Albert Hoffman Passes ON

Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, who accidentally ingested some and then found out what it was really for, died today.

I met him in the 90’s in LA, back during the psychedelic “revival.” Maybe now there will be another one.

Hoffman was a soft-spoken and friendly fellow, always ready to answer a query without making you feel stupid for asking. That’s the kind of scientist I like.

(Weirdly, Hoffman’s death is not in his Wikipedia article yet.)

Murdoch and the WSJ

Every time I speak, people ask me about new media and money – namely, how to make money through the internet. And they always bring up Rupert Murdoch. He wouldn’t have bought the Wall Street Journal if he didn’t think there was money in it, right?

Right, but wrong. There’s money for Murdoch in buying the Journal, but not the money you’re thinking about. What Murdoch wants is a respectable business brand. The WSJ is that. It was actually a profitable online business, too – their articles were valuable enough for people to pay real money to access them.

But that’s not the money Murdoch wants. Murdoch wants to spend the WSJ’s credibility on two very different things. First, he wants an international news brand for TV and the Internet. Fox is too O’Reilly-polluted to serve as a seemingly neutral source of authoritative financial news. WSJ has a good decade of international branding left in it before it would be totally watered down through overuse.

Second, the WSJ has enough credibility to influence markets. And that’s the real game being played here. The last of the credible top-down media companies will be employed in the continuing public relations strategy for deregulation, the stock market pyramid, or whatever else is in its owners’ interests. As people learn to look at bottom-up media for the credibility that top-down conglomerate-owned media must by definition lack, things will change again. This time for the better.

Feed Fixed

The RSS/Atom feeds should be working, now. I found a blank line in the functions.php file (for those of you who might be interested) which seemed to be generating an unwanted blank line before the xml thingee, which made some feed-readers break.

So now you should be able to subscribe to this blog (and, soon, my upcoming talks feed) by clicking on the orange button up and to your right.

For those of you unfamiliar with Feeds – most simply, it can create a mailbox for each of the blogs you read, right in your mail reader. New posts just show up, so you don’t have to prowl around the web to see who might have said something.

Now, back to work.

McCloud and Rushkoff at ComicCon

Just back home from Comic-Con, where I had the unique pleasure of doing a “conversation” with Scott McCloud, moderated by Marianne Petit.

I’ve received dozens of emails from people who were unable to attend, asking if there’s a transcript anywhere. Turns out there’s a lot better: a full video and an audio podcast, along with some commentary from the brilliant folks at DailyCrosshatch.

The conversation, as well as the whole convention, made me feel quite at home in comics again, after a brief hiatus to get caught up on my regular book. Honestly, there’s nothing like comics, and I feel like we’re still safely insulated from some of the forces that are diluting the power of alternative media. It’s safe here on the margins.

Here’s the first part of the discussion, which amounts to a monologue from me about what attracted me to comics, and why McCloud had such an impact on me and my comic Testament.

New Site

This site will be “under construction” for the next month or so. Everything is up for grabs, so if there’s something you want design-wise, content-wise, or context-wise, this will be the place to request it.

By September, the whole thing, including Forums, should be up to speed. Then you’ll get a sense of what it is this whole transition has been about.

Thanks for understanding in the meantime; I hope everything you need is still accessible.

This Guy Gets It

Really nice explanation of Testament at The Sacramento News and Review. Of course, there’s one more collection left to go, but the series is now officially completed.

How else to describe it? Perhaps as omnitemporality—all times exist at once, simultaneously, in separate spaces, in Douglas Rushkoff’s amazing graphic series Testament.

Or, to make it as plain as I can, instead of space as the constant, with events occuring in a temporal order in the same place (like a fire in 1941, followed by a new building in 1942, and a housing project in 1966, following by a vacant lot in 1998), the opposite is true. Everything happens at once; it just happens in different spaces.

Inverts the space-time continuum in a very thought-provoking way, doesn’t it? Sort of like a good Star Trek episode.

But Rushkoff, who among other things is a bit of a scholar of Biblical studies, is out to make a point: That even the writers of the texts we’ve come to know as “the Bible” expected them to change. In Testament, the story is always being told, so it can always be changed.

I’m sorry to those of you whose stores stopped carrying the book. It’s a tricky market out there. But you should be able to get the final collection when it comes out later this year. Then you’ll have the whole series in four books. And while I may have rushed a bit to get to the end a little earlier than I had planned, I think it still ends up pretty clear what I was trying to do with and say about Biblical narrative – as well as what it may have to do with our hyper-technologized and hyper-capitalized world.

Meanwhile, next weekend is NY Comic-Con. I’ll be there. I don’t think Vertigo has any plans for me, but I have been invited to do two panels. One of them is me and Scott McCloud in a one-on-one about the medium of comics. The other has something to do with the book Our Gods Wear Spandex. I’ll get details on all that shortly.

Lots of news, but no time. I’m fighting that weird cold/flu everyone seems to have gotten this season, while trying to write my book, an essay for the Personal Democracy Forum people, my new secret comic, and hosting a new conversations board about Corporatism right here.

BoingBoing IRC

I’m doing a live old-skul chat on the BoingBoing IRC channel Tuesday at 8pm NYC time.

If you don’t have an IRC client and know how to get to freenode.net and the #boingboing channel there, just go to a nifty little java interface on the web at http://java.freenode.net//index.php?channel=boingboing

Obama is not condescending

The fact is, Americans are smarter than Clinton and McCain suggest. Americans are frustrated that their government supports corporations at the citizens’ expense. People are getting poorer and their educations are getting worse and more expensive. As people get poorer and angrier, they do more readily cling to symbols and superstitions. Under threat or antisemitism, Jews cling more steadfastly to Israel. Just as persecuted gun owners cling to their guns, and fundamentalists cling to their gods – especially when voting.

The more repressed and dejected a population, the more susceptible they are to the hot-button issues that pollsters rely on to keep the populace divided and self-interested.

By calling attention to the fact that politicians can rely on highly emotional hot-button issues during economically stressful times, Obama was actually suggesting that we can and should operate from a higher place when exercising our democratic rights. It’s hard – especially when ruthless, patronizing politicians are telling us that our guns or bibles will be taken away from us – but these are the sick, emotionally based appeals we have to reject if we are to resist the fascism at their heels.

By labeling Obama the elitist patronizer, Clinton and McCain are attempting to preserve the elitist, top-down, manipulative politics of the past (and present). They want to make sure they can continue to manipulate uneducated and poor people living in small and big towns alike. It is they who seek to maintain their cynical hold over poor people’s emotions.

It’s all so sick, and the mainstream media mostly plays along. I suspect Clinton will soon achieve her goal of preventing any Democrat from taking the White House until she can regroup for 2012. But by then, the rest of the world won’t believe that we don’t really support the neoCons we repeatedly elect.