What an amazing historical document. I had not intended to watch the whole thing, but I did, with rapt attention. It recalls deep, vague, long-forgotten memories in me. Perhaps I saw this very episode in 1979, when I was seven; perhaps it is just that Col. Sanders speaks exactly like the elderly people in my American childhood used to speak. I knew Americans from the 19th century, worshipful Americans with their very own pastors who spoke with regional accents uncorrupted by mass media. It's hard to believe now, but I did.
There is so much here! Jim Bakker's sidekick's awful doggerel in praise of the Colonel (19'38''); the delightful finale with the giddy KFC regional managers distributing chicken to the PTL crowd, as the Colonel himself enjoys a wing; the squirm-inducing story of the polyp in Col. Sanders' colon and the 'plunk' sound he heard in the commode after his post-op enema (8'40''); Col. Sanders's own creepy pastor who denounces the 'Jewish attorney' (sic) who performed the operation on the Colonel and failed, in his Jewishness, to realize that God himself had already begun his own operation on the Colonel's colon (9'47'').
What is most stunning, of course, is the way this epitomizes so vividly the conspiracy of religion and entrepreneurship in American history. Col. Sanders is 'saved' not nearly so much when his pastor first prays for him, as when the Colonel forks over his first tithe. The simple-minded money-maker and the crafty man of God make a perfect pair. The whole history of the place is a history of duplicity, unctuousness, and unremitting hustling. I miss it.
Once a year or so I permit myself to be alarmed by the maneuverings of Bob Avakian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States. Some years ago I was invited onto the radio show of one of Avakian's principal porte-parole, whose name escapes me now, but who is a well-known fixture at the lower end of the radio dial.
The subject was some uncontroversial thing, the indefensibility of the US invasion of Iraq or the like. At some point, when it came to discussing the propaganda operation leading up to this invasion, I invoked the name of Stalin, which stopped my host cold, and triggered a spontaneous defense of the Ossetian caudillo, who, I was told, might have had to take some extreme measures, but was sure nonetheless to end up 'on the right side of history'.
This got me Googling the radio program I had innocently agreed to be on, which landed me after a few clicks on the website of the RCP-USA, learning all about the elusive Chairman Bob. A veteran of the '60s student movement in Berkeley, Avakian is now the leading Maoist figure in the US. Fine. that's his thing, and surely there's a place for it. There is a legitimate debate to be had about the historical legacy of the great leap forward. I am a pacifist, and I think that it was not worth it; I understand however the arguments of those who draw to our attention the fact that, through the bloody violence of it, China really did effect a great leap forward, and that therefore I should be interrogating myself about the ways in which my own flaccid pacifism helps maintain the interests of the imperialist lackeys, the paper tigers, etc.
That's all exciting stuff to debate. But what I can't go along with is the conscious cultivation by Avakian and his enablers of a cult of personality around this rather unexceptional Californian. It's remarkable to see them working at it (Avakian has even said, in response to the criticism that there is such a cult: "I certainly hope so— we’ve been working very hard to create one."). This does at least help me to put Maoism in perspective. When I've read Mao, and been utterly put off by the cultic aspect of it, I have sometimes tried to tell myself that this must be something deeply rooted in Chinese culture, and that cannot but come across as odd when translated into English and presented as a universalizable revolutionary doctrine. Why, after all, even if I ultimately judge that the great leap forward was worth it, should I give the slightest shit about Mao the guy? Why should I care about that stupid face of his? It must have something to do, I've often told myself, with ancestor worship, with cultural legacies I simply can't understand, just like I can't understand pangolin worship or couvade.
