We’re in the home stretch for the book part of this project, with a few wrinkles left to iron out. There’s a picture of the cover on the left-hand side of the page.

If you want to be notified when it’s available for sale, let me know.

This article was originally published on Salon on November 5, 2010.

Our cultural heritage isn’t just the books, magazines and newspapers we read, nor the movies and TV we watch or the radio we listen to. More and more of our culture takes the form of digital media — and more and more of that is what we create, not just what we consume.

Heritage is about preserving what we know (or at least what we think we know) for generations yet to be born. And in the age of democratized media, as we collectively create information that has news value for communities, small and large, the people who care most about saving what we’re creating are wondering how to do it.

No archive is as comprehensive as the one at the Library of Congress, where I’ve been a participant in a two-day meeting this week about the subset of “user generated” media we sometimes call citizen journalism. As usual, at sessions like this one – this is my third visit to the library to help out with its ambitious digital-preservation project, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program – there are more questions than answers.

The reason for libraries and archives like the Library of Congress is simple: We need a record of who we are and what we’ve said in the public sphere. We build on what we’ve learned; without understanding the past we can’t help but screw up our future.

It was easier for these archiving institutions when media consisted of a relatively small number of publications and, more recently, broadcasts. They’ve  always had to make choices, but the volume of digital material is now so enormous, and expanding at a staggering rate, that it won’t be feasible, if it ever really was, for institutions like this to find, much less, collect all the relevant data.

Meanwhile, those of us creating our own media are wondering what will happen to it. We already know we can’t fully rely on technology companies to preserve our data when we create it on their sites. Just keeping backups of what we create can be difficult enough. Ensuring that it’ll remain in the public sphere — assuming we want it to remain there — is practically impossible.

Blogging pioneer Dave Winer, a participant in this week’s meeting, has some smart recommendations on creating what he calls “future-safe archives” — including “long-lived organizations to take part in a system we create to allow people to future-safe their content.” He lists universities, government and insurance companies as examples of such institutions. The Library of Congress knows it can’t store everything. Its archiving experts are working with a variety of partners, with a long-range goal of creating archives that are loosely connected but where researchers (and I hope regular folks) in the future will be able to easily find, retrieve and work with what’s being created today.

The technology industry isn’t an obvious candidate to provide the archiving institutions; as Dave notes, the tech companies are too likely to disappear or change in ways that make them unreliable. Even Google, for all its reach and power today, isn’t the place I want to store my work, in part because it’s a company that makes money by using our data to sell advertising. That’s not the relationship I want with my own archivist.

But the tech industry has a vital role to play in preserving the material we create ourselves, e.g. blogs, at the edges of the networks. It can work with the archiving institutions to ensure that we, the creators of media,can play a role in our own archiving.

What do I mean by this? Here’s an example. I use WordPress to create my personal website, and the website that accompanies my soon-to-arrive new book, “Mediactive.” I wish there was a plug-in for WordPress that would let me save my site to the wonderful Internet Archive, the nonprofit that is trying to archive as much online material (among other things) as possible. All blogging software vendors should have features like this, assuming the Internet Archive wants the material, which I’m fairly sure it does.

The value for future historians of what we do online comes from much more than blog posts. Among the sites that tell us most about our modern culture are such services as Craigslist and eBay. They are created entirely by their users, or at least the content is. How could they be persuaded to regularly archive what they do, for future reference?

I have little hope that Facebook would participate in such a system, because it’s Facebook’s obvious plan to itself be the repository for history. This is one reason that I don’t spend a lot of time posting things on Facebook, despite its usefulness; even though I can download what I do there, or at least some of it, no one but Facebook itself can get at the greater value of the service: the relationships among the users.

So when and if the Internet Archive (among others) makes a deal with WordPress and various content-creation platform providers, as I hope will happen someday, the information that goes into the archive needs to include more than just our blog posts. It should include the links I’ve made to other sites and reader comments, of course; but it should also include the inbound attention from people who’ve linked to what I’ve written, among the other relationships.

