Outlandish Josh

Having beat a lot on the national drain-circling, I feel compelled to point out a counternote: Oregon just passed progressive tax measures to fund little things like schools and healthcare at the expense of the wealthy and corporations. In other words, the People beat the Powerful. It can be done.

How, you may ask? Well the first thing about progressive populism is you have to talk like a progressive populist, meaning you explain in no uncertain terms that you intend to address the massive inequality by requiring those who can easily afford to do so to step up and support the social contract which has benefited them so much:

Second thing you to is engage your base for God’s sake. Maybe campaigning among young people or engaging unions. Give ‘em something to jump and shout about at least.

Do those things, and you can win.

Behave as if you live in thrall to Zombie Regan, or as if you’re an aristocrat, and you will be crushed.

This seems like a pretty simple thing to understand to me, but most national Democrats seem consigned to going out with a whimper anyway. Hard to believe.

It looks like President Obama is about to consign himself to irrelevance:

In 1982 Ronald Reagan gave his first State of the Union address. His approval rating was about the same as Barack Obama’s now. His economic track record was considerably worse: instead of presiding over the end of a recession, he had presided over the beginning of one, and the economy was in free fall. Nonetheless, Reagan mounted an unapologetic defense of his economic ideology, combined with a harsh critique of his precedecessors.

We haven’t heard Obama’s SOTU yet. But the big news seems to be the spending freeze. What I hear from bat-squeaks is that it’s not a big deal on economic substance, and that admin officials hope it will clear the way for some modest job-creation efforts. We’ll see about that. Rhetorically, however, Obama is clearly, conspicuously endorsing his opponents’ world-view — which will buy him precisely nothing in return.

I can't really find words to capture the level of EPIC FAIL that we are approaching here. It's truly baffling. While Obama seems on balance to be a nice guy, and I don't doubt his basic smarts, he or the people he's listening to are showing themselves to be utterly politically incompetent. Meanwhile the actual dude who got him elected has been reduced to writing op eds, which the White House is ignoring.

As per Atrios, it really does seem as if the people in charge have no idea what they are doing. I think I'll probably stop writing about this until there's some change in the general downward spiral action.

So, the news from the centers of power is grim. Exceedingly grim. The Democratic Party is, as an institution, putting on a world-class clinic in organizational dysfunction. In complete control of the government, they have failed to make any significant achievements over the course of a full year. Their only big move, last winter's stimulus plan, has been roundly understood to be too timid, and as a result the economy, while still existent, is in a prolonged "jobless recovery" limbo.

Then last week's one-two combination of truly devastating news. First the pseduo-aristocratic nomination of a Kennedy-family apparatchik to succeed old Teddy in Massachusetts going down in flames to a right-winger in a pickup who flat out wanted it more. Scott Brown did five times as many public events as Coakly, had a hot-shit new media team (running Drupal), and surged at the end to take the win. That's Edward Kennedy's seat, going to a rather immoderate Republican, and bringing an end to the 60-vote theory of power in the Senate.

Republicans Seize 41 - 59 Senate Majority

That seems ridiculous, but it's more or less true. As a fighting entity, the Democratic Senate is somewhere below slime-mold in effectiveness. They lack any coherent vision, and the leadership simply does not have the will to utilize power. Obama's plan of rational and honest engagement with his opposition has yielded zero policy results, and his inability or unwillingness to strongly define himself or his agenda as anything other than "the establishment with brains" has resulted in an epic collapse in his polling numbers. Meanwhile, unemployment remains at 10% and people are fucking pissed off that Hope and Change appears to have been merely a slogan, used to elect a very eloquent chump.

Against this backdrop, the Supreme Court has ruled once again that Corporations are People and have 1st amendment rights to political speech, meaning they can now spend unlimited sums on influencing the outcomes of elections. Organized Labor being a shadow of its former self, it seems the near-term outlook of the US political system is pretty damn dim. Established economic interests are going to continue dominating national politics for the foreseeable future, likely until some external/existential event forces larger-scale change.

