One of my favorite political bloggers, and one of the pioneers of political blogging, Billmon, has been on a blogging hiatus since August 15. Now he checks back with us, this time in the pages (and on the Web site) of the Los Angeles Times: Blogging Sells, and Sells Out Los Angeles Times 09/26/04.
Billmon offers a downright Marcusean analysis of the way in which the market system - only the old-fashioned call it "capitalism" any more - can assimilate cultural phenomena that appear to have oppositional potential. That's the implication of "selling out," as used in the title.
I don't know where the American figure of speech "selling out" to mean some sort of betrayal of conscience came from. It was a popular saying in the so-called "counterculture" of the 1960s, which implied some sort of compromise with evil features of the what was often called the Establishment (a useful phrase which has also fallen into disuse). It may have reference to something as simple as bribery, or it may have been adapted from ordinary business practices, in which a company changes hands through sale and purchase.
My guess is that it may have come from agriculture, when "selling out" the farm implied the end of a family tradition, maybe often one extending over generations. Kate Campbell's song "Bury Me In Bluegrass" (co-written with Ira Campbell and Johnny Pierce) captures the emotional, sentimental sense of this experience:
Huey was a captain with Andy Jackson
He wettled in Kentucky on a soldier's pay
It was two hundred acres and for almost as many years
The land has borne my family name ...
The buyers signed the note today
They're gonna build a mall ...
They nailed the sign up yesterday
And I don't understand
To me it's more than just a piece of land
Billmon is experiencing something of the same at the prospect of the transformation of an important corner of cyberspace:
Even as it collectively achieves celebrity status for its anti-establishment views, blogging is already being domesticated by its success. What began as a spontaneous eruption of populist creativity is on the verge of being absorbed by the media-industrial complex it claims to despise.
In the process, a charmed circle of bloggers — those glib enough and ideologically safe enough to fit within the conventional media punditocracy — is gaining larger audiences and greater influence. But the passion and energy that made blogging such a potent alternative to the corporate-owned media are in danger of being lost, or driven back to the outer fringes of the Internet.
Here's the Marcusean point:
There's ample precedent for this. America has always had a knack for absorbing, and taming, its cultural revolutionaries. The rise and long, sad fall of rock 'n' roll is probably the most egregious example, while the music industry's colonization of rap is a more recent one. ...
Bloggers aren't the first, and won't be the last, rebellious critics to try to storm the castle, only to be invited to come inside and make themselves at home.
Billmon is focusing on a trend that undeniably is occurring. More and more blogs are sponsored by advertisements, which inevitably subject blogs to some of the same commercial pressures that newspapers have always felt. In some ways, blogs may be more susceptable, because newspapers operate in a tradition with rules, expectations and (rapidly deteriorating) ethical standards. Bloggers have operating, as we often see observed, in a more "Wild West" atmosphere. Though in the blogosphere, the gunslinging is necessarily restricted to the rhetorical.
One point he makes is especially important:
As blogs commercialize, they are tied ever closer to the mainstream media and its increasingly frivolous news agenda. The political blogosphere already has a bad habit of chasing the scandal du jour. This election season, that's meant a laser-like focus on such profound matters as the mysteries of Bush's National Guard service or whether John Kerry deserved his Vietnam War medals. [my emphasis]
Now, having focused quite a bit of attention myself on the Bush AWOL issue and the Swift Boat Liars, I'm not ready to agree with his particular illustrations. Because of the "low barriers to entry" (as they say in marketing) bloggers range from leading scholars in a particular field (like Juan Cole) to the completely frivolous partisans who only want to spread the latest talking points from Rush Limbaugh, Drudge and Fox News. The hacks tend to act as an echo-chamber for their side. And, yes, it certainly happens on the Democratic side, though the Dems' echo-chamber barely makes a rattle in comparison to that of the Republicans.
And I think Billmon's economic analysis is on the money. (Bad pun, I know.)
This is not inherently sinister. The development of online technology that allowed people to make regular updates to a Web site without having to write code to move things around on the page layout made it possibly for lots more people to have an online diary or Weblog/blog. It's a useful technology, and one that companies could make good use of, if they can overcome their chronic corporate timidities about such things.
Companies like Microsoft and Sun use blogs to facilitate customer service and sound out ideas with customers and co-workers. See Blogging for Business Business Week 08/09/04 and Blogging With The Boss's Blessing Business Week 06/28/04.
When I hear someone talking about the concept of "selling out" in this sense, I always remember an interview with Emmylou Harris, my favorite singer, on television several years ago. The interviewer asked her if she ever felt like she was "selling out." Her response (quoting from memory here) ran something like this: Well, no, I don't think so. If you mean have I had to compromise my artistic integrity, no. I've never had someone come along and say like the Devil, if you sell me your soul, I'll give you such and such. Now, I'm not saying that I might not want to sell out someday. But nobody has made me an offer yet.
So if anybody out there is reading this who cares to pay good cash money (preferably euros)for this stuff I'm writing here, my e-mail address is in the sidebar on the left side of the page. Write early, write often!
I'd even be willing to entertain offers from Republican propaganda operations - although a gig like that would probably be as short-lived as Ann Coulter's stint with USA Today covering the Democratic convention. But come to think of it, given the degree of extremism in today's Republican Party, it might take them a few days to realize that I was writing stuff designed to sound totally outrageous and obnoxious.
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