But the RCP has managed to duplicate precisely the tone of the unbelievably deadpan party-line correctness we know from the Little Red Book, yet transplanted into familiar American situations. Consider this testimonial about Chairman Avakian from a certain Carl Dix, entitled "Traveling with Chairman Avakian: A Determined Revolutionary Leader, and a Fired Man, for Decades." Dix was a member of the Black Workers' Congress from Baltimore, who was hosted by Avakian during a visit to New York. They had a discussion about some minor points of doctrinal difference between the BWC and Avakian's own group, after which, so Dix testifies, the "discussion I had with Bob Avakian was a very important turning point in my life. It is no exaggeration to say that because of it I was able to stay on the revolutionary path." Dix goes on:
The carrying forward of this line struggle is a testament to the correctness of the line that Bob Avakian has led the RCP in forging from the months leading to its formation down to the present. And it is a testament to the importance of us all learning from the approach and method he has brought to the revolutionary struggle for all of the more than three decades that I've known him.
Avakian keeps out of sight these days, and we are not told by Dix when this meeting took place, so we are left with the impression of a mythical encounter, of something fable-like that takes place outside of history but that serves as a seed for the beginning of history: like the Buddha's first witnessing of poverty. Notwithstanding his reclusion, the RCP website assures us that Avakian has an "irrepressible sense of humor" (just the other day I was irked by the assurance from Jobbik, the extreme right-wing Hungarian political party, that their leader Gábor Vona "is perhaps most notable for his disarming sense of humour, which frequently causes members of the audience at Jobbik public forums to be doubled-up with laughter." Why do political leaders who advance themselves through the threat of violence always feel the need to explicitly insist upon their own good humor?)
And now the RCP has a campaign underway that they're calling 'BA Everywhere', which is "aimed at raising big money to project Bob Avakian’s voice and works throughout society—to make BA a household word." It's being supported by something they're calling "The BAsics bus tour" (sic). Sunsara Taylor participated in one of these tours, and explained its importance as follows:
[T]he more that we are promoting Bob Avakian as who he actually is and what he is actually indispensible to (revolution aimed at the emancipation of all of humanity), the more we will be drawing forward and engaging the biggest questions of this revolution and bringing growing numbers into it.
In short, hail Bob.
Some of us of a certain age and from a certain part of the world will have trouble suppressing the memory of a different Bob, the fictional idol of the satirical Church of the SubGenius. Here the name 'Bob' was evidently chosen precisely for its uramerikanisch sonority, for its quintessential regular-guy sort of American anonymity. Bob is himself completely non-descript; he is to be worshipped not because he is exceptional, but precisely because he is a cipher.
Now the Church of the SubGenius was described by at least one of its prominent members as a 'very serious joke'. This is an approach to life that makes sense to me, which explains my at least tangential affiliation with the SubGenius crowd at an earlier stage of my development.
A serious joke is still a joke, and it is for exactly this reason that I would still contend that anyone loyal to this latter Bob, who does not exist, is leagues more sophisticated intellectually (and, I would argue, politically) than a follower of the Bob with whom we began. The Church of the SubGenius is trying to penetrate to the essence of mass movements, is exploring, through irony, what it means to line up behind some image of a head. Here there could be no real talk of 'correctness', and the literal mind that knows only correctness and incorrectness can only fear and hate the mind that works at another level. I have no doubt that Avakian would send the frivolous pranksters behind the SubGenius to the fields if he ever gained power.
Of course, the thing is, he most certainly won't, and it's in this connection that the intentional cultivation of a cult of personality seems so ridiculous to me. In order for such a cult to work, there it has to have the power of coercion behind it. Show me a single example, anywhere in world history, of a cult of personality that is not backed up by threat of force. It's a straightforward contradiction. Without such a threat, Chairman Bob is literally just a chairman, like the chairman of a school board, or of a Future Farmers of America milking competition. Even if the RCP were to seize power, its coercion could really only be exercised after the shit's already gone down. In the meantime there is simply no way that Chairman Bob could reasonably hope his dimly glowing personality might have sufficient purchase on (say) my attention to be able to bring about the cult he desires. How could it, when I've got the other Bob to amuse me?