In terms of how this plays out, I think the Democrats are going to get shellacked in the upcoming 2010 elections, which will likely result in increased timidity on their part should they retain majorities. Net-net: two years of gridlock in DC. While the economy will likely improve organically by the time 2012 rolls around, it seems unlikely that it will really get zooming since the ability of the state to effectively re-orient things away from massively unproductive activities like tract home building and financial skimming appears to be nil. People will still be upset, underemployed, angry, and looking to blame. Meanwhile the coalition of unlikely voters who rallied behind Obama in 2008 are demoralized and may stay home, as unlimited corporate money pours in to fill the void.

In brief, the Black President is looking down the barrel of a one-term legacy with no policy achievements. His putative successor on the right would almost certainly lack substantive remedies to the problems of our time — "let the market sort it out" will, um, not work — but would almost certainly possess a will to utilize power and a savvy team of political manipulators. The hegemon becomes most militarily active in its period of decline.

While I hope to be proven wrong — there's always a hope in my heart that we'll have an awesome montage-worthy darkest-hour-turnaround, but I can't do anything about it but hope — the vegas line favors a real shitshow. Even if we get a crappy beachhead of Health Care Reform, that's all we'll get, and we'll likely have to wait for generational turnover to get a chance like this again.

Thus: back to the drawing board. In the emerging environment, agents of change will need to move laterally, so simply/directly set about acquiring power and building parallel institutions to the establishment. We will need to out-compete large corporations to regain control of the state, or possibly to obsolete the state by finding other ways of doing for ourselves. Either way, no small task. Demographics are ostensibly on our side, but without a lot of organizing that won't mean much. We'll need to develop a whole set tools and the reasons to use them if we're going to have much of a chance.

Thus: mission statements.

This is an experiment, a process of becoming. I don't know the answers, but I have a sense of the questions. I know the future will be different from the past, and I'm though with waiting for that to be defined by anyone else. The sooner we start living the way we want the world to be — the more contagiously, courageously and publicly we do this — the more influence we can have over the changes to come.

And change is coming, no doubt about it. It's time to roll the dice, shoot the moon, bet the farm; because if not now when? If not us who? If not this, what? Risk is our business, fortune favors the bold, and I believe right-thinking people can take over this planet and usher in a golden era if only we have the will to do so. I want more power and more freedom and I want to bring joy to the people around me, to people around the world.

I take it on faith that a better world is possible, one in which all humans lead good lives, where we all work less and play more and no-one dies for stupid tragic reasons like a lack of clean water or mosquito bites. I take it on faith that war is an unnecessary evil, and that we can (indeed, must) recognize a shared fate as a species, and learn to get along together. I take it on faith that it is our destiny to explore the universe, to unlock its secrets, harness its energies, to dive deep, to fly high, eventually to live on other worlds. I take it on faith that the rate of human progress is more or less up to us, and I want to get there faster.

This is where I develop my theory and keep track of what happens when I try to put it into practice. This is where the structural hole becomes a node, where we cross the streams. This is the story of the rubber and the road, of what happens when you stop taking things on faith and start taking them into your own hands.

First of all, some mood music.

Lord I just want my life to be true
And I just want my heart to be true
And I just want my words to be true
I want my soul to feel brand new

I want to hold hands yeah
Yeah and I want make love
I want to keep running all day and and all night
Even when my mind tells my body that's enough

And I want to stand up yeah and I want to stand tall
If I ever have a son, if I ever have a daughter
I don't want to tell them that I didn't give my all

I just finished reading Jonathan Franzen's first novel, Twenty Seventh City. It's a really wonderful story of political intrigue and personal neurosis, and there's a killer line towards the end from the perspective of a young woman upset with her somewhat pedantic boyfriend: "Suddenly she was living in a new world made for people like him, for people who can despise it and succeed in it anyway."

(man, google books is cool)

In addition to being a well-crafted line in a segment that portrays the ideosyncratic hypocrisy of well-educated/elite criticism of the status quo, this quite effectively captures the essence of my particular angst du jour, that I might end up being more than just middle-class successful — what with my structural hole oriented persona and all — but without actually mattering in the ways I genuinely care about.

