We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I have placed my bets. I am now a blogger, and I intend to die a blogger.
And how will that work? “Today folks, I want to take another crack at the crisis in the Middle Ea………..UUUUURRRRRGHHHH!!!!” Crash. Head hits keyboard. Interestingly, funny random typing, thus – “;ldsrh;rg;gfmj’o;sarl’mj;gdvlklkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk” – is what you might then expect. But it turns out that if your head does hit the keyboard, almost or even absolutely nothing happens. Try it. Pressing random keys one at a time, monkey-Shakespeare style, gets you a mess of letters as above. Pressing just one key continuously gets you kkkkkkkkk, also as above. But pressing fifteen keys at once and holding them all down continuously while keeping the head motionless seems to achieve nothing.
Delete the above two paragraphs only if they crack immortality soon enough to include me, and if that happens I intend to blog for ever and ever. (And how might that work in the decades and centuries to come?!?!?)
What I’m saying is that I think blogging can only get bigger and better until it conquers the whole world and there are blogs everywhere about everything.
Samizdata’s readership seems to be creeping ever upwards. Yes there are numbers dips, which apparently afflict the whole blogosphere, but they are soon corrected and the underlying upward trend then resumes. People taking walks in the early summer sunshine after a war, like animals after they’ve been hybernating, for a few days, and such like. That’s all that is.
My reason for thinking that the blogophere is expanding is basically that, so far as I can see, it is. New blogs (thankyou Instapundit just when I needed you) are being started. Semi-sleeper blogs that have going a while are starting to really come alive. Long time scoffers give up the unequal fight, and start blogging as well (and yes there should be a link there alsol but I don’t know of a recent example – maybe commenters can chip in there). I really don’t think that this is CB radio. And these people certainly seem to agree with me. I wonder who they are.
But, question: Has anyone abandoned blogging with extreme prejudice? → Continue reading: Bloggers! – The future belongs to us
A democracy is a form of government in which the people, either directly or indirectly, take part in governing. The word democracy originates from Greek, and means rule of the people.
– From Wikipedia
In my recent trip to the FACT centre in Liverpool to evangelise for the blogosphere, it was suggested to me by a young lady that one of the great things about blogs is that in contrast to the established media, they are inherently democratic.
She was somewhat surprised when I disagreed. The young lady then suggested that as blogging empowers the common man by allowing them to express their views to the world without big business media owners or the government getting in the way, that it must surely be democratic. I agreed that blogs do indeed give people an unprecedented means to express themselves directly by disintermediating both the established media and the state, but there was nothing democratic about that whatsoever.
Democracy is about politics, and politics is about the use of the collective means of coercion. Democratic politics thus refers to systems by which the people who control those collective means of coercion are chosen and made accountable via one of several methods of popular voting. For something to be ‘democratic’ therefore, it must be amenable to ‘politics’. Therefore for a blog to be ‘democratic’ that does not mean it is empowering or that it disintermediates the state. In fact it means the state, which is to say democratic politics is very much involved.
But you, the reader, do not get a vote on what get written in the articles on Samizdata.net. You may agree with what an article says or you may utterly disagree, but what gets written does not depend on how popular those sentiments are. We write what we want to write.
Where you do get to choose is whether or not you decide to come back and read us again. Much as in an open market, I might decide to try and sell my fruits and meats to those who pass by, yet I cannot force them actually purchase any of my goods if they do not wish to. They cannot stop me offering for sale those things I think makes economic sense but if I am wrong about what the market wants or if others make a better offer, then the passers by will choose to shop with someone else.
Where potential clients do get a vote, albeit indirectly, rather than a ‘market choice’ regarding what I sell, is when the polity regulates what can or cannot be sold. For example it may be up to me if I wish to try and sell veal or chickens or bananas, but I may be prohibited from selling crack cocaine or flamethrowers. So to that extent a market can be made more subject to politics and less to several choice.
