It seems to me that we've injected a bit too much technological determinism into this story. Sure, Twitter has been a fascinating window for those of us on the outside and at times a critical tool for some of those on the inside. I certainly won't try to deny this, but I have to ask: if - like most start-ups who show only casual interest in generating revenue - Twitter had folded months ago, would the protesters in Iran be somehow muzzled or in any way hindered?

To say so is nothing less than patronizing. Outward and inward communiques would surely have found another path. If anything, the story is with user-generated media, broadly defined. The impressions we will take away after observing from afar will not be of the front page of the New York Times, but of grainy blog-aggregated videos and pictures taken by the protesters themselves.

Something that does appear to be fashionable, however, is Sweden's Pirate Party.

I've had the pleasure of meeting a few of the instigators of Sweden's piratic polity over the past few years and they're good folks who are earnest in their efforts. Also - from what I can tell - I seem to agree with their stance on many issues, copyright reform most of all. So it's good that they've won themselves a seat in the European Parliament, right?

My enthusiasm for the victory of some like-minded souls is perhaps not as great as one might expect, for two main reasons:

- The Pirate Party is too limited in scope to be an effective negotiator in the EP.
This election in Sweden has been a great form of protest for many who realize the flaws in global copyright schemes. That said, supporters may have been able to further their cause more effectively by casting their votes for the a more mainstream party like the Greens. With bigger numbers comes bigger influence, and there would not be much sacrifice on the issues in a switch to the Greens from the Pirate Party.
- The European Parliament elections also saw the arrival of the BNP.
While we're off celebrating the election of an internet-savvy MEP (however little such celebration means here in the US), the British are off lamenting the election of two MEPs from the unapologetically racist British National Party. Perhaps I'm not as in tune with European politics as I should be, but ultimately if one were to describe a theme to these elections across the board it would be one of antiestablishment sentiment. What else could describe someone from the Swedish Pirate Party and members of the BNP standing in the same room?

Ah yes, the failure of the mainstream European left.

And what if the two giants of online social networking are forced to shift their offering to squeeze out some dollars - or even cease operating? Who would be in a position to take their place and what would happen to our copious data on these services?

Maybe this is the ideal time for social and politically-conscious (and thus probably low-cost/low-revenue) services to begin to compete. Something in the mold of Riseup or Indymedia with more of a user-centric perspective could probably gain some ground if things really turn for the worse with the big two.

This may be a possibility and an opportunity, but I'm not betting on it any time soon.

There's a few things that caught my attention tonight. All generally seem to have to do with evolving expectations and standards. Most notably, perhaps, is Paul Boutin's piece for Wired which explains how bloggin' ain't what it used to be. First of all he's right. Blogging isn't the thing it was when I got in this game four years ago with a Scottish travel blog. Maybe this is just a jaded perspective - it's not the same for me, but there are plenty of folks just discovering the medium who are loving the idea of pouring their collective hearts out to the beautifully obscured populace of The Internet. Really, it's simply the arrogance of those of us who have been in on this for a while who are getting sick of it. The medium isn't diminished only its uses by the tech-elite.

That said, I do agree with Boutin's ultimate point that what we consider to be the top blogs today are really nothing more than online magazines (HuffPo, Gawker Media blogs, etc). This is the result of the professionalization and initial maturation of the medium rather than a sign of its death. Sure things like Huffington Post are hardly blogs in the sense that Swarming Media is or might be, but we might see a comparison in a zine that started out with humble ambitions and readership and ends up being distributed across the country in record store. Other zines are out there and still small while some make it big.

I suppose what has faded is the novelty of blogging. It's much harder to gain attention because everyone and their mother's got one (I don't know if you have one, Mom) and people like to pay attention to what's relevant to them and their social circle. That's why the blogs I posted above are indicative of how small-time blogging is alive and thriving despite how hard it is now to attain blog-fame. Blogging isn't a get rich quick scheme anymore, nor should it be - that was always kind of wrong.

As for the other things that I found notable:

This and this are things that give me comfort in an over-crowded, over-hyped web world.

And maybe I've been out of the game too long, but critical theorists need some serious editors.

"...when it comes to shaping identity, the ability to forget can be as important as the ability to remember."

Perhaps what all this points to is how focused we are on our present tenses - what is happening now in our narrowed world(s) is the extent of what matters. If so this might highlight some of the reasoning behind each 'sphere outburst. In the case of Palin, the focus on the family's pregnancies (both of rumor and of admission) are the topic of the moment thanks to McCain's seizure of the new, but will be long forgotten by the time voters step into their booths in the world of continual present tenses. Meanwhile, Google's "leak" of their browser project equally capitalizes on such world of present tenses since writers will masturbatorily try to associate themselves with the breaking news and subsequent fawning - allowing Google to sneak in their improved ability to track every online movement you make.

I suppose the only one here no focused on present tenses is Google itself; they're betting on the value of the future perfects.

