Cobb

MyBrilliantShit.com

I just thought of a remarkable thing. In light of what the Facebook experience has become for a lot of people, imagine what the other side of your own input would be.

That is to say, imagine that your N Facebook friends were opt-in customers to MyBrilliantShit.com and you were subject to privacy regulations and contact rules, etc. Every time you said something on Facebook, you would be spamming those customers. Every time they like your pictures, complaints, aphorisms, and advice they are staying opted-in.

But one dislike and you lose them for good. They opt-out of MyBrilliantShit.com and you will likely never hear from them again. This is a technical description of 'friend' and it is a liberal application of marketing and privacy rules that are programmed into Facebook defining the relationship between you and your 'friends'.

I am coming up with new concepts for this relationship definition based on the idea of 'circles of trust' but other bases as well. But my point today is that as much as you might hate Facebook's political / fake news blasts that you are subject to, you have it way better than actual online marketers.

Also tangential to this, I thought about the difference between working for a company selling a solution and a small group coming up with a solution when I changed careers in 2001.

When you are selling a solution, you are responsible for telling large numbers of different people the same thing slightly adjusted. It is one kind of information relationship. When you are building a solution, you work with the same people and are responsible for telling many different things to the small group. Something to keep in mind wrt rules for communication.

Bring Blogs Back

Everybody who thinks about it knows it to be true. Social media isn't working the way we thought it would. 

There are a lot of reasons. Some are simple and some are rather complex. But let's look at the simplest reason and to my mind, one of the most important. You don't own your own words. When you live on Facebook's property, you don't own your own words. They can be deleted by someone other than you. They can be banned by someone other than you. You can hardly even know what you said a year ago by searching for it. I don't mean to suggest that Facebook alone is capable of this, but it is the 900 pound gorilla. The same things are true of Twitter and the comments sections of hundreds of new media outlets. 

When it comes to participating in the debates that a free and open society require, these social media spaces do not facilitate. That is not why they exist. That is not their business model. They were not created to sustain collaborative thought, but to let everybody connect in social ways. They are not town halls so much as they are gas station bathrooms on the information superhighway. They serve everybody without much discrimination, but their facilities often stink. Sometimes you wonder who came in here to write what you see on the walls, and you cringe. No matter how many bots or attendants you apply to a roadside rest stop, it will never become a town hall. That's something you design from the ground up. Social media needs a redesign.

However, there was a moment of glory in the past in which the level of discourse broadly available to the internet public was better than it is now. That was the age of the blogosphere. As MySpace was dying and Google experimented with something called Orcut, which became very popular in Brazil, the American scene was beginning to get a taste of blogs and bloggers. It was a feast of alternative information written by individuals or edited contributions of blog leagues that set the American political world on fire. It was a place for writers, and it still is. 

As a veteran of early internet sites like The Well and Cafe Utne among others, I have been fortunate to have met some of the most exciting and informative writers anywhere. My history goes back to bitnet, Fido and Compuserv. Since there has been an online, I have been there. And so I have witnessed the temptations presented to bloggers to become more mainstream as previously paper only media publications moved online. Who would not, having become influential on their own, want to become even more influential as a syndicated columnist? And so many of the best bloggers moved on out of self-publication to sponsored work. I cannot say whether or not that affected the quality of their writing or if they have been edited into corners. But it did violate one of the key aspects of the blogosphere itself, which was full individual control. 

A blogger has many responsibilities aside from writing, one of which is to police their comment sections. One needs to decide whether or not to accept paid advertising. One has to decide which other blogs to link to using the novel idea of the trackback process. One has to periodically update the design, and of course one has to pay for their blog to be hosted. I've been paying 15 dollars a month for over 15 years. In 2007, there was a such thing as the Black Blogger of the Year Award dedicated to the late blogger Aaron Hawkins. I won that year owing to my extensive coverage of candidate Barack Obama and the insightful conversations I was able to host at my blog. These days I have about 900 friends on Facebook. Those days I had 1500 hits a day. The greatest responsibility to my mind was to foster the proper environment for conversations that would live on the blog. To welcome the right kind of interlocutors and to push trolls away, to steer debate towards productive an insightful conversation, to entertain tangents that are useful and yet keep the related ideas corralled. It was work. Creative, rewarding work. It required skin in the game, not some disingenuous promise to promote free speech contingent on the arbitrary goodwill of advertisers and marketing networks. 

Today I engage with many of the same writers I've known for 20 years online at Facebook. Many of us are getting tired and have enjoined a litany of complaint. Fake news, censorship, filter bubbles, defriending and the ever present trolling and flame wars are on our frustrated minds. But I think the most egregious problem in social media is its abbreviation.

I don't speak Emoji. And unlike the editors of The New York Post, I can't very often come up with a catchy headline to tweet out. I may be verbose even for an essayist, but the things I find of interest require more than two or three sentences to say. I think that is true of all of human affairs. People should not be forced into abbreviated descriptions of their ideas and their selves by the constraints of social media. I want to be responsible for the claims I make, so having them disappear after I post them serves no good purpose. Abbreviation of time is unacceptable. It's not as if the world doesn't have enough disk space in the cloud to handle all of our words, or even all of our digital video. So why should I have less than everything I want to say be referenceable in an opus of compositions over the years? Why should I not have every objection or agreement from everyone who wants to react to my compositions as well? I get that with my blog. I do not get that with Reddit or WhatsApp. The complexity of human affairs requires more space and time than social media adequately facilitates. It's no wonder that people are so frustrated.

When Google killed Google Reader, the use of RSS syndication of blogs and other online periodical publications fell to a variety of inferior tools. But now an outfit called Feedly handles it well. I still follow a selection of excellent writers in what remains of the blogosphere. Medium.com has also become a popular place for writers in all sorts of subjects. But the domination of social media over the average person's internet reading is beginning to grate on everyone's nerves. I hope to remind people that there are still cultured and informative places of respite from the oligopoly of the mainstream social media, and it is worthy and capable of supporting us all. 

I call on developers to revisit the innovations of the blogosphere and to move forward in their further development. I give props to Typepad and the other blog ecosystems for the steady platforms they have provided for years of reliable operation. I encourage writers new and old to get into blogging and recreate and renew what we know the medium of blogging can do to inform and delight. I call on devotees of the well crafted word and visual arts to put your best work forward. I call on editors in the mainstream to spend time outside of the world of compromise for wealthy producers and nurture and support organic writers in this decentralized medium. 

We must own our own words. We must resist censorship. We must facilitate real informative debate. We must not be policed by bots and algorithms. 

We have done better. We can do better again. Bring blogs back. 

 

 

How to Beat the Trolls

Right now I'm sitting in my comfortable leather chair listening to the new Bad Plus + Joshua Redmond album on my Jambox. The music is good, really good. I know it's good because I have good taste in music, and I'm bored of music that doesn't have such melodic density and rhythmic sophistication. I don't need Reddit to tell me that it would be good, but I might have found out if I went there. I know enough Jazz to be a decent critic, and if there were 50000 ranked jazz critics in America I'd be in that number. If you wanted to get the consensus of the top 100 jazz critics on this particular album, you'll never find it on Reddit.

How do you rank a jazz critic? 

Well one thing you don't do is rank them by novelty or popularity. You have to read them and listen to the music they listen to and engage in a decent discussion with them. It's something that can be done on the internet, but it is not the kind of process that is supported by the lame, one-dimensional chat systems that are the majority of webchat systems that exist. 

If you've ever graded term papers, you have an idea of how that process works. Let's call it peer review. I don't consider myself an expert or formally familiar with academic peer review processes, but I do know something about decision making systems. I've been involved with building such systems for nearly 30 years now. I do know that you won't get the 100 top jazz critics on Reddit doing peer review because those rare jazz critics, experts as they would be, would not have the stomach for dealing with trolls. In short, trolls are not the peers of experts, and most every webchat forum on the internet assumes that we all are peers or that we want to be peers. 

This wasn't always the case. Once upon a time on the internet there was a phenomenon called blogging. You may have heard of it. The best blogs were group blogs and the best individual blogs had blogrolls or belonged to blog leagues. We called it the blogosphere and we had a great system called 'trackback' that allowed us, for moments of insight to attach our ideas and remarks to other blogs which might be outside of our designated blogrolls or blog leagues. The most important thing about how these blogs worked was that we allowed authors to choose their own peers. The second important thing about the blogosphere was that authors retained the right to ban commenters. These are controls that were vital to maintaining the willingness of people who knew what they were talking about to engage with the anonymous public.

If you were a commenter at Little Green Footballs, you would never bother to try to comment at Fire Dog Lake, and vice versa. There were Red and Blue blogospheres and each kept the other in mind, yet stayed out of each other's hair. As apart as they remained, they easily found a way to stick to the same range of topics. 

Now we know that blogs have failed to retain popularity in the wake of the signing of major bloggers to larger, more mainstream publications as well as the creation of megasites like Huffington Post. Surely Facebook has taken a lot of comment traffic away from traditional blog/salons like Cafe Utne. Surely Reddit has eaten away at Salon's readership. Slate gave up on comments altogether, so it seems. All of these places have their own character and temperament. Authors, editors and commenters all have their levels of patience with each other. So it comes as no surprise that megasites that have aggregated all of the previously more well-situated commenters and their eyeballs into their virtual streets are going to have more muggings in their virtual alleys. So long as the people who run these sites refuse to use their panoptic powers to block miscreants, they will suffer.

If you ask me, it takes a lot of nerve to suggest that a site with 50,000 members is stifling free speech by getting rid of 1000 trolls. It's not as if the internet is suddenly going to miss an argument about any subject when there are literally hundreds of online publications and hundreds of thousands of blogs out there. Yet today we hear that 'the trolls are winning'.

Now I know that some fraction of America wants to know, since I'm standing up on my hind legs and saying so, that I would probably still be on USENET's Soc.Culture.African.American if the blogosphere hadn't emerged and given me the control I need as an author to kill trolls dead. I say so as black American blogger who has won the award for best black blog, and as a host at Cafe Utne, a well known commenter at Slate and Salon, and as a member of the legendary online community the WELL. I've dealt with trolls from day one.

Here's how to get rid of them in one word: Discriminate.

One. Personna Non Grata.
If you give people the opportunity to boot people they don't like, then those people will be booted. Simple. A community is not a community if membership means nothing. Good fences make good neighbors, and since we're human beings, sometimes we have to call the cops. The best cops are the people themselves. Let commenters vote other commenters off the site. Make it a topic. Let people vote.  

Two. Charge money. 
I have yet to see any website that asks for everybody's two cents in the comment sections do so much as charge two cents. I can use a credit card or Apple Pay or PayPal  to buy an order of french fries at McDonalds, and McDonald's believe it or not gets billions of french fries sold. If I can troll people for free and lose no money for doing so, why not?

Three. Scribbling
Losing money is easy. Some people will actually find it worth it to pay a membership fee if they get to troll at will, get kicked off and troll again. So erase the content of the troll. Poof. Online graffiti should be erased.  

Four. Houses.
If your webchat is big enough to have a wide enough diversity of opinion such that people will get on each other's nerves. Let people self-select themselves into houses of like-minds and temperaments. If people want, therefore, to be in the Nazi house, then let them have that house which is read-write for members and read-only for non-members. Nozi comments stay in the Nazi house which can be ignored by anybody who chooses. The Nazi house can have it's own standards and can PNG anyone who isn't pure Arayan. 

You cannot wish for a better public. They're going to be who they are. Let people say what they will say and make a real community, not some unpoliced anarchic 'public square'. It's awfully presumptuous to think that discrimination against trolls results in the suppression of the free flow of ideas in an open society. All you have to ask yourself is one thing, is a troll your peer?

One Step Closer to War TV: LRA Crisis Tracker

For some time now, I've been promoting neoconservative ideas about geopolitical grand strategy with concepts such as The Last ID,  Least Favored Nation, Global Felonies and WarTV. 

WarTV

When you show some idiot cracking his nuts from a fall off a skateboard onto a handrail, you generally have to have a disclaimer 'dont try this at home'. When you show somebody's head smacking the pavement after having been shot with an automatic rifle, the warning is superfluous. Slapstick is what it is, and so is brutality. If we showed enough of War TV, our regular instincts would jump in and we would not need the editorial so much. 

