Oblomovka

2009-09-18»

I’ve been commenting a lot online recently. I’m enjoying getting a voice back on the Net, especially to talk about politics and other contentious topics.

Weirdly, I haven’t talked much on the Net in my own voice for years. My main voice on the Net for long long time was the NTK one, which is actually rather disengaged and aloof. Dave and I inherited a disdain for political drama by the time were doing NTK: on my side that came from the psychic damage of having to write Weekending and Spitting Image; on Dave’s I think it came from him from having to listen to people talking about writing for Weekending and fucking Spitting Image all day. Also I believe Dave thinks politics is an obscure branch of Earth Primatology. (I remember him noting the day after the landslide election that brought Labour and Tony Blair to power that maybe we should have mentioned it  once in that day’s NTK).

Anyway, because I was such a firebrand, he’d allow me to write one or two “worthy” news items a week, and I’d grudgingly allow him to write 3,000 words on chocolate anytime he wanted. In the NTK divorce, I got to bother people about the Open Rights Group (join now! Fight Peter Mandelson and meet Ben “Bad Science” Goldacre!), and he got to run SnackSpot (Confirmed sighting: Brannigans Roast Beef and Mustard/ Blue Diamond Jalapeno Smokehouse Almonds). So I got a little more worthy after NTK.

When I joined EFF, and put childish things behind me, I ended up dropping that voice too, and becoming even more worthy if that were possible. Weirdly, that meant becoming far less personally outspoken. I was EFF’s main domestic activist for a while, and in that position, you quickly realise that anything you say, even informally, stops being “Danny said blah” and becomes “The EFF’s Danny O’Brien stated”. It’s like walking around online with a loudhailer stuck to your mouth; you end up just not saying anything for fear of suddenly having headlines explaining how you’re worse than Karl Rove and Hitler combined.

I do, incidentally, think that matters have got better on that front in the years since then. When I wrote about public and private registers in conversations a million years ago, I predicted that eventually we’d get used to a more informal tone from public figures:

We’ll learn a kind of tolerance for the private conversation that is not aimed at us, and that overreacting to that tone will be a sign of social naivete.

I think that’s what Twitter is all about, and permits: it’s sort of magically translated the informal register of text messages into the public space, and for public figures, allowed them to get away with throwaway comments far more than before. (My current favourite: the star of Pimp Your Ride complaining about, joking about, and finally replicating, the “yo dawg, I herd you like X, so I put an Y in your Z so you can VERB while you VERB” meme he inspired.)

That said, my political speech right now are crazily messed up. Obviously there’s the whole libertarian embarrassment. Apart from anything else, libertarians online are like Jehovah’s Witnesses, and appear to be obliged to go knocking on every comment thread they see, selling copies of the Laissez-Faire Watchtower or whatever. I know that even flirting with that title has somehow required me to endlessly clarify apparently batshit notions to my more … orthodox friends. I know for instance that I spent several hours last night actively researching the economy of Somalia before concluding that, yes, it is actually fucked. But you know, I had to check, because WHO CAN TRUST THAT STATIST LACKEY THE BBC.

At the same time, however, I’ve also becoming intensely interested in privilege, feminism, racism and power inequities amongst groups. Yes, yes, very contradictory of me, I contain multitudes cool aren’t I cheers thanks. But that means I get to be in on those endless arguments too! Usually (but not always) on the other side!

We shall talk more on this topic tomorrow, because you are already bored. But I just wanted to let you know, buried down here, that I let the NTK voice on an outing this week on my twitterfeed.

So now you can quote me horribly out of context and get me into trouble. I am Hitler!

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2009-06-08»

Actually, making people laugh is far less humiliating than having most people laugh at you, which has been the primary result of me coming out as a libertarian a few months ago. I could not have timed it better: while most of my friends (and me!) have been taking the piss out of libertarians for years, the recent downturn and the general narrative of What Went Wrong means that now that libertarians are about as popular as Marxists were in 1989. It doesn’t help that in the meltdown of the post-Bush Republican party, some of the remnants have seized upon sweet little shards of libertarian rhetoric as something to bind onto their crazy-cat-religion, conspiracy theories, and Obama Derangement Syndrome to make a comforting nest of denial.

My comfort during this time of tribulation has been Brian Doherty’s hilarious, moving, and, yes, often creepy Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, a broad look at the fall and rise of libertarianism in the United States (uh, and Austria, I guess) from the point of view of someone who adopted it almost literally for its punk rock value. Brian’s majestic and incredibly completist survey  covers everything from the mirror-Marxist machinations of Murray Rothbard, to the sex life of Ayn Rand, to my favorite libertarian of all, Andrew Galambos.

