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Some friends

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I met Scott “Understanding Comics” McCloud eight years ago (at the first Digital Storytelling Fest in 1995) and have been following his work with enthusiasm from a distance ever since. The concept of “micropayments” (small-amount payments directly from readers to content creators) was very much in the air then. McCloud now has a real-live micropayment-supported product out there: It’s a comic called “The Right Number,” which he’s publishing in three installments. Each installment costs 25 cents to read; you have to put a minimum of $3 into a Paypal-like account run by BitPass to get started.

I just paid my two bits and read the comic — a noirish (or, given its palette and ever-so-slightly adult nature, I should say “bleuish”) tale about “math, sex, obsession and phone numbers.” I found it more than engaging enough to bring me back for parts II and III, which is more than I can say about most Hollywood products that demand macropayments.

Meanwhile, if you’re here in the Bay Area and haven’t already heard the buzz, Josh Kornbluth has a great new solo show called “Love & Taxes” at the Magic Theatre, and it’s just been extended to early August. The show uses a comic saga of Josh’s deepening debts stemming from a failure to file his tax returns to make some deeper points about the purpose and value of the tax system — points that are hugely important at this moment in history, when the very notion of using public levies to support public goods is under assault by the president himself. At 4:30 on Sundays, after the matinee performance, Josh is also hosting free public forums called “Tax Talkbacks” with experts (this coming Sunday, New York Times tax-beat reporter David Cay Johnston is the guest).

If you don’t trust my enthusiasm — yes, Josh and I are old pals — you can check out the enthusiasm of other critics who aren’t friends with him.

Of mouse and men

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Definitely, the highlight of my day at ILaw (last Wednesday — I could only get out of the office one day!) was Lawrence Lessig’s talk on public domain vs. copyright. I’d heard or read bits and pieces of this before, but here, presented in one piece and delivered with considerable passion in roving-law-professor style, it acquired weight and power — and made we want to spread the word. So here are some impressionistic notes and comments on his talk.

The good and the broken

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Last night I gave my digital storytelling talk at BayCHI and had a great time.

I shared the bill with Mark Hurst of Creative Good and Good Experience, and enjoyed hearing his spiel about the importance of thinking strategically about design and user experience — stepping back from the details of button placement and link colors and so forth and asking basic questions about what your goals are, what your relationship with the user is, and whether your design helps or hurts. The message was very pertinent to the issues we wrestle with every day here at Salon, as we try to keep our “buy a subscription or get a free day pass” model clear and easy to understand.

Mark runs a mailing list, a conference, and — most recently — has started a Web site called thisisbroken.com, for which he’s asking people to send in photos of things they think are broken. It’s interesting, sometimes funny stuff.

I’m tempted to send in a picture of the White House, but I think he’s hoping to keep it a forum for thinking about design, not making satirical points about politics…

Semi snooties

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My kids love a book called “Big Truck and Little Truck,” in which a little pickup tries to make his way through the big world. On one page, plucky Little Truck encounters what the book describes as “snooty semis.”

Matthew and Jack often have near-total recall of the phrases in their bedtime books, but they somehow transposed “snooty semis” into “semi snooties.” The word was too wonderful to correct at first, and over time I have come to find it of some use.

“Semi-snooty,” for instance, is now the word that pops into my brain when the word “semiotic” is uttered within my earshot. Many are the crimes against common sense that have been committed in this word’s name. But last week at the Stanford/Harvard ILaw seminar Terry Fisher used it in a context that actually made sense to me.

The phrase he used was “semiotic democracy,” a term that apparently has been kicking around academe for some time but that I have not encountered before. Fisher described a “concentration of the power of meaning making” as a corollary to the concentration of media ownership and the prevalence of broadcast media technology. So if “political democracy” describes a system in which everyone gets to participate in the exercise of political power, “semiotic democracy” describes a system in which everyone gets to participate in the creation of cultural meaning.

