Project PM Update - September 16th, 2010

First, Id like to thank everyone for having expressed some degree of interest Project PM, particularly those who have been kind enough to share with us their time and expertise as we go about bringing this to fruition.

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 seems, is that those 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 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 this 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 or another commentator all at once and in tandem, thereby prompting attention on the part of those mainstream editors and producers 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 disregarded.

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 we were happy to note that such people could not only be of assistance in helping to implement our main goal of establishing the blogger network, but could also be organized in such a way as to compose and pursue solutions to any number of related problems.

This expansion of purpose was prompted by our desire for Project PM to exist as an opportunistic sort of entity, taking on whichever tasks are found to be most viable in light of whichever sorts of resources and human capital have been made available to it. Although we remain light on resources, the degree of human capital we have accumulated is particularly humbling. Among the journalists and bloggers who have agreed to participate or assist, we have Michael Hastings, the author and war correspondent whose Rolling Stone piece on Afghanistan prompted the near-immediate resignation of General McChrystal; Charles Johnson, a pioneer of blogging conventions and technology who served as the co-creator of the influential but idiotic blog consortium Pajamas Media and whose gradual shift from right to center has been frought with hilarity on the part of his allies-turned-enemies; Allison Kilkenny, a wonkish progressive whose radio program Citizen Radio, co-hosted with husband and comedian Jamie Kilstein, has become an inimitable and entertaining forum for honest-to-god policy discussions; and Dr. Juan Cole, whose erudite blogging on Middle Eastern affairs has happily translated into some degree of mainstream exposure. Among our non-blogging participants, meanwhile, we have a former editor of The Washington Post, a former CIA Directorate of Operations agent, a variety of scientists and programmers and engineers, several flavors of lawyer, various veteran political activists, and a great many people who lack formal credentials but nonetheless have demonstrated a keen understanding of the subjects on which we are focused as well as an inclination to put that understanding to fullest use.

Over the past couple of months, Ive been working with many of our participants in an effort to finalize and implement the blogger project as well as the various other sub-projects weve adopted so far. The process 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 writing all of that down just now. Having meanwhile developed a more specific 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 by contacting me with your interest:

The Science/Journalism Improvement Project, which seeks to match freelance writers with scientists in order to encourage the production of more accurate science journalism.

The Africa Project, which is concerned with producing self-perpetuating solutions by which to improve education and standard of living in the context of Sub-Sahara, such as a program to distribute guides with plans for locally-implementable engineering techniques and to encourage the further distribution of those guides by the recipients themselves.

The Software Project, members of which will hammer out details regarding the proposed software for the Project PM blogger network.

Wed also like to bring a few other people in to our weekly online meeting, during which time we plot and scheme and process paperwork in an effort to get Project PM established on its route to collective administration of the sort that will no longer require us to hold weekly meetings. Those who might be interested in joining us in this drudgery should e-mail me at their convenience.

Again, thanks to everyone for their interest. To be excluded from further mailings of this sort, simply reply and tell me that youd like to be taken off.