-withOUT disclosing more-

Or think of it this way. BB is much more a part of the GIFT economy than the business economy. Although the people doing it now hope to make a little something off all their work, the ethos is that of a culture, not a business. Posts are still personal, dictating more by social networks than any official or sponsored connection. So the removal of something is not a business decision or policy maneuver - but a personal reflection of what a writer does or doesn't want his name associated with.

The whole discussion of censorship and transparency really is not germane here. This isn't government. This isn't the FDA removing a study that shows a drug had dangerous side effects. This is blog from a posse that quite randomly finds stuff they like or don't like. This is not a case of institutional, commercial, or government trust; it's a social situation. In social situations we are free to sulk, to change our minds, and to stay silent about why we are.

If that doesn't meet the expectations you had when you came here, you are free to ask for your money back.

This is a blogger deciding she doesn't really agree with what she posted earlier, but thought that calling attention to the removal would have actually created more harm than good.

I've tried really hard to wrap my head around the upset, and I think it's more a matter of projection and web-polarity than substance.

A blogger on BB felt she no longer wanted to be directly associated with what she obviously felt was some negative energy. Some of you seem to feel she's not allowed to do that with disclosing more, or announcing it. To me, making that demand is not consistent with the code of the happy mutant.

The whole thing really boils down to money, doesn't it? That's the part that's interesting to me.

I had a debate a couple of years ago with Jeff Jarvis, where I argued that accepting ads on a site changes the character of the site - even if the writer(s) of the site haven't changed in their intentions. The context is just different.

If BoingBoing were still an absolutely unprofitable zine done for the pure fun of it, then removing something or changing their minds would be fair game.

But because a bb link now equates - for some - into business value, the removal is somehow more pertinent. Add to that the fact that BB is, to some extent, a profitable business itself, and readers feel there's a different sort of obligation implied.

If I cut something on my blog, chances are no one would care. That's because my linkage doesn't really help so much financially (unless I really really push, as in the case of saving Arthur or RAW) and because my site is unsponsored.

The lessons learned here are, first and foremost, the law of negative effects. Undoing something almost always makes it worse. And second, the rules of anti-censorship and value creation from the periphery are actually incompatible with business as we know it.

If the BB people were all at home, they probably would have simply decided to republish the stuff once the hubbub started, and said something like "thanks to our community, we realize that the unpublishing was contrary to the ethos we've been espousing and reconsidered our actions." Or, if Cory had a rationale for what happened that he could articulate (as only a guy like Cory can) in a way that satisfies the most FSFish amongst us, he'd have done it.

What fascinates me is whether the energy spent here might have been directed at Blackwater or some other malfeasant corporation, and how to generate the same sort of outrage for more significant crimes against humanity.

Are things going quiet? It's been fifteen minutes.

What am I going to do with the rest of my life?

But Boingboing is my only source of news. This is the window through which I experience the world!

Seriously, the real reason everyone is in a tizzy has nothing to do with censorship, and *everything* to do with sex. When something having to do with sex occurred, it is the closest blogger's *responsibility* to the rest of the blogosphere to share it. I mean, that's what the Internet was built for in the first place, right?

If you *really* want to know what happened, log onto Second Life, and find a hidden island called VelvetSchnapps. Ask for Pete.

I still don't understand the connection - and I'm not totally stupid (yet).

But this was definitely not his intent.

Yes, he wanted pseudo.com to be a cool art scene where people trip a lot and have sex or whatever, and use the net to make weird points.

But he also, almost definitely, wanted to make money for himself and his friends. At the very least, I have to believe he saw his friends, parents, siblings, and girlfriends as being on the winning side of the art/money/scam equation. I don't think he meant for the "artists" he was playing with - myself included - to lose all our savings by participating.

Perhaps he saw some endgame scenario where that would happen to Wall Street people, but even then, I think it was supposed to be about eventually getting other people's money to build a really fun media studio. That we had to put in our own money at the beginning to make it work wasn't about scamming others or being scammed ourselves, I don't think.

Well this is news to me.

Pseudo was my single dot.com investment. I put an entire book payment in there - back when I was single and reckless - because Josh called me and said he was doing me a favor and wanted me to make some money off the net for a change. I thought I was the silly artist who didn't know how to actually earn a living, and Josh was the smart guy who started Jupiter.

I find it hard to believe he'd have intentionally defrauded me with an art project - not when I was (and am) so very much poorer than him.

I think more likely he saw Pseudo a bit like eToy - an art project and a hack of corporate culture that would nonetheless pay off for those of us playing there, doing shows, and experimenting with streaming media. And for some with great shows - Jason Calacanis, Richard Metzger to name just two - it really did in the long run.

In any case, I can't bring myself to believe he intentionally went bankrupt, and I doubt that's what he means to say here.

I really do hate this stuff.

Thanks Djinn. You got to that one first and more pithily than I might have, myself.