Bob Avakian could become an important figure in my life, when, after the revolution, he sends his thugs to arrest me for this here display of gross incorrectness. I guess that's a chance I'm willing to take. Until then, as the other Bob says, give me slack.
There has been some interesting discussion at the NewAPPS blog, about the idea of 'academic passing', initiated by a thoughtful guest post from Kristie Dotson.
It has been unclear to me throughout this discussion, since Dotson's initial post, whether what is being proposed is an expansion of approaches in philosophy to include sources, from whomsoever they might come, of philosophical insight that are usually not considered legitimate, such as non-Western philosophical traditions and popular and oral traditions (Western or non-Western); or whether, by contrast, what is being proposed is that philosophers ought to be more free to bring their individual background motivations, stemming from their autobiographies and the complex ways in which their identities took shape, to bear in their philosophical work. One thing that is clear is that by implication, if it is the latter aim, it is those philosophers who have backgrounds that are underrepresented in the discipline whose personal narratives are hoped to bring the most benefit.
As I've said to one NewAPPS contributor in another venue, I think these two possible proposals must be separated. By background I, for example, appear, like it or not, to be a chip off the old hegemon, and many would suppose that for me to incorporate personal narrative into my philosophical work would just be heaping on more of the same (though here I take it one of the great fruits of disability studies has been to drive home the point that many of us are marginal in ways that may not be evident on first meeting us, or perhaps even after knowing us for quite a while).
But whether or not I am to the manner born, it is a fact about my philosophical temperament and inclinations that I love to seek out unusual, broadly unrecognized, and easily dismissed sources of philosophical insight, including but not limited to poetry, mythology, oral traditions, folk culture, ethnotaxonomy, premodern and non-Western applied sciences, etc. In this respect, I too have found myself struggling to 'pass', e.g., when I conceal the fact that it was a book I read about the folk beliefs of a certain New Guinean highland tribe concerning the sociocosmic meaning of various bodily fluids that first got me interested in the metaphysics of generation in 17th-century European philosophy.
I tend to read Descartes, Malebranche, et al., ethnographically. For example, I see their views on the formation of the fetus as heavily inflected by commonplaces of contemporaneous European midwifery, and I see these commonplaces as bearing interesting parallels to folk beliefs around the world. Moreover, this fact is not for me a count against Descartes and Malebranche; it is rather in large part what makes them interesting to me. So my own work on the representatives par excellence of the dead-white-male tradition is not, for me anyway, a reinforcement of this tradition's hegemonic status, but rather an attempt to place these dead white males in a larger community, indeed the largest community possible: that of human beings who come up with sundry ways of accounting for the nature and origins of humanity and for humanity's place in nature.
I often suppress these background interests for the sake of what I have long thought of as academic passing (though less often, as my status becomes more secure). For many fellow philosophers, it's bad enough that I am principally concerned with ideas in history, let alone with ideas about soft and squishy things like the problem of animal generation, and let alone, again, in a way that conceives these ideas as investigable in the same way that we might investigate Papuan folk beliefs about menstrual blood. But now I am told that my academic passing can't really pass as passing, since my public identity as a white male ensures that my marginal interests can be preserved intact all the way through the tenure process, whereas if my identity were different I would find the systematic exclusion of the questions I value more prohibitive to my continued pursuit of academic philosophy. If this is what is at issue, however, then it seems we aren't talking about academic passing at all, but simple old-fashioned passing, where it is not beliefs and philosophical inclinations that have to be suppressed, but identities. It is a very serious issue that such suppression occurs, but it is a different issue from the one I at times thought Dotson was discussing.
My philosophical approach does not flow in any easy or obvious way from my background or my identity, but it is not clear to me whether Dotson's intervention can be read as an incitement to me (for example) to continue to pursue it anyway. In any case I find very worrisome the suggestion that only or primarily those people with (recognized) marks of identity difference should be charged with the task of diversifying and broadening the range of acceptable sources of philosophical insight. But again I think I may still be confused about which of the two points is being put forward, or perhaps this is a confusion that remains for Dotson to work out herself. But either way the two must, I think, remain separate.
