Hollywood Reds, Metaversal Blues

Some day, somebody will be freer from the ideological constraints of our Cold War and post Cold War ages, and be able to do a very good comprehensive critical study of Hollywood and the Reds that will show just what kind of effect on society and mass culture people with a certain set of beliefs had on the public and on their age.

They'll be free, because they won't have to look over their shoulder 10 million times at the repressive antics of McCarthy and the devastation of blacklisting, nor genuflect about 30 million times to the ideas of Cold War, anti-Cold War, anti-anti-communism, blah blah. They'll be free, because they won't have to spend huge chapters of their book earnestly telling you that some producer or actress was *not* a Communist at all; or proving that they were Communists, but of the Lite variety, or the kind that definitely weren't for the invasions of Hungary or Czechoslovakia, you know, sort of 9/11 Pataki voters and McCain Democrats.

They'll just be free, just to look at the content of the beliefs and creeds and thinking of the producers and actors and critics, and see if it had any effect. They could ask the question: well, what *did* they believe, in any kind of organized way? What sustained it? Did it matter, in fact? Then they will conclude, re "Communism" (which will turn out to be a very varied collection of social ideas by that time) that a) it did matter, but not much so; b) it had a profound effect and therefore we should b1) worry about the spread of Communism or b2) encourage Communism or c) it was utterly irrelevant to anything because basically, it all comes down to whether you can tell a good story or not, and people will figure it out themselves.

In the same way, we could look now -- instead of waiting for future historians -- at the GDC stuff of Raph's ("God, we're irrelevant") or this utterings of a person I'd never heard of before who makes me shudder, Jane McGonigal (thanks to Ugotrade for picking this out of the flogosphere

"I’m not mad at game designers. Compared to the rest of the world, we have it all figured out. Our medium kicks all other media’s ass. We make more people happy than any other platform or content in the world. (If you don’t believe that, you’re not paying attention to what’s happening.) We’ve won. Games have won. As an industry we’ve spent the last 30 years learning how to optimize experience. Brains, bodies (recently), and hearts are all engaged. That’s the good news.

The bad news is we rule the virtual world only. Reality is broken, and we’re not fixing it, we’re offering alternatives to it. We offer better experiences, better socialization, in virtual experiences. That needs to start changing. If reality is broken, why aren’t game designers trying to fix it? It’s our responsibility to design systems that make us happy and successful and powerful in real life? We have the power and the responsibility."

*Holds up cross*. Look, this is pretty awful stuff. Can somebody please make sure this gal isn't allowed anywhere near, well, massness? Media? You know, influential stuff?

If you don't see the stretched membrane holding back a giant mass of stupidity about to let loose, and aren't breaking out in a cold sweat like I am, well, I guess you must be...stuck playing in a game or immersed in a virtual world or surfing the Internet or something...I'm afraid I'm finding it still GOOD news that games ONLY rule virtuality.

If you were wondering about what it will be like having game designers "fix reality" (*shudder again mightily*), then you have only to read Castronova, which I've blogged about here.

It's too bad we don't have that critical study on whether the Hollywood Reds broke anything essential about our reality -- or whether it didn't matter because they were good story tellers or weren't even Reds.

Because now with the Metaversal Blues -- I think of them as blue in electronic Internet media, somehow but this may be a mere artifact of synethesia -- we're about to see what it's like to have game-gods start to influence stuff in a bigger way without anyone getting to ask whether there's any legitimate scare, or getting to form a congressional committee, good or bad. The horror....

You know, I can't help thinking of Kurtz in Apocalypse now:

"I remember when I was with Special Forces--it seems a thousand centuries ago--we went into a camp to inoculate it. The children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile--a pile of little arms. And I remember...I...I...I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it, I never want to forget. And then I realized--like I was shot...like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, "My God, the genius of that, the genius, the will to do that." Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they could stand that--these were not monsters, these were men, trained cadres, these men who fought with their hearts, who have families, who have children, who are filled wi th love--that they had this strength, the strength to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time were able to utilize their primordial i nstincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment--without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us."

What we have with the makers of games are people who, without judgement -- and with strenous demand on all of us never to judge! -- can enable human beings to hack off little innoculated arms. That about sums it up, eh? And perhaps someone would like to pretend that the war in Iraq or tragedies like Virginia Tech are completely unrelated to media and games, but as I said, we await that future critical study free of the ideological constraints placed on the critical and open thinking required to look at just what it means to have young males especially learn how to maim and murder creatures and humans millions of times over since the age of 8, for many, many hours a day. Yes, I realize the politically correct thing to do is to pretend it has no effect on the human heart and soul. But, I've never suffered from any problem of being politically correct.