Just the other week, a girl fight in a McDonalds had the chatting classes afire with a thousand opinions, clustered into three categories. But wasn't that a waste of bandwidth, or testimony to how civilized we actually are over here in the States? I tend to believe the latter and I do so by keeping our mortality stats in mind.

War TV. It will be coming.

I've also jumped on other bandwagons like Gapminder. The point is that I think it will be inevitable that the next generation of geopolitics can and will be crowdsourced by our bourgie tastes. The important question will be Who Is Your Leviathan? But I'll finish that essay in the future.

In the meanwhile the meme of Kony 2012 is yet another instance of the American instinct towards bourgeois neoconservative intervention. One of these neat tools that helped this lightning movement along is the LRA Crisis Tracker. Check it out. Oh and it wasn't invented by Vivek Kundra. 

I should also bring to your attention that this is structured data (experts talking about something) which is what I do for a living. Facebook and Twitter are unstructured data (nobody in particular talking about everything), which is what makes today's billionaires.

A Visit to the Aquarium

James Fierce added me to his G+ circles yesterday. I kind of went on a rant about the latest outcropping of a diversity jones. Apparently some folks in Silicon Valley have got the fever for the flavor. Like CNN, they are running a special series on something to do with race. 

In 2008 I won the Aaron Hawkins Award for best black blog. I am proud of that achievement. It was a recognition I didn't seek, and I got it for doing what it is I do without any conscious effort other than the standing commitment I have to be the best writer I can be, engaging subjects of interest to me here in the blogosphere. 

I have been writing online since before the invention of the 'digital divide'. There are only a few black writers who have been as many places as I, for as long as I have been. Back in the 80s I was on bnet, the XeroxBlackNetwork, the Drum, SCAA (for whom I wrote the FAQ), SCAA-M. I have been at Compuserve, Prodigy, The Well, Meanderings, Electric Minds, cafelosnegroes, Salon, Cafe Utne (for whom I served as a Society proctor), Slate's Fray and the Mote, Brainstorms, and finally to Cobb, this blog now going on eight years. I have seen every flavor of race discussion and written about all the major controversies to the points of fulfillment, exasperation, and tedium. Furthermore, I have been featured on TV and radio. The only way you get to be better known than me as a black writer is to pursue that distinction with a vengeance as a livelihood. I would like to believe that I am as well known as I am, for what that's worth, because of quality, not because of marketing. I can't explain it more simply that this, I am a black American writer who is famous, not by design or effort, nor by accident or random chance. I am organic. It's all about the content.

I have resisted publicity and marketing for several reasons, the most important of which is that I cannot imagine a situation in which I could be positioned properly. That means I cannot imagine someone walking up to me, recognizing my work for what it is and giving me the >100k reasons per year my technical work gets for my attention. But even if that problem were solved, I think I already know the size and shape of the market that finds 'black American writer' appealing, and I'm convinced that it cannot afford me the sort of respect I would consider appropriate. Maybe Trey Ellis is doing OK. Maybe Ferai Chedeya is getting paid. I hear Zadie Smith is making out nicely and I can't imagine that Colson Whitehead is in exile anywhere outside of his own mind. Let them represent, and give a shout out to my boy Jimi Izrael.

Still, none of them does the tech hustle as I have done for the past 20 years, and I think only Farai among them understands online the way I do. I am a fairly serious online writer, and I have been invited on many occasions to interview with major newspapers. But I think inevitably, what I say and what I write is best done here on the blog, and unfortunately I have solved my curiosity around the racial subjects. So what I have to say, at the length I have to say it, in the long now's context about race is not going to sell a lot of soap. The market for solutions is small in comparison to the market for 'dialog'. 

Nevertheless, like Black History Month or a bad penny, somebody's searchlight comes sweeping around periodically. The existentials of black this or that is always somewhat interesting. But it's interesting in a very predictable way. It's like Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. There's really only one thing that is compelling about sharks, that they are viscious, monomaniacal man-eaters. All the rest of the scientifically interesting knowledge about sharks is only compelling to the sort of geek who would apply to work at an aquarium. That doesn't bring out the Red One high definition cameras, the ad campaign or the masses. Yes, sharks eat people, but.. as soon as you say 'but', who cares? 

So it is with the blackness thing. There are only a few compelling subjects within that oevre and the dudes at The Root are exploiting that to the fullest, as Ntozake Shange's character would say, assiduously without any further assistance from me. You could visit there if you like. The Root is today's black mass thing. Me, on the other hand, I'm a goddamned individual, and your preconceived notions about what growing up black in America must entail would suffer something of a bashing if you tried to apply them too closely. After all, even 'diversity' is a bucket. Sure you want to see Great Whites, Hammerheads, Threshers, Nurses, Tigers, and the occasional Whale Shark, but you still want to see them bite. 

I have not figured out a way to get that Google Plus to be a target in my 'Share This Post' widget in Typepad. I would love to share what I write here at Cobb to specific circles. It would be a technical coup. And then people who add me to their circles would be able to read what I write. So there's my suggestion about how to get an award winning blogger of note into the orbit of people who don't know. Or are blogs just too ancient a technology to matter, because, you know I kinda started this thing called The Conservative Brotherhood, and...

Black Blogging Now

Black blogging now is fresh and young. It's new and energetic. And just like this picture, I'm looking at it without it looking at me. 

I shook hands with Gina who, next to Shawn Williams, seems to be the diva in residence. The lady in green two to Gina's right won the Lifetime Achievment Award for her ConcreteLoop. And Shawn hipped me to the general flavor of this year's get together as compared to the other four he's attended. In short, it's all good, and more professional than ever. 

I mentioned shaking Gina's hand because I recognize that there has been spilt beef between her and my boy Jimi. I can't remember exactly the subject matter, but I seem to recall that the dimensions seemed large at the time, whenever exactly that was. It seemed to be enough to raise a lingering bitter aftertaste, and I realize that 'a good friend of Jimi Izrael' was a really foolish way to introduce myself. But what I didn't want to do was say, Oh I'm just the winner of this award from three years ago, you should know me. And I didn't have the nerve to introduce myself as the ghost of Aaron Hawkins. Basically, I didn't have anything useful to blurt, so I dropped that bomb name when she said that my name sounded familiar.  I just wanted to know who was whom, but since Shawn told me everything I wanted to know, I stopped poking people. 

When I bogarded into the 'survivors breakfast' I was looking to see if I could find my old friend Sheryl Huggins. But she wasn't around. Neither was George Kelly, nor Jasmyn Cannick which was something of a surprise. Jason Toney wasn't there and Gina was basically the only one whose work I recognized. Shawn told me that about 70% of the attendees have only begun blogging since 08 or 09, which roughly coincides with that dude from Chicago and the Jena Six putting 'black blogging' on the map. So I just sat back to listen. 

Gina said something that resounded with me while I was at her table. She said that black journalists made a huge mistake by not partnering with black bloggers a few years ago. If they had joined up and showed bloggers how to get paid and by what standards they might get paid, then the salary floor wouldn't have fallen so far for the industry. So the hesitation to take black bloggers seriously wounded black journalism on the whole. I'm not in a position to know better, but that makes a whole lot of sense to me, and I know that here in LA there was some effort to help but I'm not sure it did.

You see the juggernaut in black journalism is entertainment news. It drives everything and I daresay it's the only thing over which there is any blackified home field advantage. My baby brother (whom I've never mentioned on Cobb) Bleek works part time in that black journalism world and he gets the inside access to all of the hiphop and NBA stars when they are in town and there's a story to be told. That network is still tight. Of course black radio has its grip on... well everything that black radio has been for the past 30 years, which is now an aging demographic. And to tell you the truth, it ain't difficult to hear the Spinners on your traditional Oldies stations. 

This is a mistake that I've seen before, and interestingly enough I'm starting to see it as a market phenomonon. The mistake I saw before was how black radio here in Los Angeles did not take hiphop seriously in the mid 80s, nor did Motown take music videos seriously. There was a small set of execs who ran their companies they way they wanted and it took a new generation with new companies to change what was to what needed to be. But there was a price paid while the new jacks suffered out in the cold. So new exciting rap groups like Whistle no airplay while tired whack R&B groups like Midnight Star did. It's the same kind of oligarchy one step outside of the mainstream that constrains new creativity.

Obviously there's always that economic excuse. Small businessmen cannot capitalize and monetize all that new black talent. And we could get into that black economics discussion one more time, but it's rather old.

The news is that the new black bloggers are learning the capital game early, and that was the flavor I picked up in about 90 minutes. 

A Bit of History: Black CMC

(From the archives - 2003)

 

A BIT OF HISTORY, BLACK CMC

Over with the Afrofuturists, I've been going through a number of raisons d'etre and mapping out black cyberspace. Here follows materials from the archives...

The full transcript of this forum can be found at Drylongso.

Phase One:
When I first got on computer networks to communicate with other folks, there were very few black women or men online on at all. This had mostly to do with the fact that I was emailing on the Xerox internal network in the mid 80s long before there was a public Internet. So, I started my online discussions at a time when the builders of the networks frowned heavily on any non-technical discussion. Matters of netiquette were taken very seriously. That didn't stop me from having black oriented political and social discussions in the Xerox corporate intranet.

Since I had been fairly prominent in college as a national officer with NSBE, I felt that on the Xerox network I was continuing the discussions about the fate and future of blacks in Corporate America from a business and technical angle. It was certainly a male dominated world, but it existed primarily as a support network. Nobody took any social discussions seriously. The very idea of men and women meeting each other socially online was simply not done. Besides, most of us already knew each other. We assumed that white folks were listening in, and the biggest controversies had to do with airing dirty laundry.

Phase Two:
A literacy project got me involved with open mike poetry in Los Angeles around 1990. Some of that got political, and it occurred to me that any black organization that would publish a newsletter would be a candidate for their own website. It was in this spirit a few years later that I created my first website with the idea in mind that many black organizations would follow suit. It was not to be. Everything associated with the information superhighway was considered elitist, and there was a sort of anxiety about it being another example of what white folks purposely did to leave black folks behind. So between black men and women there was no issue because most were not participating.

SCAA
There was a golden age of black conversation on the net that took place between 1993 and 1996. For the most part, however, gender issues were deeply subordinated to racial and political issues. The core of the group of participants there came to know each other well enough to distinguish gender issues from personality issues. Nevertheless, there were always new folks coming into discussions, who would take communications issue and extrapolate them to "the problem with us." As a compiler of the FAQ for the SCAA group in 1995, gender issues simply weren't high on anyone's priority list. What was much more important was maintenance of the space free and clear of racist "drive-by" conduct. SCAA finally fell to a barrage of racists and serves no useful purpose today, diehards not withstanding.

Salon Table Talk
At Salon, we got into issues of identity and gender a lot deeper. One notable conversation there was specifically about hiding race and gender in cyberspace. Having been hardened by the experience of SCAA, it was clear to me, as the Internet was getting popular with non-technical folks, that certain mythologies were being promoted. I don't believe any of the black veterans of the SCAA wars would easily swallow the cliché on the Internet that "nobody knows you're a dog." We knew all too well that being black was more than just skin color--that identity was a crucial part of the way you saw and thus discussed things online. If anything, the anonymity of text enhanced the differences and conflicts as well as the contrasts and synergies. But it certainly did not obviate them. Cyberspace made you more of what you are; only the things you really felt passionate about would come through in a memorable way. So when this subject was breached at Salon's Table Talk, I really took a hard line against masking.

I never wanted to get into a trap with "authenticity," partially because spoofing identity was part of the fun of some cyberspace haunts. I think the nature of MUDs and IRC lend them particularly to this. But I never considered these places for the kinds of discussions I wished to have vis-à-vis black cultural production, criticism or political talk. Instead they were social adventures. I did have an online life as a girl named "Sindeetha" at a game site called "Sissyfight," which was very popular for a short time.

Black Planet, NetNoir
I have spent only a limited amount of time in black on black social forums where the primary activity is socializing and flirting. They simply came into being too late in my life to be of any use.

Conclusions
In general I would say that black folks' expectations for the type of interactions in which gender issues are significant came to the Internet some time after I did. In the early days, people simply didn't expect anything. People didn't expect black folks to *be* online, much less socialize there with any seriousness. Even when I had dreams of millions of black folks online, I didn't expect or desire a dating service.

