making edible playdough is hegemonic.

My previous blog, sleeping alone and starting out early, is dead. I did port the content over to making edible playdough is hegemonic, and in so doing I had a chance to file through the more than 200 posts I tossed up on the internet. Some of them were pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. Because they’re likely to be pretty much buried for good now that my world has moved on, I wanted to highlight my 10 favorite posts from my days at sleeping alone and starting out early. These aren’t necessarily my best posts; they’re just my favorites. I’ve listed them below, ordered approximately according to how much of a favorite each post is.

1. NYTimes headline: When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking. This may be my favorite post, period. I’m sad that it didn’t get much readership. The title comes from a NYTimes article about celebrities who have other people manage their Twitter feeds, but I had hoped the story would be about astronomy. So I rewrote it. I’d be really happy if you took a look.

2. on homophobia, classism, and the politics of rape: Don Belton and Bloomington’s Pride Film Festival Don Belton, a gay, African-American professor at Indiana University, was killed by his lover (a white ex-Marine) on Christmas Day 2009. Bloomington’s Pride Film Festival was dedicated to Belton’s memory. I found this problematic. I wrote:

Leaving aside issues of race–not because I think we should leave those issues aside, but because I’m not qualified to talk about race–we craft a narrative around Belton and Griffin, and it’s a narrative that points to deep class assumptions that hover above issues of gender and sexual orientation. It’s the same sort of narrative that frames, for example, the story of Tiger Woods and his multiple mistresses (“Cocktail waitresses! Pancake servers! Why’s Tiger rooting around in the trash?!?”), our attitudes toward celebrities (“Britney Spears–you can take the girl out of Hicksville, but….”), and the political decisions that undergird our social structure.

It’s easier and simpler to use Belton’s murder as a touchstone for conversations about the state of gay rights in America. In fact, this story, like all stories worth telling, is far more complicated and multithreaded. Like all stories worth telling, the work of interpreting the details is far less clearcut than it seems upon first blush.

3. Blog for International Women’s Day: a call to end ‘horizontal violence.’ In response to a call for bloggers to reflect on the theme of International Women’s Day, “equal rights, equal opportunity: Progress for all,” I wrote about the “divide and conquer” tactic that pits women against each other. I wrote:

On International Women’s Day, I’m calling for more attention to the long revolution, for more attention to the difficult and complicated work of building a movement based on solidarity, mutual respect and support, and making room for a variety of voices, interests, and needs. I’m calling for more attention to the ways in which we hurt each other, diminish the voices of our comrades, use any power we gain individually as a weapon against others who would like a little bit of power too.

4.Excuse me while I go all John Lennon on you. AdBusters had this “one flag” competition intended to establish one flag under which to unite the world. But–oops–every single judge of this competition was a white man. I wrote about this, obviously, but also about how we might imagine a world in which “flag” does not mean “territory” or “ownership,” but something very different:

We say that humans are by nature territorial, and that notions like nations, borders, governments and flags emerged from that essentially human trait. But it might have been otherwise, as the Adbusters winning flag suggests. We can imagine a world in which a block of cloth tossed up a pole means not “this land is claimed for the American government and is subject to its government and laws” but “the swimming pool is now open” or “mitosis has occurred” or “a block of cloth has been tossed up a pole.”

It might have been otherwise, and in this case the flag whose very image is that which means to us the exact opposite of “territory”–sky, the very opposite to us of land–won the contest because it helps us to imagine how it might have been otherwise. In fact, we might say the winning flag is not just the flag itself but the image of that block of cloth against a matching sky.

People drifting and gathering like clouds across the bright sky. No term to describe the notions of “borders,” of “boundaries,” no country or continent, no power exerted by the notion of “patriotism” and therefore no jingoisms, no xenophobia, no need for the complex of feelings and intentions exerted by patriotism as it currently exists in our networks of existence.