Why does Raph Koster ask about Darfur? Why does Jane McGetigan talk about the need to fix reality? Shouldn't they look deep inside their own games and fix those first? And I don't mean the lag.

Leave aside the question of whether socializing in games and worlds is "better". One could easily argue that it is worse, and not do damage to upbeat studies about people passing game-funded "academic" studies about gamers being happier and more adjusted to...their game-world relationships.

What we have to realize about the entire game and virtual worlds industry, which is still in its childhood, is that it has the relationship to critical study now that, oh, Big Pharma has to studying the effects of say, seroquel on children. Not clean. Not without an agenda. Not thorough. Not enough. Not compelling. Not understood widely.

Much of this "thinking" is beautifully choreographed and produced, like a Hollywood show! -- at large game conferences funded by game companies or media or technology companies, and they're hardly going to be expected to study themselves very critically, now, are they?

I remember one of the Pet game makers at VW07, I believe it was NeoPets and not GoPets but I'd have to research this. In a way, it doesn't matter, because most game gods believe this way, too. Somebody in the audience asked something about why there couldn't be custom content or user-made content, and he got an indignant reply. The pet guy basically ranted a story that summed up this way: if you let in user content, you let in pedophiles. What's more important, the safety of children or the "rights" of child predators? He also implied that if you had RMT and open economies, the child predator was the end of the story, too. Because all kinds of people would have now an economic motive to enter the world, and that would mean danger to kids.

It was far better to have a world where "everybody could be on an equal playing field" than to have some people rich in real life be able to win because they could buy more stuff or get ahead financially. So the beatific vision of the utopian egalitarian world. You felt as if for this guy, exposing the kids to competition and capitalism could be on par with the horror of child pornography, such is the allergy to commerce you find among the game-god set (except, of course, their own commerce -- the old "no business but my business" ethic of Second Life).

These are the people you want to fix broken reality? Please, keep parliamentary democracy and a mixed economy in analog reality, anything but virtuality!

Of course, the catalogue of stuff that game-gods believe politically, ported from real life, include all kinds of stuff, whether it's about the dangers of Global Warming, the need to vote for Obama or the lack of proof of adverse effects from Video Games. It's all a very clustered and predictable set of ideas -- an ideology. It may not have "Moscow Gold" and a Soviet Central Committee to maintain its uniformity, but it doesn't have to: it has Twitter and GDC.

This massive conformity among software manufacturers hooked to the ability to massively affect consciousness of course is a barking horror that few people think about or realize because they don't see the old dinosaur media lumbering away.

Old mass media has ceased to be able to affect consciousness in meaningful ways to act -- or at least, has saturated it, and more cannot be expected.

For example, take the photograph on the cover of today's New York Times of a burned Darfurian village, torched by the Janjaweed in their scorched-earth tactics, and the quotations drawn from diplomats and humanitarian workers. (Oops, the picture of the aerial photo of a village is on the hard-copy paper edition; the online edition puts this way "below the fold" and puts a more fun thing appropriate to the morefunness of online, which is something about an SNL comedy.)

If Jerry and Raph were correct, just getting this picture and getting these quotes "out there" would be "enough". This picture is in every deli, supermarket, train station, suburban porch and corner news stand in America and much of the urban educated world. Is Darfur going to change tomorrow? No, and I can give you 20 reasons why if you ever want to have a serious discussion about it, but it has to do with all kinds of reasons, ranging from old ANC politics, the effects of Soviet Communism on Africa, to Islamicisim and the influence of the Arab world to the Chinese need for energy.

What if you could broadcast that picture into every game, every world, every log on message for 40 people tomorrow? Would that change it? No.

Fixing broken reality isn't about awareness, which is shorthand for "making Bush do something or getting Obama elected". Fixing broken reality has at least a gadzillion moving parts that all have names like "fix ANC influence in Africa" and "fix role of Egypt in the AU" and so on, among which, sure, there's "fix gulf between State Dept and National Security Council reporting and debating on Darfur" or whatever. Trust me, reality has a LOT of moving parts! Fixing one often breaks the script in another and delays that Wednesday patch.

What's good about Jane's *shudder* speech is that she isn't mad at people who make fun stuff, the way Raph is -- or even guilty. But you could argue that both might be better off sticking to games. They aren't elected. They don't have editorial boards. They don't have constitutions or bills of rights.