See, I'll frequently rattle on about how I'm "ambitious" or that I want to "change the world," but what does that really mean? It means I want more influence. As I develop economically useful skills, and in particular build a highly effective organization around these skills, I've come to realize just how power-acquisitive I actually am. To wit, for the first time in my adult life I'm not in debt, and aside from some class-wariorish vibrations around the edges and the occasional adolescent yen to drive a really fast car, my primary financial interest is in figuring out how to apply this newfound economic capacity towards constructing that proverbial lever big enough to move the world.

Because look, if I'm able to realize my life's goals, by the end of this decade I'll have mouths to feed. That's a real thing that I want to do. No rush, but it's there. In the interim, I've got this opportunity, this liberty to move/spend/risk, and it doesn't make any sense to blow it getting sucked into some kind of rat-race or hamster wheel, even my own groovy alternative-looking one.

The way I see it, the big opportunity isn't in direct opposition to the floundering establishment but rather in the lateral development of alternative mechanisms which outperform the entrenched. I've got nothing but love for kids who want to take it to the streets, but I'd rather spend my energy creating another option than pretending we can tear it all down. My operating assumption is that the cancer-causing global system will keep sputtering along — possibly more lost years, but slow collapse if any for the American Empire — and that we are going to have to deal with that.

While I'll support those with the right temperment for the work, and I sincerely hope for the best from our post-modern aristocracy, who as I see it we're sort of stuck with, I really don't think the idea of an establishment takeover, the long march though the institutions is really my cup of tea. I don't fit the profile.

But that's ok. The way I see it, nothing succeeds like success, and results still matter even in this tragic and corrupted world. My place is in the greenfields and blueskies, coming up with more of the Crazy New Shit. There's maybe more meritocracy out there than it often feels like and I think if I can get some wins, interesting things might start happening.

Really I'm contemplating the whole multiple bottom lines thing. Investing is about returns, but also overall outcomes. A savings account is the worst of both possible worlds, because you get a crap percentage and the Bank gets to play with your money. I am not about to start into a 401k. Alternatives: Move your money, boostrap a project, start a tribe!

The way to cut my personal gordian knot lies in putting enough meat on those bones, enough specific postulates to the general theory, enough stories in the backlog, that it starts to feel more like a really actionable set of objectives, and less like an underdefined nebula of potential. It's the resurrection of the super-project, the thing that goes above, beyond, around and through my normal work.

So the tangible steps here are:

1. Finish tinkering with the old website so that it more supports this project from a writing standpoint.
2. Start more serious planning/networking with my people about how to leverage our resources.
3. Figure out an intake process for new participants.
4. Likewise, an outreach process.
5. Produce culture.
6. ???
7. Revolution!

I'm more than halfway serious. I think the time is now to shoot the moon, because if it don't work out I think I can pretty much always settle down and cruise, and in another five to ten it'll be harder to do anything so uncertain. In brief, I detest the world and intend to succeed on my own terms in a way that's hopefully both enviable and replicable. I want a family, but no picket fence. I want a compound, but not some "back to the land" anachronism. I want a direct line to every center of humanity worth being wired into, and the ability to cross-connect at will.

I want the world and I want it pretty much now. Fortes fortuna adiuvat, will to power, etc.

One of the things I did while on my world-tour last fall was give a talk about Drupal and academia in the belly of a ship in Stockholm. And the cameras we’re rolling.

How Berkeley and Stanford University Use Drupal (Joshua Koenig) from NodeOne.se on Vimeo.

It’s not my best presentation due to jetlag/sickness and a funky mic (I also never really had my breath working right, a big no-no from Theater World), but I did a decent job of regulating my pace and I think it’s a more or less accurate talk.

Huge thanks to my hosts who cut together this video really well, and gave me some lovely liquor that I didn’t quite get to drink. Looking forward to showing them a really good time when they come out to San Francisco in April!

Things never go as fast as I want. Change leaks out in incremental dribbles, globally and personally. We’re lucky for what we have, even as we ache and pine for all that’s yet to come.