It's hard not to come to the conclusion that nature is in solidarity with the re-awakening Occupy movement and (closer to home, for me) with the Québec student movement. In Montreal today the previous record temperature was beat by nine degrees Fahrenheit. Tomorrow there will be a province-wide manif against the government's plan to raise tuition. My own university will be shut down 'for safety reasons'. Meanwhile, activists are retaking Zucotti Park, and I hear just tonight they seized the iconic Wall Street bull.
New York and Montreal are in the same climate zone: for me, coming from the American West, the East Coast climatic roller coaster remains, after 18 years, a perversity: unpredictable, duplicitous, dissimulating. But it is conveying one clear truth this early spring: that it is fucking hot, and this creates a general air of chaos, of a world knocked off course, in which everything --though perhaps only temporarily-- starts to seem possible. I don't want to hold forth here about global climate change and what this means for the future; I want to talk about the present, and about how we know, from looking at the past, that meteorological fluctuations play a role, too, in the unfolding drama of human social reality.
As innovative historians such as Émmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, in his Le climat depuis l'an mil (1983), have argued, it is impossible to understand the emergence of the modern world without taking paleoclimatological data into consdieration. At the broadest scope, archeologists are by now unanimous in the view that the earliest innovations separating so-called 'pre-history' from history were the direct result of the retreat of the last Ice Age. At the opposite extreme of focus, at the level of microhistory, it has been noted that many of the crucial early experiments of the Scientific Revolution were facilitated by the 'mini Ice Age' of the 1660s, and the consequent widespread availability of ice, in Northern Europe. I remember hearing last fall that the single greatest threat to the Occupy movement was not Bloomberg, or the NYPD, or anything of the sort, but only the impending winter, but that if a germ of the movement could make it through the cold season, then it was sure to take off in the spring. The spring has just begun, and it feels like summer. The protesters feel that, and, I think, are emboldened by it.
There is something peculiar going on here, something that forces us to rethink our very understanding of historical agency. We used to suppose that climate was among the very most unmalleable things; it was not part of history because it was part of static nature: it fluctuated, but its flux always levelled out in the end to more of the same. Now it is a commonplace that human agency does change the climate. Reciprocally, though somewhat less sensationally, historians have begun to notice that climate, in turn, changes human agency. There are many good reasons for rejecting the false dichotomy between history and prehistory, in favor of what Daniel Lord Smail calls 'deep history', which encompasses (at least) the entire course of the human species since its first beginnings and which takes the innovation of written records a few thousand years ago as a relative detail. It seems to me that this new deep history should also include what used to be thought of as 'natural history', and is now parted out into the seemingly ahistorical, strictly 'hard' scientific endeavors such as climatology, ecology, etc.
Placing human history back into its climatological context is one of many ways of inciting accusations of 'determinism', but now that we recognize a role for human agency in the creation of the climate that in turn influences history, we might by the same token come to see climatological determination as a legitimate source of historical explanation in much the same way we have long seen economic determinism: as something that is created by human activity, but then comes to constrain human activity in a way that is far beyond the control of any individual or community will.
Whether, also, the intensification of human behavior is naturally indexed to the thermometer, or whether the association of human endeavors with heat is something that is anthropologically variable --leaving open the possibility that in some cultures they say something like 'the cold is on!' when communal activities intensify, and see this intensification as akin to the winter rather than the summer-- all this remains to be determined. But if we end up having an unseasonably warm spring, and if, in that warm spring, the various protest movements bubbling up around the world enjoy a particular success, I for one will be comfortable in concluding that climate has played a role in history.