There is absolutely no mechanism in place anywhere, least of all in their games, to make them accountable to anything, even their own games. Here's where you have to answer one of Henrik's time capsule questions about what's wrong with Metaversal technology with a simple answer: "There's no no vote on the JIRA". There isn't any real democratic participation.

Look, you have to pay attention to these things and how they unfold, and to do that, you really do have to look at Second Life, which in a way, some would say is turning out worse than a UN bureaucracy with a tax policy set by the EU's concept of VAT; an art and culture policy set by Germany's and Belgian's pornography police; a banking and gambling policy set by the United States; and design that ranges from concepts of the Stalinist Soviet Union to Suburban Denver; and a crime and peace-keeping policy set by post-Dayton Albania. But...maybe that's ok. Maybe that IS fixing reality. Perhaps you can tell I've been reading PJ O'Rourke's Eat the Rich, which chapter by chapter, is just like Second Life.

Seriously, before powerful game gods lurch around with their powerful influence machines and "fix reality," I want a whole lot more to say about their games, and their plan for reality. To demand that accountability isn't to fuel a "Red Scare". It's to make people who have the resources and capacity to influence "the masses" to abide by the rule of law over themselves, so that they are not unaccountable and abusive. If they do think they can just drop ideological memes into the pool, they will find themselves facing something far harsher than a blacklist, given the equally powerful capacity of the Internet to go in the other direction away from their liberal memes.

The hysteria of HUAC and the damaging of people's careers profoundly scarred the nation for many years to come and ensured many good protective laws -- often threatened again now in post 9/11 Bush's America -- laws against witch-hunting or ideological vetting.

What doesn't emerge from the Wikipedia or popular non-fiction books, however, is the basis for the "Red Square" in the broken reality of the Soviet empire -- mass purges and atrocities, which both the domestic and international media lied about, or didn't cover.

Will ordinary people already softened up by becoming addicted to their favourite online game and becoming skill slaves and loot grubbers adapt to whatever ideological meme the game gods dictate to them with their new-found "consciences"?

I guess we're about to find out?

Comments

[avantgame]

Lol, hugs and kisses to you too Prokofky! I enjoyed the Wired article you were featured in last month. It puts a rant this list in context. xoxoxox

[Prokofy Neva]

Awaiting for someone to put YOU in context, hon. (PS for those of you watching at home, that's Jane "Let Me Fix the Real World For You".)

I'll bet she's never had to face anybody ever saying "no" to her in her life lol.

[Prokofy Neva]

Eek the scary part is she has fans, that say stuff like "Can you help us gamers save the real world?"

Gosh, just when we had all the lame assholes of the universe safely sequestered playing games, now they're about to be unleashed on us!

[jonas avaro]

Really makes one question if the world will be be a better place after "the revenge of the nerds and av squad outcasts" are "given" and "gladly" grab at "leadership" in the age of electric and the micro adding chip as the last hope for capitalism - American 20th century style-).

In gamer/ geek speak for those who are confused:

Capt. Kirk has left the bridge, Spock's in Command, Prok is playing Bones McCoy, and Spock's trying his best to figure out the big bad, but unless Kirk gets back into the center seat for the last 5 minutes of the show, the "Enterprise" is toast.

Jonas

[Prokofy Neva]

Capitalism is a good thing, Jonas, don't fear it. It pays you.

[Alex]

Our robots show http://yolto.com/FeedTopic.aspx?Id=87 that: Jane has a blog of her own and she even wrote about her presentation.

IMHO she's just a sincere young lady fascinated by what she's doing... and it's worth all respect. In a sense the words were just not for a public speech.

[len]

Change a mind. Change a vote.

Then what?

Jane is simply funny. She really believes what she is saying. That's ok. From Camelot to the Alice's Restaurant Masscacree to Just Say No and now "Yes We Can" movements talk about change but mostly they create yet another polarity. Polarities aren't resolved; they are managed. The question is who sets the goals. In every large system of selectors the relevant question is 'who chooses the choices?' and as you astutely point out, the game gods aren't up to this.

Jane is too young to get that. Don't put yourself out, Prok.

[Prokofy Neva]

Oh, please, Alex, of course they're for a public speech, she gave this talk at the annual gathering of th game-gods, called GDC, for crying out loud. It's very calculated, and it's a deliberate ploy to get noticed.

And sure, she could be irrelevant in the counsels of these Olympians or even the counsels of those who aren't even there but have bigger games and bigger fish to fry and who will make mincemeat of someone like that, but they'll let her talk and beam at her patronizingly and talk about the wonderful things Jane is doing.

