I'm looking at the future in friendster.com. A few friends of mine had sent me invited, and last night Julia gave me a little nudge, so I invested thee 15 minutes to get it up and running. It's social software with a brain, the personal flip side to biz-networking sites like Ryze and it's ilk. These are all attempts to use the net to leverage the six-degrees effect for a wide range of people. Some time in the future, this will all be integrated with blogs, solid digital ID and e-commerce and we'll have another economic boom. Myabe it will be enough to keep us limping along until the Hydrogen Economy let's us grow wealthier by using less.

It's almost frightening how well this works. It asks you for your favorite TV show. One thing I put on was the PBS news hour. Sutably obscure, so out of curiosity I clicked on it and found a number of other people with similar interests. Then I clicked one photo at (attractive dame) random. Turns out she lives on Statin Island and is connected to me through two people I do not know. Same for another DJ/producer chick who shares my taste in books. It seems to be pervasive among online-ish youth here in NY. I also found a few people I used to date. Wonder if they're friends or not. Social stuff can be awkward too.

Anyway, the people behind this are going to be rich like Saudi princes if they play their cards right. They're building meta-community and letting the people fill in the roots and making it work: they might have 2 million users or more, but it still feels friendly and personal because you find people the social way. I was talking to alex in our long discussion on the "Dean Dollop" thread below about how the internet doesn't really disintermediate everything, it just makes your relationships more effective, transparent, safe, powerful, useful, and (maybe most importantly) diverse.

Can someone tell me if this is sincere or sarcastic? I can't tell anymore. Found it through various Home Star Runner anthropology. Interesting stops along the way: fhqwhgads, easter eggs, a high-school grad's blog, flag day in strongbadia. Man, the internet isn't quite like I remember. There was a time when you could sort of know everything important that was going on out here, or at least live under that illusion. It's becoming increasingly obvious that even a general comprehensive knowledge of the content available online is beyond individual human understanding. I think that's kind of exciting in a way.

Well, I got dick done today work-wise, but I did a lot of decent writing and made a few more Dean connections. I'm seriously thinking that my dream future would be to work on that campaign. I aught to start asking around. If he get's the nomination they're bound to open a NY office. Right now I'm sitting in my back yard listening to the wind move the trees and loving just about everything. There's some lively discussion about information-age economics in the "Dean Dollop" post below and I'm about to back it in, have a beer and read some more Hunter S. Thomson in the open air.

Oh, and I found another tech-meister for Dean (friend of the other doc I respect), who wants to get Searls and Lessig to deliver the technorati endorsement, and presumable the whole slashdot bloc. Geek politics ascendant, I hope. He also has a backdoor into the formerly(?) pay-only "Dean.com" article in the New Republic. Feeling groovy. Zywiec in hand and the sun on my face.

Both Sasha and my Sister had been telling me about some web toon called Home Star Runner. So tonight was the night I actually visited. F'ing brilliant! It's the first on-line sitcom. At first I thought it was bullshit and stupid-cute, just some jackass "story" about a king and his sheep. And then I hit the "commentary" section and met Stong Bad. To understand this will take you about 15 minutes: approxomately the same time as it would to get you into a situation comedy.

Consider the universe of programming out here. We've got ROMP.com our own (NC-17) version of 90210 -- or Girls Gone Wild, depending on what level of sarcasm you can deal with. And there's Broken Saints, the long-running flash-toon dark/sci-fi saga. Plus a million smaller, one-off or small-run gigs. For instance the delightful Strindburg and Helium, who will be at Cannes along with iconic Odd Todd. There's an ever growing world of content out here. Someday it could rival TV.

So there are maybe a few hours total of prime-time-ready content, great, but the most amazing thing is that it's almost all free-range shit. No well-known corporate players. No congolmorate-financed weekly-updated series for $2 a month. Enjoy it while it lasts, because there's money to be made out here. As usual, sex is first, but soon others will arrive. Commercials. Product placement. Interactive interweaving of content and advertising. Brave new world; could go either way at this point.

But good or evil, it's the new medium people. The new medium will accept what you know, but it demands flexibilty of form for success. Your art will evolve. Your culture will evolve. Your customs will evolve. Your business will evolve. Your politics will evolve. You will evolve or else you will fall behind those who do. Not to say that all this is dark or orwellian. We don't need to be crap-hungry consumerists living in ever growing metropolises. We can still go back to the trees. But if we do we're taking the internet -- and most importantly the idea of the internet -- with us.

I found some old performance text I'd not posted yet. Velocity High was the last collaboration I did with fun-loving Vermonter Johnny Nichols, who helped me develop The Best I Can, which is one of my more proud creations. He didn't actually play guitar with me, but he helped me work on it, and I think wrote a song based on the text later on when he was living up in Platsburg. Wonder what become of him...

I was about to post something about the new face of fascism in America (and apologists for McCarthy's inquisition to boot), but then dear old Capodice sent me this from McSweeny's. Lost audio commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chompsky on The Lord of the Rings. Chuckles all around. Eggers may be a pretentious ass, but he's got a good eye for good writing.

Finally, the USA Flag Balloon team emailed me again [context], this time with a long and kindly letter. Better than I deserved, in truth. I'm working on responding in kind. Maybe some useful dialogue is possible.

