This will be my final column for BushwickBk. For context, read last week's entry.
It's worth noting that there is no real equivalent today to the intensity and mass participation that marked the engagement of the American citizenry against certain of its institutions from the mid-'60s to early '70s. Part of this no doubt stems from time spent in cars and chat rooms rather than on foot and at dance halls, time spent with one's fellows being a prerequisite to a fellow being likely to spend time in fighting the times. More significantly, the relative absence of the old protest movement methodology is clearly a conscious decision by the great preponderance of those who might in earlier decades have involved themselves in such things; that age's histrionics, its self-serving optimism, its scattered flirtations with such things as Maoism and mysticism are held in relative low esteem by cynical youth of the 21st century, who of course have the advantage of looking back upon the 20th with the advantage of hindsight. It is good that we may learn from those mistakes, but perhaps we have been overly careful in avoiding the exuberance of our predecessors, who were people of action, even if some of the action in question was stupid. A certain amount of exuberance is necessary to do those things that ought to be done.
To the extent that the citizenry dictate the actions of the state, the actions of the state are the result of the thinking of the citizenry. The bulk of the citizenry is informed to some great extent by what we would term the traditional media, and thus the nature of the traditional media contributes in large part to the nature of the actions taken by the state, and of course the actions of the state determine in large part the degree to which men are imprisoned, assisted, condemned, examined, proscribed, occupied, injured, inoculated, fed and killed. Those whom the media has selected to exert a relatively large degree of collective influence over the citizenry, then, contribute to life and death in a manner largely unprecedented to history, and should perhaps be dealt with if we feel some obligation - and perhaps we do - to take responsibility for those things over which we potentially have control.
The news media of the world's sole superpower cannot be considered anything other than a relative failure. The military engagements of the last decade could have gone considerably better - better in the sense of not causing such high degrees of unnecessary death and dislocation - if certain individuals of influence had managed to determine what was obvious to many others and then used their stations by which to promote a more reasonable foreign policy than the one we have gotten. Thomas Friedman and Charles Krauthammer, both of whom command huge readerships and widespread respect, retain their positions only by virtue of the inattention of their readers to the failures of their past predictions and, more generally, their inability to provide anything close to the level of erudition that they are alleged to offer. The system that has provided such people with equal parts power and unaccountability is probably not so virtuous as to fix itself from within, particularly as it is made up of a great many individuals with their own impulses and career paths, all in competition among one another to attract an audience. Such a system may only be changed from without.
Project 3Jane is intended to reduce the influence of demonstrably mediocre political commentators while increasing that of the better ones. This is to be done by organizing certain of the more capable and honest political bloggers into a decentralized network with the purpose of occasionally coordinating to address a particular deficit of the traditional media all at once, thereby forcing coverage on the part of certain mainstream outlets. A few bloggers pointing to a factual error on the part of a respected pundit are likely to be overlooked or ignored by such outlets as CNN and The New York Times; a dozen of the most influential of them along with a great number of their lesser-known fellows, however, may once in a while collaborate in such a way as to prompt at least one producer or publisher to cover the matter. To the extent that the better bloggers are willing to associate, then, they are capable of occasionally making its own use of the same infrastructure by which the traditional media maintains relative advantage in spite of relative mediocrity.
The project will also introduce software currently in development by Andrew Stein, an IT engineer who worked on the operating system for Hearst's upcoming e-reader, among other things; we expect the end result to serve as a considerable improvement on the flow of crucial information among bloggers, providing them the means by which to improve their own output while also helping to disseminate the most important output of the political blogosphere as a whole to an audience far greater than it has so far managed to acquire on its own.
Most importantly, the project is viable. Several of the more prominent and justifiably-respected of the online commentators have already signed on to the project, ensuring a collective and unusually well-informed audience of well over a hundred thousand readers a month even at the outset; those within the network, meanwhile, are capable of bringing in additional participants based on their own judgement regarding who would be an asset to the campaign, a method of enlargement that should provide for increasing influence while also avoiding that dynamic whereby growing networks are often watered down by the inclusion of less capable members. I'll also begin recruiting in earnest later this week after such time as a more formal announcement goes up; no political commentator worth reading will be safe from my irritating, over-enthusiastic phone calls and e-mails.
If you happen to be a programmer, a media professional, or just a competent person possessed of enough flamboyance to get involved in my ambitious schemes but not so much flamboyance that you're fucking crazy, get in touch at barriticus@gmail.com.
Ah, Bushwick. I'll always remember you fondly, if perhaps inaccurately.