I think it must be said that the contributions of black cultural production or academic quality materials has been disappointing and too little too late for me. It is in that area that I wish such matters could be handled better. I blame black professors and professionals for following the dollar instead of contributing to community. Those who are intelligent and capable of delivering evolutionary content to the web don't bother and/or take a cynical attitude towards the entire enterprise. Those who have been trained to speak about such social issues only do so to be paid, and their default in the online world leaves it to lay-people to struggle with issues to which the answers already exist. Consequently, I don't really look for much. Yet. I can admit to having exceptional expectations. That I'm not satisfied in no way suggests that a plurality of black folks can't be. I've always been the explorer looking to carve out new frontiers. Let's see what happens next.

Mike Bowen - Summer 2003

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Becoming more real over the years in cyberspace-a distinction between expectations and reality. From: Mike Bowen

I perceive that people have come to appear more real to each other over the years in cyberspace. The convention of masking, originally established by techies, and the inability of the medium to use long names and pictures, has given way to more highly interactive virtual communities with highly stylized artifacts. I would think that BlackPlanet is a very good case in point. When content management software became available at no cost, the texture of online communities changed. Suddenly people who were very opaque in IRC using an abbreviated name and spurting short comments intermittently had the chance to put some style into a permanent website which added a dimension to their chat. With IRC, as soon as you stopped typing, you disappeared. With a website, you became permanent. Furthermore, with a website, you could attach pictures of yourself, artwork, favorite quotes and longer texts about yourself.

Additionally, people became more real in cyberspace because they volunteer information about their own circle of communicants and interests. Back in the days of Usenet before free website authoring became possible, individuals would put their �sig� at the end of each post. I have never seen a sig with a list of friends. Websites always list things that people might find interesting. So people could then be judged not only by what they say on one particular day, but by the online company they keep. Sure, you could tell something about a man who quotes Shakespeare, but he could become more complex if his best friend quotes Muddy Waters and less so if his friend also quotes Shakespeare.

Despite all of this, serious dislocations occur. The more real the cyber presentation is, the less likely one is to question your interpretation of it, and therefore the more likely you are to be shocked if you misinterpret all that you see. The problem is that as real as this cyber presentation feels and as much communication as it allows, it is not community. It still lacks the nuance we have with personal relationships offline. Whatever is established online is always and can never be more than an artificial community. We can no more have a relationship with people online than we do with movie stars or rock idols. Every communication is a presentation, and every presentation is interpreted. What exacerbates this problem is the reality of connecting with a wider variety and larger number of individuals online than offline.

Before establishing my persona of �boohab� I wrote:

 

Everything I do in computer-mediated communications (CMC) is an experiment in blackness as a post-modern concept. I am futzing with identity in cyberspace and trying to figure out what happens to your race when people cannot see you, hear you or smell you. (hee haw). Everybody knows that you have some freedom in CMC to choose who you be. If I choose to be black, how would I express it? If I choose to be white, how? Why? What can I say in CMC that I would never say face to face? What silences are overcome w/ respect to racial issues, which are created?

 

Everyone who represents consciously in a gender-specific way in cyberspace must reckon with its sensory deprivation. It�s not enough to simply write �I am female� because this is not how people perceive femininity offline. And so presenting oneself simply as female has issues not unlike presenting oneself as anything for which the imaginations of your audience cannot easily adopt. If you are attempting to be an instructive figure as well, the challenge is even more severe.

I recently got into a bit of trouble addressing someone who called herself �thuqmami�. I was looking around for black content in the blogosphere and found a registry site called blogs of color. It turned out that it was undergoing construction, but 9 out of 10 links I found were dead. I considered it an embarrassment and said so. I was certainly passing judgment from the perspective of an upper-middle class middle-aged father from the old school, but I ended up being corrected. There actually is a difference between a �thuq� and a �thug�. Thuqmami actually inherited the name and the site from someone else. After a time, we came to understand each other, but it took more than a few emails.

Goddess� remarks brought to mind something that I did see very often, which was the flaming of younger more naive persons, especially women but all newbies , who were trying to express themselves artistically without any understanding or consideration of the conventions of online conversation. I seem to recall this happening often. One spot that I used to hang out in was Caf� Los Negroes. It was chocked full of people who felt it was their appointed duty to put a personal spin on everything that happened. So it was as much a billboard for certain characters to rant on with inside humor as it was a public hangout. Anyone who felt it important to creatively express their blackness was suddenly held to very rigorous, if arbitrary standards. A certain smallish clique of members would give each other affirmations on their own style of speak and observations, and others who came in fresh, especially those considered unorthodox would get the virtual equivalent of a cold shoulder. I recall that this seemed rather cruel for some.

So I think the reality of cyberspace is that black folks feel as though the kinds of relationships they have in real life will be the same kind that they have online and are sometimes surprised and/or ill equipped to deal with the real individuality of people they do meet. People seeking affirmation of their personal lives and relationships are just as often as not given a cold reception or condescended to for opening up their feelings online. It�s very easy for people to turn you off and decide not to care. I think it is a mistake for black folks to assume that all black oriented content online is expressly for them and people like them. They must recognize that the monolith is shattered. This ability of cyberspace to create connections ends up introducing people to each other with widely differing perspectives on what it means to be black, the negative experience of a failure to create community only reinforces the stereotype of black disunity. Considering how important the idea of unity has been, it is not surprising that black folks may tend to be more disappointed with online experiences than others.

Cyberspace is capable of establishing a type of communications that you wouldn�t be able to sustain in person and that is good. Cyberspace fails to maintain the quality and nuance of multi-sensory communication of community and flattens experience into the strictly literary and visual; this is destructive of the expectation of a beloved community. The distinction between advanced connectedness, which the Internet delivers, and real community, which it does not, is the difference between our expectations and reality.

Mike Bowen - Summer 2003

 

 

The New Latin

There are days like today when I believe that I should belong to a secret society. Last evening as I worked with my son to study for his AP US History class we talked about the Anti-Masonics, the Whigs, Andrew Jackson and a bunch of other stuff I never learned in high school. In fact, I did not have an American History class at all in high school. That was the 70s for you. 

My buddy Lee was out here on the weekend, and he's the one guy I know who retains something ineffable despite his academic achievement. Regularness? He's been recognized as one of America's top young scientists (young <= 46) and as such was regaled with a presentation of the state of the art of what we know at the National Academy of the Sciences. They've got a nice conference center down in Irvine. I perused the presentations out in the lobby as the last session was breaking up but decided not to take any photos. His was about machine learning. I remember very little about the others, but here's something he explained to me of one of the subjects discussed.

You have taste buds in your stomach and intestines. They are the same kinds of taste buds that are on your tongue, and their function is to serve as an early warning system. Imagine that you're drinking a diet soda. It tastes sweet and so you like it. When exactly should your body start producing insulin to deal with all that sugar you are tasting? Insulin stops the use of fat in the body as an energy source, so when insulin is present the body will depend on the sugars and carbs you eat. The taste buds in the mouth would signal too soon, but the taste buds in the gut would signal right on time. Except what you're drinking in that Fresca is not sugar, so you've got all this insulin ready and no sugar to process. For the sake of the pleasure in your mouth, you're freaking out your body. Diet sodas are worse than water. That should be obvious, but now you have another reason.

When I developed the ideas around XRepublic, and now for the Lorite Interrogator, I had some very specific things in mind concerning the melioration of knowledge via computer mediated communications.  The term "CMC" penned by Howard Rheingold is so influential and central to my thought process that I named my son so that his initials would be CMC Bowen. It worked out that we had ancestors other than Cobb for the second C. One of the biggest problems is the level of patience the learned have for the unlearned, because while there are thousands who know what the millions do not, only hundreds are willing and able to teach. One of my solutions is to maintain separate 'houses' for debate, and that may or may not work - we'll have to see in practice. Despite the existence of such houses, there would be transparency. For example, I have just declared Nulan personna-non-grata in this house, but in the act of doing so I also asked for him to trackback to our common subjects, and I presume that I would remain on his blogroll. Obviously I can't stop anyone from going over to his own house, and I would encourage that. MIT has some of this kind of transparency in its OCW, but I imagine Yale does not.  It is the transparency of CMC that has allowed more to learn indirectly from various universities and learned individuals than would ordinarily be admitted through physical gates. This is, indeed how you have come to know that the stomach has taste buds - Lee as a top scientist invited to the private gated affair shared with me and I shared with you. But the many were not and will never be invited to The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Science and Engineering. 

In the prior post 'Vox Populi', the ancient aphorism rings true, that is if you know the whole thing: And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. It exactly what I say about the Denizens of Sherwood Forest. It should be what people say about the Tea Party. It is the proper warning against populism. Then again on occasion, it is wise to trust the revulsion of the masses against the corruption of the few. But looking in the other direction there are often things the millions feel that the thousands do and only hudreds can communicate. These are the edge conditions of mass communication and they have not been solved to my satisfaction. 

When I am pessimistic about this problem, as I generally am when I consider American politics in its current state, I seek to take shelter from a public and public debate I find debased. I would much rather listen to and hang out with my friend Lee. We talked exactly zero about politics. Lee shares a certain epistemological modesty. If there is something true to be said about geeks, it is that they accept the isolation their interests and arcane knowledge bring. Geeks seek the company of other geeks, happy to find a confidant or someone else who gets it. This is reward enough for the dissonances from the millions. Nerds, on the other hand, seek revenge. In a social apocalypse, what happens to destroyed nerds and geeks? Their presentations are photographed but who has the patience to teach Morlocks? I search for the signs of the mood towards cloistered knowledge, the arrogance of nerds, the desperation of geeks and the madness of crowds. 

Computer literacy is something very different in CMC. It is the ability to sniff out the good content from the zettabytes of spew. It is in its own way the New Latin, a way of recognizing the style of a website of value, of tracking one's way towards the company of the hundreds from both directions. It is a facility with the many tools of the internet. 

Cobb = 1 Million

It's official. Sometime today I got my millionth hit. That's a fairly extroardinary landmark of which I'm rather proud. I will only celebrate it by sharing that factoid with you, my readers, who have made it all possible. You are not fans of some obscure little blog. But you know that.

It took about seven years. I've put in almost 8000 posts and we have recieved over a quarter million comments. It's not huge by the standards of the major blogs, but it's better than hanging out in the park. I consider the blog a success.

As you know, my mission has changed over the years. I'd say there's a significant difference between 42 and 49, and in five years I'll be a completely different person. My aim is to become slightly more ascetic and continue to read more and talk more about the books I read. I'm just about done with gaming on XBox, which I've also done for seven years, and I expect that to liberate more of my time. I quit Mafia Wars on Facebook about a month ago, and since January I've lost about 20 pounds. My quick little experiment in the market this summer showed I can make money when I pay attention. And my attention to open source software has begun to pay off. I've also learned that I really love to focus and let my mind crank on things and that I should waste less and less time.

What all that means for the blog is that I'm likely to pursue a few less topical items as I get a bit more focused and serious. I'll probably write longer pieces, but who knows. I'm looking forward to understanding a lot more about what Taleb is about to write which will probably take me into a new place I haven't considered here much at all, and that is the world of psychology. I have been avoiding discussions about psychology and sex because I don't have any theories about them. But I'm beginning to see where the cognitive science in me is looping back to that world considering Taleb and Steven Pinker are saying about how humans represent reality in their heads.

As for sex, I'm really curious as to why people are so utterly meserized by it, or particularly why people think good sex makes life good. Which is to ask if sex is the opiate of the masses and what the effect of doing it has on perception. That's another part of psychology, I suppose. I'm curious as to what happens when knowledge fails. Exactly how animal do we become by degrees?

Thirdly, I'm hoping that my interest in big data takes me towards the analysis of different kinds of knowledge than I've been looking at. In particular I'm very curious to know why medical computing has eluded our better minds.

So it has been a great million. Thanks to all of you who have been around since back in the day. There's much more to come, so stick around. Tell a friend.

An Administrative Note

I have failed to move the discussion here into orderly buckets. I think we've made a hash of the Equality Math comments. It is just impossible in this format to keep track of the tangents. I have no idea what's going on in there, and I'm scared and fatigue to go in and trip over a mind mine. Something that will blow up in my head and compel me to go in and say something, and oh by the say something else..