It’s a new decade, and it seems like time to start doing things that make me feel good, maybe in the bigger picture sort of way. So I bought some books and am eating a lot more salad, and once I wind my way back up in Humboldt I’ll see if I can’t work the dingy little workout room at the community pool back into my schedule. Shore my locks, too.

Spending another week down in the Bay, racking up productive hours in Palo Alto, tearing up the city streets on the old bicycle, and logging somewhat surreal weekends in our decidedly bourgeois downtown office — track lighting, polished concrete, big silver fridge; it’s the office you get in the movie of your startup life right before you start to blow it.

It’s going to be a pretty big six months. There’s a ton on the horizon. Gonna try and sneak back to NYC for a week or two in March to see the fam, then speaking at SXSW and helping to host DrupalConSF. Then turning 31, hopefully starting to pull out some threads of the next phase, because it’s time to level-up.

I’ll kick up some real redesign action for ye olde site soon. This is all part of a bigger plan.

So, in the semi-working part of my vacation (mucking around with servers while the team is offline) I’ve also been trying to do some thinking, some writing, and have ended up re-reading a lot of my old shit. I have mixed emotions about this.

On the one hand, I’ve strung together some decent words. That’s always nice to remember, and it makes me feel better about my currently fumbly half-blocked state as a writer.

On the other hand, even though I also keep a personal paper journal, reading your own blog is a little like reading your own diary. It’s a little embarrassing, but that’s to be expected. The worse part is that really slaps me in the face with how consistent my complaining has been. For years now, the same old song.

An easy answer to this is that I’ve been focusing on “my career,” which is factually true, but it’s an inductive dodge in terms of addressing the state of my personal life. There are more than enough hours in the day, even when you work as much as I do. I’ve worked harder and lived better in my day.

Living the dream requires… a dream.

Everybody keeps on talking about it
nobody’s getting it done
Everybody keeps on pushing and shoving
nobody’s got the guts

It’s a damn hard thing to write/think through, the Gordian knot of your psyche. No end to the chicken/egging.

With a good four full days off work now and no other project to fill up my mind, I begin to really honestly decompress, and this is where the scary part begins. This is the part where I have to face head on the fact that life outside of professional nerdly pursuits has grown pretty barren. Much great promise withered on the vine.

Some of this is a feature of my genetically-destined workaholic lifestyle — devote yourself 110% to anything and you'll find the rest in neglect — but it occurs to me now as I start in on this sad-sack self-pity topic that a greater portion of this barren sensation is really due to a failure of imagination, confidence and will more than anything else.

I mean, as a for instance, I know people who work professionally in the entertainment industry, and contra what you might think about the glamour of stage and screen, when you're working you're fracking working, and there's not much room for anything else if you're more than halfway serious, which, if you got there, you'd better be.

Maybe it's just the grass being greener, or deeper personal shit I'm not privy to, but none of these successful working actors and musicians I know feel like their lives are empty or barren when a gig runs its course. Doubtless there's some let-down and a rough reentry to a more normal civilian life, but by in large these folks seem to bear up over the longer haul because they have a whole inner world that fits with this, they're living the dream, and nourishing creative embers that burn even through the longest roughest stretch of worky working, ready to flare up the moment oxygen's back in surplus.

And for me? To quote Forest Mars – the only individual I've met who crosses the streams: Freaky Experimental Theater and A-List Internetting — I don't know where, but somehow I lost the script. At some point along the path of following the next logical move to the next logical move, following feelings and moments, all the while making some considerable progress, I passed beyond any master plan or vision I may have at one point had in mind. I'm out now beyond any dreaming, in a place I've arrived out of fortuitous circumstance, unsure of what if any next step would beckon my rambler feet.

I think this is a core root deep down Big Thing for the old Joshman to deal with in the new decade. Survival ain't no thing to eek out, but what exactly am I attempting to accomplish with this embarrassing surfeit of opportunity? Well dude, we just don't know.

