odds and sods

Twenty years or so ago, I was introduced to the Internet in an article in Rolling Stone interviewing Mitch Kapor, who had taken about evangelizing for it. I was instantly smitten as soon I plugged-in and have remained so. I've been increasingly concerned in recent years as the distributed networking power of the Net has been pushed aside with the development of new information monopolists, Tim Wu has an excellent must read piece in the WSJ on the trend. I mostly attribute this to our inability to break from our industrial capital economic models, but still have great faith that will be done. I've been more concerned in the last six years of the incessant naval gazing of much of the thinking of those building the Net, they need to begin looking beyond the Net and at the greater world.

Nonetheless, I spend far too much time drifting the Net. Youtube is the greatest time sink, especially for those with a pop-music bent. For the five on this list concerned about such things, I found an amazing piece of pop-trivia from the late 70s, the Jam doing Eton Rifles and Joy Division doing Transmission on the same TV show -- good era for pop-music. But it brings up the question on the entire value of pop. We know one thing, it's way overvalued in this society. People are well over-compensated in all aspects and given far much too respect for something that at best rises to a measure of triviality. A couple years ago, a good friend and I were discussing the value of pop, and I asked, "In a hundred years what do you think of the last fifty years of pop culture will be remembered?" He replied without hesitation, "Nothing." I think that's about right, yet the little purple man is still absolutely right, "but life, it ain't nothing, unless it's got that pop."

However, our addiction to pop is by no means harmless. It for example has been very detrimental to our politics, creating an era of political dwarfs. If you ask who in the last fifty years of American politics will still be influential in a century, there's only one answer, Martin Luther King, and he will only be remembered in the larger context of the lessons of the mass democratic movement for civil rights, that is, if they become institutionalized, which at present seems a more remote possibility than ever. More representative of our era is Mr. Bernanke, who today makes one of the most reactionary speeches of American politics in recent years, and that's saying something. He blames the Chinese, calls for more debt enslavement, and completely ignores Wall Street's and corporate globalization's roles in creating the problems face, while placing the Fed into a public political position that it has avoided for a hundred years. Is it any wonder Mr. Krugman has become the Fed's strongest backer?

Yet, oddly enough hope arises from the strangest places, in this case Man U football legend Eric Cantona. Mr. Cantona has come out publicly promoting "Bank Mutiny Day" in Europe.(tx zerohedge). Mr Cantona comes up with the most eloquent description of democratic politics and democratic action I've heard in many years in reference to gaining back control of our lives from the banks:

"We don't pick up weapons to kill people, to start the revolution... the revolution is really easy to do nowadays. What is the system? The system revolves around the banks. It's based on the power of the banks... so it must be destroyed starting with the banks. This means that the 3 million people with their placards on the street... they go to the bank, withdraw their money from the banks and these ones collapse. 10 million people and the banks collapse and there is not real threat, a real revolution. We must go to the bank. In this case there would be a real revolution. It's not complicated. You simply go to the bank in your country and withdraw your money. If there are enough people withdrawing their money, the system collapses. No weapon, no blood, or anything like that.

As one of the fad-four said, "Power to the people, right on."