Of course it occurs that my and Kali's solution works best - to number and name subtopics and tangents. And when possible I'll take those tangents to the top in a new post, which may or may not die from lack of interest. When tangents come, I'll categorize them in Brain Spew and try to locate the center of gravity. 

I won't ask you to italicize in response to specific quotes, but it's a good idea. CNu does a great job with that and I think it's an example worth following, but numbering and naming is just as good and better for me to identify subtopics to break out. 

I would also encourage you to use bitly if you're going to embed longer URLs. Otherwise just use the full "A" tag. 

Facts Are Stupid Things

The following is from Boston.com. I understand this quite well. I've thought about it a lot as part of my profession.

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight. 

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

I expect to gain great insights when Taleb publishes his next book which will highlight what ain't right with brains that are convinced - maybe giving us a way to understand, discount and moderate false conviction. I will reiterate a couple of my standing propositions at this point.

1. It takes energy and effort to establish and sustain any idea in the public sphere. The more detailed the information, and the more people, the more energy and attention required. Conversely, small tightly knit groups can be convinced of almost anything.

2. When it comes to policy making and the enforcement of law, it is better to expend less energy and on fewer matters. The high energy required to establish and maintain a regime of truth and discipline to that truth is corrupting.

I beleive that political thought, works exactly like the article says, because it tries to establish, at bottom, justification for actions & policy based on a moral purpose.  When facts do not conform to the moral premises they are percieved as noise or deception.

Questions for the Cobb FAQ

I would like to have 100. If you wouldn't mind terribly.

An XRepublic-ish Note

In other news, I have indefinitely postponed my venture to develop a multitouch interface for business intelligence. Instead I will focus on learning the suites of open source tools and figure things out from there. Now that has been taken off my plate, it will free up time I had set aside for learning what has now become iOS, and it makes me regret the moola I spent on my MacBook Pro instead of two Mac Minis for the homestead.

Be that as it may, the new availability of time raises once again the spectre of XRepublic, my sorta-kinda life defining technical project. To that end I will slightly alter the way I write here at Cobb, letting certain aspects of XR be tried out here.

XRepublic is that thing that the blogosphere has yet to accomplish which is to give instant polling to millions and create a large virtual parliament in which people make collaborative statements. It is like a Wikipedia of common opinion and belief, always in the act of creation - such that every fully formed opinion gets linked to its assumptions and arguments.

I have always conceptualized XRepublic as something driven by people directly, following the Well's dictum that 'you own your own words'. But I did have a space for representation. IE the creation of a virtual Booker T Washington or Michel Foucault by a scholar. But what has emerged in the rise of social networking is the fact that many people simply cut and paste words that are better than their own.

I am finding this quite useful even in my own blogging, and so will continue to increase the percentages of borrowed vs original content. I have begun to do so in comments, and will continue in that vein.

Cobb Comments Are ON

Now hear this. Now hear this. Commentary is now on at Cobb. Bring it.

FreeMan and the Black Plan

It has been a long time since I've seen anybody left of Akindele articulate (well, there's a loaded word) any semi-serious black community organizing principles. But there's a dude by the handle of FreeMan who has put up some structure and a multipoint manifesto. 

FreeMan is outrageous, optimistic, excitable, intelligent, profane and foolish all at once. Here's a couple paragraphs that show what I mean:

First, we can use mom and pop distribution. Usually the big distributors want you to barely make any money on your product because they tell you to add up the pennies to become a millionaire. Now us, you and me, we got something already in place that we know hits directly our own folk. I know you are going to laugh when I say it but Barber Shops and Beauty Salons litter our neighborhoods just as much as the other God given distribution center the Black Church. If you have any product that caters towards us you would get your product out by making sure everyone who does hair has a display in their shop showcasing your goods.  You can usually make deals with one of the barbers to sell your shit on consignment. I mean how many times have you gotten your hair done and they are trying to upsale you some Black Soap or some Shea Butter? This alone will help spread your product word of mouth and if it’s a great product then it’ll be a local hit.

Second, we can use the internet. As more and more people get online you won’t even need to make a consignment deal. You can go to OUR local black bank set up a online merchant account and sell everything your hearts desire. Shit we can even make house calls for our services if you want. The future looks extremely bright with us just making deals with Amazon to showcase our products and then we can send it out from home. As usual I want us to make our own Amazon so if you’re a Black entrepreneur think about it! Ok now let’s go read how Jeff Bezos started Amazon and build our own!

Third, think UPS! All these products are going to be bought in a new way and they require delivery. If we are only catering towards our own area how big do we really have to be. See look around next time and check how many messengers are doing local delivery next to Fedex and UPS. They are making enough money to out pace the big guys because they only operate in a small radius. Just think when people start getting their groceries delivered as they aren’t going to order fish from the next fucking state. So if you start small doing small shit lets say in downtown with documents when the time comes you’ll be able to expand out with your small cars and refrigerated vans.

The audacity of having a plan to include distribution and warehousing is a hoot. You gotta love it. But, uhm, what's Shea Butter?

A Comment About Comments

Several of my readers have suggested that they are to blame for my cessation of comments. This is not the case, and I don't expect those that might be considered to be blameworthy to ever acknowledge it. So there is no finger to point and the guilty parties do not feel guilty. So it's clearly not you and it really doesn't matter who it is, because the problem was never so much a 'who' problem as a 'what' problem.

The 'what' problem is and stands as a problem of inadequate context. I had setup an environment in which some of my best writing was interactive, and indeed it was my aim to be Socratic. But everybody, not just some who, was engaging me on subjects I thought of secondary import. And it was more important to me at the time to let no subject go undiscussed than to write about what I really wanted to write about. And so I came to see that the center of gravity of this blog became something other than what I wanted it to be - I ceded control to the public and burned up a lot of my own time.

To the extent that I want this to be a philosophical, theological and curious blog, it cannot be, because it was designed to be a political blog. The problem is I'm not interested in the political so much as I used to be. So until such time as I feel that I can be utterly dismissive of that which used to get me all fired up - which is the compelling flamewars over policy, then I'll have to keep comments off, with various exceptions.

--

Tangentially, I've tried to be friendly and open up other angles on Facebook. And now you can snarkily say "Hows that working out for you?". The answer is that I play a lot of Mafia Wars and not much else but interject stuff there that in fact I'd rather have discussed here. Go figure.

So I'm frustrated.

Whatever Happened to Trackback?

Since I've bombed comments from Cobb, I expect to get trackbacks instead. I've gotten them and I'm happy.

But.

As I go around the web searching for publicity, something well shy of the second oldest blog profession of link whoring, I've noticed something new. For lack of a better word, it's shotgunning. Instead of linking mutually between bloggers, many bloggers have decided to cast their fate to any number of publicity engines. Some of these I know, most of them are completely alien. I think this signals the death of trackback, or perhaps some vote that it never worked. I like trackback, in fact I'm devoted to it, but I wonder...

At the top of these publicity engines are things we know. That would include Digg, Reddit, Delicious, RSS. Then there are some which are vaguely familiar, like Bloglines and Fark. But what the hell are Blinklist, Newvines, Shoutwire and Spurl?  Simpy? Mr. Wong?

It seems to me that if you give your users a choice of this pub engines to register their liking of your blog post you disperse, rather than concentrate your readership. I cannot imagine that this is anything more than link inflation. I mean you'll need a search engine to look through all of those registries of your blog to find you blog. And then what are the chances that helps you towards knowing?

There is a really hilarious and yet insightful parody over at The Onion. It's this video about police detectives sorting through some ungodly number of digital artifacts to figure out that a fire was not arson. But of course real detectives don't have to actually do that - they reduce the number of things they have to think about and they blow off the superfluous.

Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire

But what are we encouraged to do that gets us to the bottom line? It seems to me that broadcasting and expecting 'the wisdom of crowds' to do the work of detectives is a lazy, brute force tactic. It's the direct opposite of scholarship. Trackbacks represent the investment of a bit of detective work by one blogger to another. That's valuable. Link ubiquity is not, it's just an enabler for search engines.

One thing that I am doing that is different is publicizing through Twitter - but that's because I hand pick those I follow, and I presume that others do the same - ie they handpick me. I'm registered at bit.ly. We'll see how that goes.

A Bowl of Cherries

Life is not this.

And so I am considering allowing only trackbacks to Cobb, given the sort of commentary this blog has generated, little of which I find constructive, enlightening and recently even relevant.

I find myself looking at old posts and realizing Memer is gone, A. Charles is gone, Submandave is gone, EC is gone, Dell Gines is gone, Liz Ditz is gone, and I cannot recall the last time members of my own Conservative Brotherhood have posted here. And so clearly Cobb is in decline.

Aw hell. Today is June 1. A perfect day for transition. So shall it be written, so shall it be done. Comments are over. Nobody ever comments on the posts I personally find most interesting anyway. Get your licks in today. You have been declared noise, the lot of you.

Robin Martin Joins the Conservative Brotherhood

I am fed up with what has happening within the black community. Too many of our families are broken, too many of us are morally degenerate and too many of us are willing to blame all of our pathology on slavery, George Bush, the Republican party or anything but our failures as Parents, Husbands, Wives and Christians.
-- Robin Martin

Boom! It doesn't get any plainer than that. Capturing the intense spirit of black love and pride, Robin Martin who blogs as Conservative Black Woman joins our community of conservatives. A tireless media critic, Martin's blog goes topical and gets lots of comments on issues of the day. Her common sense approach makes her accessible and she asks the tough questions and takes people's responses to heart:

Why is it incumbent upon me as a black woman to prove that I don't despise "all things black"? Why is there even an "all things black" phenomenon? Exactly WHAT are "black things"? How is this not self-inflicted racism? Why should I bother to live up to stereotypes and bad caricatures of black womanhood to somehow prove that I am "down"( is that black enough)? Actually "down for what? Why must all black thought be monolithic? These are the questions that race through my mind whenever I have a conversation with familiars that I love (aka my family).

I understand being proud of your heritage and having healthy self-esteem but have we gone too far?

Robin also has a healthy blogroll showing that there's more to black conservative interests than just the same old folks. She has a refreshingly honest faith that is not preachy but not watered down either:

What I find absolute heart-breaking is the fact that black folks are so biblically illiterate that they would actually pray over and anoint with oil SUV's in the pulpit. I'm am certain that the stench of those greedy, corrupt, perverse, just plain dumb prayers turned the stomach of God. How can we call ourselves children of God? What self respecting man of God would substitute the redemptive work of Jesus Christ on the cross with SUV's in the pulpit? How much lower can we go? I shudder to think.

We welcome Robin into the Brotherhood and encourage you to check her out. She's just the right speed.

Kevin Jackson Joins the Brotherhood

It's 2009 and the Conservative Brotherhood is expanding once again. Kevin Jackson is one of our newest members.

Jackson writes for The Black Sphere. I have never seen a more comprehensive and funny deck of cards satirizing Barack Obama than on his left sidebar. Jackson is edgy and and witty:

The Black Sphere blog, aka Black Ops is an informative and humorous blog site that has a mission to "pimp slap" Liberals. We give daily beatdowns, sanctioned by the Republican leadership, who can admit no knowledge of our existence.

Jackson is an insightful master of snark and he pulls no punches, delivering the kind of rapid fire blows that make the opponent try to laugh and shrug it off. He demonstrates his ability to read deeper into the popular press and say what they are unwilling to. A proper blogger to be sure:

Here are a few elements of the Obama-Biden plan from this article in Yahoo News:

"Ideas included weatherizing 1 million homes, shifting to a paperless health system, investing in disease prevention and modernizing schools.

Obama's team and congressional staff over the last week have been scrambling to come up with details of a plan to pump up the droopy economy with $650 billion or more in government spending over the next few years."

I'm not sure how many jobs "disease prevention" creates or saves, but he is The Messiah. And as for weatherizing one million homes, well why not ten million? If weatherizing one million creates X, then ten million should create 10X, if my math is right. And what happened to "inflating our tires"? Surely that idea is not under the bus? How many jobs would that create?  I will search "tire inflators" on Monster.com, and get back with you on that one.

