Me Myself and My Blog

All the bellyaching over Dave Winer has eroded an ever deeper hole in well-worn channels of Winerbashing. But, step out of the arroyo, and more interesting implications and complications emerge.

For example: Dave's gesture unsettled not only a few thousand blogs, but a bunch of unquestioned assumptions about the mode, habits, residence, control, property rights, host and parasite obligations of blogs, bloggers, and coders. Many of these questions are still unadjudicated about general matters on the web, as Professor Lessig keeps reminding us, so why should we start from anger derivative of a host of assumptions about what Winer owes us, or we him, and what blogs are anyway?

Why not imaginatively interrogate some of the deeper folds inside the car crash choreographed by Winer? Who owns a blog? and what ever gave us the idea that blogs, the most ephemeral of writing modes, are supposed to be permanent, or even to enjoy the stability which is necessary for permanence to exist? We're talking about bubbles in a limitless amazon of code.

Why do we write venemously from the standard, tedious, bourgeois position of proprietary homesteaders? I might be wrong. I was under the impression this entire experiment -- at least before MS and AOL thought it was cool -- was supposed to expand how we, our texts, our persons and languages and extensions might become, interact, change, and otherwise autopoetically expand and revise and connect in an exploratory mode. What we have mostly accomplished instead has been to establish a space for egos to exercise their matchless but up to now sadly underappreciated skills in punditry.

Aaron Swartz registers this disappointment in his own suggestive way:

So what is the coolest, newest use of the Internet? Why it’s weblogs, of course, where people can clog up the Web with daily emissions of static documents written by one person. We’ve come a long, long way together, indeed.

If I were the God of Blogs, would I be tempted to open a few spigots in the sky?

As for who owns a blog, or the work of the blog, again, the prevailing notion has all but obliterated any discussion of other views. Iago, stimulated by comments by Jeneane Sessum, points to Seb Paquet asking who owns a weblog's content, where a lively discussion surrounds the argument of whether Invisible Adjunct has the "right" to make her work disappear. Iago frames it this way:

Seb Paquet questioned the blogger as a source of value and treated the blog itself as a separate object entirely, one deserving of respect and preservation, precisely because its development over time resulted in something that is not simply a product of a single blogger but of a network of relations in which the blog itself was an important actor with whom people had constructed meaningful and important relationships.

These considerations deserve some reflection. Instead, they mostly get slammed down by self-appointed Regents of the Blogosphere whose blistering authority is beyond reproof. It is this drive to closure - a sort of instant orgasmic finalization of every question the newness of blogging has raised - that has, I believe, helped reduce the interest and diversity of the mode to a normative state of middle class torpor. I swear. It's almost as bad as television.

So there. And that's why I am not entirely having fits over Dave Winer. We blather on about disruptive techologies, but when someone actually disrupts our precious bourgeois soapbox, Katie bar the door. Even RB is getting on Winer's case. What happened to "Break your company"?

Angry dispossessed bloggers have begun threatening Dave Winer with class action suits (see comments here). So Dave is on target, according to RB's admirable business plan:

"The second milestone in the Stage One process (and the really important one) is the shareholder lawsuit."

By this metric, Dave's just been sticking to the program. This morning's promise of relief might not win him new friends, but is sure to derail the Titanic Deck Chair Rearrangement Model. Just when we were getting somewhere.