So Much For Solidarity: That Comments Policy Revised & Expanded, And Other Bloggy Digressions

To make Martin’s terse announcement below a little more multilateral and a little less unconsultatory and patriarchal (let’s practice what we preach) here’s my view on it.

I’m not a moderation fan, unless the blatant trollery gets really bad; what’s an argument without opposition? But that seems unlikely given our current level of comments, so I regard initial moderation as a currently necessary but temporary experiment. In my case “moderated’ boils down to “Are you a fuckwit or not?” which is a subjective standard, I admit. But Blogger is free (or at least the front-end is, the back-end is that Google owns you) so if you have a firm opinion of whatever stripe, you can add your voice to the cacophony.

I do wish more people would blog: there are so many sharp and incisive commenters out there that the world could do with hearing more from.

I do hope that potential political bloggers are not being disouraged from using their voices because of what a certain element in center-left (and that only by warped right-wing big media standards) US political bloggers have been up to lately. Using their predominant market power to skew the blogging market by exorcising censorship blogroll amnesty on their blogrolls, they are, in essence, acting as a cartel to knock out potential competitors for future Democratic political funding.

My evidence for this is admittedly circumstantial, but nevertheless compelling.

Post the Edwards blogger brouhaha the Kool Kidz of ‘leet blogging seem to have been conducting something of a purge.

The big US political blogs, the ones that are run as business concerns for their owners – recently described by Max Sawicky as also “a mostly brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party” – have been divesting themselves of connections with what they apparently consider to be ‘lesser’ bloggers. What ‘lesser’ is in this case is hazily defined: it seems to be a combination of readership level, shade of opinion and the vehemence with which that opinion is expressed. Teh Kool Kidz might protest to the contrary, but the bloggers who have been cut certainly see themselves as being dropped for having inconvenient opinions. (And to some of those jettisoned it actually means a drop in vital ad income.)

Neither site has a blogroll even close to being in the thousands, but thousands of bloggers link TO them. I have seen many of these links from little blogs that for some reason feel compelled to put kos on their blog roll. It does them absolutely no good, but it’s great for kos.

Let’s turn the tables and talk about equality. Suppose YOUR site just happens to have a good post, will it ever see the light of day on kos? Of course not, that is unless you sign on to be a “diarist.” That’s why reciprocity is important. If you list the kos site, even though he won’t list yours, he makes money. And you? You are as much a sucker as someone playing the slots in a casino.

In what was once the blogoshere, there was a certain etiquette, that, although unwritten, revolved around reciprocity. I list your blog, you list mine. In blogdom, that is gone. With little money to go around-and some bloggers, feeling that money even corrupted the process-what made the blogosphere function was an evolving cooperative community. Like all communities it had its quirks and certainly its share of eccentric characters but it also had folks like the Wampum site that publishes the Koufax awards and sites like Crooks and Liars and My Left Wing that saw as part of their mission to encourage new voices and to recognize those of us out on the fringe. Maryscott O’Connor came by her nickname of blog mother, the old-fashioned way-she earned it.

You could ask why the surprise at this: we’ve seen recently that passion and strong feeling is frowned upon in US progressive politics , or should I say Democratic politics. The Edwards blogger situation was a demonstration of that. Campaign consultants for the Democratic Party must’ve been watching the ‘Edwards bloggers’ dog and pony show intently, as a foretaste of how this new campaign/blogging interface would be dealt with by the media at at large – that it was all a bit of a fiasco must’ve set them totally atwitter.

Co-incidentally, right afterwards the self-described ‘big bloggers’ (the ones intent on moving up in the informal Democratic power-broking hierarchy, beginning to consider themselves kingmakers and hoping for a bit of that consultancy dosh) started divesting themselves of inconvenient former connections.

Hmmm. Blogroll purge – presidential candidate/ blogger scandal, campaign war-chests: could they by chance be related? I think we should be told.

But the big bloggers only found themselves in their current positions because of the anticapitalist and antiglobalist left overseas bloggers linking to them and quoting approvingly from their posts and comments – those on the US left who looked outside the country for their news and opinion found that here was someone. actually on their own doorsteps, speaking their language. But there’d been like-minded leftists talking to each other online way before Blogger was invented, on Indymedia, Usenet, IRC and the Well: online political discussion is hardly a new thing and political bloggers were about way before Atrios or Kos typed their first anti-Bush diatribe.

What made them different? Timing and a eye to marketing.