The idea of enterprise Twitter brings idle talk into the explicit grasp of the controlling levels of capitalist production. Virno, among others, seemed to imagine idle talk taking a back-channel role in post-Fordist production - an additive role, but not a forward one. Here, we see the implicit recognition that loosely related conversation within the productive environment might actually be something the encourage and promote within the organizational structure itself.

I started this back in late 2005 and much has changed, both on this blog and the routines that surround it. Back then, "Web 2.0" was still a term folks liked to use in a hopeful, unironic way; I had never used the term "autonomism"; and blogging seemed to be at the rare cultural convergence of newness, edginess, and broad familiarity.

Going through my feed reader today - the core of which I constructed six or so months before I created this blog - I noticed that a good 13 blogs have died in the past two months since I last went through it. Either they have shifted over to posting entirely automatic del.icio.us links or they've ceased to post anything at all; that's dead enough to call it such I'd say. Swarming Media was close to joining these ranks.

What got to me in the moments of writing the blog's obituary in my mind was straying from what Fred points to in his post closing out his chimprawk.blogspot.com URL (moving to fstutzman.com):

"I had no idea of what the blog would become, and if I knew the blog would be part of my professional identity I might have chose a different name [than chimprawk]. But I'm glad I didn't, and I think my blog's name was a reminder not to take any of this too seriously. This is all an experiment."

Blogs are a good way to maintain disassociated web-based and meat-space subject positions. Perhaps I've been letting my idea of Swarming Media get in the way of its purpose.

As of tonight, I resolve to make sure that - as Fred put it - I don't take any of it too seriously and most importantly, that this is all an experiment.

A quick quote from Paul de Armond's piece in that collection, "Netwar in the Emerald City":

"Netwar is nothing new as a form of conflict. What is new is the richer informational environment, which makes the organization of civil (and uncivil) society into networks easier, less costly, and more efficient."

Back to reading.

I was looking forward to the n+1 panel because they are a bunch of intelligent people who could probably bring an interesting perspective to contemporary life in a networked world. At best, the speakers seemed well-thought yet uninformed, at worst they were petulant - reducing The Internet to merely a series of Gawker comments saying bad things about them. Mark Grief was easily the least self-obsessed, yet his broad questions concerning interaction spurred by and within the confines of the web have largely already been asked by internet and digital media thinkers before. His speech was a fish-out-of-water case, not realizing that critical thought has in many cases moved beyond his thinking. I left the panel thinking that we should not leave cultural criticism of networked culture to the literary-types.

As for the Rhizome panel, I was pleased to see Tim Whidden ad Tom Moody speak and was looking forward to hearing from Petra Cortright, one of the contributors to Nasty Nets. While most of the panelists were interesting, I was severely disappointed with Petra and Damon Zucconi. I posted these thoughts on Art Fag City's review earlier tonight:

"Damon made attempts to refer to some interesting theory-esque threads in digital media studies, but ultimately he came across as someone who has perhaps read some fancy terms before but is clueless when it comes to how to use them. He may actually have known what he was saying, and it could have been a problem with nerves in front of a crowd, but to me it seemed like he needs to do a lot more research.

As for Petra, I really do like her work and think what she’s doing is significant in the trajectory (sorry Tim) of net art (sorry again). After hearing her speak, however, it seems like she should leave the analysis of her work to others."

The fault I found with Petra on the other hand was her seeming inability to grasp the significance of her own work. She didn't seem to realize the statements about nostalgia, production, and affect that something like Nasty Nets is constantly making. I suppose this might be the very reason she is able to create these works in the first place, though.

I don't like the idea of writing negatively about these young artists, but in this case - as with the n+1 panel - the problems were utterly remediable by the speakers doing some basic background research on the topic.

If we are to view Virno's multitude as consisting of a distributed network of nodes (subjects) and edges (labor, affect), then this quote would imply that the shepherd of this state is a broad cultural, social, political, and subjective nostalgia. I don't mean nostalgia in the restorative, conservative sense, but one derived from the construction of the word itself - with nostos meaning to return home and algos meaning pain or longing. The pain of longing to return home - this seems quite close to Virno's own (translated) construction.

So what does it mean that the multitude is essentially nostalgic? Mostly it is indicative of the state of constant flux and unease that characterizes Virno's multitude, with its pinion of affect and immateriality. There is no fixed state for the multitude it is a construction that is characterized by constant subjective shifting and slippage. This, combined with the lack of centrality in a decentralized conceptual organization, sets the stage for nostalgia. The 'home' necessary for reference in nostalgia is imaginary, is always that which has just passed - or that which is believed to come.

The multitude is a state of perpetual nostalgia.

"This is the risk of criticism as a genre when it disconnects from progressive movements and locks itself up in an elitist hide-out. However messy the situation, we have to promote the Internet as a tool for global mass education[...] Sinking prices for storage, traffic and data processing result in data centres and new monopolies, but these developments are only a result of much broader policies—and it is time a new generation of net critics to situate the medium into the techno-social context it now operates in."