Street Justice

A rather interesting chain of events chronicled on my friend Aaron Naparstek’s site Streetsblog this holiday week.

Apparently, a cyclist had a run-in with a driver, who then ran over his bike and drove off. But not before the cyclist took down the driver’s license plate number, which he later posted online at Streetsblog, a site dedicated to easing traffic, making more room for pedestrians and cyclists, and other bottom-up street-related activism.

From there, though, it was only a matter of hours before members of the site tracked down the name and address of the car’s owner:

PLATE: CEY6110 TYPE: PASSENGER VIN#: 1J8HR58285C723315
REGISTRANT INFORMATION:
(NAME WITHELD BY RUSHKOFF.COM) ,N DOB: 04/15/70 SEX: M
750 ARMSTRONG AVE COUNTY: RICH
STATEN ISLAND NY ZIP: 10308
05 JEEP GREY SUBN WEIGHT:004628
FUEL: GAS CYL: 08
EXPIRES: 10/28/08 VALID: 09/13/06
MI#: G15440 09379 942826-70

Then someone else searched out the fellow’s bio:

Celerant Technology, a privately held Corporation, providing high quality, advanced retail management software systems to retail organizations. Celerant CEO, (NAME WITHEOLD), comes from a retail management software background and founded Celerant Technology to build an entirely new type of retail system from the ground-up….Celerant Technology’s headquarters are located in Staten Island, New York with satellite offices in Georgia and Oklahoma.

And someone else posted a linke to a photo of his house at that moment from MSN’s realtime Google-earth-like application, Local.live.com, in order to see if the car was yet back in his driveway (it wasn’t). When last I checked, the group was evaluating an email that cyclist received back from the car owner, claiming he was not driving the car at the time, and the person who was had been on his way to a medical emergency.

Honestly, this is fascinating stuff. While the mob’s action may not always prove benevolent, the power of a group of committed and angry people – working without top-down leadership – shouldn’t be underestimated, particularly in an age when so much information is available so quickly. This is a markedly different use of media than, say, the exploitation of radio in Rwanda to instigate mobs to round up targets and cut them to pieces. For in the case of broadcast media, it was more a matter of provocation and instigation than here on the Internet, where it looks a lot more like empowering a group of formerly voiceless or powerless individuals to take the collective action they had wanted to, all along.

Still, given the anonymity of the net, a case like this could as easily be fabricated as actual – making the crowd an easy tool for the abuse of an innocent. I’d have to believe that when mistakes like that are inevitably made, however, the crowd will use even greater effort to punish whoever abused their good will, and – if possible – repair the damage done.

Testament Online – For Free! plus NOTES

Vertigo has finally seen the light. No, not that light, but the obvious power of the Internet to share and, ultimately, promote comics work.

So they’ve created a page where users can download complete versions of the first issues (mostly sold out) of the latest and greatest comics on their roster.

Testament has been included in this group, and I encourage you to download it from the Testament downloads page. In addition to a full color pdf of the first comic book, the page includes (on the lower right) a link to download my never-before-seen explanatory notes to the first five issues – the ones included in the first ‘graphic novel’ collection available at a book or comic store near you (or from Amazon right here.

The notes were a real labor of love for me – and took about as much time as writing the comic itself. They’re quite valuable for understanding why the Bible scenes are depicted the way they are, and site all the chapters and verses from which various scenes and insights were culled. I’ve even gone so far as to include the Talmud and Midrash sources I used to come up with some of my interpretations of these scenes. (The notes to the first ten issues will appear in the back of the second collection.)

For example:

“Although the Bible makes no mention of Sarah’s reaction to Abraham’s intention to sacrifice her Isaac, we can only assume that when Abraham trots Isaac off to Mount Moriah, she knows what he intends to do up there. For, unknown to most casual readers of the Bible, child sacrifice was more than just common: it was the norm. Men of Canaan, in particular, sacrificed their first-born sons to the god Moloch, as a way of appeasing the ever-chaotic forces of nature. It was believed if you pay Moloch his due, you could at least control the inevitable losses that life would bring.

* * *

“That’s why I’ve rendered Abraham’s servants so confused at his decision to bring Isaac up to Mount Moriah. He’s already been through this, and has already accepted his God’s new deal. And even though God’s order to Abraham is framed as a “test,” (Gen. 22, 1) I think the real test here is not whether Abraham is willing to listen to God’s commands – but whether he is really able to leave his old ways behind.

Thus, we see not the Bible’s God himself, but the Canaanite god Moloch ordering Abraham to carry out this deed. For it is he who would most benefit from the sacrifice of another child to his fiery altar. Moloch’s power is dependent on the sacrificed flesh of children.

In a sense, the Bible can be understood as the chronicle of humankind’s changing relationship to God. God starts out demanding child sacrifice, then proves satisfied with some foreskin and the occasional animal sacrifice. Thanks to later prophets and the destruction of the Temple, we learn that God is actually satisfied by prayers of devotion – that he be internally experienced. And finally, through the book of laws and ethics known as Talmud, God is to be acknowledged through acts of kindness and social justice. God quite literally leaves the stage.

It is a leap of sorts to portray Moloch as ordering the sacrifice, but one absolutely consistent with how such actions would have been understood by the Torah’s original intended audience.”
–

For the hundreds who have emailed me asking questions about the Biblical or historical basis for the seemingly secret information I’ve uncovered or counter-intuitive interpretations I’ve come up with, I thought I’d open up the books a bit further and show how truly supported they are by the text.

So please do download the comic and have a free read, as well as look at some the rationale for restaging Bible stories in a near-future where people have RFID tags under their skin as a way of recording their currency transactions. The story may begin to make more sense than you’re comfortable with.

