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It's been fun knowing you all on the Internet, but the party's coming to an end unless we start lighting up the phones at Congress.
What Would a Non-Neutral Internet Look Like?Excerpts of a debate between an amazon exec and Telco spokesman/hack Mike McCurry here.
by Matt Stoller, Mon Jun 19, 2006 at 01:18:36 PM EST
Ok, it's March, 2008. You go to your computer and open your Verizon-supertier browser, and everything comes at you with blazing speed. You access your bank, NBC news, Andrew Sullivan's blog through Time.com, and check your email. You watch the last five minutes of Scary Movie 7, which you fell asleep watching the night before. Pretty cool.
Then you remember your best friend set up a new blog about her band and asked you to check it out. It's kind of irritating, because she set it up on the slow tier. You minimize the Verizon browser, open up Firefox, and type in the web address. It takes thirty seconds to load. Ugh. The site's fine, and there are some cute pictures of her band performing in a dive bar. You click on a song, and the browser begins loading the first minute of the song. After twenty seconds, you curse the fact that she didn't pay to be on Verizon's internet, and you close the browser. You're even thinking of canceling your slow-tier internet account, since shelling out the $45/month for that plus the $29/month for Verizon super-tier isn't worth it.
Welcome to a non-neutral internet.
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The net neutrality fight is coming to the Senate this week, with the Commerce Committee set to mark up the bill on Thursday. If you live in one of these states, call your Senator. We need strong net neutrality provisions in any telecom reform bill, and those that came out in the second draft over the weekend are not acceptable.
Chairman Ted Stevens (AK), (202) 224-3004
John McCain (AZ), (202) 224-2235
Conrad Burns (MT), Main: 202-224-2644
Trent Lott (MS), (202) 224-6253
Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX), 202-224-5922
Gordon H. Smith (OR), 202.224.3753
John Ensign (NV), (202) 224-6244
George Allen (VA), (202) 224-4024
John E. Sununu (NH), (202) 224-2841
Jim DeMint (SC), 202-224-6121
David Vitter (LA),(202) 224-4623
Co-Chairman Daniel K. Inouye (HI), 202-224-3934
John D. Rockefeller (WV), (202) 224-6472
John F. Kerry (MA), (202) 224-2742
Barbara Boxer (CA), (202) 224-3553
Bill Nelson (FL), 202-224-5274
Maria Cantwell (WA), 202-224-3441
Frank R. Lautenberg (NJ), (202) 224-3224
E. Benjamin Nelson (NE), (202) 224-6551
Mark Pryor (AR), (202) 224-2353
"Its a political fantasy world and unless you're in the Tolkien family, those worlds end and end badly."
From Steve Gilliard:
You know, I sit back, watching the news media and consultants shit their pants over Kos and I have to laugh. They're worried if Warner has too much influence, why they don't like Hillary Clinton, why does he have such influence. They're dragging the party to the Bush-hating far left.Update: Speaking of Counterpunch, co-editor Alexander Cockburn has a few choice words about lefty bloggers.
They just don't get it.
Bush-hating? I can introduce you to some widows and Gold Star Mothers who hate Bush with a white hot flame, who are not from the Sheehan and Berg families.
Far left? Uh, Counterpunch is that way.
That's not the issue here. Those are just cheap terms by scared people.
If they had a clue, they would realize that Kos is just the pointman for a lot of extremly unhappy people, and that efforts to diminish him is well, pointless. Because he's not the issue, it's his site, and his site can be replaced. But what's behind that site can't be.
The right and the media were just fucking jealous at Yearly Kos, looking to pull it apart because the peasants have entered the room. How dare they have big parties, they aren't consultants.
No, they're average people who are no longer apathetic and don't like what they see in politics No more bitching to friends, no more whining to the spouse. They can get involved and make a difference. And that's a gift to this democracy. It may not seem it on K Street, but Bush is a petty, Oedipal man, driven to succeed over the bodies of the dead. He will fail, and when he fails, the odds of the 25th Amendment coming into play increases exponentially.
We cannot continue with politics as usual, because it's the politics of denial. We deny the truth about everything around us and act shocked when it doesn't work out. Health care, no problem, Iraq, no problems, dependent on immigrant labor, no we aren't, ship them back. Sex tell them no.
Its a political fantasy world and unless you're in the Tolkien family, those worlds end and end badly. We will be coming to account and it won't be pretty.
So what happens, you have the whiny-ass titty babies like Jake Tapper whining about Media Matters, and the breck girl of the right, Byron York wondering if Kos is on the pad.
Let me send this message to the consultant class right now, the right will miss it. You do not have to worry about Kos, Atrios, Matt Stoller or anyone else, certainly not me. We are not your problem. It's enough to control what's posted to our blogs on a daily basis.
Our readers, otoh, are a different story. They hate you, they would like nothing better than to drive you from business and into penury. They would hunt you down like dogs and seize your homes. They blame you for ruining America. Bloggers are just conduits for the feelings of lots of people. You confuse the two at your peril. Anyone who thinks our readers are docile slaves, well, they're nuts. They can challenge us like it was a sport. Parse our words like lawyers. And you can never tell what will drive someone nuts.
Piss them off and you've got a problem. We know, we've all done it. Kos has been the scene of nasty fights, same with most sites. Our readers hold us accountable in a way which would make Jake Tapper cry.
It was the readers who propelled the Lamont bid, not the blogs. At best, we're pointmen for a lot of ordinary people. People forget that at their peril.
Cory Arcangel: "In collaboration with Galerie Lisa Ruyter and the museum in progress, I have placed a horizontal rule of gif smilies onto the Wein & Co building in Vienna..."
From the museum in progress website: "Cory Arcangel's stripe is based on 'horizontal rules,' horizontal lines of images which were common for early webpage designers to divide their webpages horizontally."
That's the front story and the back story. How many people walking down the street in Vienna will recognize that line of smileys as kitsch from the early vernacular web, to use Olia Lialina's phrase? I don't care--I like the utter banality of this piece whatever the viewer gets from it. I'm guessing it's invisible to the passerby, and there's something really beautiful about that. On the other hand, maybe it has a slightly alien quality that makes it pop (that's a verb) out there on the street. That's the curse of reacting to work from secondhand sources: we just don't know.
Update: For the Lisa Ruyter referred to in this post see Francis Ruyter.
Young art consumers viewing the collaboration I did in Toronto with John Parker. The exhibition is "Mods & Rockers." The videos are documented here and the audio is here.
"Suite 6 (Almost Live)" [mp3 removed]. An older tune I had adapted for a live playing situation when I did my lecture/performance on May 19. It's "rougher" in that the Sidstation gets glitchy when you change patches and turn knobs aggressively. In doing a studio version of the live version (of the studio version) I did some overdubbing, but it still has more of a live feel of egotistical musicians stepping on each other.
An important factoid omitted from my talk (because I just learned it)--the company that makes the drum machine (Vermona/HDB) used to be the state synthesizer company of the former East Germany.