Christopher Lydon Interviews…

     It is Tim Berners-Lee’s world; we just live in it.  But you’d never get that impression from Sir Tim himself, the man who invented the World Wide Web barely a decade ago with nary a thought of power or glory, fame or fortune.  He runs the World Wide Web Consortium from a modest academic suite of offices at MIT.  He’s an accessible scientist who speaks warily, almost defensively, about the miracle he wrought.  It is his pleasure, or perhaps his habit by now, to tell you what the Web is not.

     The Web is not, first, what Tim Berners-Lee thought he was designing in the early ’90s: a collaborative medium for researchers working together at a distance.  That part, for a variety of technical and legal reasons, just didn’t work.  Neither is the Web a superhighway of anything, if the highway motif makes you think of concrete, steel, and fixed routes to anywhere.  The Web is not, and must never be, the avenue of a monoculture.  It is not the outline of a universal brain that will reduce human beings to mere neurons in a Global Mind.  It is not a monument to the “Me Decade.”  That is, it’s not all about expressive blogging.  Or rather: it’s equally about listening and learning.  It is about them as much as it’s about us.  It is not, he insists, a structure.  It is not an active agent–even as it kicks into the cultural and political life of the United States in the presidential decision year of 2004.

     “The general public is seizing on the Web as a way to have a conversation,” he said in our own chat this week.  “That for me is very inspiring.  It doesn’t tell me something about the Web.  It tells me something about humanity.  The hope for humanity is that people do want to work things out.  They do want to come to common understandings, and they will do it by constantly refining the way they’ve expressed their own ideas–and occasionally, on a good day, listening to the way other people have expressed theirs.”

     Sir Tim uses the word “fractal” a lot.  We live in a fractal world, he kept saying, meaning a world of many levels of structure, where the shapes of mountains often resemble the shapes of sand grains at a different scale; or giant clouds replicate tiny puffs of steam, or human communities at the village level tell you about affinities and tensions at a global level.  One of his most compelling digressions was the thought that we should organize our days accordingly.  We should live some part of our lives in each of the human orders of magnitude: from the family unit of six to the global population of six billion.  Spend a few moments of the day with a consciousness of our individuality, then our closest family circle, our 60-member squad, platoon or company, our 600-member church, our 6000-citizen village in a 60,000-citizen city, in a 600,000 metropolitan area in a 6-million member state; then: our 60-million nation on a 600-million continent, and on to our full species extension. 

     At each of those levels, and others in-between, we human beings have a distinctive place in a different structure.  Perhaps the main message from Tim Berners-Lee at this moment of the Web’s further emergence is simply this: that it serves the conversation at each and every level of a fractal society and a fractal universe.  It remains a blank page –a means of getting human clusters of infinite variety on the same page.  The nightmare is that it might deliver human experience to the world the way McDonalds delivers burgers, but at this early state of the Web’s evolution, it does not seem a real prospect, not at least to Tim Berners-Lee.  “What’s great is to see this diversity of what’s coming out of it.  And the diversity does not seem to be slowing down in any way.”

     Our conversation is in two files here: Part One on the surprises between the first conception and real growth of the Web.  And Part Two on the ways in which the Web may yet realize the visions of diverse geniuses and prophets from Walt Whitman to Teilhard de Chardin. 

     It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. 

     It was an era of propaganda, it was the age of information.  It was the season of Google in the Republic of Rush; a time of sudden free access to the wisdom of the world and of unrepentant OxyContin rant on the radio. 

     It was the sleepless summer of Howard the Instigator, the avenging autumn of Arnold the Terminator. 

     It was the season of www and of dubya, dubya, dubya. 

     It was the high noon of NPR; it was the rising moon of iPods and the mp3. 

     It was a time to read Ha’aretz and Al Ahram, the New York Times and The Onion, all online. 

     It was a moment when Mickey Mouse, age 76, was still a Disney slave, a time when many other squeaky new voices were noisy and free: Daily Kos and Atrios, Billmon and Instapundit, Doc Searls and Ed Cone, Tacitus and Joi Ito. 

     It was a time when “the media” seemed tired and only the bloggers were fresh.

     We live at the end of 2003 with more astonishments and revaluations than we can keep track of.

