as ghettoes go, it is safe.I have recently gotten married and moved to the suburbs. It has has a profound effect upon my way of viewing myself. Instead of being a gadfly creative poet / organic intellectual cyber craftsman, I am now all that and a dad. Which essentially means all the ugliness I had previously railed against like a madman, I now rail against in the name of the sanctity of home and hearth. In short, I have less patience to be a street activist and soapbox preacher, now you have to pay to hear me in my living room.
It makes for an interesting combination. I have in a sense, institutionalized that which I represented in the existentials of a more energetic and evangelistic intellectuality, which like my hiphop contemporaries, I wore outwardly in the sacrament of Ralph Ellison's punchout incident. (c.f. Forward to Invisible Man)
And I see that very similar to the position I think many of the wellbeings are in. What was then the grateful dead, is now the Grateful Dead, with Jerry Garcia's name immortalized in the Usenet alt.hierarchy. Being more than just a wild man of ideas, I see myself more as a successful middle-aged man of ideas. For me, it is a necessary rite of passage. And I find the parallel in the Well meliorists. In some ways we are the same old school, our rituals have become reified. So I like the fact that they don't get generally overawed by the glow of cyberspace. Wellbeings appreciate the irony of their dissonant celebrity, and I like to talk about being black without really doing so.
In this period of time, my ideas about how black americans might demonstrate their cyberpresence has been effectively thwarted. I have not given up patience, but I am acknowledging a short-term failure which is partly mine and partly society's. For my part, I had expected that great numbers of individuals would make more conscientious efforts to expand their visions into cyberspace. In particular, I expected some notable black academics and artists to make significant steps into the domain in the first half of the 90s. I was mistaken. Although the ranks continue to grow, there have only been a small few of many I expected to show up. While quality of content is more important than timeliness, my disappointment is a factor of my own impatience.
The discourse of the social responisiblity of the talented tenth continues. In cyberspace, we have the advantage of overcoming geographical and temporal constraints, and the disadvantage of a new type of diasporal distribution. Not only that but the public is polluted. It is nearly impossible to hold a polite and sophisticated conversation in the big public spaces, and the smaller ones just don't seem to attract a proper quorum. The Well is a good place to hide out when the barbarians get me down, and Well converstions are uhm well, er.. not always boring, and sometimes great.
Having failed to get appropriate respect from Congress, we the people have been slammed by some very ugly legislation. I leave it to others to fill in those details. I happen to think blue ribbons are corny so you won't find my website wearing that badge, however some of those best informed in my opinion habitat in the Well. They kick and scream the way I would were I not dedicated to other more fundamental issues. So I trust, as a last bastion of free speech, at least in the ways and means considered most respectable these days, the well will perservere.
All that and they're cheap too.