As I men­tioned recently, many in “my culture”—including myself; the scare quotes are there sim­ply to remind me that I want no sin­gle cul­ture, that I seek no con­sis­tent views, that I need to ques­tion every damned thing I assume—value things high­est that exist on a “human scale”.

Right-​​sized meet­ings, hand-​​made crafts, sim­ple grace­ful lit­tle soft­ware projects, locally-​​grown food, first-​​hand per­sonal expe­ri­ences in our work­lives and abroad. Don’t like pol­i­tics, TV, mass pro­duc­tion, don’t like best-​​sellers, or shrink-​​wrapped meat, have no truck with big-​​city black-​​suited con­sul­tants or politi­cians or men in gray flan­nel suits. We don’t revile these; we pity them and the benighted folks who igno­rantly choose to deal on that level.

Want to help.

See, things are out of whack. We’re off track. A cor­rec­tion is in order. There’s been some kind of global cul­tural inef­fi­ciency, because the world’s gone too fast, too far, away from where it would have been oth­er­wise. Too busy, too mech­a­nized, too com­mer­cial. Soon “our” social efforts, and those mag­i­cal sus­tain­able elec­tronic inven­tions some blessed insight­ful souls [among “us”] have brought to light recently, those forces will per­me­ate this shad­owed world and guide us all back onto the lost track.

[Where by “track” one doesn’t mean to imply rail­road tracks, of course; we mean syl­van wooded grassy path. With­out any ticks or any­thing on it. But not too crowded, either.]

Back to a sim­pler day, in other words. The way things should have been. Before reviled patri­ar­chal Cor­po­rate Amer­i­can worka­day pol­luted greedy cul­ture per­vaded our lives, turned us (well, no, not “us” literally—mostly other peo­ple one doesn’t often encounter in our imme­di­ate cir­cle) into lit­tle more than polit­i­cal stooges, and oblig­ate poverty-​​ridden con­sumerist zombies.

“We” are some rude amal­gam (no doubt the phrase “dis­tinctly Amer­i­can” will crop up soon in this pas­sage; whoops, there it goes) of Tran­scen­den­tal­ist, Craftsman/​Socialist and Deca­dent, boosted high by priv­i­lege, and liv­ing in a para-​​academic cos­mopoli­tan world of seven-​​layered edu­ca­tion and a jointly held small-​​world of empowerment.

Christ—I sound like David Brooks, of all things. This is all just some crappy list of straw men. Kill me now. [See? Amus­ing recur­sion! Geeky and meta.]

Any­way, to date what we do most actu­ally has been sit­ting and typ­ing on blogs and in lit­er­ary mag­a­zines, among our­selves: pin­ing for the romance, the democ­ra­tiz­ing “level play­ing field”, the human scale of some lovely lost golden “past”.

You might be able to tell, that sets my hack­les to ris­ing, that kind of talk.

Then, in re-​​reading some­thing impor­tant about war and actual his­tory and our self-​​deceptions, I remem­bered: Sir Wal­ter Scott.

It was Sir Wal­ter that made every gen­tle­man in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a Gen­eral or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gen­tle­men value these bogus dec­o­ra­tions. For it was he that cre­ated rank and caste down there, and also rev­er­ence for rank and caste, and pride and plea­sure in them.…

Twain makes the argu­ment that Scott and his backward-​​looking roman­ti­cism rein­forced the lean­ings of the peo­ple of the South before the Civil War. That he pro­vided pre-​​written pro­pa­ganda, acci­den­tally rein­forced the tropes and ten­den­cies that set the South apart from the rest of the country.

And then they went to war. We did—“we” with­out the quotes, so far. So recently and thor­oughly that if you’re from the United States you are prob­a­bly no more than four steps away from know­ing some­body per­son­ally who sur­vived the Civil War.

Watch not the skies: watch the books. Watch the lit­er­ate folks’ read­ing lists, not your oppo­nents’. Look care­fully at the blogrolls not of your polit­i­cal “ene­mies”, but your own. Watch the sharp bound­aries of net­work­ing groups, the sharp divi­sions between what peo­ple wear or own, and who they spend their time with.

Count the num­ber of friends who “can’t stand” other peo­ple you know. Keep track: You want that num­ber high, not low.

Watch for “rev­o­lu­tions”, and “upris­ings”. Watch for any over-​​simplification that decries a mind­less, soul­less local enemy, that threat to “our” lifestyle who lives next door. Watch care­fullest of all for the words “we” use to blame the bad, mis­guided peo­ple who led us astray from the track.

Because Twain was right. He almost always was.