As I see it, Einstein simply took Judaism to its logical (and intended) extreme. Note that he still maintains his affinity for Judaism; he has simply let the God part naturally fall away, just as it does in Tanakh (which, if Ms. 50 has actually read, might actually begin to comprehend).

Nice. Except for the fact that it's the same 'creative' organization I just used for an entire chapter of my next book. Oh well. I've got different people saying basically the same things.

The weirder part, though, is that most of the people I spoke with had very little understanding of any part of the system that wasn't immediately adjacent to themselves.

The ones who did have some awareness of the other steps in the chain are now total paranoids-- storing water and duct tape and gold.

I love it. But the cover irks me for some reason. It's as if the photo can't decide if it's retro or not.

Yay Meri!

People have definitely said it before, but that doesn't mean it doesn't make sense! Back in 94, a mainstream media group study showed that the average internet-connected home was watching 9 hours less TV per week. That's when the war against participatory media began.

But the war against cognitive surplus in America began, quite consciously, during the FDR administration. Cognitive surplus was seen as the first step towards worker unrest.

The idea for three fruit trees in every Levittown garden (supplied free) was specifically designed to use up men's time so that they wouldn't stray from home and organize.

If you really want to see a case of "genre borrowing," compare elements of the Matrix to Grant Morrison's Invisibles.

But it all comes out in the wash, I suppose. Morrison is a superstar in his own right, now, as is Gaiman. The excess capital that Rowley may have accumulated extending the mythology of the bespectacled young wizard is really besides the point.

That car is a MINI!
(Observe vent pattern and logo in windshield decal.)

Proves once again that Mini drivers are courteous and evolved.

I'd try it with my three-year-old, but she can't read the stops. Or even see out the window.

Seriously, we used to do stuff as little kids that kids aren't allowed to do today. We didn't even have bike helmets when I was growing up. (Though we did have a kid crack his skull in 4th grade attempting a wheelie on his "Chopper.")

Are abductions really "up"? And does hiding kids from the real world provide a collective solution or a worsening of the environment?

Wait a minute. Does this mean we have to give back the stuff?

OF course, the whole problem is that books can only exist in one place at one time. Does an "occult gardening" book go in the occult section, the gardening section, or both? If both, then the library needs to get two books.

The net lets us give categories to things that didn't have them before. Occult may have been more a descriptor than a category - but now that anything can be a tag, we can have different kinds of categories than those we developed to reflect a Victorian or even Greek world view.

Yeah. It's got to be hollow. Otherwise there's nowhere to put the stuff.

If you want a little more excitement, there's a canon we used to make with tennis ball cans, deodorant spray, and a potato. I wonder if that one is online somewhere... I suppose it's not so safe.

I'd be afraid to hang out with someone who had the word 'psycho' tattooed on his forehead.

I mean, if he cut my hand off or something, everyone would just tell me I should have known better. And I couldn't argue, as I like to, that "well, he didn't have the word 'psycho' tattooed on his forehead."

Oh. I thought this was gonna turn Leatherman into brass knuckles or something else suitable for a "punch down."

Shows where my head is at these days.

He's positioning himself as this decade's Cliff Stohl, I suppose.

Sad thing is that there is an argument to be made from the Keen side of things. Lanier did it better in his Edge post or NYTimes OpEd, looking at some of the limitations of our own wild speculation early on.

I think the important point - and the one so often missed in the Internet's often polar discussions - is that it's not a matter of yes/no good/bad, but rather what helps online collaboration work better, and what inhibits the process? What is this technology particularly good for, and what is it less good for?

I, for one, think it's less good for what Lessig is working on now (politics) that it was for what Lessig was working on before (creative commons). But that's another conversation.

The best point of this whole thing is what you said above - that Keen proved his point accidentally, by getting the crowd to produce the wrong answer. Again, though, this just shows how a poorly set-up interactive forum will lead to a poor answer.

In early zombie movies they'd just paint eyes on the actor's eyelids.

God is angry at his Son.

You know that song - the real single - was banned on a bunch of radio stations. And the duo was condemned as 'miscreants' by Nixon for this very song.

If he sold it because of a civil suit, then how can he have lived there until he died? Or did he sell it and then rent if from the new owner, and then die?

This same thing happened to a lot of us. I posted about it on my own blog yesterday:
http://www.rushkoff.com/2008/01/jasezone.php

I figured it could have been a one-off as well, but someone managed to do a bunch of us...

Well, they didn't admit to lying. They admitted to what looks like lying.

Then again, is lying itself a form of human error?

My name is Douglas, and I am a sun sneezer.

They did a big piece of his at CalArts when I was there in the 80's. Very trippy, even life-changing spatial music thing. We lied on gym mats, if I remember correctly, and it came from all around us. Live.

His stuff had a virtuosity to it that a lot of other 'experimental' music lacked.