I just think ideologically, she's a disaster going somewhere to happen and definitely needs a pushback. Example: I don't want some fraud who flies around to game conferences and tools around in their expensive real-life car in the Valley -- who burns more oil in a year than I might burn on bus-rides in a lifetime -- deciding energy policy by promoting games about evil oil companies. Ever notice how the serious gamers and non-serious subliminal-PC message gamers are always flying around to game conferences to hawk anti-oil-company games ROFL? I don't have any special fondness for oil companies and I'm quite aware of all the issues, but I want them publicly debated in some kind of accountable way with impartial information in media, not by extremist freaks.

With games, somebody like Jane thinks she's just found a way to seize the telegraph station, like Lenin, and be the one to put out all the messages, and that's what I don't like about the entire concept of using games to shape public policy.

The war of the new media on old media might have its charms in "empowering people for change" (they never reveal their hand about what they mean by "change" -- change to what? but we understand they mean "change from capitalism to socialism" lol).

But it mainly empowers the new media game/virtual world elite who are interested in bypassing the usual more cumbersome means of rule in democracy and inserting their own agenda everywhere, which is usually that strange amalgam of old-style hippie socialism and newfangled anarchocapitalism that suits the technolibertarians.

There's no "no" vote on the JIRA.

There's a movement of Serious Gamers who think much of themselves and who command budgets in universities, even if they don't command public policy. No one ever criticizes them. All of these people live in a bubble in which they imagine they are immune from criticism and they are doing God's own work on earth.

They array themselves against another set of people whom they believe are saying *they* are doing God's own work on earth -- the born-agains (nothing makes them go into a more rabid screech than the thought of people who believe in the Rapture). And they make a caricature of government and democracy in this fashion because they try to portray it as something that brings right wing religious nuts to power -- without the faintest clue why so many other groups in society would vote for a figure like Bush.

They are unable to be persuasive through real political and social movements that genuinely involve people so they substitute this with "persuasive games" as they call them, and drop in pre-packaged ideological agendas into a school or university program. They're like PACs, without any of the scrutiny, not subject to law.

Note the easy and effortless hubris going into her "royal we," trying to become "the voice of the game industry". Note how the fanboyz line up.

And the PowerPointy goals for life -- "feeling a part of something greater than yourself," a recipe for a cult.

The good news is that the real ideological agenda of Jane and others at GDC shines through so clearly once you get outside the magic circle, people either ignore them or will be vehemently opposed to them. But that's what I meant in this article, that it could then become a backlash that they'll wish they hadn't engendered.

[Alex]

:) Thank you for the clarification (no irony), now I see your point better. Loved this one: "...found a way to seize the telegraph station, like Lenin" :), this is sooo true, except for the fact that Trotsky commanded what you said, Lenin appeared with this phrase (about telephone and telegraph) in a propaganda movie when Trotsky was already 'banned from the bolshevik forum' :) hehe. But thank you for the morning laugh, the analogy is just great. :)

[Prokofy Neva]

Well it would be interesting to see, regarding the actual revolutionary moment, what different historians say about whether it was Trotsky who commanded it or Lenin.

But the point is, Lenin long had the idea that you must seize the telegraph posts in making a revolution, that it's the first thing you do. This is deeply ingrained into Russian culture, and that's why every time there's any kind of upheaval, there's sure to be some armed formation lurching toward the television towers.

[Alex]

Really, Prokofy, it was Lev Davidovich :). Lenin had noting to do with the operation, AT ALL (they were chasing him and he was hiding), Trotsky managed the whole thing and it was indeed HIS idea to grab communications and paralyze the banking. Banks were temples of that terrible 'offline RMT' :) hehe.

Meanwhile... hehe. How about another type and form of a game-related crazyness that we are discussing? here: http://yolto.com/admin/FeedTopic.aspx?Id=96
Would you mind (and be so kind to) comment on this (somewhat 'opposite' but kinda' 'the same' :) )
Don't bother appending the article on your blog (if there will be any) to this thing, it will be added automagically. :)

[Alex]

Sorry! http://yolto.com/FeedTopic.aspx?Id=96 this link.

[jonas avaro]

Mmm
Seize the networks...only 5 supersized media owners broadcast almost all of the mass media "content" of today.

And they own or will own/ partner with the mega isp/blog/web server folks.

Nothing to worry about.- capitalism at its best? or representational government at its worse?

As this time of balance is lost, the number of "blacklisted" and "unplugged" will be millions, not thousands in the good ole USA.