Which sounds like a pretty great ideal to me. However far we may be from ever achieving it, it’s a useful yardstick, something new to weigh in the equation of social value. And it is exactly what has attracted me over the years to the phenomenon of digital storytelling. Which leads me to…

On the vine

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I’m opening the doors today on a new project — something I’m doing on the side, not affiliated with Salon — called Storyvine. It’s a themed blog, focusing on digital storytelling — the description is “the digital storytelling grapevine.” Here’s the mission statement: “I’ve got two goals for this blog: First, by providing timely news and links I hope to provide a useful service to the existing community that has formed around the idea of digital storytelling over the last decade or so, since the first Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, Colorado, in 1995. Second, I hope to help people who are curious about this phenomenon get a clearer handle on what it is, and where to find out more.”

I intend to update it as regularly as there’s news, information, links or thoughts that are of interest to the people who are interested in this subject. Come visit.

Raise money, buy TV ads, repeat

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The latest trend in political coverage seems to be ranking the candidates based on how much money they’ve raised.

Now, I will not pretend for a second that this information isn’t vitally important to the outcome of a campaign. It is a story, no question. But more and more it seems to be treated as the story: The candidate with a lot of money is the candidate best positioned to get even more money. The candidate with even more money is in the best position to pay for the kind of advertising that will win votes. The ability to raise money is the ability to get elected. Fundraising becomes a proxy for political skill, positions on issues, get-out-the-vote passion.

Horse-race handicapping has always been the curse of political reporting, but this is a new meta-level of horse-race reporting that makes the head spin. It’s similar to what’s happened in movie coverage, where the old-fashioned opening-day question of “how good is it?” has long since been eclipsed by the meta-question of “how much did it gross on opening weekend?”

It’s bad enough that this focus crowds out coverage of the actual distinctions among the candidates as leaders, legislators and thinkers. It’s worse when you force yourself to face squarely the grotesque fact that nearly all the money that’s raised goes to TV advertising; in other words, it gets put directly in the pockets of the media corporations who pay for coverage of presidential elections — and whose coverage, more and more, is dominated by fundraising tallies.

The next time you hear a TV newsperson start telling you something like “such-and-such a candidate has raised nearly $8 million this quarter…” you can finish his sentence for him: “so that next quarter the candidate can hand it over to my bosses and help us meet our profit forecast!”

There is no conspiracy here, just the iron logic of a simple marketplace that has locked in most of the participants. There may be no way out, says the pessimist in me. But if there is, then the hope lies with unorthodox efforts like those the Dean campaign is making in its online organizing.

For now, ironically, the main value in such organizing is to enable an outsider underdog like Dean to tap some new sources of money so he can pay for the same old TV advertising everyone else is going to use. But maybe, just maybe, in the long run, the ability to build a grassroots campaign via the Net will help birth a candidate who is completely unbeholden to the existing cash/media nexus — and who can help move us forward toward a democracy where dollars don’t trump votes.

Chair-ity

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I had the pleasure of spending yesterday ensconced at Stanford Law School at the Internet Law seminar sponsored by Harvard Law’s Berkman Center and Stanford’s Center for Internet Law. The day was devoted to enlightening, challenging discussions of the issues around digital content, and particularly, digital music, and I’ll say something about that in a second.

But first, the chairs. The entire lecture hall at Stanford was equipped with Aeron chairs! Aeron — meshy, black, cool. Comfortable. Expensive.

Back in the dotcom boom days, more than one careless reporter referred, Jayson-Blair-like, to Salon’s luxurious Aeron-bedecked offices. The trouble was, Salon has never ever had a single Aeron chair. So I’m a little sensitive on the subject. And floored to find them in a university lecture hall. But then I guess Stanford isn’t any old university. And there are a lot of liquidated Aeron chairs kicking around the Valley these days.

[I was going to post some substantive comments next, but unfortunately, I left my notes from the day on my laptop, and I left my laptop home today… So I’ll have to post my thoughts over the weekend.]

Distrusted computing

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Superb John Markoff article in this morning’s Times explores why the Microsoft/Intel “trusted computing” initiative should probably be named, as one source suggests to Markoff, “Don’t Trust You computing.”

Steve Jobs argues that hardware-based security is unlikely to achieve its goal, and Mitch Kapor points out that Microsoft can’t really be trusted when it promises that the non-encrypted, non-DRM-laden “open” part of the operating system will always be an option.

This is an important piece on a big subject. Plans for this closed-computing model — formerly known as Palladium — are rolling down the tracks already. If you cherish the open model of computing, in which you decide what happens on your computer and you control your own data, then “trusted computing” is something to worry about.