Galambos believed that not only was intellectual property identical to other forms of property (and thus inviolate in the libertarian tradition), so were individual ideas. He allegedly used to put a coin in a jar for the descendants of Tom Paine every time he used the word “liberty”, so that they could be refunded for his use of Paine’s term. Much more concretely, he required everyone who listened to his lectures to sign an NDA, agreeing not to reveal any of his “property” without first negotiating with him for their personal right to spread his ideas.

I have meant to use Galambosianism as an example of the dangers of too much IP protectionism for several years, but sadly his defence of his property was so complete that his ideas are utterly obscure and his name so unremembered that it’s been hard to be able to find anything to cite. Brian Doherty is to be commended for bringing his name back into currency, albeit by actively breaking the very principles Galambos espoused.

Anyway, Doherty made me realise that my take on libertarianism isn’t so far away from the mainstream of the tradition. I always assumed the anarchists were on the even-wackier side of the fence, whereas Doherty brings them center-forward, and argues that it was only in the 1970s that so-called libertarians even considered consorted with Their Enemy, The State. Before that, the libertarians were making the same kind of arguments that any other anarchist group worth their druthers was making: that this State business was a mistake from the start, and needed to wither away as soon as was logistically possible.

I like this position as a political stance to take, because I’ve always been emotionally close to anarchism as a theory, and rather comforted by its lack of any practical consequence. The closer libertarians get to being included in any government, the less I like them. I’m not a libertarian because I think they should in charge. I’m a libertarian because I don’t think anyone can be trusted with that much responsibility. I’d rather busy myself trying to think up institutions, tools, and cultural capital that can be created to prevent that from ever happening.

Actually, that’s close to a lie. The reason I’m a libertarian is an accident of timing, and of influences. Here’s an interesting (US) fact: Generation Xers, like myself, are more loyal to the Republican party than Boomers or Gen-Yers. I can imagine why that despicable fact is true. I grew up when the Left was indulging in a severe self-detonation, and laissez-faire ideas were briefly fashionably new and exciting. I read what I now realise were proto-libertarian tracts under the bed (I also read some awesome Marxist propaganda, but it didn’t really catch). In fact, I fall precisely into a distinct category in Brian Doherty’s taxonomy of libertarians, which he describes here:

[Robert Anton] Wilson’s libertarianism represents a unique strain within the modern movement, a libertarian house in which there are many more mansions than there were in the 1940s to 1970s. Libertarian scholar Chris Sciabarra believes libertarianism needs to become a more “dialectical” philosophy, subsuming more about human life and culture than just politics. He should appreciate the Wilsonian style of having libertrian values inform not just politics but a vision of a life entire. Wilson edited the School of Living’s journal, which had been called Balanced Living and which he renamed A Way Out — a way out of a way of life, state, church and culture that seemed a trap. He scandalized the more puritan among their vegetarian clean living readers in the early 1960s with articles celebrating Wilhelm Reich, sexual liberty, and Ezra Poun, and running poems by Norman Mailer.

Hippies. Anyway, this sounds much more like the scion I’m attached to, although it’s always sort of depressing to discover that your entire outlook is still determined by books you read when you were fifteen. I shall never laugh at geeks quoting The Moon is A Harsh Mistress again.

It also means that I think it perfectly understandable that a generation younger than me (and it’s amazing how many of my Gen-Xers are in denial that there could possibly be such a thing) is less enamored with the L-word. I think I came out as libertarian out of a desperate desire to become more radical as I grew older, rather than just settle into some genial liberal senility. As it is, I’m just playing exactly to type. There’s probably other more exciting philosophies than my warmed-up P.J. O’Rourkism right now. I’m not so old that I’m not fascinated to know what they are. Any ideas?

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2009-06-02»

Brief summary: Having a great deal of fun.

I am currently trying to break my brain by simultaneously book-kegging Austrian economics and feminist science fiction (as well as the conventions thereof). I am truly enjoying the mental thrashing I endure as I flick from glorious syndicalist manifestos to fierce denunciations of unionism, optimistically chatting with Seasteaders while sceptically surveying current libertarian paradises. I’ve been reading up on Dale Spender and William F. Buckley, Murray Rothbard and Murray Bookchin. I’ve gone politically non-linear. It’s akin to snorting magical policy pixie dust off Ken Macleod‘s bare back. I hope to have some screwed-up ideas of my own, very soon.

I also have a s3krit pr0ject, which I am currently bad at, but getting better. You shall not hear of it until I fail to suck. I also have a not-so-secret work project, which I hope to introduce to you soon, if only as I angst through to its final production. But most importantly, I have agreed to conduct an internal psychological experiment (n=1) that will involve far more blogging. Hooray! Onward! Outward! Excelsior!

