• Independence Day is a day of national self-reflection
• OECD reports are depressing because of our lousy social indicators
• If it was aliens and not social indicators then the real problems would be everyone else’s problems
• And we could fix it and be awesome
• (Feels good)
• While showcasing the viability of rural society and one-liners
• (Liberal elites don’t notice this part; farmers dig it)

I’m planning the fortieth anniversary of the internet right now (Oct 29 - UCLA - great party - details TBA) so I can’t live-post updates. I wrote this an hour ago, before the meeting. This post is requested commentary on my re-broadcasted 140conf talk.

-Definitely,
Brad

I started on the Valium about twenty minutes before my talk, cornered in between Scoble and a stage wall.  It was dark and my leg was composed mostly of shooting pains.  I gazed at Scoble: they were just regular chairs, but he was reclining. I re-sorted that room into people with moderate-to-severe compression of their sciatic nerve, and those without.

How do you do that, I thought. He was with them, with everyone else: nobody would understand me and my leg. I had to rejoin the majority, the Scoble World of reclining and everyone else in the room.

Valium as a muscle relaxant; my new doctor is hilarious or something. Anyways it was dark and I hadn’t checked on dosing. Next up I’m standing behind shoulder blades, and then I was introducing myself and talking.

Twitter was going to be down; used that to frame a talk on freedom and politics; now Twitter is back up but let’s go, everyone, into my Valium reality, falling forwards, backwards, sidewards in all directions; leg peace and we could have the same chemical halo: change teams.

In the words of Puff Daddy, come with me.

(video link)

Digital numbers flashed in front of me and all I could think about was a decibel meter at a former Brighton pub workplace. How long have I been talking for? I wasn’t going all Huxley on time; I was just chill.

Those numbers were the amount of time I had left to talk. For the first time ever it took me longer, and not less time, to get through my prepared talk. Because I was talking slower and you know, I think if you’ll consider it, political theory as a general topic of conversation at a social media / Twitter conference makes more sense on a heavy dose of Valium.

I did have a point. Twitter is a public space. Social media is a collection of public spaces that carry out the same functions as our meatspace social acts, the ones unmediated by layered protocols.

They’re businesses and we expect nothing from them beyond old laws and practices whose authors never expected these entities to regulate public space.\

Twitter is an interesting bit of technology, but its ascendancy — the way we use it, the timing and distribution, etc. — these are social, political, cultural factors.

So I ask, why couldn’t Twitter exist a few hundred years ago? No internet is an easy and accurate answer, but it is incomplete.

Twitter as it is can only exist in a world that is willing to cede control of private space, our personal lives and conversations, to private enterprise.

Capitalism is fine, private property and wage labor: all fine. And I am talking about general, all-purpose types of public space: think parks, not movie theaters. I offer that this kind of public space should be subject to the same imperfect and frusturating democratic control that government provides for our well-known spaces.

Please consider that no Starbucks will record and tag you, that movie theaters are not in the habit of indexing years of conversation.  Private rights extend far, and there is leeway for business enterprise to enter such a regime — but they don’t.  They don’t because we’ve got a long history of public space, free speech, and privacy that would be directly threatened by such moves. They’d seem bizarre and obscene.

Yet it is ok on Twitter.  I am not making specific policy suggestions but I do believe there should be a discussion. Simply taking social media seriously as public space, I think, means a reconceptualization of what we expect.

After all, technology is neither good nor bad — I knew I had to throw this in and, from the recording, I am glad to see I did. Twitter helps in Iran, but it could be used for virtually anything. Simply helping in a now-democracy hotspot doesn’t mean it sustains a developed democracy in decay. (Months back I wrote a similar post.)

What is more, our attitudes toward social media are not liberal; the rights we expect look more like the disinterested gestures of oppressed peasants than a semi-active citizenry.  That’s because we enter it as consumers.  We’ve been trained for both, to be citizens and consumers, and we’re applying the wrong mindset.

Like what I said in the end.

They don’t like knives in New York. on 12seconds.tv