“We” are head­ing down a path that strives to build “our own” cul­ture, a sep­a­rate par­al­lel lifestyle that pre­serves what “we” think is right. We don’t need the other folks; we have our own stores, books, blo­gos­phere, our own meeting-​​spaces, churches. Our own can­di­dates, our own bet­ter lifestyles.

See, maybe “we” can split off “our” cul­ture from the ugly scar that is the rest of the mis­di­rected world. Bring back some sen­si­ble, human-​​scale order locally, and will our human-​​scaled com­mu­ni­ties into the shapes we believe they should have had, all along.

For it is “our” com­mu­ni­ties that are, by def­i­n­i­tion, human–scaled. The rest must surely be some­thing else to be so patently different.

Hmmm. Now what word could we use to describe them?

Watch your­self. Watch how you think of your neigh­bor, your boss, your polit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tive: the ones you didn’t like very much to begin with.

What makes you so spe­cial? Not one damned thing.

Surely not your “scale”, straw man.

Stowe Boyd writes recently about con­fu­sion on the nature, scale and “new” eti­quette of con­ver­sa­tion.

Cru­cial points of our agree­ment: “…I main­tain that small world ethics will trump big world ethics every­time.” And also: “…the nature of social scale means that the value is tied to small­ness, while the pub­lisher mind­set wants big­ness. As we move to the edge, every­thing gets small, and those hold­ing to the cen­ter want to keep things big.”

I left a com­ment there, but more seems worth writ­ing down.

First, an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion, which I’m sure is 100% orig­i­nal with me: Groups and com­mu­ni­ties tend to form and grow dynam­i­cally and then shed par­tic­i­pants (par­tic­i­pants, not fol­low­ers or watch­ers or sub­scribers) at a very par­tic­u­lar scale. Might depend on the medium and the fre­quency of meet­ing and the impor­tance of the stuff the group attends to, but in gen­eral all groups have a Goldilocks size.

That’s no doubt a novel rev­e­la­tion, yes? I so smart. Oh, wait, it does sound a bit like some­thing I heard once in an intro­duc­tory anthro­pol­ogy course, or maybe it was soci­ol­ogy or pub­lic pol­icy, or maybe it’s… oh yeah. Fuck­ing com­mon sense.

Well, still. I don’t hear it trot­ted out very often in my cir­cles. Novel is as novel does.

As Stowe points out, the cul­tural assump­tions and mis­takes (here “Big World vs. Small World”) seem to come down to that word I high­lighted acci­den­tally up there: “participants”.

Sit­ting on your ass surf­ing? Rel­a­tively sim­ple. Innocu­ous activ­ity. We all—all of us—tend to devalue it, den­i­grate it, con­sider it a pas­sive low-​​impact low-​​benefit time-​​waster. It’s con­sump­tion. It’s con­sumerism. Guilty plea­sure. It’s TV-​​watching, sit­ting and nod­ding in an audi­ence, click­ing the clicker. Church. Nuren­burg. Sta­dium con­certs. Com­mer­cial radio. Best­sellers. Intro­duc­tory uni­ver­sity classes. Mass media pabulum.

Whoops, I wasted the whole day doing mind­less _​_​_​_​_​! Tee hee. Silly me; I’ll do bet­ter tomor­row. My Next Work is almost com­plete; if only I could avoid switch­ing on the _​_​_​_​_​!

Heed not the fact that we all do it. We all vis­cer­ally tend towards lik­ing it, but socially we (the “we” read­ing and writ­ing here, I bet) don’t really value it very highly. Loads of peo­ple like it and think noth­ing of it, but “we”, well we know better.

Most of “us” don’t own TVs or don’t have cars or don’t belong to a church or only buy local or don’t eat burg­ers or we walk to work or we eschew “mar­ketroids and suits” like the plague or we’re mis­sion­ar­ies or we have organic farms or we seek a Dif­fer­ent Path or we write blogs and books or we have Macs (or Linux!) or we’re Not Employ­ees or we live in quirky expen­sive “smarter” neigh­bor­hoods or we play at (of all things) com­mu­nity activism.

Pshaw. We don’t attend meet­ings, we run them. Col­lab­o­ra­tive meet­ings, where every­body “gets to” talk. Meet­ings where peo­ple are expected to get up and con­tribute some­thing, dammit.

We don’t write arti­cles, we run mag­a­zines. We don’t go to lec­tures, we give them at con­fer­ences. We don’t buy CDs, we have stu­dios in our base­ment. We have easels, and sound mix­ing boards; we do dig­i­tal let­ter­press, and use local ingre­di­ents to cook food from cuisines as far away as pos­si­ble; we design our own houses, in which own servers are run­ning soft­ware we wrote our­selves.