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2009-02-21»

So my schedule these days — I have a schedule! Do you know what a change that is in my life? — anyway, my schedule these days generally involves collapsing asleep at 9PM and waking up, actually refreshed, at around 8PM. I have traded away several hours of my life in return for not feeling attached by a very taut piece of elastic to whatever is the closest bed, tugging tugging tugging me back.

I greatly enjoy feeling well-slept, but it does mean that my usual hours of blogging (and doing any other writing or wild-eyed crazy plotting) are now contemptibly small.

Like everyone, I am still working out how to make do with less.

Also like almost everyone, I stayed up very late on New Years Eve 1999/2000. I wasn’t wandering the streets, drunk like a skunk. I was inside Netscape Communication’s server management offices, munching on sushi, and watching techies desperately guarding against the chance that the Y2K bug would take down netscape.com and other important pieces of Internet infrastructure.

A few minutes before the clockover, I realised that all the clocks in the ops center were set to slightly different times (all the better to see which ones failed, I guess), and I would have no real idea of when midnight actually happened. I eventually got hold of an accurate time signal (I think I caled POPCORN, which is the US’s speaking clock). I was the only person in the cubicles who actually knew what the time really was.

In the seconds around midnight, different engineers would shout out to their colleagues that key services were still operational: “Web3 is okay!” “DNS3 is Okay”.

At the exact moment of 00:00AM, 2000 AD, I can reveal that, at Netscape, the primary concern was the fishcam. “Fishcam is … okay!” (Big cheer).

You’ll be pleased to know it’s okay again.

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2009-01-06»

Swear to god, I woke up this morning with the following words on my lips: “I am like unto avenging God!”

Forty-five minutes later the driver of the 14 bus let me and all the other passengers know that my flies were undone.

As part of her leaving announcement, Gina Trapani mentioned that she’d been doing lifehacker.com for four years. Shocked, I double-checked, and yes, Lifehacks.com, the domain I registered minutes after coming up with the talk title, was registered on around midnight on 2003-09-26.

Over five years! That is strange and disturbing to me. Super-super-super ironically, it’s probably been my least productive period yet. I’m okay with that, in the way that you can probably forgive Europe for dropping its GDP a little during that first, tricky, world war. In those five years, the world planed me a new surface or two, mostly against my grain. I have learnt valuable lessons, but have yet to find anything I can actually trade for them.

I’ve never been truly ambitious but I have been historically, shall we say,twitchy. These days I have been growing placid. I am amazed with the magic of making my own dishes of burgers, potatoes and peas, walking in parks, and having clean laundry. I frequently go to bed early. I have a big ole beard. Young people suspect me of harboring inner wisdom, though they do not know it is all about getting infinite lives in Chuckie Egg.

Of course, all of this fondness for zen calm and gentlemanly decay happens just when my local hemisphere decides to pinball between economic collapse, n-dimensional wars, or perhaps just a planetary extinction event. Yeah, I’m all sleepy, and Bruce Sterling, the world’s oldest smart-ass punk, is right there behind my back, setting off the firecrackers.

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2008-11-25»

So I now have some clues as to why I suddenly stopped blogging twenty days ago. Looking over the black box recording, I note it coincides with me engaging in a rash of travel, and also obtaining a prescription for sleep medication for the first time in my life.

That makes sense. When I go on a longhaul plane for a speaking engagement, I go out into deep-space coma until I return. It’s the whole being ferried around by machines, and deposited into womb-like hotels thing. Add to that my discovery of a pharmaceutical that magically medically increases the amount of blood in my caffeinestream, and you’re going to lose me to forty-years worth of sleep catch-up and shoddy hotel connectivity.

Plus I swear to God, everyone I knew spent a few weeks wandering around in a post-election haze. Last week, I spoke at the University of Maryland (which was awesome, but I am an all-comers speaker: if you are at a US college, force your school at gunpoint to book me here: all the money goes to EFF). Honestly out of nowhere people would end any normally pessimistic discussion with this dreamy-eyed “but now, with this spirit of reconciliation in the air”, and stuff like that. Even the NASA guys at the hotel were cheery. Of course, that’s all in the beltway, but there’s languour elsewhere: Republicans are punch drunk and lolling, and the news media is sort of just lying there on the tarmac, having collapse in a heap and lazily eyeballing Obama nominations from one half-closed eye.

Things finally picked up this week, just in time to slam into Thanksgiving, which, to translate for British readers, is really the American Christmas (the real Christmas being more like a Bank Holiday with religious pretensions). You know what I think they should do to boost the economy here? Hold another couple of elections. People would be buying new cars just to have somewhere to put the bumperstickers.

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