The complications go on and on. On my personal site I have RSS feeds from other sites where I’ve created some content, including such things as my Amazon and Yelp reviews and Twitter stream. I have no idea how to archive all of my public work in a compact way, or even if I should.

I’m hoping, sometime in the next few months, to help organize a meeting that connects technology people with archiving people so we can talk about personal archiving of this kind. One of the ideas raised at the Washington gathering was a “public commons” — a federated collection of services, I’d hope — where we could all save our creations, and if enough of the right people got together on this they could make and connect the tools to make it all work.

We need this for our children and grandchildren. They need it, as do the researchers and creators of tomorrow, to make their own world a better place — or at least to understand more clearly how their world got the way it is.

This article was originally published on Salon on November 4, 2010.

There’s no way to sugar-coat this: Since Tuesday, network neutrality isn’t quite dead, but may well be in a coma. That’s the only rational way to look at the results of the 2010 elections, which saw some of net neutrality’s major backers go down to defeat.

Network neutrality is the idea that your broadband Internet provider — almost always a local cable or phone company — isn’t making decisions about what you can use on the Internet. That is, your ISP should not decide which bits of data get to your computer in what order or at what speed, much less whether they will ever get there at all.

Among the most damaging congressional losses will take place with thedeparture of Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, who lost his reelection bid. No one in that chamber has a better grasp of technology issues, not even Silicon Valley’s representatives. Boucher wasn’t just a strong supporter of net neutrality on tech policy; as chair of the House Communications, Technology and Internet subcommittee he used his authority over tech policy in generally progressive ways. Democrats weren’t fully in support of net neutrality to begin with, but Republicans, ever-loyal to the big-money corporate interests, have decided that the duopoly is all the competition we need.

The robber barons who run our local telecom duopolies and the barely competitive mobile networks are surely thrilled with their good luck. They aren’t stupid enough to believe voters tossed out Boucher and other net-neutrality supporters on that issue alone, or that voters even gave it much thought, but they’ll definitely take advantage of the circumstances.

The Federal Communications Commission has been relatively timid on net neutrality, working mostly at the edges of the debate; witness its move to partially reclassify broadband service — a regulatory approach that would give the commission more authority to prevent carriers from discriminating against certain kinds of content. That’s a relatively timid move (though useful), but even this limited progress is under attack. And President Obama’s campaign promises to push hard for net neutrality seem hollow, at best.

Meanwhile, America falls further and further in the deployment of serious broadband. And the carriers are closer than ever to turning the Internet, which should be the most open of networks, into just another kind of cable television.

This article was originally published on Salon on November 3, 2010.

The Democrats weren’t the only big loser in yesterday’s election. Science got clobbered, too.

Fueled by disdain for government interference with business and tanker loads of cash from the energy industry and its allies, the Republican party has been moving steadily into the denial camp on global climate change, or at least deep skepticism. And it’s practically an article of faith among the tea-party activist crowd.  A recent survey from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press showed a yawning gap between Democrats and Republicans over the issue, with just 38 percent of Republicans believing that the earth is getting warmer — a belief that drops to 23 percent among tea party Republicans.

By every account, the Republican takeover of the House is likely to derail any possibility of serious action on climate change during at least the next two years, longer if President Obama is defeated for reelection in 2012.

And Republicans in the House have vowed to go to war against the Obama administration’s environmental policies, including its (too tepid) approach to climate change. Republicans have proclaimed their intention to use their new investigatory powers —  the majority party controls congressional investigations — to go after climate scientists.

The Republican attack on science is nothing new. The Bush administration made an art form of it, not just on climate but by supporting such anti-science initiatives as creationism; at one point during his presidency George W. Bush said he thought intelligent design should be taught in class as the other side of the issue, implying two roughly equal sides to an issue where essentially all the scientific evidence supports evolution and virtually none supports creationism.

