Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. citizens aren’t rising to the challenge → independent press oversight lacking → blogs bucking this trend somewhat

And, having little of my own to say today, I turn over most of the rest of today’s entry to quoting other people. First, this bit from Allen Ginsberg, being interviewed in by Gregory Corso, in which he has a prescient vision of the world of blogs, and makes a less-uncanny prediction for their liberatory potential:

AG — Yes, if anybody gets up and tries to lead armies of other people in the direction of his “Solution,” they ought to tell him publicly to go fuck himself. If every person who reads these notes immediately starts applying this simple Zen technique energetically to his environment it would start a chain reaction in front and annihilate East and West. I think a real revolution of interpersonal relations is at hand — individuals must seize control over the means of communication. That’s my solution. The techniques applied by poets for altering the world of literature can be easily applied over telephone lines, radio stations, TV control rooms, wire services, newspaper desks, movie sets and projectors, all the way down to the minutest ramification of the vast electronic spiderweb network that controls all civilized portions of the globe — which are exactly the portions of the globe covered by infection with cold war. The war’s a byproduct of universal mass communication centralized direction of madmen. It is likely that this dialogue will be read mainly by people involved in subservient positions in that network, I therefore summon them this moment to seize the means of communication by revolution at their desks, microphones, cameras and typewriters. Otherwise I warn them they will be destroyed.

GC — But exactly what should they revolt for? What should they say when they take over the means of communication?

AG — They should say anything that comes into their head at the instant, whatever it is — in other words, if a radio announcer has got to read a story about the Russians refusing to agree on A Bomb testing, he might as well immediately interrupt his story to announce that he personally doesn’t know a fucking thing about the facts of the story except what came thru over the teletype, and if the guy at the other end of the teletype did the same thing it would reduce mass communication to a chaos of decentralized personal messages which is exactly what it should be. And that would end the cold war. And if anybody tried to organize this chaos so that Society could keep running, cut him off the line and give him his own personal ham station.

GC — I hold that Communism seems only bad in America, I mean that a simple economic theory has been monsterized into Boogieman that seems to have driven America to Birch Societies, Neo-Nazis, etc. — so, in other words, America is really suffering by Communism more than if it was Communist — what say you?

AG — Yes, the curse of Communism is universal centralized control over the psyches of participating individualities, and America intuits that if itself became Communist it would be the rottenest, sneakiest, smuggest, nastiest, finkiest, most materialistic Communism the world has ever seen, because all these characteristics have been built into it already by Capitalism. To avoid this all the reader has to do is apply the simple technique I just suggested. In the words of the Father of our country, “Father, I cannot tell a lie!” Next time in front of a microphone, absolutely not one conformist uncontroversial safe white lie, even if it means no more loot for delivering commercials. You, high school teacher, teach your own American history. You, newspaper reporter from these States, stop being yellow and express yourself, stop rewriting somebody else’s bad poetry. You, Hollywood producer, walk out on the banks and distributors. Everybody go on strike against the Government and institutions that run our government — universal strike on purely personal basis in your own area of activity without waiting for any central orders or program other than the promptings of your own conscience faced with total truthfulness or annihilation.

GC — What will happen if America does this and Russia doesn’t?

AG — You kidding? Like if that ever happened in America the world would hear five hundred million liberated squawks of ecstasy in Central China.

All this talk of Communism (which “seems only bad in America” according to Mr. Corso) made me want to double-check my position on The Political Compass. I was kind of surprised to find myself to be a slightly right-of-center libertarian.

Jesse Walker, over at The Perpetual Three-Dot Column, discusses the dilemma that radical critics of government have when coming up with strategies. Without political power, how can you hope for results? But to get political power means to compromise and in some sense become the enemy you’re trying to defeat.

I prefer a different approach. Albert Jay Nock distinguished social power, rooted in the voluntary institutions of society, from state power, rooted in coercion. Both coexist in our culture, each one waxing as the other wanes; the libertarian’s goal is to maximize the former at the expense of the latter. Washington is not always the best place to do this. The most promising transformations in America over the last few decades have taken place not when state officials voluntarily relinquished some of their authority, but when social institutions either seized new ground or (more often) crept onto it while no one was watching. Examples range from the homeschooling revolution, which achieved tremendous victories while school choice legislation was at best sputtering forward, to the various DIY alternatives eating away at licensed professions from building to broadcasting. Useful libertarian activism is a matter of defending the zones of free action that exist and assisting the people who are trying to push them further.

To his list, I’d add the internet, which has allowed people to reach mass audiences — independent of government licensing (unlike television and radio, for instance), and also much less dependent on large hunks of money (unlike television, radio, and print publishing).

This really has changed things for the better. People are much more able now to choose their own information filters, or indeed to be their own information filterers — there is less reason to rely on sanitized versions of reality, since non-sanitized versions are more up-to-date, less-biased, more-informative, and more easily-verified.

Imagine trying to implement such an important and beneficial social change through legislation, or to force it in any way by means of the government? Imagine the internet as designed by a “Democratization of Media Act” or a “Department of Public Information Access.”

It would never have survived as a free public space if politicians had designed it to be one. It’s only because of the lucky accident that the society that makes up the internet arose on its own and chose its own paths that it’s stayed free and stolen the talking stick from the official news speakers.

At this point I’ll put in a plug for the Electronic Frontier Foundation which is doing great work “defending the zones of free action that exist and assisting the people who are trying to push them further” on-line.

I don’t mean to gush in this oh-so- way about the Internet, but I’m so impressed with the way getting news has changed. It used to be that you’d hear about some event or policy debate through the newspaper or on television news. Maybe the next day there’d be an op-ed or two from somebody with specialized knowledge. The next week, the newsweeklies might publish a more in-depth article, or some TV interviewer or 60 Minutes-style show would give some more background.

Today, you get the news first on-line. Along with it, you’ve got Google to follow-up or clarify things you don’t understand, and you’ve got links to people with specialized knowledge and to relevant data. People with expertise in or first-hand knowledge about the issue are on-line instantly, sharing their views.

The news media, in contrast, is late on the scene, does a sloppy job with overworked reporters who don’t know enough about what they’re covering, and fails to provide links to sources that can verify or refute the story they’re telling. They’ve always been like this, but only now that this new internet journalism is here do they suffer from the contrast.

Now someone could have looked around in and complained that the news media was shallow, misinformed, manipulative, and shoddy — and then hoped that some top-down program of legislation, education, or BBC-style subsidy could be used to encourage better journalism. Instead, the internet came along, and through no organized, centrally-directed program, became the cure we needed for the disease we barely knew we had.

I use the decentralized internet communications medium as my model when I look at problems like this now — instead of asking, as I did in my liberal days, “why doesn’t the government do something about this?” I ask instead, “what would it look like if we solved this ourselves?”

And now for some more stories…