Next he plans to dump (their word, not mine) $650B into the economy.  I agree, it will be dumped. They could consider just burning it as well, as I predict the same outcome in its impact in the economy. A bunch of people who don't deserve the money getting the money. Well I can see the stimulus this will create.

Here is the translation of "dumping" $650B into the economy - Pay the bribes to the poor who got him elected.  A little Steak Tartar for the ObamaZombies. 

The "plan" here is simply to "divvie" up the $650B into nice little slivers, and send them out in the form of welfare, oops…stimulus checks.  For you recipients, be sure to have your Obama-Biden signs up, so the postman knows where to deliver your welfare checks.

I'm looking forward to hearing him put liberal feet to fire in the upcoming weeks and months. Check out some of his other stories:

• For the Girl Who Has Almost Everything - Caroling Kennedy for Senate, Part II
• Turdapalooza - And You Thought Hillary Was Unqualified - Meet Caroline Kennedy
• One More Liberal Scoundrel Down...More to Come - William Jefferson's Frozen Funds
• Candidate #5 - Buying of a Senate Seat

Welcome Kevin!

A New Dynamic at Cobb

I just wanted to take a moment to recognize the new dynamic that's going on here at Cobb. We have several new folks who are taking the comments into blazingly spirited territory. Overall I think it's a good thing. I'm not going to rule over this with much of an iron hand right now because I think it's going to take some time to find equilibrium. As people become accustomed to the different styles of writing and opinions of the new players things well settle out.

I recognize most of the folks from Booker Rising and I sincerely hope that you all will take advantage of the sort of environment I'm trying to maintain, which is one of collegiality and even though Nulan sucked his teeth about it which provoked in me quite a hot rage - a community of honest inquiry. I like it when people speak from personal experience. I like it when people use references. I like it when people try to find the causes of conflict and misunderstanding and leave it at that. I am not opposed to name calling, and when I get fed up then I will tend to do it along these lines (as vanderluen exemplified a few days ago - 'jane you ignorant slut'). A one liner will suffice. Find a neutral corner and leave the thread alone. There will always be another topic to discuss. When you're at your wits end and want to tell somebody to fuck off, feel free, but let that be your last word on the subject. You can only do that once - otherwise try to explain exactly why you think your opponent is smoking crack, you may convince him to put it down.

Also the pure political propaganda, and publication of events should go over to the Conservative Brotherhood website. Here I prefer, as I said, for people to figure out why the other guy thinks so strangely, as well as your take on current events etc as I bring them up.

I also take many suggestions on the backchannel. You can always tell me what you think via email if you don't want to say it out loud. I always read it and it always weighs on my mind. But I only act on these things forthrightly about 15% of the time. That's because I do get 200 emails a day. Speaking of which, I am going to talk about Kwanzaa again this year - don't despair.

That is all. Have at it. Thank you and welcome.

If The Madness Has Subsided

I am semi-hopeful that now that the election is over, that certain of my ex-blog links may be tending to more civil audiences, misguided though they may be. So I'm going to give a shot of lending my ear to three or four Democrats who have been demonstrably reasonable in times passed.

Those would be Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias, Brad DeLong and Sean-Paul Kelley. Now that they don't have Bush to kick around any longer, they may have to come up with some actual original thinking about the world we live in. Not that I expect much, I do expect better than I've seen.

You Are Hereby Notified

Cobb comments will now be moderatedaudited. Dissent is encouraged. Evildoing will be pre-emptedremoved.

UPDATE: Moderation is a pain in the butt. I have the inclination but I don't have the time.

Howard Witt's Blackosphere: Chicken or Egg?

Today I got a letter from Howard Witt. I'm one of the dozens, perhaps hundreds of bloggers he periodically sends information that's getting press in the Chicago Tribune and in the black blogosphere. Witt's exposure of many of these black bloggers merited some exclamation points in the first MSM coverage of the entire Jena tragedy. Some might go as far as to say that to many Americans black bloggers were born on that day in that context.

Continuing in that tradition of outrage, crime, punishment etc, there have been several dispatches from Witt over the months. Murder in Knoxville, Shaquanda Cotton, Dunbar Village, More on Jena 6 suspects, more on prison guards in Paris, TX and most recently a possible wrongful death in another obscure corner of America Winnifield. Louisiana.

Anybody who has read Cobb for any length of time should know that I've had a slippery grasp of blackness which has grown more lax with age and maturity. A few years ago, I boldly asked Who Owns Black?, with a resounding answer The Old School. It's something I still believe fervently, you just won't find me jumping up and down about it. I find evangelism of the sort tiring and generally a non-productive use of the blogging medium.  And so I've ditched the Negro Problem as a burden of mine, ie I'm not responsible for telling you what the Old School is and how that establishes and maintains a proper blackness. Herding black is like herding cats.  Nevertheless I remain plugged into the Kwaku Network, the informal yet pervasive blackified backchannel which communicates any and all things black on the Internet. Well, at least the political - can't say that I even know what the R in R. Kelly stands for if not reprobate.

So it is from a perspective of curiosity that I ask who is leading the story on this latest outrage. Is it Witt or is it 'his' blackosphere? You tell me.

Administrative Note

I'm getting a spam storm right about now so I've turned on CAPCHA or whatever that's called which makes you enter six bytes after a comment post. I'd rather have than than require everyone to use Typekey, but having a Typekey account will help.

I've also changed the number of comments per page up to 50 so that you don't have to scroll so much, and the auto close on comments has been extended to a year.

As soon as my domains stop getting spammed, I'll turn Captcha off and we should be back to normal. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I do wish I had an invective switch as well, but you all are only going to be as civilized as you decide.

---

UPDATE: I am requiring TypeKey from this point forward. On the whole, people who contribute most already are or easily could become TypeKey users.

A Personal History of the Black Blogosphere

Portal to the Cool Zone

				The Cool Zone
	identity parables elements flavor bastions peoples	reviews poetics ghetto tour hood action knowhow verbatim
about the zone	"Facing the rising sun of a new day begun"

---

updated Sept 10, 1998

The Root

Sixteen years ago, me and my boy Charles Isbell met Henry Louis Gates, Jr on a street in Cambridge MA. We were encouraged by his open and friendly attitude when we told him that we were putting together a black history database online. He didn't know anything about the technology but he would put us in touch with somebody who was working on a similar project. It turned out that project was the multimedia package Encarta Africana. I have the CDs around here somewhere.

Of course Charles and I were a bit dismissive. CDs could never be as interesting, exciting and expansive as online precisely because online is interactive. The black history database we made didn't make us rich or famous, but we did have the distinction of being first.

Way back in those days a number of us on the cutting edge of black cultural production were greatly enthused about such projects, the most significant of which was the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. But while we were, it seemed, in accord with the value of authoritative historical information and its salutary effect on the mass of blackfolks, we were not in accord with regard to the prospects for online. It doesn't take much of a stretch for you to presume that I was very frustrated with the attitude of black academics with regard to their dismissal of online and their insistence on the impermeability of the so-called 'digital divide'. So please forgive me if I now consider the introduction of Gates' new website 'The Root' with something less than a standing ovation.

 

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Washington Post Co. (WPO) (WPO) launched a new online magazine Monday aimed at a black audience, featuring commentary from leading black writers, along with information on genealogy.

Called "The Root," the Web site is the brain child of Post Co. Chairman Donald Graham and Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, serves as editor in chief of The Root. Lynette Clemetson, a former New York Times reporter, is the magazine's managing editor. Jacob Weisberg, editor of the online magazine Slate, also owned by the Post Co., helped develop The Root.

"We see ourselves as a daily black newspaper in a magazine format with three channels - news, views, and roots," Gates told The Associated Press. "And it's the roots channel that ... makes us completely unique.

I have practically exhausted every amount of critical theory about black culture and politics that I have been able to muster online over the past 15 years since I began pontificating on the Web, and five years prior to that in proto-web online bulletin boards. So while I wonder if there is anything to say to the new Root folks that won't bore me to tears, I still think I may be able to muster some enthusiasm. At least I can point a new aggregation of readers to the content of Cobb, and by extension, the Race Man's Home Companion, Boohab's Factotum, the Cool Zone, Cobb Vision, Vision Circle, The Conservative Brotherhood and the rest of my collected online creations. I suppose that could yield some sense of satisfaction. But I know the real deal is going to be interactive, not just linking. So you'll see me trackbacking as well as mouthing off in the fora for some time.

As for the genealogical stuff, well. Let's hope that it's more than just a marketing honeypot for the DNA industry. We've been over that scandal before. But they're going to have McWhorter and Gladwell onboard so it can't be all that bad. In fact, appropos Gates' signature and style, The Root is guaranteed some measure of respectability in that it will stir any number of progressives to a higher pitch. Gates is so very PBS and you know how that drives some people crazy.

If you don't know, now you know. The Root is online.

Maxambit: Gone Too Soon

EC Hopkins is calling it quits.

It's a dark day for the 'sphere. EC was the last existential partner, and I feel like I ought to build a group blog just for the purposes of accomodating his absence as an expository writer. I want to call it Existential Partners. But for now, I've already built one called The Brother's Cup. I'm going to invite a bunch of brothers to it and if it fails, I'll build EP.

Hopkins is one of the most rigorous minds ever to inhabit the online world of black writers. He made a splash in a very short period of time, and like with Aaron McGruder, I felt a personal burden lifted from my expository burden just by his mere presence. There was a point of view I could depend on being expressed with Hopkins around.

Hopkins (was) precise to a fault. His deep grounding in philosophy and law and his extensive reading practically overwhelmed his personality. I imagine him a large erect kind of fellow with exquisite manners and a merciful demeanor - like Colin Powell without ever a scowl. He was a man vitally engaged in developing an ethos which made clear his own love for righteousness and mankind. In that regard I think he explained too much - I could take it all just being EC. But then there he was, Mr. E. C. Hopkins. Ask me his first and middle name and I wouldn't be able to tell you. Dennis Miller over uses the phrase but I like the cut of his jib.

On his blog, EC engaged subjects that flew over most of our heads, but he was never far from touching vital nerves in my way of thinking. I feel, of all the bloggers, I owe him and New Black Man the most for keeping the highbrow touch alive despite the rest of our eagerness to get more gully on occasion. And in that regard EC obliged us with his patience in offering his blog as a grand arena for debate. It might have become a regular thing, but in one way I'm glad EC had not been reduced to being a referee and interpreter for an audience too lazy to decrypt the running debates and great controversies in the black haunts of the blogosphere. He was the right man for the job, but perhaps the job should never have existed. And now it certainly won't.

For every EC Hopkins who ventures out to speak, I imagine and hope that there are dozens in silence who audit our bloviation. Feeburner tells me that I get the most hits on the keyword "doggy style" at my blog, and so perhaps all my fervent hope is wishful thinking. But from those anonymous mists, he arose and for many bright moments he brought us a piece of his mind. We are grateful for those moments, and look forward to the future he'll be ushering in through his real world works.

Fish on Trial

Apparently Fish has insulted Nulan to the point of an impending duel. Nulan says:

Had my unedited cerebellar reaction to your preposterous offer here on this thread been deemed out of bounds - E.C. would’ve called me on it and exercised his editorial prerogative. You should really think about that because this brother is about as fair and sober a judge as you’re ever likely to encounter.

See, this really isn’t all that complicated. You did the same thing to Cobb, but much worse. If I had it to do over again, I would call you on the abuse you heaped on Cobb instead of letting it devolve the way it did. For not doing the right thing with respect to your behavior then, I owe Cobb an apology. What you did went beyond the pale. You tried to injure him personally and professionally on the Assault. Had it been me, I would’ve had you shut down for content policy violations the very same day. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

When you decided that I had broached your standard of fundamentalist ideological compliance - I was summarily reduced to being a “white ass-kisser”. Simple deja vu. Your fundamental character flaw had gotten the better of you once again, but this time - instead of my long time rhetorical and political sparring partner Cobb, I was now to be the target of your ritual habitual. That was two mistakes for the price of one.

1. By repeating yourself you confirmed your modus operandi and in the process disclosed something rather nasty about your psychological makeup.

2. You simply picked the wrong one to attempt it with - cause in this medium - I’m about as close a thing to Elegba as you’re ever likely to encounter.