And so it is with blogging, at least to a point. But to the extent that if Samizdata.net was to suddenly and highly improbably start advocating Nazi politics (such suggestions are illegal in Germany) or rather more plausibly call for the overthrow of Islamic law wherever it pertains (such suggestions are illegal in Saudi Arabia) then the very fact it is so extraordinarily difficult to prevent such sentiments being proffered by us makes us the very antithesis of ‘democratic’. You can do the ‘equivalent of refusing to buy’ in a market, i.e. you can just stop reading what we write, but you cannot actually stop us from writing. You, the reader, do not get a vote on that.
Blogs are therefore something which empowers the individual, the blogger, regardless of the wishes, and therefore the votes, of a collective who might wish to have a say in what a blogger writes. The correct analogy is therefore the market place… a blog is a open air stall in a marketplace for ideas called the blogosphere. If you find the ideas we are ‘selling’ interesting (even if you do not agree with them) you will come back for more. If we horrify you or even worse, bore the pants off you, you will probably not come back. But we will write what we will write. There is nothing democratic about that… and long may it be so.
We Samizdatistas are in the blogging business for the long haul and so it is very gratifying indeed to be involved with a highly a successful blog… we may not be in the same league popularity wise as Instapundit or Andrew Sullivan but we are nevertheless a significant fixture in the Blogosphere.
However as our hit rate steadily creeps upward, so do our bandwidth costs. As a result, Samizdata.net has finally succumbed to the economic facts of life and our sidebar now has buttons which give our truly global readership the option to send us a donation via PayPal to help defray our mounting bandwidth expenses.
I cannot begin to tell you how frustrating it is that I cannot link directly to this article in the UK Sunday Times about the growing influence of Blogging and Bloggers.
The article is focussed on the fall on former New York Times editor, Howell Raines and unequivocally places the responsibility for his downfall on the Blogosphere:
A proliferating band of independent writers known as “bloggers” (short for web loggers) is pumping out personal takes on the news, and one of the most persistent themes of their websites has been that Howell Raines, executive editor of The New York Times, would have to resign or be sacked.
The bloggers got their man last week and have been exulting in their power. After a rollercoaster two years in the job, Raines resigned from The New York Times last Thursday along with Gerald Boyd, the managing editor.
The article goes on to specifically mention Glenn Reynolds , Andrew Sullivan and Mickey Kaus and the leading role that all played in the relentless (and thoroughly merited) hounding of Mr.Raines, emphasising that, ten years ago, he would have gotten clean away with putting idealism before the truth. Nor is this the end but merely the beginning:
Their latest target is Maureen Dowd, a star writer who jeered at Bush for claiming that Al-Qaeda was “not a problem any more” and has yet to acknowledge that she played fast and loose with his words.
The article also goes on to hint at the depth of the libertarian/conservative influence in the Blogosphere:
The attacks on The New York Times have added to the suspicion among Democrats that internet pundits are part of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” once alleged by Hillary Clinton. The right is certainly gloating over the newspaper’s discomfiture. According to Kaus, a Democrat, “the blogosphere does tend to skew to the right, though not as badly as radio”.
And a warning of things to come:
Raines’s departure is allowing bloggers to indulge in further self-congratulation. The internet’s new breed of media commentators is already savouring its potential impact on the 2004 presidential race.
Which means that traditional opinion-shapers like the UK Times are also ‘savouring’ (or, perhaps more accurately, ‘fearing’) that potential impact as well.
I must say that I have had my doubts about the capacity of the Blogosphere to impact upon the wider world but perhaps I have underestimated it. When a handful of bloggers can force the editor of a publication as august as the New York Times out of his job, you know that the game has changed. The once-untouchable are now touchable and they know it. That, of itself, is hugely significant.
I don’t believe that British or European bloggers are yet having the tangible impact on this side of the Atlantic that US bloggers are clearly starting to have on that side but, then, orthodox opinions are far more hegemonic here. Still, I do not believe that the Guardian would have been forced to issue a shame-faced apology for its woeful distortion of the Paul Wolfowitz statement even a year ago. Maybe they feel that they cannot get away with that kind of thing anymore. If so, good.
The watchers are being watched. They probably don’t like it. I expect that, in due course, they will respond by lobbying the government to bring bloggers under ‘democratic control’ which is the widely accepted procedure for laying low the competition. When that happens, we will all know that we have truly arrived.
[My thanks to my dear friend and reader Nigel Meek for alerting me to the article in the Times.]