     Howard Dean Rising is no more wondrous, really, than John Kerry Disappearing: the “warrior liberal” and short-odds pick for the Democratic nomination now running behind Carol Mosely Braun and Al Sharpton in the Harris poll. 

     It is a season of economic recovery, we’re told, and of permanent emergency. 

     It’s been a month of official “We’ve Got Him” triumphalism coming out of Iraq, bumping into official notices of an Orange Alert across America. 

     The Christmas season fad has been to fault heretical Howard for observing that we’re no safer with Saddam in hand; a Christmas season in which the bellicose Berlusconi in Italy huddled with the Vatican around the risk of a hijacked-airliner assault on St. Peter’s in Rome.

     On March 18 of this year, I wrote to the Harvard Law School’s new Berkman Fellow, Dave Winer: “Yesterday I couldn’t spell blog.  Tomorrow I want to be one!  Very very eager to meet you.” 

     The man, then his Manila blogging software, and for nine months his Thursday night blogging seminar were encounters that shift one’s perspective fundamentally and, despite everything, hopefully. 

     It took me months to learn, then forget, all those coded capital letters: XML, HTML, RSS and such; to handle them as instruments marshalled in the blogosphere just in time to rescue the American privilege of democratic speech. 

     Dave Winer pushed me to try audio-blogging and to start by interviewing him.  Bob Doyle at skyBuilders.com showed me how to edit a minidisc recording into an mp3 file, and to post it on the Web.  Blogging with sound, it dawned on me, could be talk radio on steroids: free, independent, global, instant, anti-commercial, substantive, serious work and play.

     To Dave and Bob and to the cheerful adventurers in the Berkman Center where I write, no end of thanks.  To the several score of interview subjects who have pulunged with me in this experiment, thanks and admiration.  And to the generous readers and listeners out there, more of the same.  In a dire time, it feels like a fresh and promising start in a new direction.

     Blogging is a very American thing, as Dave likes to say.  It might not seem so strange to our 19th Century champions of expressive democracy, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend Walt Whitman, for example. 

      “Whitman’s ideal of

     Read that again, please.  It is precisely the bloggers’ vision.

     I begin to understand why Bill Clinton loved him.  Dick Morris–still maneuvering the broad intersection of power and opinion, media and money–is quick and cool with sticky soundbites.  He’s a man of the next not the last campaign (likely in Morris’ business to be in Brazil, or Japan or Russia).  He’s unsentimental about the interests and a lot of the people he’s served, including himself.  In conversation he got right to the point about the end of the Media Age (Lyndon Johnson and later Richard Nixon bombing the grassrootsy politics of Barry Goldwater and George McGovern with TV spots) and the start of the Internet Era.  In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the power-to-the-the-people moments, both right and left, “lasted like the Prague summer,” Morris chuckled.  But now people power is back.

     “From 1972 to 1999 or 2000 we had what I see as the Media Age in American politics–which empowered guys like me who do television commercials, fundraisers, fat-cat donors, special interests and a handful of people who became the new political elite.  But starting, I think, with Clinton beating impeachment in ’99, and going through the Dean campaign of 2004… the media is losing its power in politics and the Internet is gaining it.”

     And still, apparently sophisticated people say “what’s a blog?” and give Dick Morris the same blank stare they give you and me at the mention of this mysterious Internet transformation.  I wanted to hear what he tells the innocents and the doubters.  “Well,” Morris said, “how do you think Bill Clinton survived impeachment but for blogs and MoveOn and all of that?  Where did the anti-globalization movement gets its strength from?  Certainly not the mainstream media!  Where did the right wing get its strength from?  And the anti-Clinton stuff?  Where is the Dean candidacy from? 

     “If you just read the New York Times and Washington Post you get blindsided by all this stuff.  It’s the new age in which everybody is a publisher of a newspaper and they can circulate it to anyone who’s interested in reading it.  And that period of freedom–that free exchange of ideas, unmediated by who has a station license or can afford paper and ink–really I think is just the essence of the Internet era.”