So this is where it’s at today. You’re off on some deeply addicted knuckle-dragging type racialist shit that has no place in the company of clear-headed Black men with a shared purpose and reasonably well established trust subsystem. There may be a lot that we don’t agree on, but fundamentally we’re working toward the same ends and want to see one another succeed.

You, on the other hand, are so far gone into the sickness of your GSWS convictions, that you not only have no qualms about personally injuring other Black men with whom you disagree, but even given the benefit of time and hindsight - you’re incapable of discerning exactly where you stepped over the line. I don’t need to debate you - you’ve already demonstrated beyond any doubt whatsoever - that you’re lost.

I made the mistake of believing that you operate in good faith, but you’ve gone to great lengths to prove me wrong. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…

That's curious. I didn't realize that Fish was dragging my name in the dirt over at his website, and so I read what I presume to be the offending thread a few minutes ago. I actually only care what Ed, P6, Nulan and Mehkeru said. The rest are Fish's butt boys for the most part.

As it turned out, I left Fish in peace after our debate. I don't read his blog, and I haven't given any consideration to the original insult since then.

But now I have to seriously consider reconsidering my neutrality on him because of what he has obviously done to get on Craig Nulan's last nerve. I was aware that Craig was peeved at him for pissing on Tim Wise for no good reason. Some of those comments were here. But I didn't realize that it had come to this. So now it's definitely on, and I think some judgment is going to be made. Nulan's a full time blogger now and Earl P6 Dunovant is surely going to pay attention as are other respectable gents, some of whom dismiss me as graciously as can be expected.

I can hardly imagine more cans of whoopass being opened than this. I feel kind of sorry that it has to take place on EC's front porch, but EC's really the only man who can add any sensible discipline and decorum to what is basically going to get very, very heated. I lack the history to describe the matchup in either boxing or in the Comic Book Universe. Well, on second thought maybe it's Fish's Incredible Hulk to Nulan's Spawn.

My prediction? Fish will walk away without realizing he will have suffered massive brain damage and he will continue Hulking out in misery for the rest of his days.

The OG Blackosphere

Oooh. Look what I found.

This is a list of dialup Bulletin Board Systems/Services(BBS) in North America that are members of Afronet.  This list has been gleamed from Arthur McGee's popular African-American BBS list (copyright Arthur McGee and Associates, 1993.) 

This list is up to date as of JULY 29, 1994.
*
LEGEND: A=Afronet; B=BDPA; F=Fidonet; R=Rime
*
NAME                     NUMBER         BPS  NETWORK ADDRESS
*
*
AfraLink                 (***)NOW-DOWN  ***  101:19/2(A)
Kinky Kumputers          (***)UP!-SOON  ***  101:13/136(A)
Black Business Net[1]    (201)836-0602  144  1:2604/315(F), 101:13/132(A)
Black Business Net[2]    (201)836-1844  144  1:2604/315(F), 101:13/132(A)
Boardroom(IABPFF)        (201)923-3967  96   1:107/819(F), 101:13/111(A)
Tracks From The Past!    (205)237-6074  144  101:13/134(A)
Invention Factory[1]     (212)274-8110  144  101:13/125(A)
Invention Factory[2]     (212)274-8111  144  101:13/126(A)
Invention Factory[3]     (212)274-8112  144  101:13/127(A)
Informed Sources         (212)281-9478  144  1:278/303(F), 101:13/108(A)
Poetry In Motion         (212)666-6927  144  101:13/130(A), #1064(R)
Humanity                 (213)936-6009  96   101:10/5(A)
Alex's Place             (213)937-8734  24   1:102/744(F), 101:10/4(A)
Minority Affairs(BDPA)   (214)517-7254  144  1:124/3121(F), 101:19/1(A), (B)
Vulcan-Net III(IABPFF)   (215)223-2995  144  101:13/123(A)
African American[2]      (215)842-1560  144  1:273/957(F), 101:13/121(A)
African American[3]      (215)842-1561  144  1:273/957(F), 101:13/122(A)
Jailhouse                (305)944-6271  144  101:13/135(A)
Inglewood RoofTop!       (310)677-4007  144  1:102/355(F), 101:10/6(A)
Nefertiti(BDPA)          (312)488-8969  96   101:11/2(A), (B)
Wit-Tech(BDPA)           (410)256-0170  144  1:261/1082(F), 101:13/103(A)
Heritage                 (410)732-3368  96   101:13/114(A)
U-People                 (419)589-2310  144  1:234/62(F), 101:11/1(A)
Online In d'hood(IABPFF) (609)645-7080  144  1:2623/65(F), 101:13/118(A)
AfroConnections          (613)237-9531  24   1:163/511(F), 101:12/1(A)
Spirit DataTree          (617)983-9590  144  101:13/119(A)
Timbuktu                 (714)638-2954  144  1:103/197(F), 101:10/3(A)
Imhotep                  (718)297-4829  144  101:13/120(A)
Treasure Chest           (718)525-5610  144  101:13/128(A)
Holman's World           (718)529-8890  144  1:278/511(F), 101:13/107(A), (B)
Utmost Quality Bulldog   (718)562-2745  144  101:13/131(A)
Ashanti Connection       (718)634-4175  144  1:2603/214(F), 101:13/110(A), 1718000(V)
The BlackNet             (718)692-0943  144  1:278/618(F), 101:13/104(A)
Systematic[1]            (718)716-6198  144  1:2603/505(F), 101:13/106(A), #5210(R)
Systematic[2]            (718)716-6341  144  1:2603/505(F), 101:13/106(A), #5210(R)
Spaced Out               (718)778-5637  24   1:2603/108(F), 101:13/116(A), 7:718/1(SACnet)
Cypress Hills            (718)827-4933  144  101:13/115(A)
Fort Knox                (718)969-6910  144  101:13/117(A), 7:718/4(SACnet)
Vulcan-Net(IABPFF)       (908)769-7882  144  1:107/918(F), 101:13/105(A)
Islam On-Line[1]         (912)929-1073  144  1:3611/21(F), 101:19/3(A)
Islam On-Line[2]         (912)929-2873  144  1:3611/21(F), 101:19/3(A
Outside The Mainstream   (914)381-2390  144  1:272/74(F), 101:13/124(A), 1914000(V)

* For those unaware, Afronet is an echomail backbone supported by African and African-American BBS Sysops across North America.  The goal is to distribute conferences with African and African-American themes throughout North America.  It was originally conceived of by Ken Onwere, and implemented with the help and skill of Idette Vaughan(The BlackNet), Alex Hartley(Alex's Place), Nathaniel Saunders(Minority Affairs), and John Alston(Vulcan-Net).  For more information about Afronet, please post a message to SYSOP on any of the boards listed above. * (c)1993 Arthur R. McGee & Associates(AKA Africans Around the World)

You all just do not know the kind of stuff we used to deal with in the bad old days. I haven't spoken to Art McGee in a long time, not for any good reason.  I wonder if I can find any of the conversations we used to have about cyberspace in the early 90s. It would be fascinating. Where is Carter Bing?

Truth and Reconciliation

I'm going to try a short experiment. Well, I'm going to make some changes may become permanent and some that will be permanent.

The first is to ban the word 'nigger' from comments and trackbacks. This is certainly the most controversial change and the one that will probably most readily be reversed. I do so only in the context, somewhat symbolically, over Michael Fisher's excess some time earlier this Fall.

Fisher himself has been unbanned from commenting on Cobb as has Chance Kelsey, riding on the coattails of goodwill and the opportunity for more debate in this corner of the 'sphere.

Additionally, I will turn off Capcha and try to manually add text filters to get rid of spam. This should encourage more comments by making it slightly easier for folks to say what they want.

Respectable Negroes

I know I've lost my sense of humor and I've been a real grouch. I could feel it last night when I hung out with my brothers and Pops. But it's Friday, and although I'm about to launch into a huge debate, I'm going to try to chill out a bit. Nothing has aided that aim so much as a new blog that a thoughtful reader has just passed on to me.

It's called Respectable Negroes, and it took about 12 seconds to squirt milk out my nose. I say it now joins Hot Ghetto Mess and We Love Black People as the most hilarious sites in this vein. It's about time.

We are 3 black people whose friends got tired of hearing our daily rants, and reading our many (and often forwarded) emails. Collectively, we read too much, have opinions on everything, and have too many degrees--and the debt to prove it. We are respectable negroes who are just a little angry (and you know what happens when we get angry). It may appear that we are the same, but as you will see, we are quite different. We often agree, and we often don't. We be respectable negroes who will remain anonymous for now, but there will be clues, tasty morsels of information, that friends (and perhaps enemies) can use to find out our gov't names.
 

                     

Our Charter

    Whenever three respectable negroes, heads of families, shall desire to settle on land, and shall have selected for that purpose an island or a locality clearly defined, ...the Inspector of Settlements and Plantations will himself...give them a license to settle such island or district, and afford them such assistance as he can to enable them to establish a peaceable agricultural settlement. The three parties named will subdivide the land, under the supervision of the Inspector, among themselves and such others as may choose to settle near them, so that each family shall have a plot of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable ground.

Woohoo that's funny.

                   

The Brotherhood Expands

We welcome Desmond Burton, aka Afronerd to the Conservative Brotherhood. Afronerd is:

A new and needed web sanctuary for people of color with intellectual and artistic pursuits. In this blog we will be addressing interesting and varied subjects, i.e. current national/world affairs, culture, science, religion, politics, entertainment and literature(including graphic novels a/k/a comic books.....yes comics). We hope you enjoy the exchange of ideas. Peace & Godspeed.

Whatever you do, don't miss Afronerd Radio. It's a spiky and entertaining time and you won't forget it. Afronerd and his colleague run a great website and a truly challenging podcast. We're glad to have this new voice on board.

BTW If you haven't checked out the Conservative Brotherhood site recently, please do. The RSS aggregator has been updated and gives you access to all of the stories posted by the Brotherhood.

Triple Dog Dares

Drezner calls Drum's bluff on the rise of economic populism among Democrats.

The trouble with populism is (mostly) not about the remaining 10% of barriers to trade (though see below), it's about efforts to f$%& up the 90% of barriers that have been dismantled. The Baucus-Grassley-Schumer-Graham bill, for example, isn't about halting new trade openings -- it's about finding new ways to clamp down on existing openness.

Ezra Klein jokes about the good news on teenage sex and pregnancy. It's more interesting to me to disaggregate the teenage sex from overall birthing. Is it an independent trend down, or part of Americans have fewer babies?

Lester Spence evaluates the prospects for Black Power in the 21C through a dialog between some old radicals.

This year represents the 40 year anniversary of the Newark and Detroit riots. Next year will be the 40 year anniversary for Baltimore. One of my former students forwarded me a discussion that relates to our discussions about the local and the global. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviewed Amiri Baraka, Larry Hamm, and Grace Boggs about Newark and Detroit respectively. They were on two separate interview tracks until near the end, where Baraka and Boggs had a back and forth that was telling.

Tour de Sphere

Mighty Casey
After dropping off my radar, and evidently out of the 'sphere for a time, Casey Lartigue is back. He was at Howard for the Presidential debates last week and is rolling at The Casey Lartigue Show.

"News flash, everyone: The Civil Rights Act passed more than 4 decades. It is time to get your own act together." Is there any other civil rights legislation that needs to be passed to help blacks advance? If anyone can show any Constitutional rights that have not been extended to blacks should let me know ASAP, I'd lead the fight to change that...

Ring The Alarm
And now the sound is dying, whoa hey. It's ever so for the Left who like Michael Fauntroy here, rings an alarm as follows:

A recent Supreme Court ruling which upheld the unreasonable and unrealistic application of time limits on those who believe they are the victim of pay discrimination is another in a growing list of occurrences which demonstrate, clearly and convincingly, that the clock is being rolled back on civil rights enforcement in America. It’s the Reagan era all over again.

How did black people ever survive the Reagan Era? Well, with rising incomes. But that's old news, and so the sound is dying.