I have just got back to London after spending the night in more northern parts, where I gave a talk about blogs and blogging at Liverpool’s rather swanky new downtown FACT (Film, Art & Creative Technology) centre.
Many people are looking for the FACTs about blogging in Liverpool
It is good to proselytize the joys of blogging to a wider audience. Although though the audience was rather technology savvy, blogging was a completely concept to many of the people there. Also interesting was to see a couple people in the media lounge where I turned up to give my talk reading Salam Pax’s blog.
On a day in which an article in The Times notes the power of blogging to scare the living daylights out of some sections of the established media and quotes blogger Mickey Kaus, it is interesting to see our blogger-in-arms in Iraq helping to raise the profile of blogging generally in places like Liverpool.
I even managed to meet a new potential client for my latest business endeavor, a blogging consultancy that will show companies how blogs can greatly assist their businesses. Together with two fellow Samizdatistas David Carr and Adriana Cronin, who was the one who thought up and elaborated the idea, we have started a new venture called the Big Blog Company.
Blogs are increasingly starting to enter the public consciousness … we are spreading like a virus but are much more fun that SARS 
We now know that Salam Pax worked for a time as an interpreter for New York Times and Slate journalist Peter Maass. Maass had absolutely no idea of his interpreter’s secret identity until he returned to the US, found out some more about Salam Pax, and eventually realised that Salam Pax had been blogging about his experiences with Maass (although he hadn’t revealed Maass’ identity either – presumably to protect his own). We thus had a situation where Maass and Pax were working together, and both were writing for large global audiences, but one of them was unaware of who the other was and what he was doing. There were no doubt people in the west who were reading both Maass and Pax, and had no idea that the two people were talking about the same things – quite literally – from different points of view. Plus we have the fact that the blog and the blogger are a much more interesting story than anything in the New York Times. (It’s probably possible to relate this to Dave Winer’s bet in Wired that the blogosphere would be more authoritative than the New York Times by 2007, but I am not sure quite how. I don’t think anyone thought things would unfold like this).
When Maass first met Salam, Salam was reading a copy of Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Dick was the master writer about issues of identity. His books are full of questions about who is who, and who is real, and what is real. Although Dick wrote most of his books in the 1960s and 1970s, the issues raised in them have steadily become more relevant and fascinating to people as the decades have gone by, and the world has come to seem more like the world he envisaged. Hollywood has been influenced more and more by Dick’s work, both in terms of direct adaptations like Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report, as well as by works obviously Dick influenced, such as The Matrix, Dark City and Vanilla Sky. The Man in the High Castle is set in an alternate world in which America has lost World War Two, and America is partitioned into a Pacific Zone ruled by Japan and an Atlantic Zone ruled by Germany. And it is about occupying powers becoming fascinated with the question of the authenticity of the culture of the country they occupy . By being seen to read it, Salam Pax almost seems to be making some kind of deeply ironic statement about his situation.
And that seems to me the odd contradiction. Pax seems largely unaware of the extent that he is famous in the outside world (or at least claims to be unaware) and yet at the same time he is reading and referring to cultural items that are about the kind of awareness and interconnectedness that he is denying. The question is to what extent he is doing this deliberately, and to what extent this is simply a consequence of the zeitgeist of the age. As I discussed a few weeks ago, Pax previously compared the situation in Baghdad to something out of a William Gibson novel, unaware that Gibson himself, on his blog, had already compared Pax to a character out of one of his novels. Then of course we had Gibson commenting about Pax commenting about…
And that is the extraordinary thing about all this. Salam Pax is the most Gibsonian and Dickian figure to ever actually exist, I think. The writings of Gibson and Dick are about the muddiness, murkiness and complexity of the modern world, and the patterns that arise from that muddiness and murkiness. As Maass observes, Iraq is very muddy and murky, and Salam Pax himself appears to be a pattern coming through this, as well as a suberb chonicler of it. And through his actions, Salam Pax seems to be making a peculiar commentary on himself. And yet to make that commentary one thinks he would have to understand more than he actually does, and indeed understand more than it seems possible that anyone in Iraq could understand. From his writing it is easy to tell that Salam is very smart, but is he that smart? This is why I am finding the Salam Pax saga to be such an extraordinary story.
