy becomes a red herring for greater concerns. I spend a lot of time talking about the evolution of literature and media. I argue strenuously for the evolution of digital literature and narratives that do more than simply try to replace products that already exist. Even with all my argument and belief in those mediums the truth is that the internet, and the cloud, is limited. It only knows what we feed it and most of us, in some way or another, feed it a steady diet of lies. Some lies are little, others gargantuan, but we all shape what we say about ourselves in some way or another. We are children of advertising. We know what sells.

My name, real or not, is a pseudonym. Who I am here is a creation, a myth generated by me and by those around me. I retain privacy not by refraining from using the products. Rather, I hold certain parts of me, and of my person, sacred. I do not post everything. I keep some data private and off the cloud. I do encrypt and I only trust products and hardware that I own not a service that I rent. I may use such services, but I accept that the data I place there could be gone tomorrow.

That is the key here. The cloud doesn’t have to be as negative as I fear it may end up being. Some things should be shared. Some things should be put out there for the world to play with and engage. In those ways the cloud will enhance and help but only if we as users and consumers understand that there is a strict delineation between what we own and what we share. We are not what we share, that is simply a narrative we write about a character named after ourselves. In that sense, some things can and should be available in the cloud, others are neither important enough nor sensitive enough to warrant strict management. The rest requires another way, a way that we understood not too long ago.

Those sad archaic PCs, relics of a lost yesterday, they already are our clouds and we seem to have forgotten that. I run a system that makes what I ran five years ago seem ancient. It and the other systems I manage inside my own home form my cloud. If you ask me that is what we should be doing. We should be doing what Opera and Tonido have been trying to do by making it easier to set up as our PCs as virtual clouds instead of fleeing our machines for the supposed benevolence of corporations who are rarely as benevolent as we would like. Power comes in being able to create and in owning the tools of creation and management. Owning an iPad or an Android phone only gives you the ability to consume someone else’s product. Even using the creative tools included in those platforms makes you little more than a consumer. That cool video has to be shared on some site and, if the current paradigm holds, it won’t be one you own.

That is the wonderful world of cloud computing as it is today: a world of clients all begging to connect to their master servers. It gives me the shivers just thinking about it.

Notes:
————
1. Cloud Computing Will Surpass the Internet in Importance
2. Tonido – Run Your Own Personal Cloud
3. Opera Unite
4. Opera Unite Vision Video

It’s a terrifying thought, isn’t it? Masses of readers trapped in the vortex of slush, straggling en masse toward a few bright pieces of light while, all the while, the even greater works slip deeper and deeper into oblivion. Until, at long last, as she notes in her final sentence, we all just give up and literature slips away drowned in its excess.  Now there’s a horror movie worth watching.

To be fair, I like most of what Laura Miller writes (she was my only remaining reason for subscribing to Salon), so I want to give her a little slack and she admits that others tend not to be as, shall we say, dramatic in their predictions. Most anticipate a new form of gatekeepers arising and I tend to be part of that group. Her concern seems more that the chaos that happens as the old forms fade and new forms arise will be costly and difficult for both books and readers. I tend to think this is an overstatement. The old guard isn’t going away anytime soon and the new guard still has a long way to go. What we are seeing is a rather orderly transition from one form to another. Come on, folks, it’s not like we’re talking about the music industry here.

The simple fact is that self-publishing is great for certain things. It’s awesome if you simply want a small run of copies to give or sell to friends and family or for a specific event. It’s also great if you are a narcissist who wants to pretend that having a physical copy of a book with your name on it means something. It can also work if you are ready to market the hell out of yourself and do whatever you can to sell your books. For everyone else, it’s a model that isn’t going to work.

Let me start by reiterating a basic truth that is going to seem odd coming from a new media guy: books on the web aren’t real. They are characters that point to supposed real books that require someone to actually pay for those books before they are generated. That’s what makes print-on-demand so cool, you don’t have the overhead upfront. That’s the only thing it really changes. You still need to find somebody to buy your book. If you don’t, then there is no book. Your bad text now sits in a dusty electronic storage medium and still never sees the light of day. That’s the game with self-publishing. In self-publishing you have to be your own marketing agent. You have to push everything or nothing will happen. If your work is crap, no one is going to buy it and that, as they say, is that.