Speaking of old news, he's apparently one of those who believes that white attorneys who work for the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ are less qualified than black attorneys for the Civil Rights Division. Listen to this unalloyed yelping:

It was recently revealed that the Justice Department has an abysmal record when it comes to hiring Black attorneys and conducting civil rights cases. Since 2003, the criminal section within the Civil Rights Division (CRD) has not hired a single African American attorney to replace those who have left and it’s not like the CRD was a hotbed for Black attorneys. In 2007, there are fifty attorneys in the Criminal Section, just two of whom are African American. By comparison, the section had two African American attorneys in 1978, despite the fact that it was half the size of the current organization.

 

 

Justice commissioned KPMG Consulting and Taylor Cox and to examine diversity among attorneys throughout the department. The report, which was initially kept from Congress and the public, was heavily redacted when it was released. It was ultimately revealed that women and minority attorneys in the department feel that their careers are hindered and they are passed up in favor of White men when it comes to getting the best assignments. This, combined with six senior CRD officials being forced from their jobs for what appears to be political reasons, has undermined the work of the Justice Department.

And here's a shocker:

 According to the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Justice Department has only tried 35 Title VII employment discrimination cases since 2001, compared to 92 cases brought during the Clinton administration. The Housing and Civil Enforcement section's cases dropped from 53 in 2001 to 31 in 2006, with a 60% decline in the number of race-related cases.

Are you telling me that in eight years there were only 92 cases? Somebody with some legal chops help me out here. If your law firm had 50 attorneys and brought 92 cases in eight years, would you remain in business? Something is fishy around here. Is this why nobody pays attention to the EEOC? Do you mean to tell me that there are only 100 cases that made the cut under 'the first black president'? Is the Civil Rights business going out of business? This is very interesting indeed. Kinda reminds me of my Internet Racist Hunt.

Outreach

Today I'm going to try and reach out and touch some blogs worthy of our attention, but out in the margins of popularity. Let's give 'em some love y'all.

Acting White
First on the menu is James C. Collier who has some interesting multidimensional links to IATs that I didn't realize had been created on his sidebar. Check them out if you have the time. Meanwhile he advocates some simple health care advice.

New York City Schools will shortly begin a highly-publicized cash incentive program for coaxing improvement out of under performing black kids, and this may be well and good, but paying kids money to learn when their essential vitamin D levels are slowing them down, like a drag-shoot, makes little sense. The vitamin D levels of most of these kids, like their parents, are so low that they fail to register at all in health screening.

Innovate sure. But, while we are at it, how about wrapping some free vitamin D around a promotional campaign? It's just a cheap pill and our future, regardless of race.

Undercover Black Man
Next up, UCB has an interview with the original Ice Cube that we all know and 'loved'. I guess it just goes to show that success in show business means saying that the customer is always right.

So we’re backstage. It’s like, “Yo, man, should we do ‘Fuck tha Police’?” Nobody said yeah and nobody said no. Then we heard our cue so they ran up onstage, Ren and Dre and Yella. They go out first. To me, if nobody said yeah and nobody said no, we ain’t gonna do the song. That’s what I’m thinking. “I guess we’re going to do the regular show as planned.”

So it’s my turn to come up there, and I do “Gangsta, Gangsta.” Kids go crazy. After I finish “Gangsta, Gangsta,” after the lights go out and the music cut off, you hear the kids chanting: “Fuck the police! Fuck the police! Fuck the police!”

Then I go into “A Bitch Iz a Bitch.” After I finish that, I stop. “Fuck the police! Fuck the police! Fuck the police!” That’s all you hear the kids chanting.

He also gives some perspective on some dude named Bobby Cutts Jr, that I overheard was embarrassing black people somehow.

The Last Plantation
It looks as if, FINALLY, Debra Dickerson has gotten herself a proper blog. It's a good thing because that last pile was just too obscure to get my cyber hands on. Now she's got trackbacks, RSS and the whole grownup package. Good. Whoops. Spoke too soon. No RSS feed coming from her direction yet. Hmm. maybe the digital divide is real. I suppose I should send her an email.

Jasmyn Cannick
Speaking of butt-ugly blogs. What's up with JC? I know it's all about the content, but dayyum. She spews a bit on homophobes and the continuing drama at King Hospital which has thankfully been divested of the name of Charles Drew. No sense in dragging the Drew School through the mud. The King Hospital fiasco has been a train wreck coming for a decade now. I can remember mentioning the mismanagement to a friend at a high school reunion in '98 and he got defensive about it even way back then. Pull the plug, man just pull the plug.

Capitalism vs Communism at Exodus Mentality

There's a poll going on:

(a) having all the money you needed to do everything you and your family could ever dream of doing for yourselves,  or

(b) every person in the world having adequate food, clothing, shelter, health care, and educational opportunities.

In the real world, A happens all the time. B has never happened, that's because attempts at B always come at the expense of A. I don't know why black partisans ignore this reality. Perhaps because there are so many examples of 'black leaders' who get to do the decisions required for B.

Much Respect

It has been done multiple ways, but I think finally it's going to be done in the way it needs to be done. What's that? Aggregation of black blogs, that's what's that.

• Once upon a time Ric Landers blew up the spot, now his spot has been blown up.
• Blackblogz had to start from scratch.
• Rojo has done a decent job but that's way too much information.
• BlackElectorate is a fairly good aggregation but it's not really blog oriented.
• BookerRising is my favorite, but it's more of a community unto itself than a pure aggregator.

So here we go again. This time with a pure aggregator called Rsspect. It might even last. If not, then I'll do something with Google. Matter of fact, I know exactly what to do and I'm going to do it anyway.

On Typepad

This is Typepad. I originally started with Movable Type, from the same company, but hosting it myself was becoming too expensive. The current design of Cobb is about my 6th or 7th overall. I highly recommend Typepad as it will allow you to start off quickly and manage a fair amount of complex customization over the long haul. Actually it's not true that I started with MT...

Way back when, the first thing that got me started blogging as Cobb was the Kwanza controversy. I hand built about a six page thing. That was nothing really new because I've written a bunch of websites before. The first Cobb was done with Radio. I then moved to MT and put up the banner with the LA background. I've liked a kind of yellowish reddish tone since moving off Radio. But I first started with blue and green.

So I highly recommend Typepad for anyone who doesn't mind spending 15 bucks a month. It integrates well with a wide variety of third party tools. It's easy enough to get started on day one and it does all of the serious things a professional blog needs to do.

An Attempt At Fairness & Balance

I have recently added Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum, Joe Gandelman and Sean-Paul Kelley back into my RSS reader. What I'm attempting to do is find out how these folks, who have shown ample intelligence and insight, may or may not be representative of the other end of the political blogosphere. At the very least, I know I'll be expanding.

I've already spent a little time throwing a few barbs across the transom in the form of comments, but I hope to elevate that to trackbacks. In the meantime, I have to get into the habit of checking back to see if anyone is following up on my comments. That's going to take a little getting used to, but I think it's worth the effort.

The first thing I've noticed (and I've even ventured over to MyDD in reading through referenced posts) is the sheer volume of commenters these guys have as compared to the blogs I prefer. So the first thing I'm thinking is why do they put up with all of the nonsensical folks who have the annoying habit of saying 'me first' when they are the first person to post a comment? My gut reaction is that they care about numbers and interactivity rather than more precise analysis.. but maybe I've been spoiled by Spook86. The liberal and left game in politics is to grind the administration into whatever kinds of backwaters they can come up with, and the onus is on us to reason a way forward. No wonder there is no consensus.
 

Academic Weight for the Blackosphere

Antoinette Pole's disciplined research is getting publicity, apparently places where it matters. Here's the abstract on her paper.

This paper explores the role of black bloggers in the blogosphere. Among the top political blogs, blogging has primarily been undertaken by white men, coined by Chris Nolan as the "Big Boys Club." This research assesses how bloggers of color use their blogs for purposes related to politics, and it investigates whether the blogosphere facilitates political participation.

The data for this paper are based on in-depth interviews with 20 black bloggers conducted in November 2005. Primarily exploratory, this paper examines the issues and topics discussed by bloggers of color, and whether and how bloggers are using their blogs to engage in political participation. In addition this research attempts to assess whether black bloggers face discrimination in the blogosphere. Findings from this research suggest that black bloggers do in fact use their blogs to encourage their readers to engage in various forms of political participation. Finally, the data also show that bloggers reported that they do not feel discriminated against or excluded by other bloggers.

Notable joints:

• The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society
• Brown University
• Andy Wibbels

(Re)Birth of the Blackosphere

What I'm going to do here is rather unique. I'm just going to shutup and post a whole bunch of links.

Francis L. Holland

One way to increase Black site traffic at our Blackosphere blogs is for each of us Black bloggers to post tips about whatever available jobs of which we become aware, whatever they are, no matter how humble or exalted, be they in our own organizations or elsewhere. We cannot promise readers that they will attain or even be interviewed for these jobs, but we CAN at least serve as a Black alternative to the old white boys' club that serves to inform whites of jobs before those jobs are published in the newspaper, if they are ever published at all.

Prometheus 6

...it's one of the more important things we gave up when integration became a goal instead of a tactic. But it should remind you of something...the networks you are developing right now via your discussions.

The old network was the overlapping spheres of individual relationships. So is the one that is in development now, except now those connections can reach across the country. They can be far more numerous, denser.

And I'm using the future tense because this is still under development. This case is proof it can be developed. This case is proof it SHOULD be developed. This case is proof you can raise an issue to the point where is can no longer be ignored if you believe in it.

So do it. Okay?

Republic of T

We write about what we’re passionate about, and that often means writing about issues that (whether or not they should) not only don’t interest or attract huge numbers of readers, but that make many people so uncomfortable that they’d rather not have to address them at all.

And there’s even a “triple whammy” for African American political bloggers. Because you also open yourself up to attack by other African Americans for being “not black enough” in your politics, your choice of topics, or even your personal life. Blogging about politics from a particularly black perspective isn’t “safe” unless you steer clear of certain issues, but it isn’t “safe” to steer clear of those issues either. Add to the mix that we’re not monolithic, and thus have diverse concerns among ourselves, and the difficulty of addressing them all to our own satisfaction (let alone satisfying anyone else’s ideas of what we should or shouldn’t blog about), and the whole idea of blogging politically as an African American is a daunting one to consider.

It would be much easier to blog about something else. Maybe that’s why, in contrast to the numbers above, there are 258 blogs about black culture, over 3,000 blogs about hip hop and almost 4,000 about rap. (Though there’s certainly some overlap there because a number of the blogs on in those categories probably also cover politics to some degree.) There’s also a hip hop Blogads network and a black culture Blogads network, but no black political Blogads network that I could find.

Field Negro

Sorry folks, I didn't mean to go on a rant, but.....hey, I wouldn't be the field if I didn't. So thanks again to everyone who has helped to make this a successful year by commenting, reading, and allowing me to share the blogosphere with you.

Before I go, I was tagged by the good peeps over at Coyote Angry who wanted me to list five blogs that really make me think. This is a tough one, because different blogs make me do different things, and it's hard separating what makes me think from what I just enjoy. For instance, I enjoy reading blogs like La Bella-Noire,Nat Turner's Revenge,Too Sense, and Skeptical Brotha. For information, I say f**k Drudge. I enjoy reading Voice Of A Native Son,African American Black Opinion and Afro Netizen. For comments on my blog, I love hearing from the likes of I am not star jones,Liz,and mahndisa. Mmmmm, so now the five that makes me think. OK I would say The Free Slave ,Mirror On America,The Strange Death Of Liberal America ,The Anti Essentialist Conundrum, The Book Of Asabagna, and my man over at Exodus Mentality a close 5A; all make me think. Whew, that was deep, and I am sure I am leaving out some folks. Hey, let's just put it this way, if you are linked on this blog I am feeling you.

 

The Suicide of Latigo Flint

I often compare Americans to the peasants of Sherwood Forest. I have no reason to believe that we are any better or worse people. Axiomatically, humanity is primitive. Sometimes we walk into a magnificent church and it changes us. Sometimes we walk into a gigantic factory and it changes us. Sometimes we delve into a great book and it changes us. Still, axiomatically, we're all bitches and brutes until we locate within ourselves a reason not to be, and some edifice of human creation that gives us the courage not to corrupt and debase ourselves. Rare is the man who is a paragon unto himself; solitary confinement is the greatest punishment. We are social creatures and our society is basically base, but sometimes...