All that other stuff? Bah. That’s just sit­ting around and typ­ing. Lis­ten­ing to the Muzak of the world. Surf­ing. Being a polit­i­cal sheep, a dupe, a stooge, the eas­ily manip­u­lated raw mate­r­ial of com­merce and the octopoid Con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal machine. What have you done recently? What have you per­son­ally writ­ten recently? What have you made?

How many use­ful com­ments have you left on people’s blogs, how many links to their good stuff?

How have you par­tic­i­pated, in other words? Because con­sum­ing isn’t par­tic­i­pat­ing. It’s not cre­at­ing if you don’t mod­ify it and pass it along, in kind, enhanced somehow.

That stuff in your head, those unvoiced ideas and vague appre­ci­a­tions, those con­ver­sa­tions you have face to face, those enjoy­able moments of appre­ci­a­tion? Noth­ing; worth­less. Where have you added beauty to the world? Show us the beauty, dammit. Your nod­ding smile isn’t good in this town, ya fuckin’ tourist.

Those other peo­ple we dis­miss? They’re about mon­e­ti­za­tion and mind con­trol. We hate that; it’s greed pure and sim­ple. Old World stuff. Filthy lucre taints the purity of our essence. We don’t do khaki, we don’t do desk jobs, we don’t do com­mer­cials. Mon­e­ti­za­tion is crass.

No, we’re all about the uti­liza­tion. Every click a help­ful ref­er­ence; every link a nugget of affect­ing amuse­ment, or irony, or dis­tilled advice. You’re not sup­posed to just stare at it. It’s some­thing you’re sup­posed to see because it will make you make some­thing won­der­ful.

U HAZ A KEY. I MADE IT FOR U: This crap I’m typ­ing in my blog, it’s your key to free­dom, intel­li­gence, polit­i­cal aware­ness, action. A bet­ter… well, some­thing or other.

You haven’t uti­lized my work enough if you haven’t jumped in and par­tic­i­pated and cre­ated some­thing of your own in response. What are you? Have you no Craft, Man? Where’s your authenticity?

So here’s my premise, hyper­bole aside: What Stowe calls “big world”, which is a widely-​​accepted socioe­co­nomic struc­ture that most folks would iden­tify eas­ily as “nor­mal stuff”, is about con­sump­tion. The implicit eco­nomic agree­ment is: you con­sume it, you should reward the pro­ducer with some combo of (a) buy­ing some­thing from a sub­scrip­tion or an an ad, (b) fur­ther and con­tin­ued atten­tion in future, © did we men­tion money? Well, maybe you just thank them now and then.

What Stowe calls “small world” — which is “new” in some sense (novel is as novel does) but is in fact what a num­ber of pre­ten­tious but influ­en­tial peo­ple in the 19^th cen­tury (that godaw­ful wordy Ruskin ass, fil­i­greed tubby William Mor­ris, Henry D. Thoreau, some other stu­pid poets I can’t keep straight [insert hyperlinks!!1!]) invented, that’s about craft. Fac­to­ries were bad, see; they changed stuff. All those peo­ple who used to be just peas­ants and trades­men, they became endan­gered by the Moloch of com­merce, the cease­less mind­less inat­ten­tive drollery of… well you get it. All that green stuff we used to have, the cow manure, the muddy roads, the thun­der­mugs, overnight replaced by stink­ing auto­mo­biles rolling on pave­ment, and soul-​​sucking labor-​​saving devices.

How hor­ri­ble it was, to have lost all that local folk­loric quaint charm­ing cul­ture in the wash of glob­al­ized indus­trial con­ve­nience. Before that, every­body had to do it the hard way, just like in Hob­biton, bless their but­ton noses and fuzzy lit­tle feet.

So in response these poets and stuff did what any one of “us” would have done, given their tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions: They started small presses, held salons, painted out­ra­geously trans­gres­sive works of art involv­ing Catholi­cism and fairies, and wrote chal­leng­ing short nov­els printed in heavy type­faces with a heavy impres­sion on heavy deck­led paper. Sym­bol­ism is some­thing you’re sup­posed to use, see.

Note well: they didn’t broad­cast, didn’t write essays and let­ters in mag­a­zines (except their own). For chris­sakes they didn’t hold pub­lic meet­ings, where just any­body could come along and mean­der igno­rantly on about their per­sonal con­cerns. No: they chat­ted amongst them­selves. Because of course every val­ued con­ver­sa­tion, every con­sec­u­tive cre­ative act, that was the empow­er­ing seed of the next step towards a proper demo­c­ra­tic thought­ful self-​​governed tran­scen­dent panar­chic utopia. A prac­ti­cal, effi­cient econ­omy of fun­gi­ble cre­ation, each act use­fully sup­port­ing and rein­forc­ing another’s sensibilities.