In a recent piece in the New York Review of Books, John Terbogh offers a purportedly humanitarian argument in favor of assimilating uncontacted indigenous peoples. "Do we want," he asks,
to keep people in a 'cultural museum', a time warp as it were? Putting aside the practical questions of how this would be accomplished, is it morally the right thing to do? This is a question of values and some of my anthropologist colleagues would say yes. But the morality of this question has to be considered in the light of our own cultural origins. Once upon a time, the ancestors of each and every one of us lived in a premodern culture. Those cultural origins have now been completely erased from our collective memory. Do any of us regret the loss of this memory? Would any of us prefer to return to our ancestral condition, rather than to live in the modern world? Few, if any, would say yes. To live in isolation is to live a short, hard life in the absence of modern medicine and in complete ignorance of history, geography, science, and art.
Terbogh's heart is in the right place, but he could not be more wrong. He evidently has learned nothing from his anthropologist colleagues. As has been familiar since Lévi-Strauss's La pensée sauvage, indigenous peoples do have science, in fact they have a tremendously complex system of classifying and interpreting salient features of the natural world. This complexity has been borne out in more recent work by Brent Berlin, Scott Atran, and others on what is sometimes called 'ethnotaxonomy'. They also have history, or what we would call, usually dismissively, 'myth'. It may involve different standards of evidence and be underlain by a different epistemology, but it is meaning-giving and valuable to the people who recite it, learn it, and embody it. They certainly have geography: just ask any outsider who needs to find his way around indigenous territory and who seeks the aid of a native guide. And the claim that they do not have art is simply nonsensical.
I do personally regret the loss of many of what we may presume to have been the features of the life-world of our premodern ancestors, particularly the community they appear to have had with the rest of living nature, the socio-natural unity. It is no performative contradiction that I would refuse to go and join an Amazon tribe if given the choice: I am accustomed to the modern world, it's all I know. But that does not mean that there is not something of tremendous value in the way of life of people who live in a premodern setting, and even if you do not personally feel sad at the loss of it, as I do, you can still acknowledge that there is something of value to learn from it (e.g., a different way of relating to nature), and that there is an objective loss if the remaining vestiges of it disappear from the world.
The greatest problem with Bartogh's plea for assimilation, however, does indeed come at the practical rather than the 'philosophical' level. Indigenous people are never assimilated into a larger society anywhere other than at the very lowest rung. From being people who occupy no particular social class, they become, when urbanized or engulfed into a state structure, the occupants of the bottom class, enjoying none of that society's privileges. I don't see how anyone could argue that it is better to be a proletarianized slumdweller than to live out a life in the traditional way, beyond the pale of history, as Kant, for example, would put it in his Enlighenment condescension. Assimilation always means introduction to new hazards: guns, drugs, high-fructose corn syrup, wages guaranteed in advance to maintain the laborer in poverty (for an excellent account of the consequences of absorption of the Sudanese Nuer into a state structure, for example, see Sharon E. Hutchinson's Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State). Bartogh has absolutely no vision for a program of assimilation that would yield better results.
It's surprising that we still find Enlightenment-style paternalism about the people without history being promoted in 'liberal' venues such as the NYRB. My first thought in reading something like this is that the author simply lacks imagination; my second thought is that the editors haven't done their reading, and have no idea how retrograde, in light of the past several decades of anthropological literature, the author's opinion really is.
Amateur neo-Kremlinologists will by now have heard of Pussy Riot, a league of masked anarchist feminist punks who, until recently, could be spotted around Moscow performing their music, uninvited, in public spaces. Their career was cut short when two of their members were detained by Putin's security forces. Here is a clip of what appear to be various performances, to the tune of their best-known song, "Kropotkin-Vodka":
As far as I know, no one has yet attempted to translate the lyrics into English, so let me give it a try:
Occupy the city with a frying pan Go out with a vacuum cleaner, reach orgasm; Seduce the battalions of police virgins. The naked cops rejoice at the new reforms.
Cunt to the sexist fucking Putinites!
Kropotkin-Vodka floats in their stomachs You're doing fine, and the Kremlin bastards Are having a rebellion of the johns, poisoning is fatal Blinkers won't help, meet Kennedy.