I wrote in my little private paper journal a while back, writhing in a fit of angst and doubt about whether We will turn It around, "...and where's the Hunter S. Thomson of my generation? Probably off somewhere blogging..." I long ago fell under the sway of the Duke's particular brand of morality and truth-telling. He gets at the secret bloody crevaces of the human condition, sinking into the stinking realm of sweat and violence and fear. He's a dowager for the good kind of righteousness, a human divining rod for peace and honesty. He's an old man now, and probably too tired and burnt to take another tour on the front lines -- though God love him he's sure to try. Hence my intuative sense that these times demand a new incisive firebrand of Personal Truth and The Best Way Of Living, someone decidedly outside the fucking box and committed to driving forward like a scandalous addled cannonball. Sigh.

Hunter S. Thompson's latest, Kingdom of Fear, is a semi-auto-biography that blends little-known tales of the Gonzo Doctor's upbringing with current (circa summer 2002) observations and well-loved recollections from everywhere in between. There's something to be said about Hunter, something that's often lost in the lurid honesty about sex and drugs and power, and that's that the man can turn a phrase. His style is easily recognized, in truth even formulaic at times, but anyone who trots out the line that he's "become a parody" of himself if just player-hating. More than any of the excesses or eccentricities of his life, Thompson is a widely known and loved public figure because he has got game with words and ideas and the human spirit. If he were less of a Freak, he'd probably still be a best-selling novelist (or perhaps a successful politician). Instead he's what every lefty blogger wishes they were, someone who took the notion of first-person reportage to the limit and emerged with shining gems of quality and insight.

I take to heart Thompson's words about, "not endorsing my lifestyle for anyone else." I've seen many people who went after the HST tao of chemestry. It's not all that difficult. All you need are a few underworld connections and some ready cash; ask around at your local bar and someone will know someone who can hook you up. There's a phone number to be shared for whatever you're in the market for. What's far more rare are his mastery of language, heart-rending frankness and committment to personal ethics. These are his sources of value, not LSD or anything else.

It's common wisdom now that we're headed into another radical period, and in many ways the Establishment (The Man) is far more thuggish and well-equipped than last time around. Hew to the ethos.

Won at scrabble today:

Sasha: 226
Josh: 357

Bayback is a bitch.

Spent some much needed time with the lovely lady yesterday/today. All I had for the weekend was a little closeout manual labor arranged by my man Sam, yesterday evening down at the Clambake -- a meeting of theatrical design people so fucking invitation-only that it doesn't even have a website. After that bit of heavy lifting it was all gravy. Had girlfriend time and also time to fiddle with Kevin's new/used copy of Vice City, what a time-consumer that could become.

Best quote of the weekend comes via Archie, the EMT dispatcher and vetran of some 17 years ambulence driving who's a regular at my corner bar. "There's more to saving a life than just making a heart beat." Amen to that.

Heavy moments here and there, and few furtive, nervous, project-seeking urges; but it was sublime idle pleasure for the most part. Today was Jeremy's 24th birthday. Much debauchery at the Lyric. I am now committed to getting him and his damn website up and running.

And now to stare at my celing for a while. 4am, just waiting for sleep.

Enough with the coy realisms, let's be honest. I'm fucked up here. You are getting the locked on shit straight from the monkey-brain. I'm high on a few drugs, So realize what an effort it is to type and what it all means. I'm plugged into the mainline direct via my asshole, open to connections so you don't have to be. Honest.

• Doc is right: the matrix is marketing. You be energy-providing meat, we entertain.
• Got an email from Kayla van Allen. Gotta update that page.
• Try to move Axiom to Friday the 6th of June.
• Sasha as a NPR talk-radio hostess. The topic: sex as a general anesthetic.
• Get in touch with some theaters about hosting Fray Day NYC.

Markos, proprietor of the Daily Kos, which I think is probably one of the premere sites for Democrat/liberal/progressive political news and discussion, has at long last revealed a bit about himself. I find the biography to be fascinating, to say nothing of his paino playing (mp3's are there as well as a list of accolades). It's always interesting to find out who's behind something. While this effort here is fairly egocentric and autobiographical, Kos has thus far been quite a bit more enigmatic. Fascinating how identity is revealed in this crazy online context, how much more it means to listen to someones music as oppposed to just a simple curricula vitae.

Birthday photos are up:

Click here for the whole lot.

Enjoying the fruits of being moderately literate in technology, the new Radiohead album on the hi-fi and a new whisper-quiet 120GB drive in my cube. I'm rebuilding my development environment and gettng ready to get back to work on some kick-ass social software.

Last night played some scrabble with Sasha. She kicked my ass by virtue of her preternatural ability to place three letters and make four words simultaniously: 30-point bonanzas made of words like "pa" and "at." I bang out "tarrif" and "query/zesty" for 18 and 36 points respectively, go down in flames in the endgame. Afterwards we talk about life, the universe and everything. It's interesting, she being on the tail end of Generation X -- sarcastic, ironic, not too hopeful about things -- and me being something different alltogether. Our parents are about the same age, so we figure it has a lot to do with gaining political awareness in the age of Regan vs. Clinton, respectively.

In the course of my trying to explain emergence and railing against corporations and other inhuman forms of organization, I struck what I think might be a deep new vein of thinking ore. Institutions pervert ambition. That's the summary. Maybe more on that later.