As far as the Internet goes, the slush pile is here. It’s been here for quite some time. I can sit and read Urbis or watch Youtube and, on occasion, I’ll find something decent. I still subscribe to Netflix, though, and you’re going to see the same type of thing happen with text. My personal bet is on the rise of small publishers with niche appeal. Well, at least that is what I am hoping for. Regardless, a new method will arise to help sort the crap from the quality. Miller may bemoan the slush pile, but we all know that change is here. Hopefully this industry is smart enough to move and evolve before being run over by progress. I tend to think it is. After all, it’s not like we’re talking about the music industry here (I kid, I kid!).

- Links -
Laura Miller’s Salon Article: “When anyone can be a published author” | Youtube | Urbis | Netflix

There are few who can express this better than Garrison Keillor. Indeed, his career exists because of his ability to make the past seem like a wonderful and idyllic place. I can still remember tuning in to hear his tales of Lake Wobegon on the local radio station in Minneapolis when I was young. He is, in that sense, a part of my own mythos. He showed me that there is great beauty in memory and in those bygone golden eras that seem all the more golden as time travels on.

Because of this, I can’t say that I was surprised by Keillor’s Op-Ed in the New York Times. It can be hard to watch the world change and when you live to treasure the past it becomes easy to only see poverty in the present. The Old Era of publishing is fading. The models are changing. Even those with only a cursory understanding of publishing know that. We now live in a time where anyone can become both an author and a publisher and Keillor is so very right when he notes that most of those who choose such a course will earn almost nothing. Most will fail and their work will swirl in the electronic tide until it is lost on hard drives and deleted from memory. Of course, some form of this has always been true whether the story was written by hand, typed out on an aging typewriter or developed on the modern computer. Failure is part of being an author.

It is in that failure that the martyrdom that Keillor mourns still remains. Even an author in Keillor’s “Old Era” chose to stay. They chose to write and submit. They chose to face rejection after rejection and they still carried on. The difference today is only in the type of work an author must do. That stubborn spirit is still a requirement. That dedication and effort is still part and parcel with the character of being an author and, because of that, new mythologies of authorship and storytelling will rise and fall just as they always have. Storytellers tends to be remarkably adaptive individuals.

Perhaps, Keillor’s elite will suffer a blow; although, I tend to find that the wealthy seem quite adept at staying wealthy. Perhaps, his parties with young women in black dresses will be replaced by something else. Those things may happen, and yet I find that I don’t care so much about those things. I care about the words and the works. Yes, we are like “hummingbirds in an endless meadow of flowers” but, like hummingbirds, we still seek the flowers with the best nectar. It is they that will likely grab the most attention. That doesn’t mean we won’t miss a few treasures here or there but at least the flowers can be planted and given a chance to grow.

Make no mistake, I’m quite sure the “Old Era” was beautiful for those who made it past the iron doors. The aristocracy always tends to mourn when the masses get access to what once was theirs alone. As much as Keillor may protest with his car of 150,000 miles (happily parked near his extravagant 1914 Georgian house in one of the most expensive areas of St. Paul), he is part that aristocracy. He slipped in past the doors and he was ecstatic. Now those doors are gone and the methods have changed. A new world has arisen filled with challenges and opportunities that will press us to the limit. Feel free to pause and mourn the mythology of what once and never was. Then, look forward to a wide plethora of new creative opportunities some of which we still have yet to imagine.

+Iowa +Psychedelic +Flowers

There you go with that psychedelic horseshit
stuck in the muck growing flowers
while that ‘67 Charger screams
and Paul Mcartney, the mainstream cowboy,
lives it up inside some big honey mama
laid splayed on a davenport in Iowa.
Her mind’s lost in the haze of some diviner’s sage
‘cuz we’re all Hare Krishna now.
And this? Well, this is just a bit of hippie clip art
pulled from the Garden of Eden.
What did you expect,
landscape photos and the abstract?
This was a piece born outside a strip club
where redneck girls grind on lonely businessmen
though an endless parade of garage rock.
where the spiders hang from silvered string
and descend into the flowers
held in our outstretched hands
bald heads still shining in the sun.

In his late night email conversation with Ryan Tate, Steve Jobs wrote something that struck a chord with me:

“By the way, what have you done that is so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

He’s right. While I think he is headed down the wrong path, it is his path to choose and he is certainly far more experienced and competent than I am in traveling those paths. My critique does nothing and it means nothing. I do more by simply deciding that I won’t buy his products until I see a shift in how his company does business. That’s my choice but my second guessing how he does business does not actually contribute to world at large.