Cunt to the fucking cop stooges.
I must have slept, the day again is for oppression, Brass knuckles in my pocket: feminism, that is, Carry your soup to eastern Siberia, So that [Pussy] Riot can be sufficiently vulgar.
Cunt to the sexist fucking Putinites!
If I were to attempt an analysis, I would point out that on one level it appears that something is getting lost in the translation of a certain species of Western anarchist feminism into the Eastern European context. The formula here seems to be the assertion of a radical political stance through straightforward, in-your-face vulgarity-- something that I think is rather foreign to Western feminism. But I also think it's a mistake to try to interpret this as a borrowing or a derivation from the West: in fact it connects up with a long history of political dissent in Russia, and more broadly in Eastern Europe, through the public assertion of sexuality, most of which has not traditionally been overtly feminist. Most recently, we had the case of Voïna (War), an artists' collective that was brutally supressed by the KGB, or whatever they're calling themselves these days, after painting a giant phallus on a drawbridge that rises right next to the security forces' headquarters in Moscow. Banksy rushed to their support, though one suspects that he would have considered graffiti like this rather less interesting if it were to appear in London or Los Angeles.
More distantly, we have the pornographic novel-cum-memoir It's Me, Eddie, written in the 1970s by Eduard Limonov during his sojourn as an impostor Refusenik in New York City, long before he became a mercenary in Serbia and, finally, returned to Russia to found the so-called 'National Bolshevik Party': a bizarre mix of hateful fascist ideology with subversive street theater and clever manipulation of 20th-century political iconography. (To the right is a photo of me speaking, but not agreeing, with said fascist pornographer, circa 1996). More distantly still, we find the work of the Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev in the late 1960s and early '70s, who, like the Russian examples cited, seems to have been excited by the idea, which can be traced back to the 'Freudo-Marxism' of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s --before Stalin's imposition of socialist realism as the only legitimate form of aesthetic expression--, that true political liberation can only come with sexual liberation, or as Wilhelm Reich put it, and as Makavejev aggressively reminded us in his film about the apostate German psychoanalyst and communist: 'Fuck freely, comrades!'
So Pussy Riot, I mean to say, joins a distinguished lineage. But one thing is different this time around: the oppressive state against which the avant-garde is recalcitrating has grown more sophisticated, adaptable. In the West, this adaptability takes the form of 'greenwashing'; in China (as that one Slovenian guy is always mentioning), the state has figured out that it is better off not suppressing Buddhism altogether, but rather putting forth its very own, party-approved Dalai Lama to undermine the authority of that Western media darling in exile in India. The Putin regime, in turn, has responded to the Pussy Riot problem not only by brutal suppression (though that too), but also by propping up its very own aggressively sexual, masked, subversive, avant-garde-ish answer to Pussy Riot. As reported recently at Snob.ru (I haven't quite figured out what Snob is all about; all I know is that it is a consistently interesting source of news and information coming out of Russia, and, perhaps not unrelatedly, its servers are currently down), and as confirmed by a simple YouTube search, there is now a character going by the name of 'Dick Riot', roving around Moscow, making an ass of himself.
He claims to be an independent journalist who happens to support Putin, and protests rather loudly when he is asked whether his stunt is being supported directly by the Putin regime. To be honest I can't really figure out what he is on about in the YouTube clips of him, but he seems like a rather unpleasant person. Anyway what is of interest about him is that in today's Russia such a man as Dick Riot could be one of the derivative products formed in reaction to the hybrid of Eastern European sexual-political subversion with Western feminism that is Pussy Riot.