The war on science has extended into the classrooms of America. Biologists are constantly warding off creationists’ efforts to put “intelligent design” (the standard code word for creationism) into the curriculum. Climate science will likely face even more hostility, especially given the moneyed interests fighting to curb the truth. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent so freely to elect the Republican House, has ginned up a “teaching guide” in collaboration with a textbook publisher that should know better to persuade kids that we can’t afford to save the planet.

There’s at least one major industry in this country that absolutely relies on workers who don’t deny reality, and who need to have learned well in math and science. It’s the technology industry, the leaders of which are constantly wailing about the lousy quality of American schools.

Most of the tech leaders were silent on creationism, shamefully so. At least a few, including Google’s Eric Schmidt, have offered their opinions that global climate change is a serious issue that we have to deal with sooner than later. Schmidt made that point rather forcefully last week during a Churchill Club conversation with film director and environmental activist James Cameron.

The tech industry as a whole has been loath to take on causes that don’t have a direct impact on its own immediate bottom line. But what better cause could there be than to defend science, the bedrock of everything that makes this industry work.

No group of leaders, speaking out loudly in defense of science and against propaganda, could have a greater impact on this critically important issue. Time is running out for them, and for all of us.

This article was originally published on Salon on October 29, 2010.

When the White House invited some progressive bloggers to interview President Obama this week, a few days before the elections, the motive was surely to toss a bone to what Howard Dean once called the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” I’m sure the administration is delighted with the way the event turned out, because while the bloggers pushed the president (here’s a transcript) a teeny bit on a few hot-button issues, they didn’t come close to confronting him on the broken promises that in the end will mean the most.

I’m talking about civil liberties, where Obama’s record is as bad in most ways as his predecessor’s. In case after case, as Glenn Greenwald and a few others have painstakingly documented, this administration has claimed unprecedented presidential powers, including the right to order the assassination of U.S. citizens with no due process. Meanwhile, Obama has continued and even extended the Bush-era cult of secrecy in key ways.

Only on gays in the military and same-sex marriage did the progressive bloggers push the president in this area. I’d expected more. True, the session wasn’t all that long, but there’s nothing more fundamental to our future than basic liberties, without which there is no republic.

I also expected more from Jon Stewart, who went AWOL on civil liberties when he interviewed Obama this week on “The Daily Show.” In June, Stewart eviscerated the president’s record in an eight-minute tirade. This week, nada. The fact is that Stewart was more ferocious on an ongoing basis when Bush was shredding the Constitution.

I’ve long since given up on congressional Democrats, whose standard spinelessness has grown even more pronounced during this administration. Remember when Patrick Leahy, the Vermont senator, made fierce pronouncements on how badly Bush was wounding our liberties? He’s become Obama’s puppy dog.

And the Washington press corps, so addicted to being close to power and passionate about trivialities? The question answers itself.

But if so-called progressives won’t push Obama to justify his beyond-abysmal record on civil liberties, who will?

This article was originally published on Salon on October 18, 2010.

It’s beginning to penetrate the public consciousness that the 2010 elections are being purchased, mostly for Republicans, by a shadowy group of wealthy cowards. These anonymous buyers are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into attack ads, mostly against Democrats, via organizations that launder their money into an increasingly corrupt political system.

There’s not much anyone can do about it during this election cycle. The response time of the people being attacked has been slow, at best, while journalists have been in typical form, discovering the problem too late to matter. The campaign season is essentially over, and what was plainly going to be a big Republican gain could well become a rout, no small thanks to the opinion launderers and their paymasters.

But unless we want our nation to be entirely governed by puppets, on strings wielded by people who stay entirely in the shadows, we’ll need to find a way to put a hard stop to this — or force the anonymous cowards into the open where we can learn who’s doing the manipulating.