Driving up to Portland today with the Markman and talking about our lives, I was struck by the pointlessness of ambition without focus. Everybody wants to rule the world, or at least we all want the revolution, but the means are the simpler part: give me a lever big enough and yadda yadda. Here in Estados Unidos, it's the specific end that vaxes. Without that, you're just acquiring juice, and if all you want is power and respect, on some level what makes you anything more than a thug? Because you're nice and cultured? Really?

We're a leg down on most historical revolutionaries in that we lack real enemies. Even the Bush "regime" failed to qualify there in anything but a rhetorical sense. Meanwhile, in Tehran, it's popping off again, and seeming to be a lot more bare-knuckles this time around. In a state which regularly hangs people and pays paramilitary dudes to keep order with dirtbikes and clubs, the people have an enemy, and even if the actual coalition behind the "green revolution" is a disparate and shifting mass-marriage of convenience, the dictatorial establishment provides a crucial focus, and excitingly seems to be slipping. Good times to be speaking Farsi.

And for me, there's an inescapable sense that these questions of purpose and my lonesome laments are bound up into something approaching a grand unified theory. I believe it's out there, though I also believe it to be elusive. It requires a keen and dedicated combination of imagination, confidence and will — to dream the dream, believe it is possible, and work to see it realized — for the secrets of the universe to unfold, for you to ride life straight to perfect laughter.

But this is the only way worth being, and the only way to morally really be given that you have the option, and aren't beaten down by starvation or oppression or a terrible abusive past. We have no choice, us pampered intelligent charismatic creatives. Anything less is a slap in the face to worldwide life chances, the actuary would have a field day if we shirked.

So yes, in the new year and the new decade we have to risk it all on hopes and dreams. Hopes and dreams to come.

Afterward I discover this related older post, and the lamentable fact that I haven't tagged anything "juicy" in nearly a year.

A blog post about the feeling of wanting, or rather of wanting wanting.

I remember a night cold as this, twelve odd years ago (jesus, twelve!) one of the first times I ventured into Brooklyn as a young student; a classmate who lived out there at a young and early age, no dorms for her, was throwing a house party and everyone from our section was going, including the girl I had an enormous and unspeakable crush on. I remember a lot of talk, and some minor dancing, and seeing her mostly across the room but feeling so damn much.

It’s strange. In some ways I remember most sharply these feelings which sprang from fantastical unfulfilled crush-dreams. Times I was in love — which is a reciprocal situation, something of considerably greater depth and complexity — I know about feeling-wise mainly because I wrote about it in one place or another. Of course I remember all the facts, but only bits and pieces of the real emotions: saying goodbye the very first time, at a subway gate; bawling my eyes out on a hardwood floor; romantic petty theft; brief but indelible bedroom moments… still, by in large these quantities of time and whatever ticked by inside me have submerged below accessible consciousness. Amnesia of the heart.

And on a night like this, pedaling a borrowed bike through the city of my birth, a cold foggy Saturday night years beyond years beyond any of these times I remember, remembering those kinds of feelings makes me wish I had some of that kind of jumpy excitement in my life. Honestly I’m inwardly still somewhat Buddha calm about things like settling down and having kids; what piques my angst is this bland numbness, the staggering lack of epic romantic fantasy.

Thus the allure of fanning old flames. Thus the desire to radically switch up my situation. Thus the tendency to rhapsodize the potential of things that never happened. Thus the desire to play the lottery, to strike gold after scaling some yet unknown height.

And long run I have an inner calmness, knowing outside of all facts and figures that it’ll all work out some day, but damn if I’m not hungry now, and damn if it ain’t lonely, this kind of hunger.

Back on the west coast, where I’ll be for at least the next two or three months. It’s been a long and winding road, and lots of fun, but I’m happy to be decreasing my rate of motion. Time to come to a more settled place and process.

There’s still a big load of things to get through before the end of the year, and I wish wish wish I had more time to digest and to write, especially to write good big emails to all the people I love. Maybe that’s a good holiday project. It’s a good way of figuring out where you are in life, writing your old friends.

Anyway, I’m safe and sound in rainy California, getting ready for a final couple weeks before I retire to the relative isolation of Oregon for a spell. More when I get the chance.