As I mentioned in my spring wrap-up, there are plenty of good ideas and very few implementers. For all of his flaws, Steve Jobs is an excellent implementer. He gets things done. He creates and he facilitates creation. The same is true for Zuckerberg. Part of being an implementer is dealing with the thousands (or millions) of people who call you crazy or wrong. It’s being more involved in creating rather than than criticizing. Jobs didn’t want to use Adobe Flash. So he created a product that didn’t have it. That’s fine. It’s his/Apple’s creation. They can do that. Don’t like it? Make your own.

Now, I won’t be making an iPad competitor any time soon. I can create products and entertainment for platforms that share my personal philosophy, though. That I can do. I can focus my time on my own direction within this space instead of caring so much where everyone else is going. If you ask me, that is a far more productive path to follow.

I’ll just post the last part of Zuckerberg’s quote that Zimmer deconstructs rather nicely.

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

One of the greatest features of the Internet is that is greatly expands our ability to do what we do naturally: experiment with our identity. We can shape and reshape different identities over and over again. If we don’t like something, we can delete it and start again. We can mask ourselves and listen in as people talk about ideas and beliefs in ways we couldn’t in our local community. In this way we help to clear walls that always exist in the usual spaces and can, maybe, gain a greater understanding of not just each other but ourselves. The barriers of space and perception operate very differently online and they should. Actually, they always will. This Geoff, my online persona, may share my name but he has significant differences with the Geoff in real life. As Zimmer and others note, this is just basic sociology.

Zuckerberg’s IM’s are dated and frankly I don’t believe they are worth looking at, but the rest of the material bears examination and is something that Zuckerberg is going to have to address. Something tells me that Kirkpatrick’s book will shed even more uncomfortable light on all of this. As for me, I am thinking about following in Cory Doctorow’s footsteps. I don’t use Facebook, but I certainly don’t want my account to cause anyone else to join up.

Here’s hoping that the next social site that comes along actually cares about user privacy.

What I have an issue with is their consistent and aggressive rewriting of the rules every few months. As a user of their service, I signed up expecting ads. I also signed up expecting that I would have control over my data. Once Facebook informed me this wasn’t the case, I removed all of my important data from their site. Now, they plan to share what remains with other companies and sites even if I ask them not to. If my friend logs into a service my name goes with them regardless of what I say and I can not stop my friend from sharing at least some of my information. This is another change and while it is well within Facebook’s rights, it is also within my rights to stop using the service.

The question that I keep hearing is why would I stop? I use Tungle. I use Google services. Both of these share information about me. I have a Google profile and share my Tungle address which includes limited meeting times. How is this worse than Facebook?

The real truth is that it isn’t. That Facebook has and shares information isn’t the real issue. Oh sure, there is a great concern about any site that contains and tracks personal information but those concerns transcend Facebook and include services like Tungle and Google. The difference is that with Tungle and Google, my accounts are easily managed and I can share and hide what I like. Google provides me the capability of sharing data as I see fit. True, they deserved the massive smack they got when they broke that rule with Buzz. They also fixed it. For the most part, I have to agree to share my information. It’s an opt-in system not opt-out. For their dedication to communicating when things do change, Tungle deserves special notice. They have gone above and beyond to be very clear about what is being shared and how to manage it. Facebook could only dream of being so straightforward.

Privacy is not just about keeping things secret. It’s about control. A privacy policy should not be rewritten constantly just to fit with some new business scheme. It shouldn’t be altered without a lot of soul searching on the part of the service and even then those changes should be clearly outlined so that users can decide whether or not the service is still worth using. This is where I take issue with Facebook as a company and a service. They have failed in this regard numerous times and they have made it clear that their attention and focus is aimed not at their users but at their advertising partners. To forget the base that makes your company is a dangerous thing. Facebook would do well to remember the juggernaut that Myspace once was and what it became.

To be honest, I actually would love to see Facebook address these issues and come out as a more open company that provides complete control of its users information to its users. They have built a solid service and it is sad to it get lost under the weight of all the control issues. Will that happen? Well, that is entirely up to Facebook’s management.