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BoingBoing: A Directory of Wonderful Things is a groupblog that provides a mix of Web humor, art, politics, sex, gadgetry and unicorns. It is probably the only blog popular enough to receive its own backlash. I used to visit BoingBoing on a regular basis, nowadays it fills my feed reader. This analysis, completed for my New Media Practices course, takes the form of three short studies/observations, and assumes that readers are already somewhat familiar with the blog (for proper introduction, see the wikipedia article).

A Directory Exhumed

When I first saw BoingBoing’s extended title, ‘A Directory of Wonderful Things’, I thought it was just a juxtaposition meant to be funny. How could anyone associate ‘directory’ with such seemingly random posts? But the title has a history, and ‘directory of wonderful things’ actually refers to, well, a real directory. Comprising 93 things, the directory was (as far as I can tell) carefully compiled and annotated by Mark Frauenfelder in early 2000, when BoingBoing became a ‘real’ blog. It was featured prominently, as seen here at the top of the blog’s right column:

But within a year, the directory was forced below the fold to make room for a ‘donate’ button and a merchandise link (among other things). It also disappeared from the top menu bar. Jump forward another 2 years to 2003, and we find the directory - still the same 93 things - by scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page:

And then finally, a few days later, it disappears altogether:

In a way, the disappearance of Boingboing’s directory reflects more general changes that were happening on the Web. A professor recently pointed out (also using the Internet Archive) how something similar occurred at Google. Its directory was slowly being phased out, just as the Web’s most comprehensive directory - Yahoo - had to surrender to algorithmic search in order to better compete with Sergei and Larry.

Not to worry, though. Those carefully edited directories are still ‘out there’, if a little disheveled. Boingboing’s directory of 93 things can be found here. To get to Google’s directory, you will have to google it.

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What follows is the relatively long summary and review of Fred Turner’s book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. For the very short (Twitter-sized!) version, go here. Otherwise, get comfortable.

Nerd Politics?
A recent Ask Slashdot piece appeared with the headline, “Why are so many nerds libertarians?” The interrogator suggests this is linked to the incompatiblity of Leftist ideals and high incomes, but a more likely answer can be sensed further down the thread (far below the funny let’s-mock-Ayn-Rand’s-stilted-prose detour):

“[T]his is the core of libertarian thought: if I’m not hurting you, leave me the hell alone. Don’t tell me what to do. Don’t order me to attend your schools. Don’t take my money for your causes. Let me trade freely (for example, let me buy sugar from Cuba). Let me read, or view, or say, what I want. I don’t need you to tell me what to do; I’m quite capable of figuring it out for myself. Let me have sex with any adult I want, male or female (n.b. I’m quite straight, but I see no reason to surpress other adults’ desires; I’m still protective of minors). Let me put into my body what I choose to put in it.

[...]

Why are so many nerds libertarian? Because you can’t code by rote. You can’t create or develop a new application following someone else’s rules. It requires individual thought, individual judgement, and individual spirit - exactly the same qualities that caused you to be either bored to tears, or jeered at, or socially ostracized at school. So when you finally come to political awareness, and realize that the GOP and the Dems are two sides of the same coin - both of them take your money, lie to you, and shove crap down your throat, while they live high on the hog on your dime (I’m not going to say which side is worse; to me, they’re both squalid), you’re eager to find a personal philosophy that avoids their traps. Libertarians are basically socially progressive and financially conservative. It seems like a logical philosophy, and we’re basically logical people.”

The author of this comment, Brickwall, suggests the trend is linked to a deep-rooted sense of individualism - thought, judgement and spirit, he says. But where he argues that this mix of ’socially progressive and financially conservative’ politics is simply ‘logical’, one could take a different route, tracing the history of ‘nerd-politics’ to the odd marriage of Newt Gengrich’s Neo-Conservativism with the pages of Wired circa 1996, and then even further back. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner does exactly this, arguing convincingly that the libertarian world-view so strongly associated with the Web, as well as the corresponding emphasis on de-regulation and on individual responsibility, is intricately tied to the project begun by a distinctive faction of 1960s counterculture, the group he terms the New Communalists.

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