ThePoorman.net is a poor man institute blog.
Title
The Poor Man Institute
Description
jlove1982 has the goods on “The Future … Faster!“, an anti-”net neutrality” organization which is pretending to be a consumer advocate, but which is actually run by the Telecom industry. It’s completely camp, naturally, although it did take us few minutes to convince ourselves that it was not the “cringe-inducingly earnest open-source/libertarian airhead” kind of camp, but rather the “ham-fisted corporate attempt to impersonate cringe-inducingly earnest open-source/libertarian airheads” kind; and, as occassional readers of Reason magazine, we consider ourselve connoisseurs of both. (Dead giveaway: no mention of “transhumanism”. Or hobbits.) They are certainly getting better at this sort of thing. It is our editorial judgement that, although we hold our readers in contempt, our contempt for this sort of thing is just a smidge greater, and so we have selflessly decided to forgo the kingly $1.85 the teleco lobby dangled in front of us and not run the ad. Others may follow this example or not, as their conscience dictates, but just remember that if you run the ad that means we’re more punk rock than you’ll ever be. And we own 17 Rush albums.
Everything on the internet is always the same. Like the wingnut function, online culture is endlessly self-similar. Everything you think first happened on blogs? It’s happened at least three or four times before, and every time, it seemed as new, as exciting, and as unprecedented as it does now. The spunky, close-knit underground community that threatens to be split apart by rivalries, flame wars, and growing corporatization? That was a big worry, in 1994, in the hacker scene. It was a big deal in 1989 in the BBS scene, and in 1983 in the hacker scene, and it probably happened in 1971 when the University of Hawaii joined ARPAnet and surf punks started trolling the Jefferson Airplane forums. The crush of unprecedented media attention, the surprising thrill of that first meatspace meeting; all of that happened a thousand times over on AOL, Compuserve, GEnie, in subcultures from knitting to bass tablature to Islamic terrorism.
I mention this now in the context of an unbelievably purple and triumphalist post by SusanG, earlier, at DailyKos, about YearlyKos, transmitted, presumably, via MonthlyKos. Cue smoke machines, ladies and gentlemen, and behold the glory of a medium-sized Vegas convention room:
Contact
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- Austin TX
- United States 78756
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- +1.9999999999