We know this about ourselves. Every morning we brush our teeth and wash our faces because we're always trying to overcome entropy. A bit of maintenance symbolic of our culture's social contract. We're willing to try and civilize ourselves daily along an arc of ambition. For most of us the ambition needn't be cutthroat, but it depends upon the character of the institutions that we claim as stakeholders. I could be a CEO. I could be a treehugger. I could be Al Aksa martyr. I could be tourguide on the Sydney Harbor Bridge. I work in the shadow of structure, and I comport myself so long as I have hope to keep my face. Otherwise, I'm that fat woman scratching herself lying face up in the middle of the sidewalk on the corner of 9th and Walnut.

Sometimes we make good time along that arc. Sometimes we're naturally quick, other times we get a boost. We move fast enough within the crowd to jump out of ourselves and comment on the game itself. With enough momentum, we stop and smell the roses. They smell like something joyful and fun. We laugh and dance and forget bad times. Most of us thank the stars for the recreation time and then get back into the grind. Some cannot help but want to live outside of the crowded brotherhood of man so that we can make our business not business, but meta-business. We don't work, so much as we observe  other people's work. We draw attention to ourselves in order to draw people to look at themselves as blithely or cynically as we do.

You know the attitude today in America. Irony. We angle into irony and jest or bite about the difference between joy and pain. Jesting irony is the province of the clown. Biting irony is the province of the poet. Either way, poetry and clowning lie in the province of hope and sometimes that becomes our profession. I know two men who became poets in this way, but I only know them from their dramatic self-personae.

One of those men was Latigo Flint, and he was the fastest gun in the West. He lived on the Westside among the gleaming Mercedes Benzes and million dollar mansions. He was confident and sure because he had that six-shooter. Some people reacted and said he was 150 years too late to be a top dog in California, but like all poets, he had his sense of integrity. From that source he drew straight illuminating stories through the random rococo sybaritic sensibilities of La La Land. I made all of the strage sense of sanity we daily deal seem slightly more ridiculous as only a sharpshooter could. He had more than an aw shucks charm that became easily recognizable virtue. There were only ladies in his world, each puzzlingly ignorant of why they needed his selfless chivalry, at first. Latigo Flint was a hero, no doubt about it. A hero out of time inside the mind of a man who wrote stories on the internet. And in that way he became a poet who bit quite properly at the lack of courage and nobility in our contemporary lifestyles.

Then one day that man looked at himself and discovered that he wasn't a biting poet but an evil clown.

Okay then... here's the fundamental aspect of madness that underlies all others:

Everything, and I do mean everything, sprouts tentacles and grows a fangy clown face if you stare at it long enough.

Toasters: check. Laptops: check. Bus drivers: check. The Revlon Girl on the billboard: check. The list goes on and on--concentrically and then back in again.

So, soon as you see it happen--scream. And don't stop until the fangy clown face tentacle monster is dead, killed by your mighty screams, and/or the men with caps give you a magical jacket made of space age polymer fibers designed exclusively for the purpose of shielding the wearer from fangy clown face tentacle monsters.

Name your jacket immediately. It can't protect you for very long if it doesn't have a name. Whatever you do though, don't use vowels. Vowels are how the fangy clown face tentacle monster latches onto your insides. If you utter a vowel when you talk to your magical jacket then the beast is gonna tear you apart and lap up your lung blood with a bacteria tongue of festering doom.

Which is no fun, by the way. It's just really no fun at all.

I recommend you name your magical jacket: "Gggrrgffttsk." Although you can’t go wrong with: "Pllfflrrgghh" either. "Ssgrrfflkmnhrrgy" is risky… you know, 'cause of the whole "and sometimes Y" thing.

And that was the last thing he wrote in his blog.

There may be some cells that remain in your body most of your life. Perhaps the roots of your teeth, perhaps some core heart muscle or maybe a few irreplaceable ganglia at the base of your skull are the only you that stays you. The rest of your body regenerates through working off old cells and putting new ones in roughly the same place. They say it takes 11 years to trade out all the exchangeable cells, and with the exception of the few, you are not the same person at all. Thus a natural rebirth takes eleven, so then does a natural death. But Latigo Flint was compelled to shortcut the process.

The Viagra industry notwithstanding, nobody gets a woody in the face of death. Scary things, truly frightening things that you expect to defeat you will cause permanent shrinkage. A man thus contributes to his demise by his inability to reproduce, it is self-motivated Darwinism. It is a slow form of suicide. A man who shrinks into himself hastens his own death. You can tell when clowns and poets are ready to undo themselves. They start to scribble over their own creations. They burn their manuscripts. They reveal themselves as frauds. They send their chihuahua packing. They total their little car that used to carry so many clowns in arms. They descend into self-mockery, self-loathing. They walk out of the building that used to house them and back into Sherwood Forest. They begin to describe themselves as would an ordinary bitch or brute.

They no longer put on their face.

For you and me that's like throwing away the toothbrush and the soap. It is the beginning of the end. It's heading to the crusty corner of 9th and Walnut to steal the half eaten Subway sandwich from the itchy woman. To appreciate the warmth of a manhole cover. To start rehearsing the excuses of beggary. Spit them all at once before they say no, and wait to see if you become a kick-dog scavenger or a dirty nailed predator craving for a beatdown at the hands of the clean shaven.

Yes, we all know when we need to start killing ourselves. We feel that we are completely wrong, that all the accumulations of our works and our selves and our bodies were done under false premises. We finally say the words "I am unworthy" and the debasement begins. The cells of the self finally get the message and they commence to radiate pain. We feel the pain deep in our hearts, in the back of our heads and throbbing in roots of our teeth.

Latigo Flint is dead. He shot himself in the face. There was nobody who could save him, because he was the quickest quickdraw in the West.

The Clocksite

Here's an idea and a term to coin. Clocksite.

A clocksite is a website put together to establish or debunk any economic or social theory that makes predictions about some important occurrence or keeps track of some indicator of public interest.

The term originates from the now familiar practice of billboard advertisements which are calibrated at a certain rate to estimate some important metric of public interest, like the number of smokers who die from lung cancer, the estimated number of dead in war, the number of dollars in the federal deficit or most famously the 'number of minutes to nuclear holocaust'.

A clocksite however, would employ multiple metrics and varying types of analysis and would allow for a more sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the issue at hand.  It might be open for collaboration or some officially sponsored by a partisan group.

As more open source tools become available to present analytic data on websites, we should expect more clocksites to follow the open publishing models that are now being experimented with by the folks at Swivel and ManyEyes. I have been interested in this matter for many years as I have been involved with building such sites with proprietary tools for business.

The Mystery of the Referenceable Blogger

Very much like my Mystery of the Black Blogger problem, Robin Hanson wonders aloud if the 'sphere will go towards a model of referential integrity like that of academic publishing or of popular unattributable flavorful communitarian model like that of popular journalism. I say the latter is inevitable, because people don't necessarily care about the truth and authenticity as they do about being relatively informed. If you can get the gist without footnotes, you will.

But, if social norms allow academics to ignore blog posts, by not citing clearly relevant and influential blog posts just because they are blog posts, then blog writers will have little incentive to offer insightful comments that can be fit easily into an academic network of cited insights.  Blog writers will instead have the incentives of newspaper columnists, to provide an engaging style with little expectation of originality or cumulative expert influence.  Such blog writers might well cite each other, but more as a way to create an engaging multi-character show for their readers. 

So can we create an academic blog world, where blog posts get academic credit?  If someone gets a Nobel prize for developing an idea that was first explained in someone else's carefully written but short blog post, will that blog author be celebrated, or will he be ignored as the sort of distraction that academics can't be expected to pay attention to?  A lot will depend on whether blogs can organize themselves into networks of specialists, so that it is feasible for someone working on a particular topic to find the careful serious blog posts related to their topic.  This is obviously harder to do for many small blog posts than for fewer larger papers or books.  But it is not obviously impossible, and this is the blog world I hope to live in.

Aside from the fundamental conflict between the credentialed and the well-informed, there is the problem of incentives. Academic teaching is something of a subscription model of information dissemination. The great value in teaching is found in the efficiencies of f2f interaction and variant explanations that are readily available to a good teacher. Replicating this online would take way too much effort, and online is not a good place to try although video transcripts of seminars can be pretty damned illuminating.  But there is also the economy of valuation of teaching materials based upon the publication business.  Sure there's MIT's Open Courseware, but it is the exception that proves the rule. Nobody publishes academic quality materials for free.

I would absolutely love for Google to put Lexis-Nexis out of business, but that's going to take a generation of IP holders to die and some serious changes in copyright law and convention. I am a huge champion of their efforts to digitize the libraries of the world. This has been a dream of computer scientists from day one, and it is one that will not die. We have to reorient valuation of learning paradigms towards human interaction and let the world of media be cheap. I think that this will ultimately happen, someday.

There is great value in peer-reviewed materials. This is the kind of credentialing that the academic community can and should teach the blogging world. There are tools that can be easily built, but nobody is really interested right now except weirdos like me who have no money or time, which could establish this kind of rating and ranking. The brief explanation is that right now we in the 'sphere are oriented around a long tail of popularity rather than one of credibility or usability. We don't have market enablers of cred, and that's what we need. Now there may be something new in Ice Rocket, Technorati or Google Blog search that I have missed, but right now for the overwhelming majority of Internet content all we know are Hits and Stars. Two dimensions ain't enough.

And so we instantiate our own peer networks which are the aggregations of the biases of our in-groups. These become ossified over time. When's the last time you changed your blogroll? At one time I had close to three times the link traffic to Cobb as I do now. The market does not move swiftly enough to be accurate, and again, there are only a small set of ratings criteria.

Now I've identified and solved this problem, in fact I did it years ago. Who's going to fund that out here in web-land? (That link will be available Friday, in the meantime try this)

Blogger President

I'm definitely on that meme. Give me a President who blogs. McCain's stock is going down. He's really fumbling with his words - Hugh Hewitt nailed him today. Our next President, whoever he is, has got a lot of fast talking to do, and the one who blogs best will get my vote.

So far it's all Mitt for our team.

Dell Gines Closes Shop

Dell Gines, a reluctant black conservative who enjoined some of the most boisterous topics in this corner of the blogosphere is closing shop. His blog's going dark in a month or so he just announced. That's a loss.

Why I Love the Blogosphere

Michael Totten reporting from Lebanon says:

I try my best to be accurate. But these reports are not “objective.” My writing is personal and unapologetically biased. If you want bloodless and neutral coverage of the ongoing crisis in Lebanon, find a writer or reporter who doesn’t care about Lebanon, who can shrug at its problems, who only cares about the place because it’s a “story,” who can yawn and sleep soundly while it convulses and explodes. There are plenty around. The rest of us will take sides.

I wrote this in 1992:

In my view the editorial style and physical limitations of what we call newspapers   force researchers into particular ways of seeing things that lack the authenticity of the   voice of people, African Americans, especially. The very manner in which newspapers and   televised journalistic reports are assembled are biased to profess the false objectivity   of journalists who themselves have become a very powerful class of Americans. This bias   for me has become unendurable and I find it most annoying to parse through a multiplicity   of papers to get at the truth. Having done so, the truth I arrive at seems much the   product of oppositional cross-examination of institutions with much to hide. Yet often   there are odd spots of writing I happen upon which ring with the flavor of authentic   experience. It is this type of information that gives me the confidence that the world is   indeed populated by human beings who can understand and explain it and do so out of   genuine curiosity and love.

I have waited years to hear this on a regular basis. It is why I write on the web and almost nowhere else. As I type this on my flat color screen I realize that I am to an appreciable degree, living in the future I've always desired.

Check Out My PJs Dude

I just got off the phone with Baldilocks who's the LA editor of Pajamas Media. She emailed me a new sticker for my race car. See it? I kinda like it. Way back when, I declined my invitation to be part of the original PJ crew. I basically didn't realize how much traffic my site was getting, so that underestimation was part of my calculation to say that it wasn't worth it for me to put ads on my humble blog.

These days, although I'm in no hurry, I welcome the attention and wouldn't be particularly averse to advertising. I'm not principly against it, and I'm over myself. I'm already syndicated by the good folks at Newstex who were kind enough not to ask for exclusivity.

So the new deal is that I'm on the official blogroll for Pajamas Media, and this is my reciprocal link. All good baby.