Changing My Site, Among Others

I’ve been contemplating a major redesign of this site for the past two years. That’s about the same length of time that I’ve been remiss in updating the content, here.

I mean, I haven’t really been uploading and formating reviews of my books or interviews with me since, well, since Nothing Sacred back in 1999. And I’ve probably done more interviews since 1999 than I did before 1999.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve got a choice between doing my work and recording my work. And as the realities of fatherhood and public activity (if we can use this term for the kinds of stuff I do at schools or conferences or online forums) make evermore pressing demands on my time, I find I can’t write books and maintain a site, a blog, a mailing list, and a family at the same time.

So, I took a look at the websites of the people I consider my peers (or, to use market terminology, ‘competitors’) and I see they don’t bother with any of the stuff I’ve been archiving here for the past twelve years. They just have a blog, a list of books, and maybe some contact info or a calendar. And that sure looks easy.

One of my students has offered to let me hire her to create an Expression Engine version of my site – which would be easier to update, of course, than the manual html I’ve been doing since the beginning. (Actually, this site began as a file area on the Well, accessed by ftp.) But what I’m wondering now is just how useful all this stuff is to anyone but a High School student required to do a book report.

Why not use this space simply to upload and archive the stuff that I actually write myself. And then use the blog to mention (and link) to particularly relevant reviews or interviews. If I could tag each post appropriately, it should make those reviews easy to search out later by anyone looking for reviews of, say, Playing the Future. Something about the hierarchical menu system on this site feels hopelessly pre-tag, anyway.

Or maybe just drag all the reviews into folders and let people who are interested in doing “research” just wade their way through it.

What say you? I’ll go ahead and pay for whatever it is people really want this place to be.

KQED Podcast

Here’s the archive and podcast of my Tuesday appearance on KQED’s Forum (the best-produced talk show on radio).

I haven’t had a chance to listen to it, yet, but I think it went quite well. It may have ended up a bit “left coast” in tone – focusing more on the return to passion and meaning than all my research on the Industrial Age and its diminishing returns. But maybe the value of passion is the more important message contained in my last book (Get Back in the Box), anyway.

Still, I was glad for a caller who asked if there’s any evidence or case studies for all this. It gave me the opportunity to say “yes! They’re in the book!”

Thanks again to Robin for putting me on the show, Dave Iverson for pitch-hitting with grace and intelligence, and to Institute for the Future for giving me an excuse to be in SF.

Forum with Michael Krasny – this Monday

I’ll be in SF for a couple of days this week – doing an event for Institute for the Future. And though I was unable to secure a bookstore event at such late notice (I was hoping for a lunchtime talk at Stacy’s, but they were booked up months in advance) I will be doing the best radio show in town, KQED’s Forum with Michael Krasney on Monday at 10am.

The topic is my latest book, Get Back in the Box. But, as always, I’m sure we’ll venture from there into new turf. If we’re going to be honest, here, I’d have to admit that not just one but two new book ideas were inspired at least in part by the conversations I had with Michael on the air. He’s got a unique ability to inquire about the implications of the ideas I raise in a book – forcing me to start another.

Anyway, sorry I couldn’t find a way to interact live and in person with everyone in SF, but please do feel free call in and we talk live that way.

Rushkoff and Pinchbeck

I never did post the link to this bookstore discussion I had with Daniel Pinchbeck last month, taped by David Lamphier of Spiral Media in Motion.

It’s a strange discussion – and while it may not require a whole lot of prior knowledge, it’s still a bit specialized in its subject matter: the appropriate use of prophecy in our time. I see prophecy as allegory, while Daniel and some portion of the audience see the visions experienced in altered states (such as the DMT trip) as real communications from external consciousnesses.

We also get onto the topic of whether focusing on a date in the future – in this case, the notorious 2012 – is useful and real, or an excuse to avoid the present.

But, like I say, this is a pretty roundabout conversation, and probably more interesting for the styles of engagement than the content itself.

Richmond.edu, who are you?

So for the past week or so, I’ve been getting all these weird emails from people with Richmond.edu return addresses. Most of them are in the form of short essays, either agreeing or disagreeing with some of the points I make in the introduction to my book Screenagers (formerly, Playing the Future).

I tried to write back to some of them, figuring after the first three or four that it was some kind of class assignment, and that their teacher was hoping I’d write them back. Or maybe he thought it was good for them to experience their essays in action.

Most of them seemed unconscious of the fact that it was the introduction to a book. They kept referring to it as an ‘essay,’ and wanted to know why I hadn’t brought up points that end up being made (or refuted) in the book itself. And a couple of them were downright obnoxious.

The weirdest part, though, is that the most obnoxious ones seemed surprised – almost insulted – that I wrote them back. These ones told me that they were forced to send their essay to me by their teacher, that they don’t care at all about my book or essay, and that I shouldn’t have responded to their emails.

So, I look up richmond.edu on the Internet, and it turns out this isn’t some junior high school, but a real university. And though I’ve written back to pretty much all of these students, telling them I’ve got no context for what they’re sending me – that no one has bothered to even write an into line to me, such as, “we were assigned to write an essay for our media class, and then to send it to you for comment.” Nothing. And the only ones who write me back – just two of them, so far – have written to say it’s crazy for me to write them back, and they either didn’t mean what they wrote or just didn’t care.

If the teacher of this course is listening (no one will tell me who it is), you should know that I’m honored you have included me in your curriculum – but that I could have been of much better service to you if you had clued me in to the fact that they would all be writing to me. And you might have told them that if they did email me, they might get a response!