[Prokofy Neva]

Alex, I see you are a Trotskyite, but I don't trust your read on this. I'd like to see a variety of historical accounts and see all sides. Lenin was on the phone in Smolny. All the paintings show it. You can't say he was in hiding on that. ON the telegraphs, possibly, but I'd like to see all the evidence.

jonas, I realize it's a very closely-held religious belief of many leftist tekkies that there is this evil concentrated media out there owned by "only 5 companies". But...that's silly.

Pick up any media directory and study it. There are many smaller papers and independent papers all ove the world that play very important roles in keeping free press alive. If a Time Warner or something owns all these IPS and blogs, what of it? The blogs aren't really touched by the macros company at that level.

I don't see that you can properly claim that media will become more concentrated and suck in all blogs and social media. Things are always merging and de-merging.

If you don't like the way capitalism does free media with media concentration, I suggest you try reading Pravda for a season and not have any blogs to read and then you might change your mind.

I see you have one of those hysterical notions of victimhood of dissenters that so many leftists harbour, with so little reason. Um, could you point to a "blacklist" of some sort in the United States now that bars people from media in some way? I mean, I can think of one journalist in the last few years jailed for refusing to reveal a source. Contrast that with hundreds in other countries. You need to get a grip.

[jonas avaro]

"get a grip"....

Exactly what was said in Germany in 1929.

You dont see it.

It's ok.

It's still going to eat you.

"Blacklist"-How about the New Orleans phone book.?

"Blacklist" -How about the millions who need to pay for 4.00 gas to get to work vs the "luxury" of a 120.00 cable bill?

"Blacklist" - How about the 5 million uninsured and the 900 of them who showed up at a weekend "Doctors without Borders event" - not in Panama or Brazil- but in the USA a few months ago.

Blacklist?- Like "police action" it's a period word replaced in a culture who "wants" the "cnn war" and the "homeland security" offered by "chistians" in Brooks Brothers suits ever since the reality of the "evil doers" world was "discovered" again after 9/11/2001.

The grip is already here.

Too much "news" is the same as no news as well.
I know thats hard for you to understand but since I'm a simple "godless red",I guess I just see things I can't understand.:)

As any techie will tell you. the best way to close down a node- overload it.

The same techie and capitalist?;) will tell you - more is always better. Use it, or lose it.

An interesting method to enforce control, isnt it?

What amazes me most is that all the navel gazing and punditry around virtual worlds and SL are blogged by those who clearly are missing the point that we've created our world ever since we stopped being tiger food and started to create tools(technology)."
The only hope is that the shear "power" of the 24/7 media reality, like the shear power of the Atom before it, will frighten enough of "other regular folks;)" into the balance and moderation needed by a society that so easily can snuff itself out or destroy the "other" as we humans so regularly have done.

"other countries"? My dear Prok, we already ARE the other countries. Have been for ever.

Only as we "recreate" our society in a simulator like SL or a vr world tool do we finally see how the "other" in Russia or Germany or Cambodia is just like us.

Deconstruction of our true society is tough stuff to see.The illusion of it all being a game or number theory or patriotic jingoism is safe and all, but eventually the "other" is you.

jonas

[jonas avaro]

"If a Time Warner or something owns all these IPS and blogs, what of it? The blogs aren't really touched by the macros company at that level."

- they really are, and what of it? Sounds just like your fav state of Soviets.

"I don't see that you can properly claim that media will become more concentrated and suck in all blogs and social media. Things are always merging and de-merging."

-yes. they are as Pravda, or Newscorp can attest too.

BTW- even in free liberal hippie SF. All newspapers and media outlets are now owned and controlled by 2 media companies.
And that wasnt the reality just 5 years ago.

So we get more and we get less. Only the illusion of the other to help us decide which is better.

jonas

[Prokofy Neva]

jonas, your worldview is a terrible hobble, it really is. This evil horrid imperialist Bush ClearChannel media concentration SUV-driving carbon spewing thing you imagine happening is...because old media is dying, and it is huddling together for warmth. There are many, many things competing. My blog is obviously one of them.

Did Time Warner or Murdoch buy Six Apart lol?

[Alex]

Prokofy, I'm not a 'trotskite' as well as any other '...ite'. :) hehe. Just, by some accident I know f...ing russian history of that time way too well (on the archive documents level). :) Am trying to forget it all the time, but you remind me about it over and over again. :) hehe. Kidding, no kidding. :)

[jonas avaro]

six who? ;)

And yes warner just bought newline. so forget any hobbit(hobble) movies to be made..and never ever will 3 movies like the LOR be funded/and thus allowed to be created the same way again from a Warners.

