The wonderboy Umair Haque is someone I've long had on my to-do list to take on, because he's really one of the preeminent technocommunists disguised as a cool new media entrepreneur who has endless capacity (and funding) from the large ad agency Havas, Harvard and the conference circuit to spread his bad ideas all over the Internet. I've seen him crop up here and there on Twitter, usually in some ecstatic post by some middleaged white tech guy in Silicon Valley with a hard-on for a younger 30-something brown guy who seems "entrepreneurial" and "start-upy". There's a lot of that love-hate stuff that goes on between the old white Christian or Jewish white guys in Silicon Valley for the Hindu boys, as they acquire a greater presence on the scene, have you noticed? It's because the guilty white-guy liberals get to PC-love a minority this way, but a minority that has an engineering degree and wants a tech-start up visa, and doesn't place social demands as other minorities might. But despite this great middle-aged white guy/young Indian guy collaboration, the Indian gets uppity and the white guy becomes bitter.
But it's also because white guys are out of ideas, especially American white guys who aren't as well educated as non-white guys in Europe, or for that matter, even in Asia these days. So you get people who become adoring, uncritical fans of Umair's system, like this blogger, simply because they've never seen a coherent system in all their half-paragraph media pablum diet.
But wait. I though Umair or his ancesters were from India. But maybe he is Pakistani? French? Or Palestinian? Or maybe he's Black Irish? You're not supposed to care or know, but it's part of that anonymous Internetry nowadays that cleverly in fact avoids, even in a deluge of information, any explication of one's "roots" by appealing to a new transnational identity of cyberspace. Like the Soviets created with homo Sovieticus, "beyond" nationality.
So it's partly because of the smartness and sophisticated Haque *system* that I've been waiting to study more, and bring my "best game" so to speak to a critique. But now, as he spreads and spreads with only very, very rare criticism, like this hilarious post, I think I'll still try to do my shabby best to counter him.
Umair has achieved a modern miracle: he has *no Wikipedia entry*. Can you imagine? A guy this famous, at Harvard, at all the major conference, endlessly blogging and being retweeted, endlessly flooding his memes and "change agency" and "thought leadership" to the masses and he *has no Wikipedia entry at all* -- like a vampire that cannot be seen in a mirror. Uncanny. Usually people like this make vanity Wikipedia entries of themselves, but he's avoided that, possibly because he couldn't avoid people then changing the text, even under the draconian arcane editing rules of Wikipedia.
That "Wikipedia-free" Internet presence is something that Edelman and other major ad agencies know how to ensure for their people. Nowhere do you see anything about Umair but this very spare bio: "Director of the Havas Media Lab. He also founded Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique that shaped strategies across media and consumer industries."
So it is hard to tell who he is, where he was educated, what his past jobs might be, etc. and hard to understand how he came to his socialist anti-capitalist views, which I call "technocommunist" to reflect their renovation in the technical age -- of course he and his fanboyz strenuously deny that they are socialist/communist and insist that they are healthy and robust capitalists but merely want to "reconstruct" capitalism and make it "constructive". Like Constructivism itself, its roots are primarily in a mixture of karma mysticism, utopianism, old-fashioned collectivism, ecstatic group-think and merging with the masses as one, and of course, a prominent role for an avant-garde that will lead these masses in their "deep democracy.
Interestingly, without me having to do a thing, Umair has now come under fire -- by none other than the TechCrunch people who you would think have had him in awe. I guess sometimes Arrington's bunch have to behave like journalists, because they simply reporte that when Umair interviewed Ev of Twitter fame at the fabulous SWSX, people actually walked out of the keynote. Imagine walking out from the keynote of the founder of the most talked-about, revolutionary device since, well, Facebook! I'm waiting for someone to point me to a video of this to get the nuance, because frankly, while the transcript makes Umair up to be a prancing self-promoting ninny, it doesn't seem as if he overshares *that* much.
In any event, Umair is also getting lots of retweet love because he's now been babbling about the overselling of social media and the disappointment of the Internet.
It's actually a very, very telling that Umair's manifestos and credos are under serious fire from reality, and really indicates a crisis of the soul for this particular comrade. Yet, true to form, instead it is greeted as penetrating insight and business acumen.
I replied, but I got erased, not surprisingly, by this no doubt thin-skinned geek. Here's my rejoinder:
You know what I think your problem is, Umair? You put such strenuous, utopian faith in these technocommunist tools of social media that you are only discovering now that even the "collaboration" (collectivization) and "community" (group-think) that you thought they'd give you are turning out to be not so fabulous. That's because, well, the communal group-think online isn't such a great thing when it turns out not everybody thinks as you do. Didn't plan on that, did you?
You're finding that it's not just you and your elite liberal friends at Harvard and the Berkman Center and such who get to run this social media to create mass followers for yourself, but everybody, with all kinds of beliefs and levels of culture, and gosh, there's more of them than you.
You're like Clay Shirky running around shouting "Here Comes Everybody" when he could incite the mobs to kill establishment newspapers and spread socialism, but as soon as the everybody *really* came, he suddenly began talking about the need for filtering and curation.
Your downright snobby and snotty hatred of Farmville is just plain ignorant trash. Farmville has 75 million players. They are of wildly different levels of education and culture. Many females, and older females play this game because it's *fun*. They like it because they have something to doodle with and share with friends. They find it compelling and social and they like it. Your hatred of it is merely a marker for your own aggressive, elitist cultural warfare against people you don't like.
Guess what. The reason they call it social media is because it is social, and that doesn't mean the avant-garde imposing socialism. All kinds of people get to use it for whatever value they find in it, and if it isn't the high art that you fancy yourself and your friends promoting, so what? You don't get to decide what is of value, the market does, and gasp, it still works pretty well despite the recession and the socialist bailouts you love to incite as the end of capitalism.
You have so many *bad ideas*, Umair, truly. I'm going to take your Manifesto apart line by line on my blog. Chief among them is the idea that human nature can change or become "better" or that people who care about beauty contests are doing something wrong, evil, wasteful, etc. Leave people alone to do their thing. Get your hands off the levers of social media. You do not rule it.
Nobody wants to friggin' be *rewired* (ugh!) by the likes of you. Paws off.
In my next post I will take on Umair's dreadful "Generation M" manifesto...
"The promise of the Internet wasn't merely to inflate relationships, without adding depth, resonance, and meaning. It was to fundamentally rewire people, communities, civil society, business, and the state — through thicker, stronger, more meaningful relationships. That's where the future of media lies."
lol. sure it was.
Posted by: cube inada | March 27, 2010 at 06:47 PM