The Filthian, pompous and facetious as ever, is " opening a new style of long
form blog" or some such shit. It means it is publishing tedious essays by in-house wankers, the first of whom, sirprise, surprise is its own supreme editor in chief for life.
The repulsive Alan Rusbridger, head of the Guardian Praesideum, has a lecture to prepare for delivery in about six weeks' time and has - phony and and condescending - asked for assistance from those who cross party swords at Comment Is Free, But Rigidly Moderated. So Not Really Free
At All.
At All.
Rusbrudger's beef is that the traditional, centuries-old dominion of so-called journalism - the press and more recently the broadcast media - is under threat from what he means but refuses to describe as the blogosphere. How can redundant rubbish like him hang on to their gigs?
Many of the more servile commenters - stereotypical Guardianistas, cunts, in other words - fall willingly on Arsebridger's knob and attempt to help him shore-up his worthless, poisonous, faux-liberal, ecologically wasteful, outdated but obscenely lucrative position - Have you thought of so-and-so, Alan; Alan opens an interesting debate, and so on. Campaigning for the poor and exploiting the charitable status of the Scott Trust, which owns the Filthian, Arsebridger pays himself over ten thousand pounds a week for presiding over the decline of a once truly fine newspaper into so-called ethical consumerism and lame, cheesy Coalition-wanking.
But this delight leapt out of the know-it-all dross. There is as much, more, between the lines as upon them. I reproduce it without necessarily sharing its optimism and - obviously - without permission.
It chronicles that last great period in English history when the shackles of the accepted order - in particular, the role of the church and the state - were thrown off for 20-odd years... until order was 'restored' in 1660.
The Ranters, the Diggers, the Levellers, etc were all put back in their box; control of the Press became industrialised... and, therefore, beyond their reach. Only in the last 20 years has that power shifted back into the hands of the great unwashed.
Give me a SmartPhone and a wifi cloud in Starbucks and not only am I a publisher, now I am a broadcaster.
Loathe as I am to agree with a Conservative minister, I cannot forsee a 'restoration' of the old order as happened in 1660. Some 350 years of imposition - you *will* watch the news now, you *will* wait until tomorrow to have your news delivered, etc, etc - has gone.
'We will not pay rent to the masters, bow to the lords...'
They sought to create a 'common treasury' for all; in their eyes, that was land... they would not be bound to pay tithes to an incumbent Popish priest... in that their issues were intensely local... those were the issues that *really* mattered to them... and to that we also return.
'What is mine, what is yours... where is meum et teum... it is fallen into the chaos of a higher power...' was - if memory serves - one quote that emerged from the floor of Parliament in those tumultuous times.
What's my content, what's yours? What if the web is that 'higher power' into which we are now falling; with chaos duly ensuing...
For me, the challenge is such that we start from the bottom up; start from scratch with the issues that most people care about... local.
We hand out the tools that the Diggers, the Levellers and the Ranters lacked when it came to the distribution of news and ideas - and we look to new ways of sustaining those ideas, those communities... we build again from the base of the pyramid.
We look at a world that has turned upside down; a world for which the likes of a Rupert Murdoch has little time nor comprehension; we look to help 1000 flowers bloom where once there were newspapers.
We go again; from the bottom up....