Every­thing impor­tant is either cre­ation or crit­i­cism. Often both! Folks “pay” for stuff by giv­ing you back stuff in return, as effi­ciently as pos­si­ble. You accept (crassly, “con­sume”) novel beauty, but then if you’re one of “us” you are then expected to cre­ate some­thing of beauty in return. If noth­ing else, by point­ing out how cun­ning and cre­ative we are. You may post a short acco­lade in the accom­pa­ny­ing form.

In prac­tice “in return” means merely giv­ing credit to the source. The orig­i­nal author should be part of the con­ver­sa­tion, should be stand­ing right there next to you on the ground, not tow­er­ing above. Things, designs, they must above all else to be kept on a “human scale”. We hate unsym­pa­thetic cor­po­rate sprawl­ing inter­na­tional tow­er­ing mon­sters where you’re just left unable to respond in kind, an awe-​​struck con­sumer. I mean, how is that fair? Don’ have no truck wi’ wiz­ards in thayse parts.

Because if you like some­thing, you’re sup­posed to reward the cre­ator. Directly, if pos­si­ble, and in kind.

That’s the implicit social rule, right there: Free­dom comes only at the price of authen­tic par­tic­i­pa­tion. And by exten­sion: inau­then­tic­ity dilutes free­dom. Mar­ket­ing, adver­tis­ing, glob­al­iza­tion: they are the ene­mies of free­dom because they under­mine the cru­cial human trade in authen­tic beauty.

So think about Twit­ter: Is it noise, or fun? Do you post a lot, or do you find it annoy­ingly “dilute”? What about email? Do you try to dili­gently reply to every email you get (that’s worth­while), or do you slack off and just read it, and get around to reply­ing when you have a chance? Face­book? Do you like look­ing and surf­ing your network’s gang-​​sign-​​throwing pho­tos at Face­book, or do you try to empower com­mu­ni­ties by set­ting up groups of like-​​minded indi­vid­u­als? Do you have a blog of your own, and does any­body care if you are tardy post­ing use­ful stuff?

Now, hav­ing asked those ques­tions: what makes you think I care?

And, finally. Do I really need to explain the role of “r/​K selec­tion” in this con­text? I mean, it seems kindof lazy for me not to, hav­ing promised early on. Or, wait, am I iron­i­cally break­ing my social con­tract as an “author” by not fol­low­ing through on promise of my title, and try­ing to make a point on how you’re empow­ered, see, to look it up and fig­ure out the neat puz­zle all by yourself?

No, really, I’m not sure. That’s not meta-​​meta. Just meta.

In gen­eral, is it an act of lazi­ness if I leave some­thing unex­plained and con­fus­ing on the Inter­net? Or am I being “sym­bolic” and solic­it­ing par­tic­i­pa­tory cun­ning help from my insider-​​laden small social world? The peo­ple that mat­ter, they get it surely.

Is my del​.icio​.us feed a bor­ing, mass-​​consumption piece of crap that means I’m lazy and can’t be both­ered to write real use­ful stuff? Or am I hark­ing back con­sciously to the day when a “blog” was lit­tle more than what you might call a “log of web­sites”, a kind of per­sonal diary of what I find use­ful and inter­est­ing and think you might as well? Am I being more use­ful and pro­duc­tive by post­ing com­ments and essays in response the ones other peo­ple write, or am I being even more meta-​​creative by post­ing oblique links with­out any con­nect­ing explana­tory mesh? Or do I need to use Arial Black for that and call it a Tumblog?

Hang on, dammit. Am I agree­ing with Stowe Boyd, who says that small worlds like “ours” will trump big world designs tar­get­ing “the masses” through broad­cast and con­sump­tion? Or am I ques­tion­ing his (and my own) assump­tions about indi­vid­u­a­tion, about mem­ber­ship in dis­crete demo­graph­ics or con­sis­tency of behav­ior, and the fun­da­men­tal dynam­ics of social (and busi­ness) strategies?

Heav­ens. Dis­am­bigua­tion needed.

Hell. Don’t ask me. I per­son­ally don’t know which side of any of these dichotomies is the right answer. Don’t even know which dichotomy is most important.

By invok­ing an abstruse metaphor from math­e­mat­i­cal ecol­ogy in a dis­cus­sion of social dynam­ics and busi­ness mod­els in the New Ecominny, am I imply­ing some­thing pre­ten­tiously inge­nious? Or maybe it’s… oh yeah. Fuck­ing com­mon sense.

Or maybe it’s just about his­tory and per­spec­tive. Again. Maybe all I ever say is: What makes you think you’re so special?

Com­ments welcomed!

And remem­ber: Every time you leave some­thing con­fus­ing on the Inter­net, an angel eats a kitten.