My short-term, personal response to the attack ads, and the one I hope you’re adopting (as I suggested several weeks ago) has been to treat them exactly the way I treat anonymous comments on news sites and blogs: Someone who is so cowardly that he attacks others anonymously doesn’t just deserve to be ignored; he invites active disbelief. Even the political organizations that do disclose their donors rarely do so in a timely way, so I’ve come to treat all attack ads as lies.

Maybe Congress will act, but probably not. The political class is most culpable in this growing offense against our republic’s bedrock, fair elections. A bill in Congress, called the DISCLOSE Act, has languisheddue to the opposition of Senate Republicans who say they’ll filibuster against it, and who have tacit collaboration from Democrats – always hypocritical on these issues, but never mind that — who never actually force Republicans to actually filibuster, that is, stand up and talk for hours or days on end.

Journalists, by and large, are nowhere near up to the task of sorting out truth from lies in this media avalanche, and they barely care enough even to attempt to learn who’s behind the onslaught. A few news organizations have devoted some resources to the issue during the past few weeks, such as the New York Times, NPR and Rachel Maddow’s teamat MSNBC. Naturally, there’s been near-silence from the media companies profiting the most from the lies, namely the local TV and radio stations that have been absolutely raking in cash this summer and fall.

The American public knows something is wrong. Several new polls showa deep unease with a system that allows anonymous but wealthy cowards to pollute the airwaves with their lies and deceptions. But if people don’t have a clear sense of how vast this pollution has become, it’s because they haven’t been given the data.

One way we could begin to get a grip on the size of the spending at local levels — apart from anecdotal guesswork — is to look at what broadcasters are raking in from the opinion launderers. Every local station is required by federal law to keep logs of political ad spending. NPR looked at stations in Pittsburgh last week, and in an unsurprising finding, reported major spending on behalf of Republicans by shadowy groups. From the show’s transcript:

PETER: So the groups are filing their paperwork with stations but they’re not taking it very seriously.

Some answer a few questions, most leave the important lines blank. It’s an indication that TV stations can’t act as a watchdog of these groups.

ANDREA: This is where the trail goes cold. We called some of the groups behind these ads. They either said they were busy, they’re complying with the law, or they didn’t call us back at all.

And they don’t have to. For most of these groups there’s almost nothing required in terms of donor disclosure. They can keep their funding sources comfortably hidden.

But from sifting through the public files at two Pittsburgh TV stations we did learn a few things.

PETER: We learned that these groups are spending amounts of money that were unimaginable just a few years ago. One group can easily spend $100,000 or more at one station, in a few weeks.

Multiply that by four or five local stations in each area, and five or six groups spending at that level, and the amount of money flowing from secret sources to fund attack ads across the nation is easily in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

But how can we, as a nation, get the actual number? What we need is a compilation of every station’s logs. And while no single media organization could possibly do such a project on its own, and it’s obvious that local media outlets aren’t doing it themselves, there are ways to pull this data together — and the best way is to crowdsource it.

If I could be media czar for a day, I’d get every newspaper behind this project:

• The first step would be, with the public’s help, to visit every station, get a copy of every log of political advertising, and then compile numbers at local, state and federal levels.
• The next step would be to see who’s benefiting from the spending, i.e. who’s not being attacked, and disclose that.
• Then, see if the spenders are following the law in how they describe what they’re doing with the money; as NPR observed, the gaps in the forms showed that the spenders were blatantly flouting even the minimal disclosure requirements.
• Then get every media outlet that cared to trumpet the results for their own regions and the nation.

That’s the easy part, unfortunately. Learning how much is being spent, and on whose behalf, won’t uncover the names and businesses of the anonymous cowards who are pouring so much cash into buying a new Congress. But perhaps, just perhaps, wider understanding of the vastness of this enterprise would generate sufficient public outrage to force some changes later on.

It’s getting harder to be optimistic about our future. I fear that the corruption of the public sphere has become so overwhelming, and the public’s helpless acceptance such a dead weight for reform, that no amount of disclosure will help.

But if we don’t even try, we’re lost.