(This is also why I am finding the “Salam is a tool of the Ba’athists” theory steadily less likely. The more detailed and intricate the story gets, the less I simply can believe they could have the imagination to dream something like this up).
John Naughton has written an article about blogging and much to my surprise, he avoids all the usual Big Media whinging.
In fact, when it comes to many topics in which I have a professional interest, I would sooner pay attention to particular blogs than to anything published in Big Media – including the venerable New York Times. This is not necessarily because journalists are idiots; it’s just that serious subjects are complicated and hacks have neither the training nor the time to reach a sophisticated understanding of them – which is why much journalistic coverage is inevitably superficial and often misleading, and why so many blogs are thoughtful and accurate by comparison.
Third, there is the problem – not often touched upon in the New York Times, by the way – that many controversial public issues are ignored by Big Media for the simple reason that the ideological and commercial interests of their proprietors preclude it.
Read the whole article, it is good stuff!
It was strangely disconcerting to suddenly see our blog-father off the ether for such a long time, particularly as, like Glenn, Samizdata.net also resides on Hosting Matters servers.
For those of you who do not know, Hosting Matters had an electrical fire and whilst it took us off the air for only a few minutes, the James Brown of the Blogosphere was silenced for most of yesterday.
But he is back and blogging his heart out once more. The world is back running in well-oiled grooves.
Heh.
I suppose that to many Samizdata readers the quotes below will be old news. But it was newsworthy news to Patrick Crozier when he wrote it, and it was news to me when I read it about two days ago. I realise that two days in blog time is a lifetime, but I think this double titbit may still have enough pep left in it to be worth recycling here in full. I hope so.
Two bits of news today (or at least news to me today) suggest that there’s going to be a hell of a battle between rival blog management systems.
First up is Movable Type who are introducing a new system called TypePad. This will be a sort of Movable Type Lite with the additional features of a template design facility and inclusive hosting. The idea is to appeal to the casual ie not very technical blogger and bearing in mind that the lack of templates and fact you have to find your own host are the very things that put people off switching to Movable Type it would appear that they could be on to something.
Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Blogger is hitting back with Dano, the Blogger that works ie a Blogger where the archives don’t do a runner every five minutes. I assume that they will lick their archives problem which should prevent a haemorraging of customers but that still leaves the problem of lack of flexibility which the introduction of no more than about five new tags will do little to alleviate.
So, to sum up, MT are going to compete on Blogger’s ground of being easy to use and Blogger are going to compete on MT’s ground of actually working. Things are about to get very interesting in the Blogosphere
And the morals of that are, I suppose, (a) that if you are still with Blogger and you are a technophobe, give them a few more months to fix their archiving nonsense; and (b) that blogging as a whole is about to conquer the known universe, or they wouldn’t be fighting over it like this.
Patrick has been quietly writing things at CrozierVision, but hasn’t been telling anybody. What I’ve been telling him is: stick with your two blogs, CrozierVision and Transport Blog, and help the rest of us sort ourselves out. Transport Blog is slowly improving its regularity and broadening its scope, now that Patrick is being assisted by a handful of Transport Blog occasionals: me, Michael Jennings, David Farrer, with more to come I expect. It is slowly becoming a group blog. I wonder where he got that idea from.
Patrick and I have been collaborating on the look of my two blogs, starting with the Education one. It has taken me months to persuade some blog-techno-savvy person to sit next to me in my kitchen and press buttons for me while I strode about making aesthetic judgements, because it has taken months for Patrick to decide that being blog-techno-savvy is what he does, but finally it has happened.
The verdict so far is: a few like it and the antis have stayed quiet. Which is as it should be. I made it clear that I was only in the market for compliments and would be ignoring all complaints.
The London-and-surrounding-areas blogosphere is showing no signs of running of out steam.
Salam Pax posted a big update yesterday, with photographs taken during a trip from Baghdad to Basra via Najaf.
So, those of you who thought he was not ‘for real’… has this changed your mind? Whilst it is difficult to be sure, I have always suspected the ‘Baghdad Blogger’ was exactly what he said he was.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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