5. zomg these guys are so racist. I found some incredibly racist people saying some incredibly racist things on the internet. So I blogged about them:

I just found out about American Renaissance Magazine, a disgusting neo-conservative platform for justifying loathsomely cretinous attitudes toward race clearinghouse for neo-conservative articles that support white supremacist beliefs. I’m finding it impossible, actually, to describe this site in a way that could be remotely considered unbiased, so I’ll just let it speak for itself:

American Renaissance is a monthly magazine that has been published since 1991. It has been called “a literate, undeceived journal of race, immigration and the decline of civility.”
Well played, American Renaissance. The phrasing of this description completely conceals the fact that the praise you’re quoting comes from the founder of the magazine himself, white supremacist Jared Taylor.

6. Actually, “Snakes on a Plane” wasn’t that bad…jk jk jk. In the dubbed-over cable version of “Snakes on a Plane,” Samuel L. Jackson says this: “I have had it with these monkeyfighting snakes on this Monday to Friday plane!” I found this too awesome to not blog about it.

7. eppur si muove: a defense of Twitter. Galileo was rumored to have said “eppur si muove” (and yet it moves) after being forced by the Church to recant his assertion that the Earth revolves around the sun. This post takes on the general complaint that Twitter is filled up with meaningless drivel, inane babble, and banal missives; I argue that people who see Twitter in this way are missing the engine that keeps it growing and changing.

8. why educated elites are lame, by a member of the educated elite. I wrote that

the dross that exists on the internet has always existed; it’s just that until the emergence of participatory media, the educated elites never had to lower themselves to engaging with it. Lame ideas, poorly designed creative works, ignorant or bigoted political stances, and individual identity work had no avenue for widespread expression, and so the people in charge got to act like none of the above actually existed. And, for all cultural intents and purposes, none of the above actually did exist.

Let me put a finer point on this: The decline-in-quality argument is an elitist stance in reaction to the transformative democratic potential of social media for the unwashed masses. I say this as an educated elite, as someone who has benefited as much as the next guy from the ability to participate in the dominant group’s dominant Discourse.

9. on ageism, sexism, and bad behavior: what we can learn from Dave Winer This guy felt he had been the victim of ageism and lashed out at the world, both on Twitter and on his blog. Which is fine, except that he sort of has a reputation of being a little bit petty and mean when he perceives someone is criticizing him, so this turns him into a little bit of the boy who cried wolf. I wrote this:

There are at least two lessons to draw from the Winer / ageism story: First, that the worn grooves of prejudice and discrimination are so, so easy for humans, flawed as we are, to fall into, and that it is our responsibility to guard against taking that easy path; and second, that bad behavior in communities of practice is still not okay, no matter who you are. The difference these days, of course, is that reputation not only precedes you but follows behind you like a little yipping terrier. It’s getting harder and harder to walk into a room you’ve never entered without everyone noticing the constant bark of that little dog.

10. smacking down Jaron Lanier & ‘World Wide Mush’. Okay, I’ll admit that the main reason I like this post so much is that Howard Rheingold liked it too. But I also think it’s a good example of my position with respect to social technologies. I wrote this:

Lanier of all people should know that the often anonymous, often trivial and often problematic Wikipedia model is only one approach to collaboration, and one that works–and often works very well–for fairly low-stakes and longer-term goals. You don’t cite Wikipedia in a White House briefing on Islam in Nigeria, for example, but you do cite Wikipedia in proving to your brother-in-law that Breakfast at Tiffany’s was released just at the very beginning of the 1960′s, just like you said it was. (Did you get that, Dean? 1961.)

11. how to eat pistachios and where to buy your jeans. Levi-Strauss Jeans Co. created this fake campaign called Go Forth! It was intended to harness the very American desire to travel, to shake free of our moorings, to meet on the road, surrounded by the vastness, and to connect. Anyway, they created this backstory about a prodigal cousin who left gold bars strewn across the country; they had beautiful, touching commercials; and it was all a fake manufactured to sell more product. I got pissed. So I wrote about it.