Pun Salad

The city is five square miles of low-slung industrial and commercial buildings, laced with railroad tracks. Green space is nearly nonexistent. Among the few splashes of color is the landmark mural of farm animals on the side of the Farmer John pork processing plant.

Although (the Times reports) about 44,000 people work there, the live-in population is estimated at 93. There are less than 60 registered voters.

Now, without looking at the article, can you imagine what sort of city government Vernon has? Well, it's probably worse than you can imagine: it's basically a setup to enrich those in charge, and to maintain their grip on power. There hasn't been a contested election in a quarter century. Almost all voters are "either city employees or related to a city official."

The story concerns the efforts of a small group of people to move into Vernon and get on the City Council. Who could blame them for attempting to hop on the gravy train, right? Of course, they get massive thuggish pushback from the entrenched government; it's also an iffy question whether a convicted felon is behind the effort to horn in on the cushy situation.

As Mel Brooks famously said in Blazing Saddles: "We've gotta protect our phony baloney jobs, gentlemen!" Libertarians of all stripes can only look, chuckle, and draw parallels between Vernon's government and ones that differ only in degree, not in kind.

Just as Marx seduced a generation of European idealists with his fantasy of self-realization in a communist utopia, so the Web 2.0 cult of creative self-realization has seduced everyone in Silicon Valley. … The consequences of Web 2.0 are inherently dangerous for the vitality of culture and the arts. Its empowering promises play upon that legacy of the '60s--the creeping narcissism that Christopher Lasch described so presciently, with its obsessive focus on the realization of the self.

Sorry, I don't see it. Nothing in current or future technology is likely to repeal Sturgeon's Law ("Ninety percent of everything is crap.") Keen bemoans the destructive changes in the mainstream media: newspapers, TV networks, the music industry, all in decline! This shows, I think, one of the cleavages between conservatives and libertarians: most libertarians know that marketplace-driven destruction is creative destruction. Conservatives just see change, and bemoan the coming dark ages. I'm sorry, but the coming dark ages have been coming ever since I was a kid.

The corollary to Sturgeon's Law is that ten percent of everything isn't crap, and that's still going to be an unprecedented flood of good stuff, that we don't have to rely on an "elite" set of gatekeepers for us to find and present. This isn't utopian; it's just what's gonna happen. To a large extent, it's already happened.

The real problem with Web 2.0, by the way, appears in passing near the beginning of the article, meant to display a canonical example:

LAST WEEK, I was treated to lunch at a fashionable Japanese restaurant in Palo Alto by a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who, back in the dot.com boom, had invested in my start-up Audiocafe.com. The entrepreneur, like me a Silicon Valley veteran, was pitching me his latest start-up: a technology platform that creates easy-to-use software tools for online communities to publish weblogs, digital movies, and music.

Yes, exactly. "Web 2.0" is, God bless it, an overhyped creature of entrepreneurs making "pitches" in fashionable restaurants, trying once again to turn the crank on the old money machine. That's fine, I love capitalism and entrepreneurship, probably more so than the next guy. But, come on, do we really have to take the resultant hype all that seriously? No; keep your checkbook in your pocket, unless there's something concrete behind the buzzwords.

Ironic note at the end of the article:

Andrew Keen is a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur and digital media critic. He blogs at TheGreatSeduction.com and has recently launched aftertv.com, a podcast chat show about media, culture, and technology.

Oh, OK then.