Ss your blog competing? or will you at best be another matt drudge 2.0 -btw- paid for by FOX?

So far, only Conde Nast- via Wired- and yes also an owned "publisher" has used you for yucks...

As for "new" media being any differnt than OLD media, you really do have to read your own rantings, to see that not even you believe that:)

If you really believe that the BUSH machine or whatever you call it is going to be replaced by anything different because of "new" media then you are sadly afflicted by the same techie illusion's you rile against;)

If you cant see that the same corporations fund both ends of the "elected" parties then you really havent been watching the last 50 years.

Who are the real underwriters for your "new "Googles/ SLs/ Social 2.0s and VR worlds game companies?
the CIA/ military/ and NSA all via VC companies they set up in the mid 90s.

I asked a friend who was part of the earliest 3d web and vr industry who funds all the startups that created There, SL, and the other 3d games "engines"--shockwave 3d etc. The answer isnt the toy industry or hollywood. VR worlds. realtime 3d simulation/ data modeling all were military investments and in the last few year "homeland security" investments.

this is all sad. but true.

jonas.

[Prokofy Neva]

jonas, it's not very interesting debating people with extremist ideas and ideologies who believe there is a conspiracy of concentrated evil everywhere.

I simply don't see the evil you see lurking everywhere in the ownership of mass media. It doesn't bother me at the same level, nor am I at all convinced that some horrendous masking of the truth has taken place.

I have so much diverse media from all over the world I see everyday that I feel that any educated person with broadband has absolutely no excuse sitting around whining and moaning leftist nonsense like this.

This fake knowing smirk of the conspiracy believer becomes wearisome after awhile; you have trouble trying to place your fellow copyleftist Julian Dibbell into that hiearchy of evil that was the giant media machine of Conde Naste using me for yucks. Please spare me the drama.

New media isn't all that different. But it's different *enough*. I can remember the days when we struggled to get a 450 word letter to the editor into the NYT and had to try 25 times, or a 750 op-ed piece and had to try 50 or 100 times. Now I sit in my living and post a comment to their blog in five minutes and literally millions could read it. Sorry, that's a big, big difference, whatever your tinfoil antennae is rattling about today.

The CIA/NSC blah blah blah are not the "real underwriters" of virtual worlds, that's preposterous. They don't have the budgets. The few projects they have mounted pale in the amount of expenditures that say, CBS has made. Are you going to claim now that CBS is underwritten by Homeland Security.

I start to realize when I read crazy Internet nutter stuff like what you are spouting that I can't talk to you any more, because you are not capable of critical reasoning. You're only capable of cutting and pasting the wildest gossip that fits some pre-conceived silly leftist template.

Your friend has the same skewed, screwed-up wrong-end-of-the-telescope view as you, and as that jackass who was ranting in the MacArthur meeting about the US Military running everything.

By mounting such lame conspiracy theories, you're missing a) the real, non-virtual stuff that these US government agencies do, which is awful enough and b) missing the evils of the real actors funding this and their influence, which is awful enough.

But hey, I'm done with trying to talk to you, it has ceased to be educational.

[Prokofy Neva]

And that's the end of the line for you, jonas, you've posted here a number of times, and I thought "jonas avaro" was a SL name as it sounds like one -- but it isn't. There's no such name. I thought you had a blog website -- but I pressed on it, and it's some stupid generic ad site about fitness. I googled you -- you don't exist except for your posts here.

I hate that crap. If you want to spout extreme leftist Internet meme crap, you can do so, but put a SL name with it so you can take some responsibility in the community for this kind of nutter stuff. Or put a real life name or a blogger's recognizable name. I have the rules I do here to try to clean up the discourse from its usual Internet dreck to something where people create a freer and more thoughtful discuss by not imposing harassing language or extremist memes like this on people without taking responsibility for what they are doing.

You're welcome to sit in smug contentment with your media concentration stuff on yor own blog : )

[len]

Ummm... Jonas isn't completely wacko, Prok. Those agencies do have their own VC companies, do control bidder lists, do control approved standards and so on. Pushing technology to the emergence point is one of their jobs. Past the emergence point, they can't control it, but they don't want to or need to. They breed it first then release it in the wild. No not all, but a lot of what you see on your screens today do originate that way.

There has also been a phenomenal consolidation of big media for the last ten years. Sorry, but blogs can't touch the exposure or immediacy of a CNN or Fox. They are not without power but don't make the same mistake as Jane G. and assume you are in some elite with lots of clout. Fish and ponds, eh?

