newsletter draft

Thanks to everyone for your interest and participation.

Project PM was originally intended to serve a narrow purpose: to reduce the influence of those mainstream commentators who have done nothing to merit the great influence they possess over the form and content of the national dialogue. This goal itself was prompted by the months I had spent in reading over the work of such people as Thomas Friedman and Charles Krauthammer in the course of writing my next book as well as a series of articles on the same general subject. During this time, it occurred to me that a great number of our most influential commentators have gained that influence despite a demonstrable and consistent tendency towards making predictions that did not actually come true, deploying self-contradictory arguments, accidentally misrepresenting important and verifiable facts, and otherwise conducting their work in such a way as to damage the public understanding. Meanwhile, there exist other pundits whose confidence and honesty are just easily identifiable but who nonetheless have not been granted anything close to the numerical reach of their more incompetent counterparts at such places as The New York Times and Washington Post. The problem, it seemed, is that those among the former audience who would shift their attention to other, better pundits if they knew about these failures have in fact not managed to learn of them, not being consumers of those information information outlets which are in the business of pointing out such failures.

This problem - all the more significant for having damaged the national understanding, and thus having been at fundamental fault for some degree of the problems the nation has concocted for itself over the years - has already been remedied to a small but noticeable extent by the unprecedented increases in communicational possibilities that have come about by way of the internet. In particular, a portion of the blogosphere has proven itself effective in pointing out these deficits to a considerable audience which has consequently abandoned those pundits who have been shown to exhibit them. I think that this advantageous process can be improved upon; in fact, Id argue that it would be ridiculous to think that it cannot be improved upon.

Project PM originated as a means to identify and implement such improvements in order to meet the aforementioned goal of lessening the influence of those whose influence plainly ought to be lessened. This was to be done by way of a very simple schematic whereby a significant number of participating bloggers would be persuaded to bring up the deficits of some particular commentator all at once and in tandem, thereby prompting attention on the part of those editors and producers working for the various mainstream outlets, who in turn would be hard-pressed not to address an issue being widely and suddenly discussed by a large array of commentators with a high level of collective notability. In this way, the blogger array may in effect take temporary control of the mainstream medias infrastructure in order to get across the general message to its vast audience that the commentators on whom they are depending for information are incompetent and ought to be abandoned.

To this end, I began contacting some of the better bloggers (including traditional journalists who work in part through online media) and explaining that shit be all fucked up and that maybe we could unfuck it to some extent if we all got together and did our thing as described above, or words to that effect. Having recruited a couple of dozen such folks possessed of combined notoriety more than sufficient to prompt the necessary reaction, and having designed a simple schematic by which this would all be carried out, it occurred to me that a similar schematic, backed by simple software, could also be used by bloggers to greatly improve the means by which they communicate with one another. Meanwhile, we had managed to recruit an even greater number of non-bloggers possessed of various skill sets - many with extraordinarily impressive backgrounds - and it occurred to us that such people could not only be of assistance in helping to develop this particular project, but could in fact be organized in such a way as to come up with solutions to any number of related problems, particularly if our schematic could be adapted for their use.

Over the past couple of months, Ive been working with many of our participants in an effort to finalize and implement both the blogger project and the various other sub-projects we have decided to take on as well. This has involved an overlapping tangle of makeshift experiments in online collaboration, the launching of various discussion groups, research on emergent internet dynamics and related items of inquiry, recruitment of additional participants capable of filling in any remaining expertise gaps, determinations of legal framework and other arrangements, and a great deal of pacing back and forth and mumbling. Having finally come to a point at which we can honestly say that we have a firm idea of what we want to do and why and how, we have finally gotten to the matter of when and decided that now would probably work.

As such, Id like to invite you to join one or more of the following working groups:

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Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302