The internet is good for politics, a welcome addition to aging machine organizations, broadcast campaigning, a moribund press corps and the "infotainment" of 24-hour cable news. Even though many lament the "coarsening of the discourse" and the sharpness and vitrol you can find in the online "fever swamp", it's not as if this is actually new. Talk radio is famous for this, and countless other subcultural media -- mostly on the right, but some on the anarchist or communist fringe -- have been at it for years. It's just out in the open now, which, if you want to address the problems of divisive politics, is a necessary first step.

The internet is good chiefly for two reasons:

1. Lower Barriers to Entry and Decentralized Authority: basically anyone who meets a minimal (and increasingly ubiquitous) set of requirements can take part. This widens the circle of participation, prevents or at least counteracts stale and unhelpful assumptions (aka "conventional wisdom"), and creates more competition to deliver good results. Win win win.

   Also, the open playing field means that authority -- and by that I mean both who's "an authority" on something as well as who's the boss -- becomes decentralized and harder to work for. You're an authority because you put out something that builds a community of consensus, and in an open system it's hard to do that without transparency and hard to build a consensus around lies if you can't be opaque. Again, people will and are using this for evil as well as good, but the good is far more prevalent, and net/net it's a much better ecosystem for civilization than the Hurst empire.

It's coming on the turn of the year, a time to draw up to my full height and survey the scene. I've been going around and seeing people I've not seen in a while, which has revealed that I really don't have a good 30-second explanation for myself these days -- you know, the kind of quick encapsulated "elevator pitch" of what's new and exciting in your life. It's not a particularly great or important thing to have in the can or spring on lots of people, but it's usually something I've got down pat, and the absence of this trusty bit of performance is indicative, I think, of the larger ennui with which I grapple.

Intention is a tricky bitch. It's hard line to walk between trying to force yourself upon the world and taking a back-seat role in your own life. One wants to be an active participant, to listen and respond in conversation with the universe, but at some point you've got to pull the trigger; and it sucks being wrong, to gamble and lose. It burns rare and precious soulful fuel taking these shots, runs down some energy reserve that seems to take an aeon to recharge.

I haven't done too well with decisions over the past four years. Most of the big things I've set myself towards doing intentionally -- personally, professionally, creatively -- have ended up going bust. In spite of this, or probably because i've had the good fortune to have so many fine at-bats, I've landed amazingly well: poised on the brink of a the best jobby-job ever; living the neobohemian dream; penetrating the global power-elite seemingly without even trying.

It's an old story. "...And I stumbled to safety" was designated the title of my autobiography years ago.

So I don't lament my lot in life. I am lucky and blessed beyond knowing, and everyone seems convinced that I'm bound for some sort of glory or another, an opinion I don't necessarily dispute even if it can get to be a bit of a weight to carry at times.

Glenn Greenwald just fucked Thomas Friedman up:

Tom Friedman is a morally bankrupt narcissist whose only devotion is to the self-love of his own genius. He emphatically advocated the war beforehand but included every caveat possible so that, no matter what happened, he could claim to have been right, which is exactly what he has been doing.

But tragically, there is nothing unique about Tom Friedman. What drives him is the same mentality that enabled the administration's invasion of Iraq and, so much worse, it is the mentality that is keeping us there and will keep us there for the indefinite future. We stay in Iraq in pursuit of goals we know are fantasies, because to do otherwise requires the geniuses and serious establishment analysts to accept responsibility for what they have done -- and that is, by far, the most feared and despised outcome.

This all seems true to me, and it's going to change very slowly if at all. Totally depressing. The hope is that as the current crop of individuals who comprise the current "Establishment" begin to retire or finally lose relevance, they are not replaced by more of the same, but rather by something structurally different.