But it's been going on for a very long time and with the exception of the IP pirating (they do tend to finance companies that want to harvest IP from otherwise open projects), no harm is done and quite a bit of good tech comes out of these experiments. As a friend of mine from DARPA said, if one in 50 projects bears fruit, we hold a party.

Conspiracy paranoia: it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. It means you can't be sure which one of the many you suspect will get you first. :-)

It really comes down to who is elected and if that person has the clout to control the agencies. Jack Kennedy tried and failed. Lyndon Johnson succeeded because he had built a very powerful machine first. Nixon succeeded wildly and blew it with petty paranoia. Carter never had a chance. Reagan/Bush were very smooth at it. Clinton ignored it. Bush Jr abused it.

Does this sort of thing go on? Yes, both competently and incompetently. In that chasm are all the choices that make a difference.

But the influence does exist, is wielded, and they are very good at it. You would not have the web had DARPA not taken interest in a small project in CERN, then funded a university to build an original and free version of browser technology that was demonstrated to them prior to that built not for the web but for electronic manuals. This kind of cross-breeding is what they do very well and is exactly what they are funded to do.

The rabbit trails of technology development aren't smooth and don't make for good thrillers unless the backstory is ditched and the plot is way simplified.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ummmm yes he is, len. People who posit conspiratorially all these vast concentrated powers are making themselves victims. It's infantile to empower those entities in that way, and therefore let yourself off the hook to do something about it.

What part of "these defense agencies don't have anything like the budgets of a CBS" don't you understand? Can we point to a Department of Defense $7 *million* dollar expenditure on VWs like CBS dropped just on the Sheep and CSI:NY? Please.

I personally don't share ANY of the illusions that Jane *shudder* has about having seized any telegraph stations. Good Lord, I don't have a fraction of her audience, it's not like I'm speaking at GDC *cough*. But what we do have is important and not to be overlooked, the opening of papers like the Times to blog comments is very important. People are spoiled very easily by new media and don't realize what it was like before. Why, when I was a wee thing, we used to have to get up and thaw out the Internet every morning in a bucket of boiling water and walk 6 miles with it to plug it in.

This idea that it "comes down to who is elected" is one of those other infantalisms of the left. They always imagine the person who is chosen as president is someone who will thoroughly affect things from the top down, they make him responsible, and thereofre they demonize him or become ga-ga worshipful of him, it's truly puerile. What's more important are the advisers, line officers, etc. they bring along with them.

I very much believe in representative democracy and have none of the Snowcrash ethos about corporativist elite groups running things, but I am sanguine about the ability of elected officials to affect things especially beyond their borders in complex disasters.

This idea that you can chunk of reigns of presidents with facile statements like "Nixon blew it with paranoia" strikes me as uninformed. I guess you're not old enough to remember the slogan "Dick Nixon Before He Dicks You" on every telephone pole, and the Vietnam war.

CERN is not a product of the US Defense Department. CERN would be insulted to be characterized this way.

You've provided an important corrective for the likes of jonas, but I have to laugh at all this bull-session like stuff, it's not serious. There are plenty of works, including old-fashioned published books, on the origins of the Internet. To characterize the Internet as a conspiracy of American military power is a huge conceit. It's a conceit that leads you to false premises like: "All you have to do to control the Internet is to put Obama into power to control the American military" blah blah.

[len]

Ummm.... I'm 54, Prok, and I lived through all of that. Saying it short and sweet is not the same as being infantile. It means a comment is not the place to explain it all. BTW: Nixon copped George Wallace's positions, softened them a little, then grabbed the blue collar vote that still believed Peace With Honor was possible. What we got was Recession With Honor, and so history repeats itself. He had an iron grip on Washington protesters not withstanding. He settled the war, got us into China and off the gold standard. He was a good executive but a pathetic man. In the end, he admitted as much.

I didn't say DARPA sponsored CERN. DARPA sponsored Mosaic. Big diff. They had seen the markup-based browsers that predate Mosaic which were actually more advanced because they provided full-markup support and stylesheets and images (really plugins) years before HTML. Simpler won but not without a push from Uncle Sam. Even then, within a decade the browsers were surpassing the complexity of the pre-Netscape systems. Hypertext is not a field that sprung fully-formed from the web. It has a long history.