Putin is no Stalin, and the fact that he has been able to consolidate power in the era of YouTube is in part a result of his ability to coopt the forces of would-be subversion, forces that to which a tyrant like Stalin could respond only through utter suppression. Usually, this cooptation is simple Berlusconi-style media manipulation; surely the most vulgar example of this was the 'Tear Something Up for Putin' campaign, in which nubile young women could win their very own iPad2 by submitting a video of themselves sexily tearing something up that, it was understood, represented Putin's cowardly enemies. One of the most favored submissions featured a Playboy-ready young woman tearing up a pile of US dollars.
But the reaction to Pussy Riot, perhaps, shows a new sort of cooptative sophistication. It responds to the avant-garde not with more, louder, sillier, glossier air-brushed nonsense, sustained by the hope of a new iPad, but rather with a figure that supposedly emerges from the fringes himself, bearing a mask, pulling stunts, playing the merry prankster. Of course, there is nothing at all avant-garde about Dick Riot, and in fact the substitution of 'dick' for 'pussy' is deeply, literally, illustratively reactionary, exactly like the disgruntled proposals we often hear in the United States for the creation of a 'National Association for the Advancement of White People'. The very first lesson of feminism, learned by pretty much all non-australopithecines in the West a long time ago, is that feminist and 'masculinist' perspectives on one and the same thing are not, so to speak, enantiomorphs of one another. They are different because the feminine is always the marked category; everything is a dick unless otherwise specified.
So in that respect Dick Riot is not just reactionary but also redundant. That the Putin regime would be able (directly or indirectly) to produce such a creature, as its pseudo-avant-garde response to a genuinely subversive phenomenon, makes sense when we recall what a dick Putin himself is. I sat at a desk across from that morose little man in 1990, when he was consigned by the Gorbachev regime to a sinecure watching over foreign students at Leningrad State University. I swear I'm not making it up when I say this: I remember thinking, this guy's got a problem. But he's managed to do a lot with his problem, and again I think much of his success has to do with his adaptability. Stalin squelched the avant-garde. A tyrant with any hope of sticking around in the age of YouTube will take a different, more supple approach.
The Hinternet is going to be developed into a group blog, one that will be like a great many other such blogs before it, with this one noteworthy difference, that it will not be stultifyingly boring. It will draw on the interests of the artists, academics, critics, and scientists who contribute to it, but there will be absolutely zero shop talk. No moaning about performance reviews, the tedium of grading, parental leave, &c. Just ideas, discussed with elegance and conviction. We are envisioning something like Cabinet Magazine, transported into the format of, say, The Daily Beast.
We are not yet sure this will even be possible. Certainly, there is not much else on the Internet that aspires to this end. That's why we're calling it 'The Hinternet': we're going behind and around the established conventions in this venue, acknowledging that we've moved into a post-paper world, but seeking nonetheless to preserve something of the non-evanescence, the feeling of relative permanence, that one used to get from ideas discussed in print. We will also differ from existing blogs in that we will try to be self-contained, also somewhat like an old-fashioned magazine. A post that provides a link to a post somewhere else with a sentence or two of commentary will not cut it here.
We learned after registering our domain name that the term 'hinternet' is already in use, evidently mostly among conspiracy-mongering off-the-grid types who worry about 'the government' 'shutting down' the Internet, to describe some anarchic assemblage of ham radios they've put together to simulate the workings of the Internet. There was some thought when we learned this that we would do better to change our name. We decided to stick with it, though. Let 'hinternet' be polysemous. Let us see what the primary meaning of the word will be a decade from now.
It will take a while yet before we begin with our regular stream of posts. For now, we would like to ask you to help us out by spreading the word about The Hinternet. 'Like' us on Facebook, for example, and encourage your friends to do the same. The more readers we have, the greater the incentive will be to write good stuff, which will get us more readers, and so on, in an unending virtuous circle.
We already have most of our bases covered, with excellent writers ready to hold forth regularly on architecture, cognitive science, the history of science, linguistics, literature, &c. We would be interested in hearing from an aspiring music critic interested in gaining some exposure. Someone who lives it and loves it, and who knows how to write.
Otherwise stay tuned, and be patient, as we slowly become operational.