     We’re living in Internet time, kids, and we’re not going back.  We got here, in Morris’s quick summary, by push and pull.  The push is the shriveling audience for network news.  Lyndon Johnson used his famous three-set console to keep an eye on ABC, CBS and NBC and see what 70 percent of the country was watching with him.  The nightly news exposure gets 18 percent of the electorate these days.  And though some pols will triple their TV buys to make up the difference, “it’s the last gasp of a dying system.”  The pull, Morris says, is the fact that one quarter of the country is on a computer during prime time; 70 percent of Americans have regular Internet access.  “It’s an entirely new age in American politics.”

     Dick Morris actually trumps Joe Trippi with Internet bullishness.  “The essence of the Internet,” he said, “is not that it provides a new set of eyes and ears, but that it gives the voters a mouth, which they’ve never had in the media.  The impact of that is absolutely historic.” 

     But Morris makes it a mighty Republican tool in 2004, especially in the hands of Karl Rove, a direct-mail master.  With email, Rove simply saves the postage.  “Let’s remember,” Morris observed, “that the Internet is more male than female, more right-wing than left-wing, more upscale than downscale.”  The vast right-wing conspiracy which grew up outside the mainstream media is savvy now about spontaneous on-line community building.  Not all the grassroots on the right are Astroturf.  “The Republican base is seething with activity,” Morris said.  “Also, c’mon, you can’t think of any community that is better connected, and better wired to itself, than the religious community.  There are all kinds of prayer groups around the country, and the fact is that people who attend church regularly vote Republican by 2 to 1,  and those who don’t vote Democratic by 2 to 1.  The gay marriage issue is going to accentuate that divide.  So I think this kind of viral bottom-up growth (which is what the Internet is all about) will be as much Republican as Democratic.”

     RSVP was the label the old Boston pols used to put on guys like Dick Morris, meaning: ” Rattle Snake.  Very Poisonous.”  But he’s our kind of rattlesnake.  Hear him out here.

     David Rees’s public career began as just the opposite of trying to be funny.  It was a late-at-night flight from his idle amateur cartooning.  “I kinda made a decision,” he said.  “Well, I’ll try to make a comic about how I actually feel for once.”  The ruins of the World Trade Center were barely cool.  The war on Afghanistan had been announced.  David Rees was struck by the want of public skepticism about a war on terror, the silence about the human cost on the ground.  And so “Get Your War On” was born, with an office jock observing into the phone: “Yes!  Operation: Enduring Our Freedom To Bomb The Living Fuck Out Of You is in the house!!!”

     The language of the early strip still shocks with undeniable images and vernacular simplicity–what oft was thought but ne’er expressed out loud.  Except by the clip-art man at his desk: “You know what I love?  I love how we’re dropping food aid packages into a country that’s one big fucking minefield!  That’s good!” And his pal on the phone: “Well, it turns the relief effort into a fun game for the Afghan people.  A game called “See if you have any fucking arms left to eat the food we dropped after you step on a landmine trying to retrieve it.”

     Commentary too raw for the Letterman Show, for The New Yorker or in fact for any publication you’d enjoy reading, made and still makes slashing dark sense on the Internet–a remarkably efficient medium for sharing strong sensibilities without compromise.

     Questions here: when did profane humor come to seem the only approach to truth?  How did John Stewart’s Daily Show become the definitive news on TV?  Should Al Franken be running for president?  Granting, as David Rees does, that The Onion is the funniest site on the Web, what else makes you laugh?

     David Rees’s reading, on his own favorites toolbar, is as deadpan and dour as he is, starting with the New York Times, the BBC, Reuters, Doctors Without Borders and Human Rights Watch.  As usual, it takes one deadly serious student of language to be as funny as Rees is.  He is 31 years old, a faculty kid from North Carolina who majored in philosophy at Oberlin in Ohio.  He says it disappoints people that he’s not a freak or an ideologue–just another NPR-head, an ordinary dude trying to talk back to the news.  He is ready to move on from “Get Your War On” as soon as George W. Bush fires Donald Rumsfeld.  The satisfaction of the strip, he said, is a sort of “self-medication via comics,” starting with a physical wave of relief on the night two years ago when he wrote “those first stupid little cartoons.”  The further reward was giving more than $40,000 from “Get Your War On” book royalties to the Adopt-a-Minefield program in Western Afghanistan.

     “Who knows what’s funny?” as W. C. Fields used to say.  Listen up to David Rees, and add a comment, please, on Internet humor.