These are areas where I have quite a bit more background and expertise than you do, not to toot the horn, but to make it clear to you that there are people here who've been doing this work for quite a few more years than you have been involved. Ok? I'm not trying to prop up Jonas or the conspiracy theorists. I'm flatly telling you that technology breeding is a fact of government in every government. It isn't a conspiracy. It is your tax dollars at work. Without DoD funding you and I would be having this exchange on a rotary phone. Without DARPA funding, we'd be sending email from PINE.

If you understood the policies by which information is acquired and shared by the agencies Jonas mentions, you'd know that it very much depends on who you elect as to what gets shared and the means they will resort to. They collect but they do not distribute unless asked. They don't overstep policy without asking. They are professionals, not villains.

This is where you are being a bit naive and uninformed. I believe in democracy too, but I live in a republic and so do you. This is representative democracy. Vote smart because you live with it, impeach it, or assassinate it and no one likes that last bit, but the two people Obama is most compared to are JFK (elected, assasinated, a decade of incredible violent change follows) and Abraham Lincoln (elected, followed by the Civil War, then assassinated).

So frankly, I'd rather see them just voted off the island. ;-)

As to Obama, I'm a Hillary supporter. I don't think we need a movement. We need a competent executive to help us dig out. I've seen lots and lots of movements. Populism has a bad history of making real change in this country. I think should he be elected, some very nasty shocks are in store for your generation. Mine, we will watch and shake our heads because truly, each generation learns nothing from the one preceding it. It seems everyone has to make their own mistakes. Obama is Jimmy Carter with a smoother speech and Chicago thugs. That ought to be a real whoopee party.

[Prokofy Neva]

Len, Your mannerisms pronouncing on history are simply pompous, so it's good to push back. I do know something about Nixon voters as my parents were Nixon voters, my God, they were probably the only Catholics in the parish. We even had a treasured letter from Nixon in the high roll-top desk, imagine, with his signature.

It's precisely because you think you've been around the been and know it all, you need to be challenged. A person doesn't have to be an expert to challenge you. Imagine, I've been to CERN and climbed down in the depths to see the particle accelerator. I do know something about this field, surprisingly enough.

Please don't talk to me about government programs that support science. This is -- again -- something I happen to know at least a little about! So it's not persuasive to rant on and tell me that "the Internet" is "supported by the military" and then rattle on later knowingly, "Well, even though it isn't really, well of course it *is*..." Please. It's two-dimensional and wooden thinking. There are many factors that went into "the Internet"; if it were only for the military, my God, it wouldn't work as well as it does.

This kind of facile, arrogant, dense statement is typical of your sort, and why no one can find you credible: "It isn't a conspiracy. It is your tax dollars at work. Without DoD funding you and I would be having this exchange on a rotary phone. Without DARPA funding, we'd be sending email from PINE."

It's more likely I'm talking to you now because of ebay and amazon and Jeff Bezos and Pierre Omidyar -- literally, due to Second Life, and in the more abstract sense, due to commercial interest in in the Internet -- than your PINEs and your DARPAs.

Please don't tell me about hypertext, either, as I saw the first hypertext in Russia long before there was an Internet.

In fact, any reasonably educated thinking person of 50 or more who is in any kind of field related even tangentially to information is going to have a better grasp of all this than you -- because you are hidebound by your silo view of technology.

Here's the thing about Obama. I don't have any special love for Obama; his ties to communists bother me as much as his ties to Islamicists like Farrakhan. He's a mascot, a selectively bred mascot, for the moveon.org types and that's ok, they bothered, they raised the money and the consciousness, and they're entitled.

And it's a social movement, not a party, but that's ok, this country needs social movements. I don't believe they are "populist" just because they appeal to the populace. It's a social movement at a time when there really should be one due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and overall the war on terror.

Why? Because there always should be social movements of conscience against wars, because, oh, war is not healthy for children and other living things. So it's all good.

Hillary represents the kind of corrupt Democratic machine that gets you into wars, not out of them and I don't think is adequate to the awesome task of leading a movement of conscience about the war in Iraq (which is what it must be above all: a movement of conscience).

Perhaps Obama will succeed -- great, this country needs 4 years of better good will with Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Can't hurt. Might help.

Perhaps Obama will fail -- then he will be a mitigating force on McCain. Can't hurt. It's actually a great election, you can't lose either way.

I wonder why "my generation" at the age of 51 is somehow in a different category than "your generation" at the age of 54. There was some, um, generation gap there in those 3 years???

Obama is not about Chicago thugs, or at least, not only about Chicago thugs. He's about sectarian leftists, and they're awful, let me tell you. But I'd rather have them out in the open than under cover as they are with Hilary.