Kos’diary model was timely – it came along just at the right time, when there was a dearth of political space for US liberals against the war to speak their minds and discuss their position. It was a niche market: a discussion forum run by Americans for Americans and in which Europeans and others could actually speak to Americans about politics and it was a safe space when a safe space was badly needed.

The likes of Kos and Atrios and others may see themselves as having been in the blogging vanguard but their success is built on the work of thousands. When or how they began to see blogging as a money-making platform for their own ambitions I couldn’t say for sure, but I suspect around the time the Liberal Ad Network was formed.

Kos’ success in my opinion has been a matter of historical happenstance, (plus hard work – there’s no denying he’s given it that ) plus the fact that when he started there was no US progressive blogosphere to speak of. The market was ripe for the plucking: but had he come along at another time under another president but Bush, it would’ve been a bust.

But most essential of all to Kos’ success has been an educated, eloquent and dogged group of diarists. For many of those diarists it was the first time they realised they could speak out in public and the sky wouldn’t fall; many went on to become bloggers themselves, loyally linking to Kos and back and to their fellow diarists and bloggers. Thus circular linking built a readership, a blogosphere and a sucessful Kos brand.

But Daily Kos isn’t and has never been a democracy, for all its ratings systems: it’s exactly what I said, a brand, and a brand has an image to protect if it wants to attract investment.

Atrios’ rise is slightly differently explained: he became popular initially because of linkage from non-USAnian and expatriate bloggers against the war – it was “Look- here’s an American economist who agrees with us, and he’s funny too”. The fact that he worked for Media Matters for America also gave his opinions added credibility. That he writes with a wry self-deprecation and an eye for the ridiculous and the in-joke made him even more popular – and as with Kos, linkage gave him prominence.

Then the early adopters and those with a little clue amongst the mainstream media started asking “who are these people?” and slowly the bigger blogs started to have some actual influence. But the moment they stepped into fund-raising for the Democrats they stopped being outside critics of the political system and started working within it.

One of the first blogs I ever read, and I’ve been reading and contributing to blogs before they were blogs, was American Samizdat. I always thought samizdat was exactly the right description of political blogging -information and politics that was outside the mainstream channels, uncontrolled and unfiltered by editors or party apparatchiks – people’s actual voices and personal knowledge. Whistleblowing on a grand scale.

The big blogs got where they are on the back for the hard work of those whistleblowers – iIf it weren’t for them, they’d’ve had no content and no links. To have to have bought in what the diarists and commenters brought to the big blogs would’ve cost plenty at investigative journalists’ and pundits’ rates.

But the commenters and diarists did it for nothing, because of their political commitment, and in the process they made Kos and Atrios well-known and influential; so much so they think they deserve a slice of the presidential campaign war-chests.

I’ve seen the phenomenon of the free-marketisation of political blogging described as the natural consequence of a lack of the progressive equivalent of wingnut welfare. I see it as a lack of thought and participative discussion about how an online political community could have actually explored a new model of democratic participation. If there’s that much concern about supporting progressive bloggers financially, all that money raised for unsuccesful candidates could have been put into a progressive blogging foundation, along the lines of the trust that runs a couple of British newspapers, with a membership organisation, a democratically elected board, regular meetings and votes. Grant money could have been applied for on that basis.

But no, the basic premise for the US center-left – and they have the loudest online presence – is and has always been the free market, so that’s how they’re running their blogs.

That’s fine, it’s their blog, we can all get our own. But we can all also choose who we participate with and link to, and those who live by the market die by the market. Death for any blog is no content and no links and this is the hidden power the so-called ‘lesser blogs’ have over the Kool kidz. How much influence would they have then? Would Democratic politiciams still take their phone calls without those comments and links?

To adapt a free-market truism, the Kool Kidz should remember that bloggers can go down as well as up. And isn’t there some saying about being nice to those you meet on the way up, because you can be sure you’ll meet them on the way down?

I don’t care whether we’re linked to by the self-chosen elite big blogs or not, so this can’t be dismissed as sour grapes. Martin may feel differently, but it’s enough for me that a handful of people read this blog – it’s nice to look at stats and have a little internal smugness because the hits are high, but really in the long run it’s irrelevant. Popularity is such a fleeting thing – it’s what you do politically, not what you say, that actually matters.

If only one person were to change their way of thinking or understand the world a little better because of something Martin or I’ve written or done, it’ll do for me.

I could be accused of being a moral prig because we don’t need to make money from Prog Gold and have no plans to do so, and maybe that’s true.

But if we ever were to decide to collude with the political establishment in maintaining the capitalist status quo, personally profiting from doing so whilst simultaneously shitting on the people who made us what we are, you’ld be the first to know.